In discussion: Onetag’s Daniel Pirchio on the power of curation to navigate the ad industry’s biggest challenges

In our latest episode of Life in Digital, we spoke to Daniel Pirchio, founder and CEO of programmatic curation company Onetag, about his journey to the helm of his innovative adtech business and what we can expect from curation in the months and years to come. 

Here, as well as sharing his own professional journey, Daniel tells us his hopes and predictions for the future of the advertising industry, and what Onetag is doing to drive a more efficient and compliant programmatic ecosystem. 

How it all began

Daniel launched his own website at the tender age of 13, and before long, turned site visits into ad revenue. By 19, he had built his first display ad serving platform, and was soon using his coding skills to automate the optimisation he felt was lacking among the early major ad networks. 

From these beginnings, he tells us, Onetag was born: “It was a solution that could identify the best placements on a web page and dynamically insert them on the site.’ He continues, ‘From the ad server that I built initially as a teenager, we built and sold a commercially successful DSP.”

Having started out with a dream early client in Procter & Gamble’s Italian business, Onetag’s ascendency was rapid and impressive, as it married its expertise and technology on both the supply and the demand side to create a truly holistic offering. It is now a global platform with over 2,000 direct publisher integrations on one side, and pre-filtered DSP integrations on the other.

Formative moments along the way

The growth of any company often stems from a few key situations and circumstances. Daniel feels that foremost among these for Onetag was the premonition that privacy would become a hot topic in advertising and that cookies would fall out of favour - well before these conversations became mainstream. As he puts it, it was “an early understanding of the value of the placements, and realising that we could build a whole platform without cookies” that went on to position Onetag so well for a crucial role in the industry as we see it in 2024. 

The growth trajectory of the company was also, Daniel tells us, helped by a combination of a highly motivated team, their belief in the product, and the pandemic period (i.e. being housebound and outside of routine), enabling him to pursue conversations with partners in different time zones and at all hours. 

In the face of scepticism about the ability of Onetag to integrate US publishers at scale, they took their unique tech offering straight to market in the US with great success: “Thanks to an amazing team who had the vision and belief in our new technology and innovation - and given the market penetration we had already - we showed that you can drive your company from anywhere in the world to being a global platform.” Today, some of Onetag’s most significant supply partners are US-based. 

What's to come

Daniel sees curation as the solution to many of the challenges facing the advertising industry as we approach 2025 - whether that’s tackling ad waste, consent issues or media quality. But he’s also clear about what curation means and what it doesn’t: “When we started, it was all about inclusion lists and how to help traders buy more efficiently. Now, what we call smart curation is the evolution of that process - it’s far more sophisticated.”  

Daniel elaborates: “Some platforms are still about inclusion lists yet they call it curation. We believe our approach to curation is something different. It's about solving industry problems - and how we assess, measure and optimise media quality, and protect brand safety at the same time.”

There can be no doubt that the future for Onetag will also involve further and new integration of AI capabilities. The platform already learns from all ad placements in real time, using AI to power their traffic shaping technology. And with a large data science team devoted to the continued integration of AI into the company’s smart curation services, Daniel is confident Onetag’s enhancements and capabilities will continue to expand in this area. 

To find out more about the benefits of smart curation - and what it promises to deliver to the adtech industry as it evolves - listen to the full conversation here.

You can find the full episode and more on our Life in Digital podcast. To find out more about Daniel and the Onetag offering, visit their website.