Krystian Żółtowski is a Senior Product Manager at PrimeAudience. Previous roles have included Senior Product Manager at Ringier Axel Springer Polska and OnAudience. His hero is a well-known privacy crusader.
Who is your digital hero?
Lately, it has to be Alan Chapell, even though I don’t know him personally.
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
Alan has earned “hero status” for me because he consistently publishes high-quality, relevant content on privacy in AdTech.
More specifically, he discusses topics that align with my current professional challenges, including how AI is reshaping targeting technologies. He’s the person I go back to when I want to refresh or recalibrate my own understanding.
Beyond knowledge sharing, he’s one of the few industry voices willing to speak plainly about privacy issues that people representing larger companies often avoid. We need more advocates like him who push the industry forward instead of hiding behind safe narratives.
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
Even as industry interest in privacy is slowing due to the third-party cookie deprecation being put on hold and many companies quietly deprioritising privacy-preserving technologies, Alan has kept the pressure on.
His work ensures that privacy remains a relevant consideration, even when businesses have fewer incentives to push it forward. By consistently highlighting the gaps and reminding the industry why privacy matters, he helps keep digital moving in a direction that isn’t driven by short-term convenience.
What are the biggest challenges in digital that we need another hero to solve?
I don’t think the biggest challenges in our industry are something a single hero can solve. We already have broad, ecosystem-wide initiatives driving real progress, whether it’s the IAB’s standardisation work or independent efforts like AdCP. We also see work like Deals API pushing consistency in how curated deals and PMPs are managed.
But if there were space for an individual hero, it would be on the buy side.
Deal activation is still stuck in a legacy mindset: deals are created for a single buyer, and many buy-side platforms refuse to accept deals that could be distributed to multiple buyers simultaneously. What we actually need is someone who can reset that paradigm.
My view is that the real opportunity is in creating a deal marketplace, a place where curation vendors or publishers can publish deals publicly, and buyers can browse and activate them just like they select audiences in today’s data marketplaces.
That would break the bottleneck and finally modernise how deal-based activation works.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
My most meaningful achievement so far has been helping to demonstrate what real curation actually looks like in practice.
This doesn’t just mean packaging static data; it also involves activating signals in real time under strict technical constraints. The “heroic” part wasn’t about individual contribution. It was the collective effort of working with the development team to push the technical limits, test infrastructure across regions, and fine-tune latency. We are now operating near the physical limits of what’s possible.
That work demonstrated that real-time curation can move from theory to something tangible, and it has brought me the most satisfaction so far in my professional career.
*PrimeAudience is a client of Bluestripe Communications, owned by Bluestripe Group, the owner of NDA.
