Industry Profile: Rubicon Project managing director, Rick Mulia

Pippa Chambers
By Pippa Chambers | 31 March 2016
 
JAPAC managing director, Rick Mulia Rubicon.

Our Industry Profile takes a weekly look at some of the professionals working across the advertising, ad tech, marketing and media sector in Australia. It aims to shed light on the varying roles and companies across the buzzing industry.

This week we head to Sydney to meet Rick Mulia, managing director at Rubicon Project.

Duration in current role/time at the company:

One month.

How would you describe what the company does?

We automate the selling and buying of advertising.

What does your role involve?

I lead the JAPAC (Japan and APAC) region to service our clients based here and ensure our world-class products and platforms are relevant and leading the local markets.  

Within the last six months/year, what stands out as the company’s major milestones?

Rubicon Project has had some incredible success both globally and locally over the past year. We have partnered with five publisher co-operatives, including the global Pangaea Alliance (including The Guardian, FT, Reuters, CNN and The Economist) and most recently the NZ co-operative KPEX. We've also expanded our automated advertising offering into the OOH industry, with partnerships in the UK and US.

Locally, we've worked closely with publishers and app developers to add significantly more mobile inventory onto our platform. We also won travel meta-search engine, WEGO, which has been an innovator in its adoption of automated advertising in this region.

Best thing about the industry you work in:

It moves very quickly with a new challenge always around the corner. You're never bored.

Previous industry related (ad land/ad tech) companies you have worked at:

Twitter, Wego, Microsoft and Yahoo! 

Career-wise, where do you see yourself in three years' time?

Having just started at Rubicon and relocated back to Australia from Singapore I'd be more than happy to be in the same role in three years time.  

Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?

I studied criminology in post-grad (but never completed it) in the hope of joining the Australian Federal Police.  

Top networking tip:

Always leave one hand free to shake another. 

My favourite restaurant for a business lunch is:
Din Tai Fung (in most major cities around APAC). Like Rubicon, they're fast, efficient, consistently high quality and in every market they need to be in APAC. So far I haven't met a customer or partner who doesn't mind a meal there. 

My favourite advert is:

Liam Neeson, Clash of Clans: Revenge. Most memorable and hilarious.

My must-have gadget is:

The Coopidea Powerblock Multi-port USB charger. Smartphones, laptops and tablets are pretty interchangeable these days, so the most important gadget to me is the one that can charge them all at once. I travel three weeks out of the month, so to bring just one thing that can charge everything is an absolute god-send.

My favourite media is:

Media? I'm a big fan of magazines and most of that consumption currently happens via my iPad Mini. The only hard copy magazine I buy these days is Monocle.  

My favourite TV show is:

Just finished binge-watching House of Cards season four.  

The last book I read:

Churchill in the Trenches by Peter Apps. It's a biography about a formative period in Churchill's life that would shape the leader he would become. After personal and military failures early in World War I, he rejoined the British Army to take a role that would place him directly on the Western Front. From this you can see that his leadership, military and even his oratory skills are still being developed. From this I've learned that leaders aren't born but bred; constantly failing and teaching and driving themselves to become the leaders they want to be. Sorry, I’m a history nerd.

I read it at the same time I was reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. A fascinating character, but it made me want a Tesla Model S even more.

My mantra / philosophy is:

It's ok to fail, but fail fast and learn even faster. 

I got into advertising/ad tech/marketing etc because:

I saw it as the intersection of many things I was passionate about: technology, content and brands. 

If I wasn't doing this for a living, I'd be:

A chef or a federal police officer. I think I made the right choice.

In five years' time I'll be:

Still figuring out how to make the best flat white. 

Define your job in one word:

Automation. 

What's your poison:

Gin and tonic in the evening. Coke Zero the rest of the time.

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