Beyond Proxy Metrics
Fifteen years in programmatic, from an Italian media analyst to Chief Revenue Officer at Adlook, and an argument that accountability now decides where budgets go.
"I love the Japanese philosophy kaizen, which is small, steady, every-single-day improvement."
Luca Filardo is Chief Revenue Officer at Adlook, where he owns go-to-market and works with the product team to turn client pain points into product. He is known for arguing that programmatic has moved past proxy metrics into an era where every dollar must link to a real business outcome.
Filardo studied maths, statistics and economics, and began his career as an analyst for a media company in Italy. He moved from analysis into commercial work, and fell for the early days of programmatic and the way it let marketers access media through pipes and measure and optimise in real time. By his account he has spent more than 15 years in the industry.
Over 15 to 20 years, Filardo says, he covered technical commercial roles, go-to-market roles and sales roles, a range he credits for making him an effective sales leader today. As Chief Revenue Officer at Adlook his remit runs from building pipeline and growing clients to sitting with the product team so that what the market asks for becomes product that solves real problems. He describes AI as the accelerant reshaping targeting, creative and measurement, and presses publishers to clean up the open web.
It's not just democratisation, it's innovation.
"How this dollar we are putting on the platform is helping driving us our key and ultimate KPI"
Filardo argues the defining demand from marketers is to link every dollar to a real result. He frames proxy metrics like viewability and click-through as a decade-long habit that buyers are now abandoning. The pressure, he says, falls on vendors to prove the connection between spend and outcome.
"We can do this AB test in real time."
Where his early programmatic days meant briefing a strategy and running slow AB tests, Filardo says AI now lets creative and targeting change in real time. He points to triggers such as weather and sports scores that can reshape a campaign with little to no human intervention. Testing hundreds of variants and optimising against the best performer is, in his telling, now routine.
"Improving the UX, then ultimately will improve attention of the ad, will improve, like, economics for the marketers."
Filardo is blunt that pages crowded with ads push users off the open web. Because his platform bids against attention, cluttered sites lose the time spent that makes them valuable. Cleaner UX, he says, lifts attention, improves marketer economics and lets publishers capture higher budgets.
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