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SMART TALK
We talk with GDR's co-founder and Managing Director, Per Kristian Tandberg, about:
AI agents that don’t care who you are, the privacy bet that never had a triumphant moment, and why the company spent years assuming the US was closed to them.
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Per Kristian Tandberg
Co-founder and Managing Director, GDR
Co-founder and Managing Director
Per Kristian Tandberg sets the company’s long-term direction.
Per Kristian Tandberg is co-founder and Managing Director of Global Data Resources (GDR), where he sets the company’s long-term direction and leads its international expansion.
With more than 25 years in digital advertising, including leading Advertising.com in Northern Europe, Per brings deep industry experience and a strong commercial perspective to GDR’s growth.
He holds a master’s degree in Business & Economics and remains closely involved in the company’s strategy, partnerships and long-term development.
Everyone in this industry is talking about AI right now. You’ve watched a few hype cycles. What has actually changed in the last eighteen months?
Compared with most hype cycles, this one is very real.
It is already changing how online advertising data is produced and verified, and how that data is used. For a company like GDR, that is a massive opportunity.
Let’s start with how the data is used.
Most of our clients and partners already use AI agents to run and optimise campaigns.
That is a huge opportunity for anyone with good data, because an AI agent is completely brand blind.
It doesn’t care who you are. It looks for reach, it looks for performance, and it looks for a fair price.
If you meet those three criteria, the agent picks you.
That is a pretty good position for GDR to be in, because we can compete with anybody on all three.
And we are already seeing a substantial pick-up in demand from those optimisation agents.
On the data production side, AI is playing an almost equally large role.
But Ulrik heads our data science work and covered that properly in another edition of Smart Talk, so I’ll point you there rather than repeat him.
You’ve said your team tracks what those agents "like." That sounds like a new discipline? Optimising to be chosen by a machine rather than sold to a person?
It is, and there are many parameters.
I can’t give you all the secret sauce. But at the core, our data ops team constantly monitors what data the agents actually pick up.
Are we seeing the same thing in other markets?
Are there gaps?
And then, of course, the three parameters I mentioned:
performance, reach, and a fair price.
If agents are brand blind, does that not undo everything this industry has spent decades building? The relationships, the reputation, the lunches.
It does change it, yes.
Those things used to be fundamental to the business.
But they still matter, because clients are not testing data completely blindly - and wisely so.
Most of them maintain a whitelist of trusted partners, and the agents work within it.
So being on that list is as important as it ever was.
The agent is brand blind.
The list it is choosing from is not.
Let’s talk about scale. You’ve said that if you have a good and proven product, you are almost obligated to scale it. Why obligated - and to whom?
Two groups.
The first is the owners of GDR.
The Nordics is our home market and where we come from, and we have many incredible partners and clients here.
But the Nordics is 25 million people.
There is a whole world beyond that.
The second obligation is to clients and advertisers.
We have very good data that performs on reach, performance and price, without any form of online tracking.
Advertisers in Mexico, India, the US and Canada should have that option too - not just advertisers in the Nordics and EMEA.
The Nordics is still home, but the growth is elsewhere. What does home market mean now?
Don’t get me wrong here.
The Nordics is our home market, and it will always be home in many ways.
What surprises people is that it travels well.
The feedback we get in APAC and the Americas is often an appreciation of where we come from - not only for the winters, the mountains, and the nature.
The Nordics stand for a strict commitment to user privacy and to data quality.
That reputation opens doors.
What didn’t travel? What did you have to unlearn?
Let me give you a real answer rather than a CEO answer.
For many years, we did not prioritise markets like the US or APAC at all.
The assumption was that they were crowded and dominated by competitors operating under very different privacy laws and very different privacy commitments than ours.
That was wrong.
What we had to unlearn was actually quite simple: if you have a good, proven product at a fair price, marketers will buy it in the US, India, Australia and Canada too.
So where is the growth actually coming from?
North America is an amazing market with a long tradition of using data in campaigns, and it’s where the optimisation agents matter most.
Ten years ago, a push into North America would have cost millions of euros and expensive feet on the ground.
Today, the right product and the right quality can take you a very long way.
APAC is a different story.
In markets like India and Indonesia, there are far fewer data providers operating at scale.
Most of our success there has come from long-standing clients in Australia and the US who now experience that they have options in India and Indonesia that were earlier hard to find.
GDR has never used cookies, mobile IDs or personal identifiers - years before regulation forced anyone’s hand. When was that decision made?
It was baked into the company from day one.
The vision among the founding team was that we needed to provide online targeting data that scales and performs without ever tracking individuals and their online activity.
What did holding that line cost you?
The hardest part was convincing clients that tracking data wasn't automatically better.
When a provider says they have 216,987 users interested in tennis, everybody assumed for a long time that this was one-to-one truth.
It is not. It never was.
Almost all online advertising data is probabilistic.
That goes for Meta, for Google, for GDR, for everybody.
Genuinely deterministic data is very scarce - and at scale, most likely illegal.
When did “no identifiers” stop being the caveat and start being the pitch? Was it GDPR?
Honestly, GDPR and the cookie deprecation noise helped much less than we expected.
The implementation of GDPR in online advertising has been, shall we say, strange.
Some bad actors were removed, and that was great.
But for many, the real consequence was a cookie acceptance script listing a thousand data partners, instead of the thirty or fifty carefully selected partners we saw before GDPR.
So there was no single moment.
The only way for us to prove our approach has always been hard work and good commercial partners.
Nobody uses GDR data unless it is a clear improvement on both cost and quality compared to the alternatives.
That is how it is, and how it should be.
You ran Advertising.com in Northern Europe. GDR is a fraction of that size but covers 37 markets. What can you do now that you couldn’t then - and what do you miss?
The GDR team is still small enough that I speak to everybody weekly or every second week.
That is a huge benefit. I don't need to interfere, but I know what everyone is doing and why.
It also makes us fast. No bureaucracy, no long approval trails. One or two messages in Slack and we are all running in the same direction.
Everybody knows the strategy, the targets and the constraints, so I rarely have to block a project.
In the larger organisations I’ve led, the day-to-day is very different.
But a large organisation also has far more power to put behind a big strategic push - once it has been approved.
You say your most important job is picking the right people, then getting out of the way. How do you pick them? And where does getting out of the way go wrong?
Picking the right people is probably my most important task.
Experience and a large network are a massive benefit there, and I’m helped by having the founders still in the company.
The "get out of the way" part rarely goes wrong.
We’re a tight team of different specialists, and I never pretend to know more about statistical modelling than our data science team does.
What I do need to do sometimes is remind people of the strategy and the cost/benefit of the different things we could be spending time on.
What’s your role with partners?
If I’ve done a good job picking the right people to run partnerships and onboarding, my role is limited.
The partnerships team, the customer success team and the data operations team often make me less important - as it should be.
Where I do step in is on partnerships large enough to change our internal resource allocation and our global strategy.
That’s the test.
Which brings us to this autumn. You have two partnerships coming - LiveRamp and InfoSum.
Both are partnerships we have worked on for a long time.
I give full credit to our partnership team, headed by Gunnar Kihl, for putting GDR on the radar of partners at that scale.
I’ll leave the actual details to the launch later in the year.
Better not to steal Marketing’s thunder.
One question I’ll ask now, though: LiveRamp is an identity company, InfoSum is a clean room. GDR’s whole position is that you never track individuals. How do those sit together?
In both partnerships, our data collection methodology is 100% unchanged.
We do not track online IDs.
We use aggregated data from at least fifteen households within a geographical unit.
That doesn’t bend to accommodate a partner.
And, to our credit and our luck, more and more international partners are starting to see the value in that approach.
That is exactly what opens the door to partners like LiveRamp and InfoSum.
Where is GDR in three years?
The aim - and the difficult part - is to keep the Nordic foundation of data quality while scaling into markets with very different traditions and very different data environments.
Building geographical data segments in India, Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina has to be done differently.
We intend to live up to our name - Global Data Resources.
But we cannot compromise on what made us successful in the first place: high-quality data, at a fair price, without personal data.
That is the challenge.
One final thought?
Go old school.
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