MarTech Interview with Filippo Gramigna, co CEO at Onetag on programmatic advertising, creative intelligence, data, privacy and the future of the open web.
Welcome to MarTech Cube, Filippo. We’re delighted to have you. Can you please walk us through your professional journey and what led you to co-lead Onetag?
I started my career working at an independent radio station and would read the nightly news live on air. I was very aware that people were listening to me and relying on me to deliver correct information. This sense of responsibility has remained through my subsequent job roles.
However, even before this first job, journalism was in my roots. Both my parents worked across national newspapers and magazines in Italy, and my great-grandfather was editor-in-chief of Il Corriere della Sera during the Second World War. News has always been present for me; it has weight and matters.
When I moved into digital advertising, I continued to carry that perspective with me. I was less interested in the mechanics of buying media and more interested in the system around content. Over time, it became clear that the economics supporting journalism were not evolving at the same pace as the technology built around it. That gap is what led me here, focusing on how value is created and distributed across the open web.
How do you see programmatic evolving beyond buying impressions to delivering real, measurable business outcomes?
For a long time, programmatic has been built around access and efficiency. But while it gave advertisers scale, it also introduced a level of fragmentation that made it harder to understand what was actually driving results.
That’s starting to shift. There’s a growing expectation that programmatic should contribute directly to business outcomes, not just deliver impressions. To get there, the different parts of a campaign need to be connected more closely. Media, creative, and performance data can’t sit in separate systems anymore.
When those layers come together, something changes in how optimization works. We can now see that decisions can be made continuously, based on how people are actually engaging and responding. It becomes easier to identify what is working, and why. This is what allows the open web to compete more effectively with walled gardens, because it starts to offer both scale and clarity.
What role does intelligence and automation play in shaping the next era of digital advertising?
A lot of optimization has traditionally happened too late on the DSP side. Campaigns would run, data would come back, and then adjustments would be made. By that point, a large part of the opportunity had already passed.
What we are seeing now is intelligence moving upstream. Decisions are being informed earlier, closer to where impressions are actually being made available on the sell side. That changes the dynamic quite significantly.
Automation plays an important role here because it allows systems to process and react to signals in real time, making better use of the information that already exists. When that happens, lower quality supply can be filtered out more effectively, and stronger environments become easier to identify. That maximizes value for buyers and publishers on both sides of the market.
Creative is increasingly becoming a signal rather than just an asset. How are interactive formats like AR and 3D changing how brands understand audience engagement?
Creative has often been treated as something fixed. You produce an asset, launch it, and then measure what happens afterwards. That approach feels quite limited now.
With more interactive formats, the experience itself becomes a source of insight. When someone explores a product in 3D or engages with an immersive format, they are leaving signals behind. You can see how long they stay, what they interact with, where their attention goes.
That changes the role of creative. It becomes part of the feedback loop. Instead of being evaluated at the end, it helps shape decisions while a campaign is still running. Over time, that creates a much clearer picture of what actually resonates with people.
How can advertisers better use real time data from creative interactions to refine campaigns and improve performance?
There is a lot of valuable information in those interactions, but it hasn’t always been easy to use it in a meaningful way. Data like dwell time, scroll depth, interaction rate, product exploration, and tap-through show how users engage with specific elements that often sit in separate systems.
When that data is brought into the optimization process, it starts to influence decisions much earlier. You can see patterns forming as a campaign runs. Some creatives hold attention better. Others might attract initial interest but fail to sustain it.
The key is using those signals as they emerge. This allows advertisers to shift budget, adjust creative, and refine placements while there is still time to make an impact. It creates a much more direct connection between what people experience and the outcomes that follow, which is something that display advertising, traditionally, has never had.
Looking at the open web ecosystem, what steps are needed to create a stronger value exchange between publishers, advertisers, and consumers?
Pressure on the performance of the open web largely comes from fragmentation. Too many parts of the system operate in isolation, which makes it difficult to understand how value flows from one side to the other.
A stronger value exchange depends on reconnecting those parts. When media quality, creative engagement, and performance signals are considered together, it becomes easier to see what is actually contributing to outcomes.
This also has implications for publishers. When their environments are recognized for the attention and engagement they generate, demand becomes more consistent. And over time, that supports a healthier balance across the ecosystem, where quality is more clearly linked to revenue.
From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges in balancing privacy, personalization, and performance in today’s ecosystem?
The shift away from traditional identifiers has made this balance more complex, but it has also made the direction clearer. The industry can no longer rely on stitching together user-level data in the same way, which means the way we think about targeting and measurement has to evolve.
One of the more practical approaches is to apply audience, performance, and measurement data directly on the supply side. This is often referred to as data curation, where this intelligence enriches the inventory at the earliest stage before it reaches the buy side. Instead of relying on matching users downstream on a very limited view of inventory, the value of each impression is increased upstream.
This has a meaningful impact. It increases data addressability quite significantly and allows campaigns to operate with greater scale and speed, even in lower-signal environments. At the same time, it respects the direction the industry has moved in from a privacy standpoint.
The next step is mass adoption. This now requires a shift in mindset, moving away from user-level dependency toward understanding how data can work at the impression level. When that shift happens, personalization and performance can still improve, but through a model that is more sustainable.
If we want the open web to remain valuable, the way value moves through it has to make sense. When media quality, creative engagement, and data are connected, you start to see a more honest exchange. That benefits advertisers, supports publishers, and ultimately leads to a better experience for people using the internet.
On a personal level, what strategies help you stay ahead in such a fast evolving adtech landscape?
The most useful thing I do is talk to people. Reports and industry coverage matter, but a thirty-minute conversation with a publisher CEO, an agency lead, or someone running strategy at a peer company will often tell me more about where the market is actually moving. I also make a point of staying close to people at different levels, from founders to operators on the ground, because the signal you get from each is quite different. Adtech is still a small enough industry that those conversations are possible, and I try to protect time for them.
Beyond that, I try to keep some distance from the day-to-day. The market moves quickly enough that you can spend every day reacting to the next thing and never quite step back. Some of the clearest thinking happens away from the desk, and that perspective only really arrives when you give yourself the room to find it.
AI tools have also become part of how I work. Not as a curiosity, but as part of how I structure thinking, prepare for meetings, and pressure-test ideas. That has changed how I read the industry too. The companies treating this as a genuine shift in how they operate, rather than a feature to bolt on, are the ones worth paying close attention to.
What advice would you give to marketers and industry professionals looking to adapt to this new wave of intelligent and creative driven programmatic?
It helps to start by looking at how different parts of a campaign connect. Too often, media, creative, and data are still treated as separate disciplines, and that separation makes it harder to see what is actually driving performance.
There is also a shift happening in the type of signals that matter. Engagement, attention, and context are becoming more useful indicators than surface-level metrics as they provide a clearer view of how people are responding.
Moreover, simplicity should not be overlooked. The more complex a system becomes, the harder it is to extract value from it. Approaches that bring things together tend to produce more stable outcomes.
As we wrap up, what are your final thoughts on where the future of programmatic and the open web is headed?
The direction is becoming easier to recognize. There is a move toward models that are more simple, accountable and tied to real outcomes.
The open web continues to offer something unique. It has diversity, scale, and a depth of content that you don’t find elsewhere. The challenge has been making that value consistently visible.
As different signals are connected and used more effectively, the performance gap closes. Advertisers gain a clearer understanding of what they are investing in, publishers see their work reflected more accurately in revenue, and audiences enjoy a higher quality advertising experience from programmatic, which enables valued and trusted content to continue. That creates a stronger foundation for the future.
Originally Published on: MarTech Cube
