The Big Story: Fuel For The Holidays

The Big Story is a breezy podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

The Wild West days of ad tech are over. Any new startup that wants to stick around must show it can be a business first, one that makes money and adds value.

It’s not that the industry is any less complex, it’s that marketers know what questions to ask and what pitfalls to avoid.

And there’s a concerted effort to ensure that there are consequences when bad actors infiltrate the system. We’re seeing the fruits of that collaboration today, with the FBI, Google, White Ops and other members of the ad tech community working together to crash a notorious ad fraud ring.

While the do’s and don’ts have been codified, it’s worth looking at the brilliance and subsequent burn out of some companies from the past, which made up the rules as they went along and eventually paid the penalty.

On Monday, Allison Schiff excavated the remains of Rocket Fuel and showed how the company benefited greatly from sharing data that it didn’t have permission to share. Rocket Fuel’s rise and sputtering fall is a quintessential ad tech story, filled with brilliant people who hatched an innovative way to solve a persistent industry problem – but did so in a way that wasn’t always above board.

This week on “The Big Story,” the AdExchanger team discusses what Rocket Fuel was up to, what can be learned from its fall from grace and how that story came to be.