Proxy metrics are dying. Marketers now demand ROAS at every stage of the funnel. And AI lets the campaign respond to the market in real time.

Filardo came into the industry through maths, statistics and economics, starting as an analyst for a media company in Italy before moving into commercial work. He fell for the early days of programmatic and the way marketers could access media through pipes and measure and optimise in real time, and he never left. More than ever, he says, the industry is living the best time it has ever seen, with programmatic evolving fast thanks to AI and strong innovation.

The client cannot see the pipes, but they can see the front end and touch the product, the DSP. What they really touch is the end result. Filardo says his company is strong at driving business outcomes and improving client economics, so buyers feel how the pipes improve what matters to them, whether that is sales, brand awareness, brand penetration or point of lift.

Sales is no longer only about building and maintaining relationships. It is about understanding the market, the trends and the product, and drafting a strong go-to-market. Filardo covered technical commercial roles, go-to-market and sales across 15 to 20 years, and credits that range for making him effective now.

Go-to-market, for Filardo, starts from being in market. At Cannes he spent hours with clients and prospects on their pain points, how they see AI shaping their business and their priorities for the next two to five years. First of all it is about listening, truly listening, and capturing where the market is moving.

For over a decade media was bought against proxies that stood in for the real goal: viewability, click-through, video completion. In the last 12 to 24 months, Filardo says, marketers are demanding to measure ROAS at every single stage of the funnel against their dollars. That accountability, demanded from brands and agencies on vendors, is the number one change he has observed.

The biggest challenge marketers put on the table is to link every single dollar to an actual outcome: how the money on the platform drives the ultimate KPI, whether sales, ROAS or market share. He is confident they are putting that to the whole industry.

Filardo describes triggers like weather or a World Cup scoreline that once could not be acted on inside a pre-briefed targeting strategy. With AI, campaigns can now change creative and targeting in real time with little to no human intervention. His company was early to prompt-based targeting through a proprietary LLM, presented an LLM trigger product, and is releasing a chatbot that builds campaigns through conversation. That, he says, is where the money is going.

Clients increasingly build their own AI, so Filardo keeps an open module to onboard a client's model and connect it to the pipes. It has to connect to activate, otherwise marketers are flooded and overwhelmed. Every single market is different: a bank, an insurer and an auto brand all need custom solutions, and one solution cannot answer different problems.

Cheaper building and vibe coding open the door, but Filardo insists the real story is innovation. Over 15 years he has never seen a pace like today, with companies popping up that drive genuine value, which his firm integrates and offers to marketers. His caveat: the technology on the bidder and the DSP is decades of development, and the scale of the pipes and the traffic they manage is not easy to replicate.

Filardo's sharpest plea is to publishers: improve UX and stop floating pages with ads, because those pages push users off the open web. A platform that optimises against attention loses time spent on sites crowded like Christmas trees. Cleaner UX improves attention, improves marketer economics and lets publishers capture higher budgets. He points to the open web moving towards the large screen, mobile and in-app branding.

He sees a move from static display to animation, and growth in rich media, high impact formats and connected TV, all tied to measurable outcomes rather than points of coverage. On fraud, he says the company invests heavily so engineers stay best in class, and works with all the measurement providers to constantly measure the traffic it buys.

Filardo frames brand measurement in three layers: media KPIs such as viewability and attention, then brand growth like point of lift, favourability and purchase intent, then business outcome measured as ROAS, cost per acquisition and sales lift. He says the company has a framework and an inspectable brand lift study covering each stage.

The industry changes every day, and Filardo says the biggest mistake is to avoid continued learning. He reminds his team to take time off, treats end of day as end of day, and uses meditation and running to decompress. His advice to newcomers is to be driven, stay curious and follow kaizen, small steady improvement every single day.