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Rich Cook & Andrew Morgan on Considered Online Advertising

By Rich Cook & Andrew Morgan

CEO & COO of Trade House Media

When Rich Cook, Andrew Morgan, and Antoine Pilate came together in 2017 to co-found Trade House Media, their collective skills in digital tech, marketing, and operations created an online advertising business divergently pushing the parameters of method and innovation in their field.

Each has worked in high-level roles for large corporates – Rich for Carnival, BT, IBM, Switch Concepts, and Chalk Global; and Andrew as a professional musician and producer in South Africa followed by director roles for leading programmatic companies in the UK – and the co-founders have in their own business applied a people-centric approach underpinned by extensive experience.

Trade House Media generates online ad revenue for their broad spectrum of clients from blue chips to bloggers. The company is continually innovating, demonstrated most recently by its moves towards verticalization and the launch of Active by Trade House Media as the go-to solution for brands accessing an active lifestyle audience.

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What's your motivator?

AM: I’m particularly proud that we’re able to make meaningful differences in our clients’ lives, enabling them to do what they love and earn an income from it. We have a very tangible impact on the lives of our clients as a source of income and it's a responsibility we take very seriously. We all know each one of our clients on a first-name basis; we have a very boutique approach.
Internally in the business, I’m proud that we've been able to create a workplace culture where people enjoy coming to work. Anecdotally, everyone who's been here has said it's the best place they've ever worked and that's a huge sense of pride for me.

RC: I'm a single dad, and I home educate so creating a culture and working environment for me to have the priorities that I have is a big motivator for me. It's also a real privilege to be able to build a team within the business as well as be able to choose who we work with as clients.

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What three words describe your business style?

RC: Human because I like connecting and communicating with people. Consultative because I like to see opportunities and think outside of the box. And genuine because we’re all just humans trying to get by and help one another which is also a value we have as a business.

AM: Creative because I enjoy the marketing and design work. And adaptable, because we’re in an industry that’s constantly in flux, there’s always some sort of existential crisis happening out of our control so being able to adapt to that and shift our perspective is quite important.

What’s a common misconception about online advertising?

RC: I think people forget that online advertising powers the free internet. We take for granted that you can browse the web and consume whatever you want for free 99% of the time and that’s because of advertising spend.

There are however a lot of poor-quality sites where vendors flood websites with ridiculous amounts of ads. Our ethos is a more purist approach, considering every one of the stakeholders in the journey – the editorial team, the development team, the advertisers, and the users – to understand what the objectives are and what your users are expecting.

"I think people forget that online advertising powers the free internet. We take for granted that you can browse the web and consume whatever you want for free 99% of the time and that’s because of advertising spend."

Rich Cook

What are your top online advertising tips?

RC: A person that’s relatively new to it will typically just work with Google AdSense which is the entry point to ad monetization. We want to move away from a Google-centric world because billions of pounds of global spend is not going through Google. There’s an open-source technology called Prebid that’s pretty much the go-to outside of Google for ad monetization. Introducing Prebid, and Amazon’s technology which is another big player, is a good secondary stage. Then getting those all integrated using a technology like ours to piece it together – there is a lot of value in working with someone who understands the space.

What’s on your bucket list?

RC: Starting my charity around neurodivergence. My daughter is autistic and has ADHD and the charity is about gaining access to diagnosis and support for people like her. It’s a personal goal that would fulfil my soul.

AM: From a business perspective, I would like to have some sort of exit in the next three to five years but primarily enjoy the journey and the process of getting there.

"I’m particularly proud that we’re able to make meaningful differences to our clients’ lives, enabling them to do what they love and earn an income from it."

Andrew Morgan

What’s your favourite book or podcast?

RC: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell or The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.

AM: Hard Fork is probably my favourite podcast at the moment, it’s a tech podcast, but it’s quite approachable.

What’s your go-to way to switch off?

RC: Going to the gym or doing some form of sport or crazy activity followed up by a sauna.

AM: I’ve built a recording studio in my garden which is where I enjoy spending my time in the evenings and on the weekends now.

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