Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
All Content > Group or Company Profile > Northeast

Title of entry: 
One-On-One With The Most Important – And Inadvertent – Newsmaker In Ad Tech

Issue or Publication date:
February 12

Publication name: 
AdExchanger

View Website home page:
https://adexchanger.com/

Links to entry URLs

Please note: These URLs are only required for entries in the Online division categories, or digital entries in appropriate Overall Excellence, Design or All Content division categories.

Entry URL(s), if applicable:
Please enter a URL that will direct judges to the entry: 
https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/meet-adalytics-an-asteroid-headed-for-ad-tech/

Entry Essay: 
One man can change the world – it’s not a cliché.

An analytics software startup called Adalytics, founded by someone who had no experience in ad tech, online advertising or programmatic, has had more of an impact on the online ad industry over the past two years than the largest companies in this space.

In fact, Krzysztof Franaszek –the company’s PhD-holding founder – has produced research through his startup that uncovered scandalous and unethical behavior at many of those large companies, including Google.

But let’s back up. Krzysztof, who goes by Kris to his friends, was a computational biology researcher until just a few years ago. But he changed gears after being disturbed by how online advertising was used to spread misinformation during the 2020 US presidential election. He was also confused by the experience of being served completely irrelevant ads.

What the heck was happening in the background with programmatic advertising? Kris decided to find out and Adalytics was born.

He’s since spent countless hours analyzing log-level data – the technical term for all of the data associated with an ad impression – and has published long research studies on his findings. What Adalytics finds is typically rather unflattering, including brand unsafe user-generated content, made-for-advertising (MFA) sites easily passing through programmatic quality control audits and Forbes operating a mislabeled MFA subdomain unbeknownst buyers.

AdExchanger often covers this research in our pages.

Kris shines a light directly into programmatic advertising’s darkest corners in the hope of forcing change through transparency – and that’s made him one of the most important and influential people in the industry. His work is pushing the industry towards real change, and it’s about time.

But although Kris shines a light, he avoids the spotlight. Our Senior Editor James Hercher had to coax Kris to do an interview and let us profile Adalytics.

One reason Kris has been reticent to do press is because the companies he exposes often fight back with ad hominem attacks. But that hasn’t stopped Adalytics from researching tough topics and publishing its findings.

And that’s why we profiled him. He’s speaking truth to power and that’s also what we try to do at AdExchanger every day.