Oleg Korenfeld on why sell-side decisioning brings accountability to healthcare marketing
Welcome to Innovators Unscripted, a series where we share unfiltered insights from some of the most disruptive voices in today’s advertising ecosystem. Oleg Korenfeld, group president of tech and platforms at CMI Media Group, joins for a conversation about supply path optimization (SPO) in healthcare marketing, how sell-side decisioning brings accountability to every media dollar, and why AI still needs a human in the loop.
Here are the takeaways that stuck with us.
SPO brings accountability to every dollar spent
Trust and accountability aren’t optional in healthcare marketing, which has led CMI to spending the last two years refining its SPO strategy. CMI realized relying on the DSP alone wasn’t enough when searching for niche healthcare audiences, so the agency set out to better understand and simplify the supply chain further upstream.
“For every dollar that we spend, we now have a much better idea of what gets spent in the middle and what actually moves the needle… There’s a direct correlation between the value a publisher sees to the type of impressions we buy.”
Oleg Korenfeld, Group President of Tech and Platforms
CMI Media Group
That visibility means CMI can show clients exactly where their money went and what it delivered, meeting the accountability clients expect. It also rewards media owners. More streamlined supply paths allow them to retain more value from every media dollar, creating stronger incentives to continue investing in high-quality inventory and strengthening the supply chain for everyone buying through it.
Supply-side signals are proving themselves in healthcare marketing
Sell-side decisioning—and activating audience signals closer to the media owner—is a newer concept for CMI, which, like many agencies, has historically relied on the DSP for decisioning.
Oleg is optimistic about where that shift leads as early tests showed success. Now, he says, the focus is on proving those early results at scale to understand how sell-side decisioning can consistently deliver higher match rates, lower data costs, and better inventory. As marketers gain greater visibility into the supply chain, the next challenge becomes connecting those insights across every channel.
Sell-side decisioning makes omnichannel campaigns more effective
Omnichannel orchestration has been core to CMI’s business for a decade, and as CMI invests in new channels, understanding consumers across all of them only becomes more important. In healthcare marketing, Oleg points out that omnichannel means far more than paid media alone, extending to sales teams, CRM systems, and more. Paid media too often operates on an island, disconnected from the rest of the stack.
Moving decisioning closer to the impression is what reconnects it, giving CMI a clearer view of the full outcome from top to bottom. For marketers, that means budget decisions grounded in the full picture, not just the slice a DSP alone can see.
That same shift toward sell-side decisioning has changed CMI’s relationship with media owners, allowing for closer partnerships and more direct collaboration.
“I can get back to having a more productive conversation with publishers by relying on sell-side [decisioning]. It’s a more direct connection.”
Oleg Korenfeld, Group President of Tech and Platforms
CMI Media Group
Ultimately, that full-picture view and more direct connections with media owners lead to more efficient investments and better outcomes for healthcare companies.
AI brings speed, but people bring accountability
For Oleg, no matter how much momentum builds behind AI in programmatic advertising, a human still has to own the outcome.
“You need someone to validate [AI] and someone to truly be responsible for the process.”
Oleg Korenfeld, Group President of Tech and Platforms
CMI Media Group
AI isn’t one monolithic solution. Different tasks call for different tools. But what excites Oleg about the AI era is the speed, accuracy, and depth of insight it provides. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) used to mean waiting three to six months for an answer. AI now delivers that insight while a campaign is still live, fast enough for marketers to act on it before the moment passes.
Healthcare marketing’s compliance culture built the governance AI now demands
Marketers often assume healthcare’s strict privacy and compliance requirements slow innovation down. Oleg sees it as an advantage. Operating inside a controlled environment for CMI’s entire existence meant the agency already had governance in place before AI ever entered the picture.
That governance mindset shaped how CMI approached AI from the start, treating it as a set of distinct applications rather than one single technology, since automation calls for different oversight than generative AI does, for example. For marketers outside healthcare, that same discipline is the accountability every regulated category will eventually need.
Discover how sell-side decisioning makes accountability part of every media buy.
