This week on the podcast we talk with Roy Peleng, who is one of the founders of a company called First Impression. Roy has build the technology that allows a publisher to dynamically test 19 different ad units, along with the monetization partners behind them, to determine what the best format for each page/device type is.

I was initially interested in talking with Roy because his comapny is sitting on a huge data set about how users respond to different ad formats and he is in a place to definitively say what formats work the best in what scenarios.

It turns out, as with many parts of ad tech, general rules of thumb are rare and almost ever ad format is dependent on the content around it. There is no single format that works the best everywhere, but with enough diligence and testing you can determine the format that works best for you.

First Impression, similar to Sortable, is a company that has brining large scale infrastructure and machine learning capabilities to a field that has traditionally be run by humans. I think this new style of ad tech companies are extremely interesting and will make major waves in the next few years as the market changes.