Oz Etzioni Named “CEO of the Year” for Rewriting Advertising's Operating Model

The 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Awards recognize Etzioni’s work building Flight Control into the system that connects creative, media, data, and measurement, with advertisers cutting campaign launch times by more than 80%.

NEW YORK — Clinch, the operating system for autonomous advertising, today announced that Co-Founder and CEO Oz Etzioni has been named “MarTech Company CEO of the Year” in the 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Awards. The annual program recognizes leading companies and executives across the global marketing, advertising, and sales technology industry. It reviewed more than 4,000 nominations from companies worldwide this year.

While most of the advertising industry is still testing where AI fits, Etzioni has operationalized it across the entire advertising journey. Under his leadership, Clinch grew Flight Control from a dynamic creative platform into a full campaign interface that connects creative, media, data, and measurement in one workflow. The work targets a systemic problem that has held the industry back for years: the fragmented operational layer between creative and media execution. Etzioni’s view is that as media buying becomes more autonomous, the infrastructure that executes campaigns must keep pace, and Clinch built its platform to close that  gap.

The results are concrete. Advertisers running campaigns on Flight Control have reduced launch timelines by more than 80%, cut manual campaign management by up to 75%, and lowered creative production costs by up to 60%. Mars Wrigley saw a 76% increase in return on ad spend, Hyundai a 156% lift in conversions, and Coca-Cola a 410% increase in programmatic video click-through rate on its Aquarius campaign.

Under Etzioni, Clinch became the first ad server to support Amazon Custom Audiences, letting clients like Keurig Dr Pepper activate retail purchase signals directly inside personalized creative, and introduced an "Unlimited Ad Serving" model that prices on outcomes rather than impressions. The company’s AI work has been recognized by the Digiday Technology Awards and the Newsweek AI Impact Awards.

“The industry spent years treating AI as a feature to bolt onto individual tasks. We built Clinch to orchestrate creative, media, and data as one unified system, so campaigns can adapt while they are live instead of after the fact. This award belongs to the team making that real for the brands we work with,” said Oz Etzioni, Co-Founder and CEO of Clinch.