The infrastructure should disappear. The marketer should feel simplicity. But the data underneath still has to be there to audit.

Whitten is one of the rare people who studied this, a master's in new media and information systems, after two years teaching in Japan. The 16 to 18 year olds he taught were on their phones constantly, banking and living through devices whose technology was far ahead of what people were doing. He thought it was fascinating and certain to come to the UK and Europe, which it has. It was the marketing side, how commerce could run through these new devices, that fascinated him. The hardware was the tell: flip phones with incredible screens, a pre-smartphone precursor that opened his eyes to what was possible.

With more than 20 years in the industry and 10 at Adform, Whitten says the last decade has moved at an incredible pace. New channels that were previously unaddressable to programmatic, CTV, audio streaming and digital out of home, came online, while identity fragmentation became a huge challenge to solve for advertisers, agencies and publishers. If it ever got dull, he says, there is a new challenge or a new opportunity around the corner each year.

Ideally the infrastructure should not be the marketer's concern; the plumbing should work as seamlessly as possible. But each wave of innovation solved a problem while adding a layer of complexity. The more the nuts and bolts slip into an infrastructure play and strategy is done in a simple, intuitive way, the better, and AI is opening that potential. Adform differentiates by listening, innovating products, and keeping boots on the ground across its markets to build three to five year roadmaps with clients.

Where most companies deal with one part of the advertising workflow, Adform runs a very broad stack: ad server, DSP, data management platform and sell-side tools. That gives a purview across data, creative, trading and media, and lets the company find synergy across them. There is still an element of build and they will come, placing bets on where the puck is going, as with the identity solution built ahead of cookie deprecation. But the biggest driving force is simplification in a fragmented world, connecting the dots for the marketer, which led to this year's AI-backed campaign planner inside the DSP.

The customer relationship is changing because clients are driving innovation on top of the platform. Historically an ad tech platform's features are limited to its own roadmap, but with MCP, Model Context Protocol, as an API gateway, clients can now innovate on top of the infrastructure. Adform put an MCP layer over its existing APIs, letting anyone who can use Claude call into the system and combine 800 features in ways the company might not have thought of. Beta clients are already building around creative and ad serving, reporting and insights, and planning.

This is a new frontier for everyone. Few were vibe coding a year ago; now people set up incredible things in natural language. Marketer clients are piecing tools together and agencies are investing heavily in orchestration layers on their behalf. Adform's job is twofold: provide a huge architecture of possibilities and data to pull into other systems, and put native agents into its own UI for everyday work. Above the traditional stack, its role is to plug in and make everything available.

When facing big market change, Whitten focuses on strategy, people, product and customers. Adform decides what to develop by listening to customers and making sure the right people are in the right places to execute. It sounds simple, he says, but at scale it never is.

The commercial to product interface runs on a scaled process led by the CTO. Feedback from 26 markets is gathered through customer success teams, bubbled up into engagement groups and then a steering board where roadmaps are set. With large development capacity and a competitive market, Adform stays pretty analytical about making the right choices.

Whitten loves the complexity of Europe. The market cares more than the States about privacy, where Europe led on GDPR, and about transparency, log level data and transaction flows. There was pushback in Europe against big tech companies over conflicts of interest and their dominance, something a Danish business stands against as a values matter. Adform was far ahead working with PwC on transparency audits, and puts trust at the core of what it does, while treating the US as incredibly important as the home of ad tech.

You can break AI apart. Programmatic and social have relied on machine learning for a long time, so marketers already relinquished some control to platforms that do a better, faster job. Generative AI is different: it is about the interface and agents orchestrating with other agents. But that does not remove the need for log level data or the ability to audit systems. AI simplifies the frontend and the workflows, so marketers should still be able to request all the data that sits underneath.

Opening up digital out of home, CTV and audio gives audiovisual and outdoor advertisers much more storytelling potential, because rich data signals can be married with big creative canvases. In digital out of home, two years of investment has brought weather based targeting and real time response to real world events, moving from a two week planning cycle to changing messaging in real time. In CTV, more performance advertising is coming in as streaming content grows, with more precise targeting connected through to real world action.

Marketing has always been at the centre of revenue generation, and technology keeps expanding the touchpoints and connectivity. So Whitten expects more CMOs at board level and taking CEO positions. When a board wants a chief-everything role that barely exists, his answer is that it is just business: technology, marketing, sales and product are fundamental, and the job of an exec team is to bring them together. If you are not connecting those dots, you are probably not going to thrive.

Beyond being curious and diving in, an early boss told Whitten to fill the void: whenever you land in a job, if you see something not being done that needs doing, get on and do it. It was the best advice he ever got, because it makes you keep asking whether you are doing enough. As a leader he now looks for AI skills and AI literacy when hiring, expecting graduates to have it as native, with enthusiasm for it critical to the next phase of work.