the blaze strategy

In 2012, my co-founders, Ari Lewine, Shaun Zacharia, and I were working at a major ad tech company, when we identified a problem we believed to be worth solving. Consumer platforms like Google and Facebook were creating these really compelling ad experiences – delivering ads directly into the feed of content, because they had scale and complete control of the content and ad experience. Meanwhile, ads across the rest of the internet were locked into fixed spaces and were interrupting consumers’ experiences altogether, resulting in underperformance for both marketers and publishers. The problem could be solved by creating better ad experiences — bringing what was working on the major platforms out to the open web. That idea launched the company and soon defined an entirely new category of digital media: Native Advertising.