Iván Markman joined Mediaocean in May 2026 as its first President and COO — a role that didn't exist before he took it. He joins Corey Ferengul and Joe Zawadzki to explain what Bill Wise hired him to fix.
Iván traces a path from Overture and Yahoo through MarketShare and Neustar to running search, ad tech, and Edgecast at Verizon Media, where he helped turn the business around ahead of the Apollo sale. He describes Mediaocean as two halves of the same problem: Prisma, the financial backbone moving a couple hundred billion dollars of media and reconciling it to the penny, and the Flashtalking, Innovid, and 4C side serving roughly a trillion impressions a year across social, CTV, and everything between. The company buys no media and sells no media — Iván compares the position to Visa.
The conversation turns to what actually makes agentic advertising work. Iván argues the scarce asset isn't the model, it's deterministic data and deterministic pathways — and that Mediaocean owns a second data set nobody else has: not the client's campaign data, but the data about how the money and the impressions actually moved. On MCP, he notes the important letter is the C.
He also covers the integration reality behind the marketing, why he asks every founder for their "investor scorecard" rather than a pitch, Mediaocean AI Ventures, and where the next dollar goes: building.