Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Join us each week on the Women of Influence podcast, hosted by Aliza Freud and presented by SheSpeaks. Each week, Aliza sits down with trailblazing women from various fields—business leaders, social media influencers, authors, speakers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders—who are using their platforms to create meaningful impact. Discover how these women harness their influence to inspire, motivate, and drive change, and gain actionable insights you can apply to your own life!
Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Unlocking Trust: Data, Privacy & Leadership
Ad fraud and data privacy are changing the way advertisers and consumers interact. In this episode of Women of Influence, Nina Talcott, Director of Research Communications and Media Engagement at Pixalate, explains how fraud drains billions from the industry, what new privacy laws mean for consumers, and why transparency is critical. She also shares her perspective on influence, the value of mentorship, and the advice she would give her younger self.
Episode Highlights:
- How Pixalate combats ad fraud and protects consumer data.
- Billions lost to bots, spoofing, and fake apps on connected TV.
- Why consumer privacy and new data laws matter.
- Influence built through one-on-one connections.
- Advice to her younger self: be authentic and embrace individuality.
Links and Resources
Connect with Nina Talcott on LinkedIn
Connect with Pixalate on LinkedIn
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lean into your uniqueness. I think it's very easy earlier on in a career to try to do everything the right way and follow this path of. I need to make sure that everything I'm doing you know I have this persona and the demeanor I've learned over the years that I've had a much better connection with people of just being my authentic self as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Welcome back for another episode of she Speaks Women of Influence podcast. Today, I'm joined by Nina Talcott, and Nina works in an industry that you probably don't think about, but is something you interact with every day. You are surfing the web if you're on social media, and Nina is the Director of Research, communications and Media Entertainment at Pixelate, and Pixelate is focused on ad protection and privacy for consumers, and Pixelate is focused on ad protection and privacy for consumers, and what Nina does specifically is she connects the work of the data science that her team does with the broader advertising industry people who are advertising to you and I online and shares those insights about ad fraud and privacy and consumer protection. So in our conversation, nina and I explore how fraud is actually affecting both advertisers and consumers like us, why transparency in digital advertising is so important and what influence means to her in her own life as well as in her career. She shares some really great advice on mentoring others and embracing authenticity, which has been a theme that we've been hearing about so much from the women who come on the show.
Speaker 2:I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation with Nina. You're going to learn about an industry that you interact with, as I said every day, you're going to learn about an industry that you interact with as I said every day but probably don't think that much about, but also has implications for you as a consumer. So with that, I'm going to let you hear my conversation with Nina Talcott. Here we go. Nina, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk with you because there is so much conversation right now in the market. I was just at a conference in Miami and there was a lot of conversation about fraud and what companies advertisers can do to mitigate fraud, and I know we're going to get into that in terms of what your company does. So you are currently the director of research, communications and Media Entertainment at Pixelate, so can you talk a little bit about what Pixelate does and more about your day-to-day role?
Speaker 1:Sure, thank you. So Pixelate is an analytics platform focused on ad fraud, privacy and compliance, specializing in connected TV so your Rokus, your Apple TV, your Amazon but then also looking at programmatic ad trends on mobile Google, android phones and iPhones, and then also web as well. In a lot of ways, I feel like we are the watchdogs to see and make sure that there's transparency within the advertising ecosystem. So when you have an ad that's being placed on a website, we're able to see how those ads are being viewed or not viewed by humans or bots. So that is something that our team has been doing now for over a decade, and my particular role is kind of bridging the gap between all of the data scientists who we have on our team who are doing the research, and I'm taking that and then synthesizing it out to our social, on LinkedIn, different places that it might be picked up from like a media standpoint. We've had articles that have been in Wall Street Journal to those people in like the publishing space, the brands and the agencies to see the data.
Speaker 2:So it sounds like it's a bit like B2B marketing. You are kind of in charge of helping to build the brand Pixelate brand with the potential customers who might use your services, is that?
Speaker 1:a good yeah. So we operate only in the B2B space and working with large clients and some smaller ones as well, but 100% B2B and so there's a lot of interest in it from like a consumer standpoint. So we have a couple of tools that you can go on right now and look up an app. So if you have children who are playing like Roblox or things like anything on the Xbox, you can actually go to our site right now anybody and look up to see are these apps that I'm using, my children are using, my family, my business are using? Are there areas where there's maybe privacy policies missing? Are they targeted towards clients and age groups that they shouldn't be? So we have that data online, which is really a great tool, and useful for me, okay.
Speaker 2:So, nina, I really want to delve into this a little bit more, if we can. So it's almost like there are two elements of who you're bringing value for, and I'm very glad you clarified this because, on the one hand, if you're an advertiser let's say I'm just making your Coca-Cola you want to know that if you're placing an ad somewhere, that ad is not being just shown to bots. Right, there are tons and tons of bots out there. How do you know that your ad is actually getting in front of your intended target audience and they are not mine?
Speaker 2:That's one part of what you're working on and is obviously extremely valuable to the advertising marketing industry, because you budget and as a former brand marketer, I remember we always knew that there was some fraud going on, but we didn't know where the fraud was Right. So, helping to and it's obviously just a waste of money, I mean you're wasting your budget. So there's that. That part of what you're doing. More about consumer understanding and consumer safety is another part and I'd love if you could talk about just a little bit. How do you think consumers are feeling now, in this day and age, about their privacy and having an understanding of what some of the risks are when they're using some of the apps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's evolving, I would say, as we look to the UK with things like the GDPR and making that pretty prominent in everyone's day-to-day life, and that you have these new laws to protect you from your data being shared, your data being added to a registry, your data being sold to others to then market to you, and so those laws are coming and have been coming stateside in places like California and New York, and it's definitely become more commonplace now to wonder you know, how is my data being used?
Speaker 1:And it wasn't always that way, maybe five or so years ago. But when we have these reports that we're producing and we're putting a spotlight on the fact that dozens of apps have and thousands of apps really have data and are using it in a way that is not probably in the way that you would want it to be used. And you talked about the amount of money that's being lost to things like ad fraud and bots. Last year we had a report in the Q3 2024 timeframe that $1.4 billion was lost to ad fraud on CTV, on connected television, just on CTV, on.
Speaker 2:CTV. That's mind-blowing. $1.4 billion just on CTV. I mean that's incredible. And is that mostly bots? Just so the audience understands, when that fraud that you're talking about for NCTV, what is really driving it.
Speaker 1:We also have a report on that as well. To actually go through the types of fraud that we are seeing, whether that is actual bots, whether that is a data center that's just collecting that information and not actually people, whether that's IP address spoofing you could have a bunch of computers pretending to be people that are from XYZ location and it really is and it's just like a whole algorithm being run to just siphon money away from these advertisers.
Speaker 2:So the spoofing is interesting because it's sort of a variation of what I would consider like a bot, because you're taking a computer and sort of setting it up and pretending that it's a person similar to like a bot being an actual person or pretending to be an actual person so people understand. I realize that might be worthwhile to explain to people what is a bot.
Speaker 1:A bot is essentially any kind of scripts that's being run to mimic what a human would be doing.
Speaker 1:So there might be you're browsing the internet, you're clicking and you're looking at things.
Speaker 1:You're on your phone and there's usually going to be like ups and downs of you clicking and you can see that traffic on the back end, whereas a bot, there might be uniform clicks happening. So every three seconds when you're looking on the back end, you see like every three seconds, this is being clicked. That's pretty unusual and it's being done in these 30 minute intervals over and over again. Most likely a human would not be clicking every three seconds for 30 minutes non-stops. Those are kind of a 30,000 view of what a bot could be and, as you mentioned, with spoofing as well, some of the data that we've done over the years and some of the reports that we do highlight not just like spoofing from that standpoint, but also spoofing from fake apps being created. You might be actually going to like a fake app and you won't even realize that you're not even in the app that you're supposed to be, because they've built it and made it look like exactly the way you know that it's supposed to look.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, Nina, this podcast is called Women of Influence. Can you give us an idea of what?
Speaker 1:influence means to you? Yeah, for me it's not necessarily about how many followers people have or any kind of subscribers that they have. I think it's like you can have a thousand people following your subscribers, but if no one's really doing anything with the information that you're sharing, then it's like you're not really influencing. And so I find to say, like for me, influencing is more like a one-on-one. I have a couple of people that reach out to me that I've made connections with over the course of my career, and one particular that I can share.
Speaker 1:The story is I worked with her for a long time at a large corporation and at the time she was an executive assistant. But she was looking to make a change. And she came to me and said I really love your advice in this time, like, give me the prescription of how, what I should be doing here. And so I said let's take a look at your resume, let's just update it. And I said here's some opportunities for new career paths that I think would be great for you. And she was like I don't think I could do this. I've just been in EA and I'm like listen, you do project management, you are coordinating all these different marketing efforts and so giving her that platform to say, okay, let's just go for it. And so I feel like having those one-on-one opportunities to influence people, where she was like, okay, I'm going to go do this. And the end of the story is that she did find an opportunity in a completely different capacity.
Speaker 1:Out of the executive function, assistant function is now a project manager. She often will like ping me on LinkedIn and she's like I just am so thankful that we were able to have those like conversations where you were just like an encouragement and I wasn't really getting that from other people around me where it was like this is your box, this is the box you're staying in. Listen, you don't need to be anything other than what you'd like to be. Just because someone's saying like you've always been this role doesn't mean you need to stay there forever. And for me, that's where I see the value of influencing is having those like one-on-one personal conversations and just sharing more of a story so that other people might resonate with it. You never know where someone might be stuck, and you have those like moments where you're talking with them and they're like, oh, okay, you've gone through this too. That's where I kind of see, influence is like that more personal touch.
Speaker 2:I love that and I agree with you completely. I think that we sometimes don't recognize day-to-day, let's say, you're not a traditional influencer. The rest of us, day-to-day, are having an influence and it's sometimes hard to recognize and see that influence. But when you do, and this woman that you mentored to evolve her thinking on what she was capable of, sometimes you like, we can see things for other people that they can't see for themselves, and what a gift it is to give that to someone else. I love that example that you shared, because having that impact and the fact that she was generous in letting you know that you had that impact on her, that's a gift back to you For sure.
Speaker 1:And I try to as much as I can whether it's like in personal or professional do just that of where people don't necessarily see the impact that they're making or the good work that they're doing, to just like call it out and it's just very easy just to be oh, you're doing a really good job, but you're not. It doesn't need to be like, oh, you closed this million dollar deal, it could just be like you handled that very professionally or whatever it is. So, just bringing that to the forefront, people take that with them and they keep that with them and I think about I just always try to do that as much as possible.
Speaker 2:I love that. Well, nina. My last question what would you go back and tell the younger Nina?
Speaker 1:I would say lean into your uniqueness. I think it's very easy earlier on in a career to try to do everything the right way and follow this path of. I need to make sure that everything I'm doing you know, I have this persona and the demeanor I've learned over the years that I've had a much better connection with people of just being my authentic self as much as possible A little goofy sometimes, nerding out on things like Star Trek and bringing references to that into the workplace. Okay, and so I think for me, looking back on it, I wish I had done that earlier of just like not trying to be someone that I wasn't. I think that's something that I wish I could say now to like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I love that, and I think it's also the recognition that being who you are authentically actually is a thing that draws people to you, and I think that we don't necessarily learn that as we're kind of coming up through our schooling system. It sort of teaches us that you get graded and it's like you can't fail. You can't. It almost makes us less likely to take a risk and kind of just show the world who we are. I love that advice. Well, nina, thank you so much for spending this time with us. I am so grateful that you took the time to give your insights and talk about your industry. I learned a lot, so I'm excited for people to hear this episode. Well, thank you for having me today.
