Vincent Tessier is Brand & Agency Lead EMEA – MoPub at Twitter. In a career in digital media spanning over a decade, he’s worked at companies including Adsquare, AOL, Alchemy, Trademob and La Place Media, one of the first publisher cooperatives.
We find out who his hero is.
Who is your digital hero?
Fabien Magalon, Managing Director of Gravity, the french premium publisher media & data alliance. I know very few people that are capable of having a very high level and strategic conversation about programmatic, but that really understand the nitty gritty and operational details at the same time.
It’s actually a pretty impressive and fairly scarce skill in my experience, and I believe it really gives you an edge in this industry.
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
First, he hired me to develop the mobile programmatic offering of La Place Media, the leading publisher alliance back in 2013. Overall, I just think he is a great leader that truly understands programmatic inside and out and that above anything else has publishers’ interests very close to his heart.
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
The whole mission of a publisher alliance is to help publishers compete with the big platforms in terms of scale mainly. It’s also about proving the value of premium publishers, which is not such an easy thing to do, trust me.
I really believe his pioneer work helped publishers understand better and adopt faster programmatic as a legitimate lever in their monetisation strategy. If you go back 10 years ago there was a lot of scepticism, misunderstanding and fear about programmatic, it took a lot of courage to advocate.
What the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
Right now identity is definitely the most challenging topic that is definitely challenging the growth of digital.
Big companies will survive but there are many startups that will not survive these big industry moves we are seeing right now. I have to give props to fellow countryman Mathieu Roche who was bold enough to launch ID5 a couple of years ago.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
I’d say that helping agencies to leverage mobile app more is what I’m most proud of. IOs on mobile have been very persistent up until recently as agencies did prefer to outsource mobile for a long time.
I like to believe that I helped mobile programmatic adoption whether it was during my time at Adsquare democratising the use of mobile data or footfall measurement as a standalone product, an important step I believe to move away from IOs, or now with MoPub helping agencies navigate the app inventory landscape and be their trusted partner of choice.
