PubMatic Is Telling a Good Story. It Needs Better Distribution
I recently read PubMatic’s Q3 earnings call. For an SSP that’s lost ~45% of its market cap over the past year (a tough year for many adtech stocks), the story they’re telling, especially around AI, is strong.
The problem: unless you’re the kind of person who reads earnings call transcripts on a Saturday morning, you’d never know PubMatic is articulating a compelling AI narrative.
PubMatic has not come up as an AI innovator in my weekly conversations with a dozen adtech CEOs over the past year. I don’t see the company being mentioned or its leaders driving discussion on social. The company is not, to my knowledge, dominating the podcast circuit.
PubMatic is telling a good story. But without modern distribution, it won’t move the market.
1. The Story: A 3-Layer Framework for Agentic AI
PubMatic’s AI strategy is built around a crisp, three-layer framework:
1. Infrastructure
An owned, GPU-powered tech stack built with NVIDIA that promises superior speed, reliability, and scale. PubMatic is positioning this as a long-term competitive moat and one of the few true infrastructure-level AI plays in the SSP category.
2. Applications
AI embedded across buyer and publisher tools to automate workflows and improve performance (87% faster campaign setup, 70% faster issue resolution, 17+ AI agents already active). In a world where every adtech vendor says “AI-powered,” this is tangible innovation.
3. Transactions
A push toward the next major shift in programmatic: standards and protocols (e.g. AdCP) that enable AI agents to autonomously negotiate, buy, and sell media.
Taken together, these layers should fuel:
Higher platform usage
Differentiation
Major efficiency gains
And paired with PubMatic’s pushes in CTV, SPO, commerce media, curation, and buy-side expansion, the company is positioning itself as both the infrastructure and one of the application-level standard setters for the agentic AI era.
This is a legitimate push. Everyone who drives adtech discourse — and conditions how brand, agency, and publisher executives make decisions on their tech stack — should know about it.
2. The Problem: A Need for Stronger Distribution
A great story with suboptimal distribution is a tree falling in an empty forest. A message is only as valuable as the people who encounter it, repeat it, and build on it.
So what actually drives message amplification in B2B tech and adtech specifically today?
It boils down to four channels:
Social
Email/newsletters
Audio/podcasts
The press
As a long-time proponent of executive evangelism — leaders telling their own stories in their own names on first-party channels — I’d argue that social drives all the others.
People spend more time on X and LinkedIn than on any trade publication. And the people who write or produce the news often get their story ideas from social, too.
If I were PubMatic, I’d be investing heavily across all four channels, specifically prioritizing social.
Specifically, I’d be using their well-known co-founder/CEO, Rajeev Goel, as a narrative engine. Two to three high-quality posts per week, falling into these four buckets:
Thought leadership on where AI is taking the industry
Building in public: the story of where PubMatic has been and where it’s going
Case studies showing how AI is improving outcomes for publishers and buyers
Data & trends that challenge consensus thinking
This is how you take a story out of an earnings transcript and put it into the bloodstream of the industry.
(By the way, reposts from the CEO’s account or posts from the PubMatic company page on LinkedIn only drive a fraction of the impact of original posts from the CEO’s account. This is partially technical; LinkedIn just amplifies reposts less than original posts. But it’s also cultural — people want to hear directly from the CEO, not faceless corporate accounts or deputies. The CEO is always, whether he or she wants to be or not, the chief evangelist. Every CEO needs to step into that role to win the game of modern distribution. And, as tactical and humble as it may seem, that means posting on LinkedIn.)
3. Why Modern Distribution Matters for a Business
Adtech marketing isn’t sexy. People don’t talk about it much. But it’s one of the highest-leverage ways to use 2-3 hours per week of a CEO’s very valuable time.
The adage is true: Perception is reality. It doesn’t matter if PubMatic is innovating if the people who shape industry discourse — the founders, strategists, analysts, agency leads, publisher CROs — aren’t thinking of PubMatic as an AI leader.
Right now, my impression is that PubMatic’s perception in the industry does not fully align with its innovations or its story. That’s a distribution problem.
If Rajeev and his exec team were consistently articulating their three-layer framework and reinforcing it through the four distribution channels above, they would:
Dramatically increase awareness
Shape the AI conversation
Strengthen their strategic position
And, yes, increase their valuation
For a company that recently had a $1B+ market cap, it’s not crazy to say that better distribution alone could unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value.
PubMatic has the story. Now it needs the reach. That all starts with the company’s leaders getting out there on the primary channel for modern B2B marketing: social.
