The Invisible Plumbing
More than 20 years in digital media and 10 at Adform, on making ad tech infrastructure disappear while keeping the data beneath it honest.
"That real enthusiasm for it is gonna be absolutely critical to the next phase of work"
Oliver Whitten is Chief Operating Officer at Adform, the Danish ad tech company with a broad stack spanning ad server, DSP, data management platform and sell-side tools. He is known for arguing that infrastructure should be invisible to the marketer, and for pushing Adform to let clients build on top of the platform through an MCP layer.
Whitten calls himself one of the rare people who studied his way into the industry, taking a master's in new media and information systems after two years teaching in Japan. There, he watched teenagers bank and live through flip phones whose technology, by his account, ran years ahead of the UK and Europe, and it was the marketing question, how commerce moves through devices, that pulled him in. He describes more than 20 years in digital media, much of it in innovative businesses.
For the last 10 years Whitten has been at Adform, where he now serves as Chief Operating Officer. He frames the company as different from most of the market because its stack is broad rather than confined to one part of the advertising workflow, giving it a purview across data, creative, trading and media across 26 markets. He points to identity work built ahead of cookie deprecation, transparency audits run with PwC, and a European instinct for privacy as evidence of a values led business, and to a Model Context Protocol layer that he says unlocked 800 features for clients to combine.
The infrastructure shouldn't be the concern of the marketer
"It's a very broad stack of technologies"
Whitten argues Adform's edge is that it never confined itself to one part of the advertising workflow. Because the stack runs from ad server through DSP and data management to sell-side tools, he says the company can see across data, creative, trading and media at once. That purview, in his telling, is what lets it find the synergy others miss.
"We certainly, you know, try to put that trust aspect right at the core of what we do."
For Whitten, trust starts with the values a business ascribes and the relationships it keeps, then has to be delivered through product, platform and transparency. He cites transparency audits run with PwC and a European lead on privacy as proof of intent rather than words. Even in the AI age, he insists, marketers must keep the right to audit the data underneath.
"We're very proud to have boots on the ground across all of the markets that we're operating in"
Whitten roots differentiation in proximity rather than pure product. Boots on the ground across every market, he says, is how Adform learns where clients are heading in the next three to five years and builds roadmaps with them. It is the same instinct that now shows up as co-creation, with clients building on top of the platform.
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