AMENIA, NY — Does the world need another demand-side platform in 2025? Keith Gooberman, CEO and co-founder of DSP Pontiac Intelligence is ready to make that case.
“The old DSPs are like a battleship. There are entire departments of people running around the decks,” Gooberman told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat Berkshires 2025. “CTV is new. You need a speedboat. I want something that connects me, gets me my buys, I want to control it. I want to be nimble.”
This philosophy drives Pontiac Intelligence’s entry into a market that hasn’t seen significant new competition since the early 2010s. The company built its bidder between 2020 and 2022, specifically designed for the realities of streaming TV buying rather than retrofitting display advertising technology.
Programmatic 2.0 demands different architecture
The shift from traditional programmatic buying to connected TV represents more than just a new inventory source. According to Gooberman, it requires completely different technological and operational approaches.
“The actual core, technological way that real-time bidding works has changed,” Gooberman said. “Streaming TV includes content signals that didn’t get included in programmatic 1.0.”
Traditional programmatic buying typically involves hundreds of data partners targeting thousands of websites with cookie-based audience segmentation. Connected TV operates under entirely different parameters: private marketplace deals, no cookies, and content-based targeting rather than behavioral data.
“Large advertisers have a relationship with Disney for a very long time; this is not new,” Gooberman noted. “But they want to buy it programmatically. They want to control their budgets. They want to be able to create a swap when they can do it.”
This creates what Gooberman sees as a fundamental mismatch between legacy DSP architecture and modern CTV buying patterns. Instead of managing hundreds of data partners across thousands of sites, advertisers want to run targeted campaigns across seven or eight premium streaming platforms like Hulu, Spectrum, Disney, and NBC.
The bootstrap advantage
Unlike most DSP competitors that raised significant venture capital during the programmatic boom of the early 2010s, Pontiac Intelligence has remained entirely bootstrapped since its founding. This approach stems from Gooberman’s experience running Programmatic Mechanics, a trading desk he started in 2013.
“I started Programmatic Mechanics in 2013. I built that by competing with Rocket Fuel and a couple of these companies,” he said. “What we did with some of the profits of that business, that’s what we used to invest into Pontiac.”
The bootstrap approach allows the company to operate on dramatically lower margins than venture-backed competitors. “When you raise money, you have investors that want to see returns and they want to see profitability,” Gooberman explained. Without external investment pressure, Pontiac can price its technology at margins that would be unsustainable for companies with investor return expectations.
This pricing advantage becomes particularly relevant for large advertisers evaluating cost efficiency. “They like the fact that there’s more working media, they like more control,” he said. “The relationship with Disney now doesn’t have somebody taking 20% of the pie.”
Focusing on the pipes
Despite industry excitement around artificial intelligence and advanced targeting capabilities, Gooberman takes a pragmatic view of where lasting value exists in programmatic advertising. He borrows some thoughts from Index Exchange’s Andrew Casale to describe his company’s approach.
“We just want to be the pipes and the pipes aren’t going to change,” Gooberman said. “The way ads are bought and sold, the programmatic pipes, that is what happens in programmatic. A publisher ad becomes live. They then use a piece of technology to auction it to the highest bidder. It’s the same technique of algorithms that the airlines use.”
This focus on auction mechanics rather than targeting innovation reflects Gooberman’s belief that the fundamental infrastructure of programmatic buying will remain stable even as measurement and optimization tools evolve. “AI may, AI not going to change” the basic auction interaction between DSPs and supply-side platforms, he argued.
The strategy positions Pontiac as “infrastructure rather than innovation,” as Gooberman is betting that buyers will value transparent, low-cost access to premium CTV inventory over complex targeting capabilities that may not deliver measurable results.
The scale challenge
Pontiac Intelligence’s biggest operational challenge lies in reaching the large advertisers who can fully appreciate its cost advantages. Small buyers with modest budgets don’t necessarily see value in saving percentage points on technology fees, while major advertisers immediately understand the working media implications.
“If people aren’t spending that much money, a lower margin DSP that lets you control 40 private marketplaces simultaneously and manage it with some ease isn’t going to matter to them,” Gooberman acknowledged.
The company competes directly with Google, The Trade Desk, and Amazon — established players with significant market presence and sales resources. Breaking into enterprise conversations requires demonstrating that a bootstrapped startup can provide reliable technology that performs at scale.
“It’s very hard to get into the rooms to talk to these people about the scale at which we can bring and the efficiency we can bring,” Gooberman said. “But with each win and each word of mouth, it slowly starts to roll.”
