Where Mystery Is Margin
John Piccone is Regional President Americas at Adform, the independent integrated ad tech platform with 725 people across 28 European offices plus a growing US operation. He has spent over 30 years navigating the intersection of commercial value and product roadmap, from launching Real Media Europe in 1997 to scaling CTV and programmatic businesses through Simulmedia, Innovid, and QTT.
“There is no such thing as Europe. 28 offices, each led by a local leader.”
John Piccone is Regional President Americas at Adform, the enterprise ad tech platform built for independent, transparent campaign management across programmatic, CTV, and digital. He joined in May 2022 after a career spanning the foundational years of digital advertising in Europe and the US.
John started as a Publicitas advertising sales engineer before joining Real Media in 1997 to help launch Real Media Europe, running around Lausanne, Switzerland and Paris, France for a decade and a half. He describes those early years as easy: if you could listen to what someone wanted and had the kit that roughly fit, getting started was straightforward. Keeping them was the game. That interplay between commercial discourse and product roadmap became the foundation of everything that followed.
He went on to hold CRO, CSO, and President roles at Simulmedia, where he spent nine years in total at the intersection of data and television, then CGO at Innovid, and President at QTT, which was building programmatic linear TV buying. At Adform, his brief is to bring the company’s 23 years of European ad tech depth, its DSP, buy-side ad server, DMP, and ID fusion graph, to bear in the Americas, and to find the people inside brands and agencies who recognise something they have not heard before.
“You have to find the Davids who want to beat up the Goliaths. That is a character trait, not something you can teach.”
“Where there is mystery, there is margin. You are paying for all of it.”
John’s case for independence in ad tech is not ideological. It is economic. When intermediaries take positions on inventory and resell it, or restrict the data flowing between buyers and sellers, the cost is borne by the advertiser. The walled gardens maintain this opacity deliberately because transparency would commoditise their inventory. Adform’s position is that an independent platform with no media or data arbitrage restores that value to the brand. The marketer needs to know because they are paying for everything in the ecosystem.
“The German go-to-market is very different from the French. Always hire local leadership.”
John built Real Media Europe from Paris and has spent 30 years watching European expansion attempts from both sides. The pattern is consistent: US companies land in the UK first because the language is shared, assume the model will transfer, and under-invest in local leadership. Continental Europe does not forgive that. Adform’s 28 offices, each with a local leader, are the product of a European company understanding that the market itself demands local depth. The same challenge applies in reverse: European companies often land in the UK as a stepping stone to the US and make the same category error.
“Linear TV is the most effective, cheapest media ever made. CTV is its extension but priced differently.”
John’s CTV thesis is a structural one. The sell side built their position by controlling premium content relationships. If CTV opens all inventory programmatically, it risks being commoditised the way online display was. The brands that only want cheap GRPs will not find them at CTV prices. The brands that care about content association will pay the premium. Until the sell side is confident it will not be commoditised, the inventory will not fully open. Cross-platform buying will continue to evolve, but within that tension.
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