New Digital Age Editor Justin Pearse speaks with Shane Shevlin, Co-Founder and CEO of Bedrock Platform, about the company’s vision, the challenges of programmatic complexity, and the role of curation in the evolving digital advertising landscape.
Let’s start with the basics, what exactly is Bedrock, and what inspired you to build it?
After finishing up at Iponweb, where I had the privilege of seeing the inner workings of adtech platforms, I took some time out following its acquisition by Criteo. It gave me a chance to reflect on the complexities of programmatic advertising and the increasing need for curation.
Bedrock was born from these insights. We’ve built what is effectively a bidder, serving the demand side of the ecosystem, primarily media buyers, while integrating curation at the heart of our approach.
We believe curation isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ anymore, it’s an essential part of executing meaningful campaigns. Our goal is to bring together workflows for curation and media buying in one seamless platform.
How does Bedrock approach curation differently to the wealth of other companies focussing on it currently?
Curation is about addressing the inefficiencies of programmatic advertising. Over time, programmatic evolved from its original vision of democratising media buying through auction-based systems into something incredibly convoluted. Many agencies and brands struggle with how fragmented and opaque the supply path has become.
We view curation as a way to simplify and optimise supply-side operations. Instead of dealing with black-box setups, where buyers lack transparency over where their money goes, we’re creating a ‘closed-loop curation’ system.
This means deals are structured beyond the SSP level,closer to the actual campaign activation,allowing advertisers to have much more precise control over their buying strategies.
You launched Bedrock last year. How has the journey been so far?
It’s been an exciting ride. We launched the company just under a year ago and spent last summer building out the platform with support from First Party Capital. We’re headquartered in London but operate as a remote-first business with teams in Ukraine, Poland, and India.
Before the holiday season, we rolled out our beta program and currently have a handful of early clients testing budgets through our system.
The focus now is gathering valuable data to refine our models and optimise performance. We’re also heavily investing in machine learning to ensure campaign and curated deal performance improve over time.
What kind of feedback have you received from your early testers?
So far, the reaction has been really encouraging. One of the key things we’re addressing is the redundancy and inefficiency in campaign targeting.
In traditional setups, media buyers often deal with overlapping segments, unnecessary verification steps, and misaligned targeting criteria. We’re eliminating these pain points by integrating audience-based buying principles more effectively.
Clients also appreciate how curation can offer more control over budgets, ensuring media owners and agencies are better aligned. With agencies under increasing pressure to prove value and efficiency, the ability to fine-tune programmatic buying in a transparent way is something they’re embracing.
You’re working with both agencies and clients directly. What differences are you seeing in their needs?
Agencies are definitely embracing curation, but some more than others. There’s also an increasing sense of ‘lock-in’ within larger platforms, which makes independent solutions like ours more attractive. Agencies want control over their budgets rather than being forced into rigid structures dictated by the biggest DSPs.
On the client side, we’ve noticed a shift towards planning-first approaches when it comes to audience building.
There was a post-cookie ‘gold rush’ where many tech providers claimed to have the perfect audience solution. But in reality, successful audience targeting needs to happen at the planning level, not as an afterthought. We’re seeing a growing appreciation for that mindset among brands.
How are publishers reacting to this shift?
Publishers have faced enormous challenges over the years,particularly during the race to the bottom in open market trading. Curation started as an additional revenue stream for them, but now, the savvier media owners see its strategic potential.
Through curation, publishers gain more control over their assets, be it first-party data from logged-in users or more precise content taxonomies. We’re seeing more media owners lean in and leverage curation in ways that benefit both them and their advertiser partners.
Control seems to be a recurring theme here,whether for agencies, brands, or publishers.
Absolutely. The technology we’re building is designed to give control back to the key players in programmatic,without forcing them into one-size-fits-all solutions. Agencies need more say in how their budgets are spent.
Publishers need to ensure their inventory isn’t being devalued. Our neutrality in this space means we can support both sides without conflicts of interest.
Looking ahead, what’s next for Bedrock in terms of growth?
We were thrilled to bring Austin Scott on board as our Chief Commercial Officer. Convincing her to leave a secure role at Microsoft wasn’t easy! She’s already making an impact, helping shape our commercial strategy.
For expansion, we’re focused on Europe first. After the UK, France is our next priority,it has a thriving independent agency market that aligns well with our offering. While the US is obviously a massive opportunity, the costs and logistical challenges of launching there mean we’re approaching it carefully.
Finally, what are you most optimistic about this year, and what concerns you the most?
Privacy remains a major issue.
Despite GDPR being around since 2018, we still haven’t fully reckoned with its implications. I expect more big stories to emerge about data protection and compliance,or lack thereof. But curation can play a huge role in ensuring compliance by filtering bidstream traffic to focus on legitimately consented users.
On the downside, I’m concerned about the broader macroeconomic and geopolitical climate. Tariffs and international trade tensions could have a real impact on ad budgets across regions, and that’s something we’re keeping an eye on.
