RedTrack CEO Vlad Zhovtenko explains why owning your first-party data has gone from nice-to-have to the only thing that actually protects your ad spend.
Twenty-five years ago, Vlad Zhovtenko launched an ad campaign, watched the network’s numbers say it was a hit, then checked his own numbers and found out it wasn’t. When he called to ask what happened, the answer was: we ran your campaign from 11pm to 3am and called it done. That’s the world Zhovtenko started in. Today he’s the CEO and co-founder of RedTrack, and he’s spent two decades watching media buying go from “basically blind” to fully programmatic, and now, he argues, back to a place where the advertiser has to fight to see anything at all.
That’s a big deal, and it’s the real thread running through this conversation: platforms didn’t get more transparent over time, they got less. First-party data isn’t a compliance checkbox anymore. It’s the only way media buyers get to keep any of the control they used to have.
How Has the Value of Data in Media Buying Actually Changed?
Zhovtenko walked us through the timeline, and it’s worth sitting with because it explains why so much of today’s media buying feels different from even five years ago. Blind ad networks, then Google Analytics as “a major breakthrough” because it gave marketers their first real reports, then the rise of programmatic and impression-level targeting, then the iOS 14.5 update that cut the tracking ties between pixels and ad platform back ends.
“When the iOS 14.5 kicked in, which cut the tracking ties between the pixels and third-party data run by Meta or Google and their back ends, this cemented the shift from the past world of third-party data… to the first-party data, where collecting, processing, and storing, reaching and pushing data back to ad platforms turned from nice-to-have to actually must-have.”
— Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO and Co-Founder, RedTrack
That’s the crux of it. Without a media buyer sending clean signals back to the platform, the platform’s algorithm has nothing to learn from, and it can’t find the audience that actually converts. Data went from a reporting layer you glanced at to the raw fuel the entire ad system runs on.
Where Does AI Actually Help Media Buyers Right Now?
We expected the usual AI hype answer. Zhovtenko gave us something more specific: AI’s real value right now is compressing analytical work that almost nobody has time to do properly.
“This is very deep analytical thinking that requires… to have the ideas about those segments, then test those ideas, then monitor how those segments behave over time… The complexity and the granularity of decisions required more time than we have in the day. What AI does, it allows to cut part of the chase and actually process those huge volumes of data and select the best segments.”
— Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO and Co-Founder, RedTrack
Customer segmentation and cohort analysis are supposed to be standard practice for ecommerce media buyers. In reality, almost nobody does it well because it’s genuinely time-consuming. Feed the dataset to AI, get back a shortlist of the segments actually worth building, then validate manually. That’s not AI replacing a media buyer’s judgment, it’s AI clearing the backlog of analysis that judgment never had time to reach.
And here’s where it gets interesting: Zhovtenko doesn’t think AI replaces media buyers, but he does think it’s already replacing the manual controls they used to rely on.
“You’re basically describing how Meta Advantage+ campaigns are working. It’s like you set the goal, upload the creatives, give the budget, and then, run… I miss good old days when I have all those humongous dashboards with all those finite controls, and I could squeeze every cent out of the ad campaigns.”
— Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO and Co-Founder, RedTrack
How Do You Make Media Buying Decisions Without Perfect Data?
There’s no such thing as perfect data, and Zhovtenko, who studied sociology before falling into digital marketing, framed this in a way we hadn’t heard before: any data model is just an approximation of the real world, and the simpler the model, the bigger the margin of error.
His practical fix is pattern observation. He described scaling a B2B SaaS company from half a million to ten million in revenue almost entirely through Google Search, between 2005 and 2010, by running one controlled change at a time and tracking the outcome on a consistent delay.
“We found that if we change something… we have a shift in the outcomes, basically signups and purchases, exactly six weeks later, give or take. So we did more of that. It actually works. So now we found how we can scale that campaign, and we keep pushing it until we reach the plateau.”
— Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO and Co-Founder, RedTrack
One variable, one time window, repeat. It’s not glamorous, but it’s how you make confident decisions when the dataset in front of you will never be complete.
What’s the Single Highest-Leverage Thing Media Buyers Are Missing?
We asked what actually moves the needle on scaling a business, and Zhovtenko’s answer came back to a very specific, almost overlooked tactic: sending 100% of your conversion data back to the ad platform, not just the conversions the platform already thinks it caused.
“For whatever reasons, a lot of solutions send back to Meta only conversions attributed to Meta. Let’s say you run an ecom store, you got 100 purchases, 50 of them came from Meta. So you send that 50 back to Meta. What about the other 50? The learning power of 100 conversions is way larger than the learning power of 50 conversions.”
— Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO and Co-Founder, RedTrack
He paired that with the value of sending back granular identifiers, like Facebook Browser ID, on every conversion event, because a higher match score means the platform can more accurately identify your actual best customers, and then go find more of them. Most media buyers, he said, simply aren’t doing either of these things.
Why Hasn’t “Paid Data” Evolved the Way Everything Else Has?
This was the sharpest point in the conversation. Zhovtenko argued that the standard paid media metrics, impressions, CTR, conversion rate, ROI, haven’t kept pace with how much control media buyers have actually lost.
“Media buyer and ad platform pursue the same but very contradicting goals. They both want to maximize their profits… For a media buyer, maximum profit is spending as little as possible with as good results as possible. For the ad platform, maximum profit means getting as much budget from the media buyers as possible.”
— Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO and Co-Founder, RedTrack
His shoelace example makes the stakes concrete: if your average order value is $150 and someone buys a $10 pair of shoelaces, sending that conversion back into the same pool distorts the signal the algorithm uses to find your next customer. Platforms have also gotten far more granular about creative than most media buyers realize, they can distinguish UGC from produced video, long copy from short, and route different creative formats to different audience subsets automatically. Most teams, he said, are still evaluating “does this ad work” instead of “does this creative angle work for this specific segment,” and that’s the gap AI and better first-party data are starting to close.
The Bigger Picture
What Zhovtenko described isn’t really a story about AI, even though AI came up constantly. It’s a story about who owns the data that determines whether an ad campaign succeeds. For most of the last decade, that was the platform’s job by default, pixels fired, cookies tracked, Meta and Google filled in the gaps. That default is gone. iOS 14.5 broke it, privacy regulation is accelerating it, and platforms are removing the manual levers that used to let media buyers compensate for it.
The advertisers who come out ahead won’t be the ones with the best creative or the biggest budget alone, they’ll be the ones who own their conversion data cleanly enough to feed the algorithm the full picture instead of half of it. That’s the same principle behind identity resolution more broadly: the less you outsource “knowing your customer” to a third party, the more control you keep when that third party changes the rules, which, as this conversation makes clear, they will keep doing.
Find Vlad Zhovtenko and RedTrack on LinkedIn or at redtrack.io.
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Watch the full episode: Rethinking Paid Media for Smarter Buying on YouTube
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
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