He decided in 2012 that where people go would outlast who the internet thinks they are. Then he spent the next decade building the exchange to prove it.
The face of a company that spends its days deciding whether a phone was actually in a grocery store or merely near one. He looks like he already knows the answer.
Adsquare does a strange and specific thing for a living. It takes location signals from mobile phones - collected, Laband insists, only with consent through publisher partners - and turns them into audiences that advertisers can buy inside the automated auctions that decide which ad you see. It does not want to know who you are. It wants to know that a device shaped like a person spent Tuesday evenings at a hardware store, and to sell that pattern without ever attaching a name to it. Laband has been the CEO of this arrangement since 2012, which in adtech years is close to geological.
The pitch has barely moved in thirteen years, which is itself the interesting part. Most adtech companies pivot every eighteen months, chasing whatever the platforms just changed. Laband picked one idea - location, collected the right way, is durable - and kept building it out. Offices opened in London, Paris, Milan, Madrid, Singapore, Dusseldorf, Sydney and New York. The engineering stayed in Berlin. And the thesis stayed put while the rest of the industry slowly wandered over to agree with it.
That agreement arrived on a schedule Laband could not have set better himself. As third-party cookies decayed and Apple and Google made the mobile advertising identifier harder to use, the whole business woke up needing a signal that did not depend on tracking a single person across the web. Location - anonymous, consented, aggregated - turned out to be that signal. "Identity is fading, and online identifiers are fragmented," Laband said in late 2025. "Location remains a powerful, privacy-compliant signal." He has been saying versions of this sentence for over a decade. The market only recently started listening.
What he sells now is less a targeting trick than an intelligence layer. In his framing, the raw coordinates are worthless on their own - the value is in the modeling, the consent scaffolding, and the plumbing that connects it to every major buying platform. That is a deliberately unglamorous description of a company, and it is roughly what infrastructure is supposed to sound like.
Raw location data alone tells you nothing.Tom Laband, on why the exchange, not the coordinates, is the product
There is a cynical way to run a location-data business and a careful way, and the two produce similar-looking datasets right up until a regulator asks how you got them. Laband has spent years insisting Adsquare is built the careful way: data collected only with user consent through publisher partners, aligned to the IAB's Transparency and Consent Framework, with location treated as a sensitive category that carries legal weight.
It is easy to read that as compliance boilerplate. It is more useful to read it as a bet. In a world where the sloppy version of adtech keeps colliding with GDPR fines and platform crackdowns, building on consent from the start is a way of being boring on purpose - and boring, for infrastructure, is the whole point. Laband describes leadership at Adsquare as "collecting data the right way, extracting intelligence responsibly, and being integrated with every major programmatic platform." Three clauses, one of which is about ethics and two of which are about distribution. He would tell you they are the same sentence.
He is also careful to say what the business is for. "It's not just about targeting; it's about delivering real outcomes," he has said - the adtech version of promising you can measure whether the ad actually sent someone into a store, not just whether they saw it. It is the difference between selling attention and selling proof, and Adsquare would very much like to be in the proof business.
When we started 12 years ago, location data was really just a niche tool used for proximity targeting.
Now, it's a core intelligence layer that fuels the entire programmatic value chain.
Identity is fading, and online identifiers are fragmented. Location remains a powerful, privacy-compliant signal.
It's not just about targeting; it's about delivering real outcomes.
We only collect location data with user consent via our publisher partners.
Location is a sensitive data category. You must respect privacy laws and act ethically.
Raw location data alone tells you nothing.
Leadership is about collecting data the right way, extracting intelligence responsibly, and being integrated with every major programmatic platform.
Adsquare's public Twitter and Facebook are the company account, @adsquarecom. Laband keeps a low personal social footprint - a location-data CEO who does not broadcast his own.
The technical core sits in Berlin. Laband runs the commercial operation from New York. German engineering, American go-to-market.
He studied English and American Studies alongside business - years before ending up steering the US operation from Manhattan.
Location data, collected with consent, turned into audiences. The sentence has stayed almost identical since 2012 while the industry churned around it.
Tom Laband is the co-founder and CEO of Adsquare, a Berlin-born location-intelligence company he started in 2012 with Sebastian Doerfel and Fritz Richter. Adsquare runs a neutral data exchange that turns consented location signals into audience data for programmatic advertising, and Laband has spent more than a decade arguing that location is a durable, privacy-compliant alternative to the crumbling world of online identifiers. A University of Mannheim graduate who cut his teeth in early European mobile advertising at YOC and Sevenval, he now splits his attention between the company's Berlin engineering base and its commercial push in New York.
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