A Chat With Piero Pavone, CEO Of Preciso On How Native Advertising Is Shaping A More Sustainable Future

Tell us about Preciso

I’m the Founder and CEO of Preciso, and we’re a programmatic advertising business focused on bringing precision, efficiency and fairness to a space that has often prioritised scale over quality.

We work with both advertisers and publishers, helping them make better decisions around how ads are bought, placed and, ultimately, consumed by the user. A lot of adtech has historically been built around volume – more impressions, more spend, more reach – but that doesn’t necessarily translate into better outcomes. In fact, it often leads to wasted budget and poor user experience.

Our philosophy is to focus on quality signals, smarter bidding logic and more meaningful engagement. That applies across everything we build, from display to native, and increasingly into AI-driven optimisation.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

The idea came from recognising a fundamental inefficiency in programmatic advertising. Too many platforms were optimising for spend rather than outcomes. Advertisers were effectively paying for redundancy – impressions that didn’t convert, audiences that weren’t relevant, and placements that didn’t make sense contextually.

We launched in 2020, with an opportunity to rethink that model. Instead of asking, “How do we spend this budget?”, we asked, “Which impressions actually matter?” That shift in thinking led to the creation of our smart bid approach, which underpins everything we do.

There was also a strong motivation to level the playing field. Smaller advertisers and publishers often struggle to access the same quality inventory or compete with larger players. By focusing on bidding precision rather than budget size, we’ve been able to create a more balanced ecosystem.

Tell us about your core product or service, Ultima

Our flagship product, Ultima, is an AI-powered native advertising platform. It was developed to address two key challenges: ad fatigue and inefficiency in campaign delivery.

Native advertising, when done properly, is a powerful format because it aligns with the user experience rather than interrupting it. But it also requires a high degree of precision – in creative, placement and timing.

That’s where platforms like Ultima come in. They use machine learning to optimise bidding and placement in real time, ensuring that ads appear in the most relevant environments. They also support the generation and testing of multiple creative variations, helping brands refine their messaging quickly and effectively.

What’s important with this latest generation of native ad technology is that it doesn’t just improve performance metrics like engagement and click-through rates, although it does that very well. But crucially, it also reduces waste. By filtering out low-quality traffic and focusing on high-intent users, we’re able to deliver stronger outcomes while using far less resources.

And for publishers, it means monetisation that doesn’t compromise the integrity of their content or alienate their audience.
 

What most excites you about the adtech industry?

What excites me most is the shift towards more intelligent, user-centric advertising. For a long time, the industry has relied on really blunt instruments – think broad targeting and intrusive formats – as well as third-party data. Thankfully, that model is changing.

We’re now seeing the convergence of AI, first-party data and contextual relevance, which is enabling a much more sophisticated approach. Advertising is becoming less about interruption and more about integration – fitting naturally into the environments where users are already engaged.

There’s also a growing awareness of sustainability, both in terms of user experience and environmental impact. Reducing unnecessary impressions and improving efficiency isn’t just good for performance, but for the ecosystem as a whole. Being part of that evolution, and helping to shape it, is incredibly exciting.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome along the way?

One of the biggest challenges has been shifting mindsets. The adtech industry is mature, and many of its practices are deeply ingrained. Convincing stakeholders to move away from volume-based thinking towards a more precision-led approach isn’t always straightforward.

There’s often a perception that more spend equals better results, or that high-impact, disruptive formats are necessary to capture attention. In reality, the data increasingly shows the opposite – that relevance and context drive far better engagement.

Another challenge is maintaining performance as you scale. As campaigns grow, many platforms struggle to maintain the quality of their bidding logic, leading to inefficiencies. We’ve had to design our infrastructure very carefully to ensure that precision is maintained at scale, not diluted by it.

What is your number-one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Focus on solving a real problem, and make sure you can prove it. It sounds simple, but it’s something that is often overlooked. In our case, everything is grounded in evidence, whether that’s campaign performance, user engagement or cost efficiency. Before you scale a solution, you need to validate that it delivers meaningful business outcomes.

I’d also say: don’t underestimate the importance of balance. Move quickly, but bring people with you. Some of the best decisions we’ve made have come from combining data with diverse perspectives across the team.

What can we hope to see from Preciso in the future?

We’re continuing to invest heavily in AI and native advertising, particularly in making these technologies more accessible to publishers. One of our key areas of focus is expanding Ultima’s capabilities for publisher environments, including simplified integrations that allow them to add high-quality native placements with minimal effort.

We’re also refining our bidding and optimisation models to make them even more efficient and adaptive. The goal is to ensure that every impression has a purpose – reducing waste, improving performance and enhancing the overall user experience.

Looking further ahead, we see a continued shift towards more conversational and integrated forms of digital engagement, where advertising becomes part of the content journey rather than a distraction from it. Our role is to build the technology that enables that shift, in a way that benefits advertisers, publishers and audiences alike.