Guest
Jeremy Fain
CEO & Co-Founder, Cognitiv
Twenty-five years across digital media, from the first online rewards platforms to the IAB standards years and a deep learning advertising company he has kept independent since 2015.
About
Jeremy Fain is CEO and Co-Founder of Cognitiv, the deep learning advertising platform he started in 2015 with the tagline the brain behind the brands. An engineer by training, he is known for arguing that deep learning can finally run advertising to real business KPIs across the whole funnel, rather than optimising to clicks and view-throughs.
Fain began in technology consulting at PwC Consulting, now IBM Global Services, before taking his first marketing job at Digitas in 2000, where he helped blue-chip companies get onto the internet and built early work he describes as the first online American Express rewards platform and an HBO email newsletter. After business school he moved to the media side and spent roughly five years at the IAB, from about 2005 to 2009, working on industry standards including VAST, which he worked on with Ari Paparo, during what he calls the Wild West years.
He went into ad tech on the publisher side at CBS Interactive, which he says launched the first premium exchange, then joined Rubicon Project, which became Magnite after its IPO. Seeing the templated nature of DSP bidding and a new predictive technology called deep learning, brought to him by co-founder Aaron from a Stanford postdoc, Fain co-founded Cognitiv in 2015. By his account the company has stayed independent with no VC backing, surviving while most of its ad tech cohort did not, and has built out a full funnel deep learning platform including the ContextGPT product.
Career27 years
- 2015 to now Cognitiv CEO and Co-Founder
- 2011 to 2015 Rubicon Project SVP Accounts
- 2011 to 2013 Rubicon Project Vice President of Client Services
- 2010 to 2011 CBS Interactive Director Network Solutions
Show earlier roles: Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Digitas, MyBestInterest.com, PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting
- 2005 to 2010 Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Vice President of Industry Services
- 2000 to 2003 Digitas Manager
- 2000 MyBestInterest.com Director of Web Development
- 1999 to 2000 PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting Consultant
How Jeremy thinks3 convictions
-
Marketing to real outcomes
Fain argues that digital advertising drifted to clicks and view-throughs because the business outcomes that matter were never buyable. Insurance companies want lifetime value and incremental lift, consumer brands want net new customers, and he says deep learning has finally built the event systems to run campaigns toward those KPIs. For Fain the vanity metrics were a limitation, not a choice.
-
Relationship-based selling
Even as he builds automation, Fain is sceptical that agentic selling replaces a sales team any time soon. Delivering a value proposition takes time and trust, and premium publishers offer something custom that an agent cannot simply trade. He sees the human relationship as durable where the industry assumes it is disposable.
-
Flexibility over specialisation
Against the push for vocational, specialised degrees, Fain warns that AI can take a speciality away overnight. What lasts is the ability to see a problem, design a solution and judge its effectiveness. He frames critical thinking and flexibility as the only reliable insurance in a market he has watched reinvent itself for twenty-five years.