Never Go Dark
Vitaly Pecherskiy, CEO and co-founder of StackAdapt, studied finance, walked into an ad tech startup, and never looked back. Ten years on, StackAdapt is the number one programmatic advertising platform by customer satisfaction, with 1,100 people globally and a product built, still, out of personal frustration with what the market was missing.
“Once I understood how consumer behaviour is seen online through advertising, I was fascinated. In many ways, we’re inventing the industry as we go.”
Vitaly Pecherskiy is the CEO and co-founder of StackAdapt, the programmatic advertising platform ranked number one in customer satisfaction by G2 Crowd and listed in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50. He co-founded the business in Toronto in 2014 and led it as COO before becoming CEO in January 2024, building it from a native advertising startup to a 1,100-person global platform operating across 16 markets.
Vitaly studied finance and arrived at ad tech by accident, joining a small startup after being asked to spend a weekend learning everything there was to know about advertising. He arrived on Monday, was hired on the spot, and has not left the industry since. His early career included roles at AdParlor and Xaxis before he and his co-founders started StackAdapt in 2014, born out of the frustration of not having the product they needed in the market.
StackAdapt began as a programmatic native advertising platform focused on mobile and has evolved over a decade into a full-stack platform covering native, display, video, connected TV, audio, and digital out-of-home. The business is consistently recognised for its design quality, customer satisfaction, and engineering rigour. Vitaly oversees a 50-person marketing team alongside wider company leadership, and has spent the past year building out StackAdapt’s creative tools and generative AI capabilities.
“StackAdapt was born out of personal frustration, and that’s exactly how it should be.”
“You should never go dark. You should always stay top of mind.”
The instinct during economic uncertainty, internal pressure, or strategic transition is to pause marketing spend and wait for clarity. Vitaly’s experience is that this is exactly when going quiet is most damaging. Brands that disappear from view during difficult periods do not just lose share of voice, they lose the accumulated trust and familiarity that makes buyers comfortable choosing them when they are ready to buy.
“To stand out you have to be different. Think like a B2C company. Take risks. Be something people enjoy.”
The most forward-thinking B2B brands are borrowing creative strategies from consumer marketing: outdoor, connected TV, dynamic creative, brand advertising that is genuinely enjoyable. Vitaly’s case is that B2B buyers are people first. They consume the same content, respond to the same emotional triggers, and are just as likely to remember a brand for how it made them feel as for what it technically offers. The decision makers at the end of a B2B sales cycle are not buying committees, they are humans.
“Once we asked what marketers in B2B, retail, and healthcare actually struggle with, marketing became the product.”
StackAdapt began by describing itself as a programmatic advertising platform that any marketer could use. The problem was that any marketer could not easily see themselves in that description. The shift came when the team started speaking to the specific pain of specific verticals, and building separate solutions, messaging, and marketing around each. The product is the same, but the conversation is entirely different.
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