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Tyler Kelly is not here to sell you a TED Talk.
He’s not here to peddle PowerPoint optimism or pretend that running a billion-dollar adtech machine is a serene ride through a cloud-native, AI-enhanced utopia. When asked how he’s really doing — not the LinkedIn version with the curated beach photo and hustle-harder hashtags — he doesn’t flinch: “Surviving would definitely be the way to frame that.”
Welcome to The Adotat Show, where we skip the performative back-pats and go straight for the existential dread behind the KPIs.
Tyler Kelly, President of Basis Technologies and resident grown-up in a company once described as “four guys and a dial-up modem,” is leading a thousand-person platform through what he politely calls “economic fog.” Others might describe it as a Category 5 hurricane made of pitch decks, burnout, and vaguely threatening Slack threads. He’s clear-eyed about it: “Anxiety is always high with that many people working for you.”
So yes, let’s be honest: everyone’s winging it. And some are winging it with nicer dashboards.
We’re in an era of marketing nihilism, where strategy has been replaced by jargon and the tech stack is so dense it might need its own carbon offset. So naturally, we asked Kelly when he last realized this industry was totally unhinged. His answer? Possible — the adtech conference, not the abstract concept. He recalls the moment like a man describing a war flashback.
“There were just so many different ad tech partners that I got to a point where I couldn’t even take any more meetings,” he said. “It was hard for me to break through the clutter. I can’t even imagine from a client perspective.” If you felt that in your soul, you’re not alone. The industry, as Kelly puts it, has become a parade of UI wrappers on someone else’s plumbing, like ChatGPT cosplaying as infrastructure.
On AI? “The majority were that,” he says, referring to startups duct-taping OpenAI to a website and calling it proprietary. “You’ve got three or four people using someone else’s LLM as their backbone. That’s just the math.” In other words, ChatGPT in a trench coat, pretending to be scalable. You can practically hear the VC checks burning.
But don’t mistake Kelly for a luddite. Basis has been building automation tech since 2006, before “DSP” even meant anything outside of a semiconductor catalog. They’ve spent hundreds of millions on infrastructure — not pitch decks — and now run 240 people deep in R&D alone. His argument isn’t against automation. It’s that automation isn’t some sleek, touchless Tesla moment. It’s a battered Ford pickup hauling your junior team out of reporting hell.
He gets into it: campaign pacing, billing reconciliation, vendor directory lookup — the stuff you’d usually assign to someone who just graduated with $100,000 in student debt and dreams of “strategy.” These are the tasks that should be machine territory, and Basis is leaning hard into automating them, not because it’s trendy, but because it’s merciful.
“I’ve always said associates should be 100% automated,” he deadpans. “Their job is three things: optimizing campaigns, pacing, and billing reconciliation. Those are all pretty mindless things.” Translation: let your bright, eager new hires actually use their brains instead of updating spreadsheets like digital janitors.
And when it comes to metrics? Tyler is done pretending. “Clickthrough rate is probably one of the worst terms in things that we focused on for years.” He wants to burn it to the ground — not metaphorically. Literally. He’s that over it. It’s a proxy built for a web that no longer exists, tracking a behavior that no one genuinely does. “I’ve never clicked on a Netflix email,” I admitted. “But I still watch the shows.”
The bigger play? Basis doesn’t want to be another DSP chasing marginal yield. They want to be the pipes. The infrastructure. The unsexy but essential layer that makes the entire ecosystem work — from programmatic to search, social to… whatever Frankenstack we all invent next.
In between all that, I asked the real questions, like a WeWork rabbi for the ad industry:
What would you bring to a desert island — your family, a fleece vest, or a chatbot that praises your leadership decisions?
Kelly’s answer? Bring the family, skip the chatbot, and hoard anything that gets you food. “Although,” he adds, “the fleece might be useful. Maybe tear it up, use it for kindling.”
And just like that, you understand the man: practical, scrappy, and a little burned out — but still grinding, still building, and still weirdly optimistic that this adtech circus can evolve into something smarter.
🧩 Why It Matters:
While the rest of the industry’s busy slapping AI buzzwords on warmed-over dashboards, Tyler Kelly is talking about trust, trench work, and eliminating clickthrough rate like it owes him money. This isn’t about disruption. It’s about survival — with enough infrastructure to actually get things done. That alone makes him worth listening to.
Behind the Curtain: From Four Guys to a $2B Engine
Chicago-based Basis Technologies was never supposed to become a $2 billion media platform. At least not if you asked its founders in the early 2000s, when the company—then called Centro—was little more than a bootstrap effort, operating without venture capital and with an early product that predated the programmatic landscape as we know it.
But two decades later, Basis has scaled into one of the most quietly consequential players in digital advertising, managing over $2 billion in annual media and maintaining one of the industry’s largest in-house R&D teams, with more than 240 dedicated engineers.
President Tyler Kelly, who joined the company when it was still “four guys and a dial-up modem,” credits the company’s longevity to its early and continued commitment to automation—not as a trend, but as infrastructure. “Our first product, MMS—Media Management System—launched in 2006,” Kelly said. “That was before DSPs were even a thing.”
While most companies in the sector were focused on building bidder tech or layering on flashy analytics dashboards, Basis focused on internal coherence. The goal wasn’t to win short-term deals—it was to reduce human drag across every stage of the digital media workflow: planning, buying, execution, reconciliation.
That infrastructure-first approach has proven to be a strategic hedge against the shifting sands of digital advertising. “If we had stayed the same company we were in 2005, we’d be out of business,” Kelly noted. “The market changes too fast.”
The pivot from Centro to Basis in 2021 wasn’t simply a rebrand; it was a reflection of how the company had evolved from a managed service provider into a full-stack SaaS platform. That platform—now one of the most integrated in the market—connects DSP functionality with direct search and social integrations, billing automation, and internal collaboration tools, effectively consolidating the fragmented media planning process into a single interface.
Part of what has made Basis distinct is its approach to employee retention in an industry often defined by burnout. The company made a deliberate choice to invest in automating what Kelly calls the “soul-sucking” work: repetitive campaign pacing, billing reconciliation, and vendor communication—tasks typically handed to entry-level associates.
“We get kids out of college who’ve spent six figures on an education, and we put them on spreadsheets all day,” Kelly said. “That shouldn’t be the job. If we can automate that, we let them focus on strategy and creative thinking.”
The company’s migration of all data infrastructure into Snowflake over the past few years is part of that effort. The centralized architecture enables Basis to build machine-driven optimizations across channels, not just within individual buys. It also reduces the need for manual oversight in campaign delivery, relying instead on rule-based alerts and automated pacing tools to ensure performance targets are met.
As for the broader ecosystem, Kelly sees agencies evolving—not disappearing. “In-housing sounds great on paper,” he said. “But the operational complexity of building internal media buying teams is massive.” Instead, he sees agencies leaning into consultative roles—offering strategic oversight, creative development, and platform governance rather than executional buying.
What Basis wants to be, Kelly emphasizes, is not the agency of record, nor another dashboard. “We want to be the pipes,” he said. “The infrastructure layer people build on top of.” It’s a pitch that echoes what The Trade Desk has said for years—but with a notable difference: Basis isn’t trying to replace partners; it’s trying to give them a better foundation.
That posture—build foundationally, automate ruthlessly, and own the plumbing—may explain why the company has stayed relatively under the radar compared to flashier players. But it also raises a question: in an ad tech sector known for churn, is Basis quietly building the next default operating system for digital media?
In a market flooded with pitch decks and point solutions, Basis is one of the few platforms focused on infrastructure over interface. It isn’t just selling software—it’s replacing the duct tape that holds the modern media workflow together. And that may be the most scalable business model of all.
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