Guest · B2B demand and pipeline
Vitaly Pecherskiy
CEO and Co-Founder, StackAdapt
Vitaly Pecherskiy studied finance and expected a career in banking. Instead he talked his way into a small ad tech startup, taught himself the business over a weekend, and a decade later runs one of North America's fastest-growing programmatic platforms. As CEO and co-founder of StackAdapt, which he built from a narrow native-advertising tool into a full-stack platform of close to 1,100 people across sixteen markets, he argues that the industry moves too fast to be taught, so you learn it by building it. He is a quant who prizes creative courage, a CEO who tells his team never to go dark, and the man behind a brand mascot that is, for no good reason, a toaster.
About
Vitaly Pecherskiy is the CEO and Co-Founder of StackAdapt, one of the fastest-growing programmatic advertising platforms in North America, now operating with close to 1,100 people across sixteen markets worldwide. A finance graduate who stumbled into ad tech through a weekend crash course and a Monday morning start date, he co-founded StackAdapt in 2014 and has shaped it from a narrow native advertising startup into a full-stack platform that is redefining how brands and agencies buy media across the open internet.
Vitaly studied finance at the University of Ottawa, graduating Cum Laude, with additional studies at NEOMA Business School. He moved to Toronto expecting a career in investment banking but instead landed at AdParlor, a small ad tech startup and Facebook Ads API partner, after the CEO told him to study advertising over the weekend and come back Monday with his laptop. That immersion in the mechanics of digital advertising sparked a fascination with how consumer behaviour could be observed and acted upon through technology, a fascination that has driven his career ever since.
He co-founded StackAdapt in 2014 alongside Ildar Shar and Yang Han, initially focusing on programmatic native advertising for mobile. Over a decade, the platform expanded to encompass display, video, connected TV, streaming audio, digital out-of-home, and in-game advertising, with a growing suite of creative tools and first-party data integrations. Vitaly served as COO for the company's first ten years before being appointed CEO in January 2024, with co-founder Ildar Shar moving to the board and Yang Han continuing as CTO.
Under his leadership, StackAdapt has invested heavily in verticalising its go-to-market approach, building dedicated engineering and solutions teams for B2B, retail, e-commerce, and healthcare marketers. The company has also moved into creative production, launching an in-house creative services team and a self-serve ad builder that serves as a foundation for generative AI capabilities. Vitaly's philosophy is that product and marketing must be deeply interconnected: when marketing speaks to specific customer pain points rather than generic platform features, it resonates far more powerfully.
Recognised early in his career on industry under-30 lists, Vitaly writes and speaks regularly on leadership, entrepreneurship, and the future of advertising technology, and StackAdapt has been recognised in growth and workplace rankings including Deloitte's Technology Fast 50. He is drawn to the parallels between athletic performance and building a business, a theme that surfaces in how he leads.
Career16 years
- 2014 to now
- 2013 Xaxis
- 2011 to 2012 AdParlor
- 2010 Industry Canada
How Vitaly thinks4 convictions
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Never go dark
One lesson has stuck with Vitaly through every downturn: the moment you pause marketing, everything gets harder. When uncertainty hits, the instinct is to go quiet and protect the budget, but he believes that is exactly backwards. The companies that stay top of mind, that keep leading with a message even when the market tightens, are the ones still standing when conditions improve. Going dark, he says, is the one thing StackAdapt has learned never to do.
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The accidental toaster
StackAdapt's unlikely mascot is a toaster, and the story of how it got there is the whole point. An early brand ad, made with an agency, drew a parallel between business and sport and somehow ended up representing the company as a toaster. Even the team thought it was random. But it went live, people kept asking why a toaster, and the question itself became the marketing. So they leaned in, 3D-printing a real toaster for the follow-up film. For Vitaly it proves that B2B advertising can be memorable and a little absurd, and that getting people talking is its own measure of success.
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Steal the consumer playbook
Vitaly thinks the biggest opportunity in B2B is to stop behaving like B2B. The category is crowded and the barriers to entry are low, so the only way to stand out is to be different, which to him means borrowing from the consumer world: bolder creative, personalisation, dynamic creative, and channels like connected TV and digital out-of-home that consumer brands pioneered. He points to the rare B2B campaigns that are genuinely fun to watch as proof of what is possible. Underneath it sits a simple truth he keeps returning to, that the executives doing the buying are ordinary people consuming the same content as everyone else, and the brands that remember that win their attention.
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Talk to the pain
Early on, StackAdapt described itself as a programmatic platform for marketers in any industry, and Vitaly found that buyers struggled to connect that to their own problems. The turning point was verticalising the business and asking, instead, what a B2B marketer or a retail or healthcare marketer actually struggles with. Today dedicated engineering and solutions teams build for those specific pains, even though it remains one interconnected product underneath. When marketing speaks precisely to a customer's pain point, he has found, the response changes to oh, they really understand me, and everything resonates more. The deeper marketing and product are intertwined, the better the work lands.
