Meet Shobha Doshi, SVP Programmatic Strategy & Operations

Meet Shobha Doshi, SVP of Programmatic Strategy & Operations at Raptive!

Shobha leads the programmatic operations team and is always looking for new ways to make creators and publishers more money. She told us how she’s seen the programmatic space change over the last decade, and what she thinks is the most important topic in the industry today.

How would you describe your job? 

Programmatic advertising is a complex process that can be distilled down to a few concepts: Advertisers use programmatic buying to target their best customers and get transparency about ad performance. Creators win because advertisers spend more to reach the right audience. And it all leads to a better experience for readers, who get more relevant ads. 

My team makes sure our programmatic partners understand that we’re very different from a traditional publisher. We were recently named to AdExchanger’s 2024 Programmatic Power Players list and rank in Comscore’s top ten, right up there with big names like Disney, Google, and Amazon, but we represent thousands of small businesses with a very engaged customer base. 

We’re like relationship brokers, sharing our creators’ voices with the industry and helping them appreciate the nuances of working with creators. Once we talk to people and they hear about our strong focus on quality, there’s a lot of respect for what we do and how we do it. We work really well with our programmatic partners to come up with creative ways of doing things that benefit both creators and advertisers. 

What impact does programmatic advertising have on the creator economy? 

Raptive creators make up such a large portion of the internet, which really brings to life the power of independent creators. In the early days it was a free-for-all, with everybody fighting to get their voice heard. Now the industry is taking independent creators into account and making sure they’re represented. Programmatic advertising helps provide that foundation for creators to make revenue while having the freedom to innovate. 

How have you seen programmatic advertising change over time? 

I think back to ten years ago, when we were talking about this ‘new thing’ called header bidding. Technology has evolved so much to make programmatic more efficient. We’re at a completely different level of understanding how the internet and browsers actually work, and we’re always working to determine what happens next and how to make it better. Now we work with over 30 programmatic partners and more than 5,000 sites, which is amazing because when I was first doing it, we were experimenting with one site. 

What do you think is the most important topic in the industry today?

To me it’s the privacy sandbox and cookie deprecation. We’re in so many conversations about what the solutions might look like for third-party cookies going away, and they’re all tied to privacy and regulations. We’re looking at how to go beyond being compliant, and thinking through people’s privacy so we can be good custodians of their data. 

Where do you see things going from here? 

With cookie deprecation, I think we’ll see a period of time where the industry isn’t quite sure what to do but there will be a lot of opportunity. We’ll see massive amounts of innovation. People will be at different points of the starting line, but the changes will create some really interesting solutions. 

Raptive is really good at adapting without abandoning what we’ve done before. When there’s a wrench in the wheel, we figure out how to take what we’ve done and shift with it, rather than tear it all down and start over. And through it all, we retain our dedication to quality. We’re doing a lot of work to make sure that whatever happens across the industry, independent creators and publishers are represented and protected.