AdTalk Interview, March 2026

Julien Gardès, VP International Exchange & Business Development, at TripleLift

🎧 Audio version is available exclusively on Spotify: 

Briefly introduce yourself, your role, and the pivotal moment in your career that led you to AdTech.

I’m Julien Gardès, and I have been with TripleLift for six years. My current role is VP of International Exchange Optimization & Strategic Projects. This means I oversee all supply-side aspects of new business, including publisher development, open auction optimization, and curation. The pivotal moment that led me to adtech was a desire for deeper technical understanding. I started my career in online advertising at a performance network, which was very media-oriented. However, I was frustrated by my inability to technically comprehend how things worked in the backend. Seeking a new challenge, I decided to move into a more technical field and subsequently worked for an ad server, so that’s how I ended up working in adtech. 

What is an underrated tool, habit, or soft skill that has become indispensable to your daily work?

I strive to maintain a zero-inbox policy, as a cluttered email inbox can be a significant source of stress for me. To achieve this goal, it is essential that I remain highly organized and ensure timely delivery of all tasks. The key is to address and act upon items promptly, avoiding the tendency to leave things untouched for an extended period.

What is one common misconception about programmatic or AdTech that you find yourself constantly correcting?

For too long, I’ve had to counter the persistent myth that programmatic advertising is only applicable to low-quality inventory. This is simply not true. Programmatic technology has evolved significantly, allowing for real-time transaction of campaigns across premium, high-quality, and even shoppable inventory. It’s crucial to continuously educate the market and demonstrate that programmatic is a sophisticated, efficient, and effective channel for all levels of advertising investment.

What are your platform’s three biggest priorities right now, and why do they matter for the broader ecosystem? 

Our three biggest priorities right now, and why they matter, are:

• Deliver unmatched performance through creative and custom solutions. This is crucial for driving measurable results for our advertisers and ensuring the value of our platform.
• Operate smarter, faster, and stronger through AI and Automation. We’re investing heavily in building the first agentic creative SSP, through TL Spark – our agentic intelligence layer that interprets campaign goals, orchestrates decisions across the ecosystem, and continuously reallocates resources toward measurable outcomes. This efficiency and intelligence are vital for scaling and maintaining a competitive edge.
• Lead the industry’s next-generation exchange by creating an infrastructure focused on signal sophistication and yield optimization. This will be key in combating open-web headwinds and ensuring a sustainable, high-quality exchange for publishers and advertisers alike.

Based on your experience, what is the #1 “best practice” most companies overlook when trying to succeed in programmatic?

I’m very pragmatic and for me it’s all about having common sense. Sometimes, people tend to overcomplicate concepts that are fundamentally simple. Ultimately, the core purpose of an SSP like TripleLift is to efficiently connect a buyer and a seller, ensuring that both parties’ criteria are mutually satisfied—a foundational truth we must always remember. It often feels as though we’ve allowed programmatic to become synonymous with overly complex ideas, which simply isn’t true. 

Without giving away trade secrets, can you share a recent project or case study that highlights a creative solution to a tough AdTech problem?

Brands are becoming much more sophisticated in monetising their first-party inventory, but the real opportunity lies in recognising that on-site revenue is just the start. To truly scale their advertising businesses, brands must leverage off-site media. This means using valuable customer browsing and buying signals to drive measurable outcomes across the open web. 

A recent example is how Philips Hue sought to expand its reach beyond Amazon and connect with New-to-Brand customers on the open internet, with the support of digital marketing agency Numberly. Numberly selected TripleLift for its advanced creative capabilities and access to premium publishers to ensure a seamless, premium ad experience consistent with the brand. Leveraging the Amazon Ads Native Responsive eCommerce format, combined with operational simplicity and a premium advertising experience, Philips Hue achieved 70% higher CTR, 60% new-to-brand sales, and 41% unique campaign reach.

AI Beyond the Hype: We know AI is everywhere. Where specifically do you see it providing the most practical value for identity and targeting today?

AI is already helping us to improve campaign insights, planning, execution and performance. It’s the engine that pulls the whole train. AI refines the targeting, optimizes the content delivery and helps tailor the creative. It’s making every single step more precise, faster, and easier to execute. When it comes to identity and targeting, AI provides the most practical value in helping create look-alike audiences from first- and third-party data insights, and optimizing campaign performance by identifying key behavioral patterns and predicting future user actions.

Which specific niche or sub-sector of AdTech would you bet on for the most rapid growth right now?

Attention is a critical factor for measuring reliable campaign outcomes, and attention-based marketing is gaining significant traction in the industry. As a result, campaigns are increasingly being optimized on both viewability and attention metrics. This represents an evolution in campaign strategy, as previously, optimization was primarily focused on viewability alone. The current approach involves a simultaneous focus on these two combined metrics to drive better performance. 

For a recent Vodafone UK Home Broadband campaign, TripleLift used Amazon DSP and curated purchase intent data to target high-propensity switchers, driving awareness and engagement without distracting from surrounding content. The campaign surpassed benchmarks, delivering a lower CPM than Vodafone’s historical programmatic buys. An eye-tracking study confirmed high performance: 96% of those exposed saw the ad, which was noticed 3x faster than a standard display ad, with an average view time of 2.14 seconds, indicating strong engagement.

What is a “hidden gem” opportunity currently opening up for advertisers or publishers that most people aren’t talking about yet?

We’re noticing a  strategic shift towards sell-side decisioning that moves the targeting intelligence from the buyer to the publisher, making the publisher’s first-party data and resulting curated segments highly valuable assets for targeted advertising initiatives.The TripleLift platform offers significant value by enabling publishers to leverage their first-party data within curation campaigns. 

Share one book, podcast, or article that has fundamentally shifted your perspective on business or technology recently. 

When I was a teenager, I got asked by a teacher to read “Zadig, or the book of fate” from French philosopher Voltaire. This book taught me that nothing comes to you by surprise and that whatever the journey is, you need to own it. Its most famous quote is “One Must Cultivate One’s Own Garden” which has always been my mantra. Learning, being curious, asking questions is a never ending discipline I try to apply myself everyday.