Nov. 21, 2025

Episode 149: Steven Liss of OpenAds on AI start-up, AdCP, UCP, and how The Trade Desk stole his name

Show Notes

Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi sit down with Steven Liss, CEO of OpenAds, to discuss the company’s shift from placing ads inside AI chat to using AI to transform display advertising. They explore why contextual intelligence is gaining new traction, how AI-generated creative performs in practice, and what the new IAB standards AdCP and UCP signal for the future of programmatic buying. The conversation also covers the challenges of embedding interoperability, the complexities of building an AI native DSP, and how agencies are adopting creative generation tools.

Takeaways

Ads inside AI chat are constrained by a limited supply, while ads powered by AI offer far more scale
New language models improve contextual classification, which leads to more accurate targeting
AI creative becomes stronger when grounded in a real webpage context and variety
Agencies are driving demand for efficient AI-powered creative, while creative and media teams remain separate
Building a DSP from scratch is now possible because coding models accelerate engineering work
AdCP helps unify signals between buyers and publishers, which cuts waste in programmatic
UCP faces hurdles because embeddings created by different models cannot interpret one another
Open source or shared industry models may be needed to support reliable embedding exchange