Growth has no blueprint. If your team cannot recite the strategy, the market never will. And the next phase belongs to fewer, deeper partners.

Lehman's entry was accidental. Early in his career, in the tech boom of the 2000s, he was building a story for a business school application and wanted a tech job in the industry all the investment was flowing into. He was not targeting ad tech. An introduction led to a yield manager role at Rubicon Project, since rebranded through acquisitions to Magnite, at a company he knew nothing about. He read the website and it could have been in Chinese. Then he arrived and fell in love with how dynamic and fast-moving it was, the business school idea disappeared, and he has been in ad tech ever since.

Growth objectives differ sharply across venture-backed, private equity-owned and public companies, and treating growth as a template is where people go wrong. Stage matters most. An early-stage venture-backed company is chasing product market fit and top line revenue, the signal that dollars are pouring into digital and that agencies and publishers need platforms. Later-stage private equity-backed companies still want product market fit and revenue, but also sustainability and profitability, so EBITDA and client retention start to weigh more. The maturity of the market and the incentives of the investors matter too. You cannot design one approach. You read the circumstances and build the strategy to fit.

At an inflection point, the data should tell you whether the problem is demand, product, pricing or execution. A well-run company has internal data, sales velocity and KPIs, and if it does not, that absence is itself an execution issue. Go into the CRM, see why you win and why you lose, and the focus becomes clear. It does not make the answer easy, because ad tech today is unbelievably competitive, but the data tells you where to look.

At Nativo, Lehman looked at where resources were deployed against where the business was actually growing. A common trap is that the product where a company first saw traction is not the one that carries it forward, and much of Nativo's people and strategy were pointed where the future was not. He made that adjustment and took easy wins the business had left on the table, because the product was compelling but the story had not been told simply enough. Companies assume a turn from plateau to growth needs a huge pivot. Often it is small tweaks that move things in the right direction.

Lehman's first step is always strategy: a confident, informed view of where the market is going, defined at the executive level and communicated so clearly that any employee, from a twenty-person startup to a thousand person company, could recite it if pulled aside. Usually that is not the case. If the teams do not understand the strategy, the market never will. Once it is defined, objectives across sales, marketing, product and engineering can hang off it, including building things that do not generate revenue today but will dominate in two years. Without it, teams get whiplash, feel the direction changes monthly, and burn out.

The failure is not simply the CEO's. CEOs come with different skill sets, product, sales or finance, and good ones hire leaders who complement them. They are also under enormous pressure to run complex organisations in uncertain times, while the market moves from rewarding growth to rewarding profitability. Defining and communicating strategy is an organizational responsibility, not the CEO's alone. The CEOs who perform best empower the right people to define it, and the ones who struggle do not.

For a long time the belief was that ad tech was entirely product and automation. But the space became so complex that a media buyer's or publisher's life is harder than it was fifteen years ago, and running an ad business now needs a complicated tech stack. The companies performing best pair robust technology with strategic insight and managed service, because the DNA of publishers, agencies and brands is not primarily tech. Lehman expects the same of AI: the winners will help clients understand how to use it and build strategies with it. The idea that the human need in the space is disappearing has never held true.

There is no single leadership playbook, but authenticity is essential. Teams have to feel leadership is telling them a real story and believes it, because a manufactured vision produces a dissatisfied team. Every company in the space is under pressure, so no one is advantaged there. The advantage comes from whether you can tell your team a compelling story they want to build a career around. If you can, they are motivated and willing to put in extra effort, and if some are not on board, that is fine as long as the reason makes sense. It all comes back to clarity around strategy.

The complexity of the ecosystem means clients need partners they can genuinely trust. Through no single misstep, but the relentless pace of innovation, many clients have felt let down over the last ten years by products and stories that did not live up to the hype. When you try to predict the future you will miss sometimes, but trust has eroded. That is why clients are cutting partner counts and refining who they work with, and the organisations that can tell the right story will hold lasting partnerships.

The most successful engagements come from mutual investment on both sides towards the future. Too often objectives get pushed on an organisation, a partnership is signed, then expectations fade or the organisation pivots. True alignment requires investment from both parties. The market is maturing after years of experimentation, and clients are now picking best-in-breed and going deep. Fewer, deeper partnerships and more successful engagements are better for the ecosystem, and Lehman is bullish on this next phase.

Publishers are not a monolith. For small and long-tail publishers the road ahead is genuinely challenging, and the data already shows it. But premium publishers with recognisable brands have reason for optimism. Their strategy will need non-advertising revenue streams, and the successful ones already have them. The digital ad market keeps growing, and channels like connected TV, retail and digital out of home are insulated from AI, you cannot watch Yellowstone or buy from Walmart on ChatGPT. Brands still value the open internet, so if mid-size publishers fall away, premium publishers take a larger share, and some of the programmatic-era erosion could reverse.

The danger is AI-generated content. The second a consumer feels content is AI generated, they disassociate. We are inherently built to ignore robots more than people, the way we skip a bot reminder but answer the CEO. So even as media companies use AI tools, the authentic voice of the editor and the publication matters, and content that reads like an AI-written essay will lose the audience.

Lehman's advice to newcomers is deliberately simple. Get in however you can, and whatever the job is, do it really well. It is easy early on, and it happened to him, to get preoccupied with promotions, raises, the clients you work with or face time with the CEO. If you just do your job well, people notice, you perform, you move forward and you learn. Keep it simple, get in, do the job well, and good things happen.