The online advertising industry is undergoing huge changes, and the relationship between advertisers and publishers faces unprecedented challenges. With the failure of traditional advertising technology, new business models are being explored. Aly Nurmohamed, former general manager of Criteo’s global publisher partner, keenly captured this trend and founded Nodals AI, an artificial intelligence company dedicated to revolutionizing the way it serves advertising.
In the advertising industry, the relationship between advertisers and publishers is facing unprecedented challenges. As advertising identification codes and data signals disappear, the ecosystem of this industry has become increasingly complex. Aly Nurmohamed, who was formerly general manager of Criteo’s global publisher partners, was deeply worried about this. After leaving Criteo in 2020, he joined Permutive as general manager and chief operating officer to deepen his online advertising space.
After more than a year of brewing, Nurmohamed recently launched Nodals AI, a custom algorithm advertising company headquartered in London. The company has raised 2 million euros (about $2.1 million) from European venture capital firm Stride and several angel investors in advertising technology.
The core philosophy of Nodals AI is to replace traditional demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs) and advertising exchanges, but to create a more transparent advertising network. Nurmohamed said Nodals is not an ordinary advertising network because it connects directly with publishers to create customized identity and audience signals for advertisers. Unlike advertisers that rely on third-party technology, advertisers served by Nodals can serve directly based on the publisher's first-party data.
Nodals is currently working initially with several top UK publishers and a handful of large advertisers to validate its business model. The goal is to attract advertisers who go beyond simple clicks and post-sales to start incremental testing. By analyzing incremental test results, Nodals can help advertisers determine which potential customers are worth paying attention to and which media channels should be selected for promotion.
However, establishing direct publisher relationships also faces considerable challenges. Although advertisers are the core customers of Nodals, the company still needs to spend a lot of effort to build a network of partners with publishers. Compared to the traditional SSP model, Nodals prefers to work with dozens of quality publishers rather than hundreds.
In the future, Nodals may consider integrating with third-party DSPs, SSPs or other advertising technology companies. But this will be done after validating its use case for building a custom bidding algorithm through direct publisher transactions. Nurmohamed stressed that companies choose to build infrastructure from scratch when making initial decisions, focusing on solving new problems in the current advertising industry.
The emergence of Nodals AI has brought new hope to the advertising industry, and its unique business model and technological innovation are worth paying attention to. In the future, let's wait and see whether Nodals AI can successfully challenge the traditional advertising model.