Adtech: Contextual Before It Was Called Contextual: Silverpush's Hitesh Chawla
About this episode
Hitesh Chawla discusses the evolution of Silverpush and the shift to contextual advertising in the wake of regulatory challenges.
Contextual advertising, brand safety, and the FTC warning letter that rebuilt an entire ad tech company. Hitesh Chawla, founder and CEO of Silverpush, joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show for a conversation about ultrasonic cross-device tracking, the pivot to contextual targeting, and what post-cookie advertising actually looks like in practice. In 2015, Silverpush embedded inaudible ultrasonic audio beacons into television commercials so mobile phones running their SDK could detect them and link TV viewing to device activity. In March 2016, the FTC issued warning letters to twelve Android app developers who had integrated the code. Chawla's account of the internal response is direct: "We did not take it seriously, we did not respond, so that's why they put it on the website and that became a bigger deal than it was." He then shut the product down, under no legal obligation to do so, and rebuilt the company around contextual video intelligence five years before cookie deprecation made contextual advertising a category everyone claimed to have believed in all along. As he puts it: "If you think of 2015, no one was talking about or even no one was using the word contextual at…
People in this episode
Host: Pesach Lattin
Guest: Hitesh Chawla
Topics covered
- contextual advertising
- brand safety
- ultrasonic cross-device tracking
- post-cookie advertising
- video intelligence
- ad tech company pivot
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Silverpush, FTC
Places: YouTube, TikTok, Meta, connected TV
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