1135: Where Strategy Meets Finance in the Ad-Tech Revolution | Clayton Kossl, CFO, Basis Technologies
Description
On his first day in investment banking, Clayton Kossl was “thrown right into the cauldron.” With few senior professionals in the small aerospace and defense group, junior bankers like him were expected to face company owners directly. “You had to understand the businesses inside and out,” he tells us. The experience forced him to blend analytical depth with the interpersonal agility needed to earn trust in every room.
That mix of skills—numbers and nuance—became a through line in Kossl’s career. At ZocDoc, he joined a Strategic Finance team that partnered closely with the CEO and CFO, taking ownership of decisions that rippled across the fast-growing health-tech firm. The role taught him that financial modeling and relationship-building could coexist—and that influence often came from understanding how leaders think, not just how spreadsheets add up.
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Later, when Kossl joined Paintzen as one of roughly a dozen employees, those lessons proved vital. He rebuilt systems from scratch, partnered daily with the CEO and COO, and touched nearly every function of the business. “Someone had to do it,” he recalls. His ability to translate operational chaos into financial clarity helped guide Paintzen through its expansion and eventual sale to PPG Industries.
Across these chapters, Kossl’s story reveals a consistent pattern: using strategy to tell better stories. Whether advising founders or steering finance in ad-tech today, he views storytelling not as spin, but as structure—the way finance can make complexity understandable and transformation achievable.
CFOTL: Tell us about Basis Technologies. What space does the company operate in, and how would you describe its mission?
Kossl: Basis is an advertising technology platform that helps brands and agencies plan, buy, and optimize their digital media spend. The advertising landscape is highly fragmented—there’s display, video, search, social, programmatic, and direct publisher deals, each often managed in disconnected systems. That fragmentation creates inefficiencies, limited transparency, and difficulty proving ROI.
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Basis solves this by unifying workflows, automating repetitive tasks, and connecting every dollar spent to measurable results. Interestingly, I was once a Basis (then Centro) client, and it was the only platform that gave me real insight into my marketing performance. What sets us apart today is not just our technology, but our people—we focus on long-term partnerships and “raving fan” service, which makes the client experience both personal and powerful.
CFOTL: What are Basis Technologies’ current growth priorities in today’s advertising landscape?
Kossl: Our focus is on unifying all digital media channels—search, social, programmatic, and direct buys—within a single demand-side platform. Most DSPs can’t do that. Basis has always been a machine-learning-driven company, and we recently brought on a head of AI to lead that work. The ultimate goal is a fully automated media-mix modeling solution: a system where a marketer simply enters how much they want to spend and the results they want to achieve, and our platform intelligently allocates those dollars across channels for maximum impact. Achieving that requires real-time data integration across every media type, continuous self-correction, and optimization as campaigns run. Our guiding pillars remain the same—automation, data, and being the best demand-side platform in the market.
Basis Technologies | www.basis.com | Chicago, IL
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