As we celebrate one year of coming together as Equativ, we took the opportunity to sit down with our CEO, Arnaud Creput to reflect on the year to come.

A full transcript of the video appears below.

Q. Where do you envision Equativ in five years?

Yeah, it’s always hard, you know, to project over the next five years and even more in our industry, which is changing that fast.

But, I would say first, Equativ has to achieve scale everywhere in the world, and especially in the US. Equativ has to become a one-stop shop for publishers, for advertisers, for broadcasters, for retailers, for agencies to deliver value and to get the best performance from advertising campaigns, both sides of the market.

In order to achieve that, and this is the main ambition to achieve. That is just the execution of our foundational principles. Number one is all about transparency. You know that in this business some large US players are behaving as a black box. This is exactly what we don’t want to do. And how does it work? It’s all about interoperability, openness of the platform. It’s all about brand safety and quality – delivering the best quality ads on websites, and providing the best quality inventory and the best content to advertisers. Something that you can’t find, for instance, on social media. And, on top of that, this is all about delivering fair value to all, you know. This is also cost efficiency, directness, and making supply and demand converge on the same platform.

The number two is all about privacy. You know that our world is changing extremely fast. Now, what matters most in this industry is to respect the consumer’s right to privacy. We are coming from the strictest region in the world in terms of privacy, which is Europe with the GDPR and even in France, the CNIL’s data privacy authorities are probably the strictest in the world. We are complying, and more than complying, with this. Where most of the US players are extremely far from respecting this foundational rights to consumers.

My number three would be all about, you know, a shared interest business model. What does it mean? It means acting and behaving without any conflict of interest, like a few advertising giants, and having our interests 100% align with the ones of our clients.

And my number four is all about sustainability. You know that this business is not a green business. It is consuming a lot of IT resources, a lot of traffic, and the carbon footprint is definitely far from being neutral. So, one of the big challenges for Equativ and for the whole industry is to find the right way to achieve carbon neutrality and to propose the right value proposition around this.