We’re asking some of our industry’s leading figures to nominate their digital hero and to explain what’s so special about them.
Amit Kotecha is Marketing Director at the data platform built for publishers Permutive. Prior to Permutive he spent five years at Quantcast. A digital pioneer, Amit spent a decade at the Internet Advertising Bureau UK where he was responsible for launching the Display Trading Council, a significant development in the growth of the real-time advertising industry.
Who is your digital hero?
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
He took on a really tough job when he started at the IAB to introduce mobile into everyone’s conversation.
It was just really difficult to just educate the market about how mobile was going to change everything and I watched the way he did that, with a lot of drive and tenacity, and it was really inspiring.
He deserved the job of CEO at the IAB He was my boss for about two years when I was there, when we started the programmatic council.
He was a great team leader and has always had a lot of empathy for people that worked for him and cared a lot about the people at the IAB.
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
Everything he does impacts the entire digital industry. But he had a massive part to play in growing mobile advertising as a sector and educating advertisers and publishers on how they can just do mobile better. Instead of just having it as an add on to what they were doing already. Essentially helping to create a whole sector.
He was brilliant at managing large meetings, when you have 20 really loud voices, and being able to understand what people are saying, and then distil it down. There aren’t many people that can do that.
He made it fun rather than like a trade body, always making sure he hired really creative people. Things like the Nonference came from him always thinking about how to do things differently.
What’s your most heroic achievement in digital?
The most rewarding was creating the Display Trading Council at the IAB from scratch when I had four companies, Google included, just shouting me all the time telling me to do something. I managed to pull it off and create a whole new revenue stream for the IAB on top of the benefit to the industry.
As part of this, in 2012 I created a video called The Evolution of Online Display Advertising, which I’m still very proud of.
