Tal Hayek

Tal Hayek is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Upwave, formerly Survata, one of the AdTech industry's leading brand measurement and analytics platforms. He has spent over a decade tackling one of advertising's most persistent challenges: proving that brand-building investments actually move the needle on consumer perception and business outcomes. By developing scalable, survey-based brand lift methodologies and integrating them directly into programmatic workflows, Hayek has helped shift the industry's measurement conversation beyond last-click attribution toward a more holistic view of campaign effectiveness across awareness, consideration, and purchase intent. Hayek co-founded Survata in the early 2010s as a survey-based research and data collection platform, then strategically evolved the company into a full-fledged brand intelligence solution before rebranding as Upwave to signal its expanded predictive analytics capabilities. Under his leadership, Upwave has become a trusted measurement partner for Fortune 500 brands, major holding company agencies, and streaming platforms, with integrations across leading DSPs and publishers that allow for campaign-level brand health tracking at scale. His ability to navigate the company through multiple industry inflection points — from the rise of programmatic to the deprecation of third-party cookies — reflects strong product vision and operational discipline. Hayek has been a consistent public voice on the value of upper-funnel measurement and the dangers of over-indexing on performance metrics at the expense of brand equity. He has guided Upwave's methodology development through the evolving privacy landscape, ensuring measurement fidelity as traditional identity signals erode. His entrepreneurial journey mirrors a broader industry maturation toward treating brand health as a quantifiable, data-driven asset rather than a soft, unverifiable outcome.

• Co-founded Survata and successfully pivoted and rebranded the company to Upwave, expanding from a survey research tool to a full-scale brand measurement platform
• Built Upwave into a trusted brand intelligence partner for Fortune 500 advertisers, major media agencies, and streaming platforms with integrations across leading DSPs and publishers
• Developed privacy-resilient brand measurement methodologies that maintain fidelity amid third-party cookie deprecation and signal loss