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Joe Root
Co-founder at Permutive
Joe Root is the co-founder and CEO of Permutive, a leading audience platform for advertisers and publishers. He is known for his role in developing a privacy-centric approach to data management, enabling publishers to control and monetize their audience data effectively while respecting consumer privacy.
Background
- Education: Joe Root holds a BEng in Computing from Imperial College and an MSc in Computer Sciences from Oxford. He dropped out of a PhD in Mathematical Genomics at Cambridge to start Permutive.149
- Career: Root co-founded Permutive, which was initially part of Entrepreneur First and later joined Y Combinator. The company has received significant backing from investors like Y Combinator, EQT, and SoftBank Vision Fund.149
Permutive
- Company Overview: Permutive is a fast and scalable platform focused on real-time personalization in publishing, e-commerce, and gaming. It empowers publishers to gain comprehensive audience insights, optimize campaigns, and provide detailed campaign reports.49
- Privacy Focus: Permutive uses patented on-device technology to ensure privacy-safe data handling, allowing publishers to reach and monetize their audience without compromising consumer privacy.58
- Clients: The company works with major publishers such as News Corp, Hearst, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, Vox Media, and Condé Nast International.25
LinkedIn Presence
Joe Root's LinkedIn username is josephsroot, where he shares updates about Permutive and industry insights.36
Recent Activities
- Cannes Participation: Joe Root has been involved in industry events like Cannes, focusing on integrating the publisher ecosystem and discussing topics such as data privacy and generative AI.7
- Interviews and Talks: He has participated in interviews discussing Permutive's growth, the impact of generative AI on the publishing industry, and future plans for the company.710
Highlights
The biggest risk to the Open Internet is a false sense of security settling in. This isn't about Google, it's about consumer choice. Cookies are already blocked across 70% of consumers. For advertisers this means reach has disappeared and performance is harder to find, and for publishers this means yield has collapsed across 70% of inventory.
Cookies are still deprecating, Google are just explicitly placing the choice and the rollout of it in the hands of consumers instead.
When given a choice, consumers overwhelmingly opt-out. Permutive sits across >1B devices every month. Of those, 70% of consumers no longer have a cookie and within Chrome, 40% of consumers have manually disabled cookies themselves. The debate is simply with this new choice, do we go from 30% of consumers with a cookie, to 15%, or 10% or 5%. None of these options work.
Publisher first-party signals are the only signals which work across 100% of consumers.
Publishers need to invest in collecting and managing their first-party signals, and collaborating with the ecosystem to make them accessible. Advertisers need to invest in collaborating with publishers on top of those signals to find reach and performance. And when they do, Advertisers see sales double and CPAs halve, and Publishers see CPMs grow >90%.
We're seeing this at scale today—over a billion dollars in media spend transacts through our infrastructure. If you want to be a part of building a flourishing and performant Open Web, get in touch!
Publisher signals aren't just the future of media buying, they drive performance today at enormous scale. We've reimagined how the ecosystem can collaborate and activate on those signals, and the results are phenomenal: 2.1x sales, 51% reduction in CPAs, and 90% uplift in CPMs.
Everyone wins. If you're a publisher, advertiser or ad-tech company looking to reimagine a more performant, sustainable ecosystem, get in touch in my DMs!
I'll be joined by a load of awesome Permutive folk out for the week: Elizabeth Brennan, Jay Stevens, Rhiannon Prothero, Samuel K.
