The Bottom Line is an interview series from New Digital Age, talking to adtech CFOs about the financial, strategic and market forces shaping the future of the sector. To kick off the series, NDA sits down with TripleLift CFO Matthew Novick.
For years, adtech was built around one mantra: grow first, worry about profitability later.
Venture capital flowed freely, sales teams expanded rapidly and businesses could afford to spend heavily in pursuit of market share. That world has gone.
For Matthew Novick, CFO at TripleLift, the shift has fundamentally changed what it means to be a finance chief in adtech. Today’s CFO needs to understand the technology, the customers, the sales funnel and the wider market, as well as the numbers.
How has the CFO role changed as adtech has moved beyond its growth-at-all-costs era?
A lot has changed. When I started, venture money flowed in like water. The goal was to spend and spend, because when you spent it there was plenty more behind it.
It was very much a growth world. You developed products, invested heavily in technology and product, and threw salespeople at growth. You wanted to grow 100% or 200%.
That’s shifted. The dollars coming into adtech aren’t flowing in the way they used to, and they’re not coming in on the same terms. The ecosystem has moved from growth at all costs towards sustained, controlled growth alongside profitability.
For a lot of businesses, healthy growth paired with real profitability is a much better story than growth alone ever was.
The question is how you control your own destiny rather than having to go find more money.
My focus is much more on what the next two or three years look like, how we manage our dollars across that period and how we make the business more efficient. Those days of unchecked losses are over. Nobody is throwing money around like that anymore, particularly in adtech.
How do you turn all of adtech’s complexity, from privacy and identity to measurement and AI, into financial decisions?
The CFO is not an accountant anymore. I’m much more of an operational CFO. I want to understand what’s on the paper, but also what’s off the paper.
If we’re making a product change, why are we making it? I’m in market with our salespeople, I’m talking to people across the industry, I’m looking at technologies and I’m involved in corporate development opportunities.
You need to understand that complexity to decide where money should be spent.
Ultimately, you have to work backwards. If I’m taking a dollar of revenue and trying to get to an EBITDA target, what needs to live in between?
Our new tagline is impact. How do we make sure advertisers are getting impact from the products and supply they are buying from us?
That means understanding identity, measurement, privacy, first-party data, third-party data and the technology required to bring it all together. Then you translate that into the financial model.
How closely does the CFO need to work with the rest of the C-suite?
Very closely. Triplelift is a private equity-backed company, and our ownership is very driven by metrics, so my team and I need to be on top of those metrics.
The only way to understand what’s happening in the business is to be close to the other C-suite leaders. We meet weekly, have quarterly off-sites and regularly review financial results.
Every C-suite person has a separate meeting with me and my team to understand what we’re spending, why we’re spending it, whether we need to spend it and what the ROI is.
If my CMO tells me about an event, I’ll ask how many leads we got, what the ROI was and whether we should do it again.
Revenue operations also reports into Finance as I have an operations background. That helps because I understand sales metrics, operational metrics and financial metrics.
It’s very much a collaborative effort. You have to make all the pieces of the financial model fit together.
Which metrics really tell you whether an adtech business is healthy?
Profitability is critical. You have to understand the true profitability of the revenue before you even get to G&A, sales and marketing.
You also need to understand gross margin, net revenue and the true profitability of what you’re selling. If you’re an SSP running an ad impression, what is the actual profitability of that impression?
Then you look at retention. Revenue in adtech is tied to actual media delivery rather than a flat subscription, so understanding delivery alongside margin, logo retention, gross retention and net retention gives you a much fuller picture than contract value alone.
You also need to understand why revenue is growing and where it’s growing. We look closely at pipeline, close rates and the sales funnel. How many meetings does it take to create pipeline, what close rate does that produce and what does it take to generate the revenue?
What role should CFOs play in adtech’s long-running transparency debate?
Transparency matters, and we hold ourselves to a high bar with our clients. Everyone values services differently, and unless you understand the entire P&L, you don’t necessarily understand why something is priced the way it is.
I think the bigger issue for the industry is the black box around whether advertising actually drove impact.
Did your dollar drive a conversion, an eyeball or something else? Until there’s a common set of attribution metrics, the industry will keep having this conversation.
And where does AI fit into all of this?
AI will have an impact, but I don’t think it will change the entire landscape as quickly as everyone thinks.
AI has already been part of adtech for years through machine learning and decision engines. Agentic AI changes things somewhat, but we’ve already seen a lot of what AI can do on the backend.
I think the bigger opportunity may be in the back office and operational side, where agents can help standardise and optimise processes.
We’re trying to skate to where the puck is going. We need to understand where AI, funding and the public markets are heading, while building unique data, creative or supply capabilities and creating captive demand.
So what will define the successful adtech CFO of the future?
The adtech CFO role is, in many ways, a strategic partner to the CEO, not just a numbers person.
Adtech is incredibly complex. On day one, particularly in media, your revenue is zero because you haven’t delivered the media yet. You have to navigate complex deals involving marketers, agencies, partners and suppliers.
You need to understand identity graphs, measurement partners and the wider ecosystem. If I didn’t know what those things were, I couldn’t do my job effectively.
I think the CFO will continue to be a critical partner to the CEO as this industry evolves – someone who understands the business as deeply as the balance sheet.
