Adtech: Contextual Before It Was Called Contextual: Silverpush's Hitesh Chawla

Contextual advertising, brand safety, and the FTC warning letter that rebuilt an entire ad tech company.

Hitesh Chawla, founder and CEO of Silverpush, joins Pesach Lattin on the ADOTAT Show for a conversation about ultrasonic cross-device tracking, the pivot to contextual targeting, and what post-cookie advertising actually looks like in practice.

In 2015, Silverpush embedded inaudible ultrasonic audio beacons into television commercials so mobile phones running their SDK could detect them and link TV viewing to device activity. In March 2016, the FTC issued warning letters to twelve Android app developers who had integrated the code. Chawla's account of the internal response is direct: "We did not take it seriously, we did not respond, so that's why they put it on the website and that became a bigger deal than it was."

He then shut the product down, under no legal obligation to do so, and rebuilt the company around contextual video intelligence five years before cookie deprecation made contextual advertising a category everyone claimed to have believed in all along. As he puts it: "If you think of 2015, no one was talking about or even no one was using the word contextual at that time."

Today Silverpush analyzes roughly half a billion seconds of video per day across YouTube, connected TV, TikTok, Meta, and open programmatic, on approximately $20 million in lifetime funding and about 150 employees across more than 30 countries.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Ultrasonic audio beacons, cross-device tracking, and the 2016 FTC warning letters
• Why contextual targeting was the only viable answer to losing personal data
• How MIRRORS uses computer vision for in-video context detection and brand suitability
• The Trend Intelligence Platform, launched January 2026, and what "real-time" actually means (a 24-hour refresh)
• Brand safety versus brand suitability, and why the difference matters for news publishers, political content, and opinion inventory
• The hard case: a shooting story that is unsafe by blocklist but suitable for a security brand
• Building YouTube contextual targeting for a decade without a YouTube relationship
• Why connected TV contextual is harder than YouTube, publisher metadata fragmentation, and using subtitle APIs to identify content
• Agentic AI architecture, multi-agent campaign optimization, and why the entire company including sales is learning to code
• The attention economy versus the distraction economy
• Emerging market expansion across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and why South America has not worked
• Whether third-party contextual vendors exist only because YouTube, TikTok, and Meta refuse to grade their own content
• India engineering economics, cost structure, and competing against US and EU ad tech
• Rapid fire: the most overrated thing in ad tech ("that everyone is AI native, which is not true") and the most underrated (cash flow positive companies nobody talks about)

Guest: Hitesh Chawla, founder and CEO of Silverpush. IIT Delhi, class of 2004. Investor in roughly 30 startups.

Host: Pesach Lattin, investigative journalist and publisher at ADOTAT, covering ad tech fraud, programmatic economics, and holding company structures. Confidential tips: pesach@adotat.com , or Signal on request.

Sponsors: Troutman Amin LLP, the lawyers you want on speed dial before the regulator writes, not after.

And Incremental.com, for everyone still pretending their attribution model is real.

The full three-part written investigation, including methodology, funding and headcount discrepancies, disclosures, and right of reply, is published at ADOTAT.

Keywords: contextual advertising, brand safety, brand suitability, programmatic advertising, connected TV, CTV advertising, post-cookie targeting, cross-device tracking, ad tech, YouTube advertising, computer vision advertising, ad verification, FTC privacy, agentic AI, media buying, adtech podcast