Selected 2016

Juan Domínguez

  • Current company Adglow

Juan Dominguez is the founder and CEO of Adglow. He attended Universidad Pontificia Comillas to study law and business administration, receiving his degree in 1991. After graduating, he outgrew his legal interests and worked various jobs in finance before getting his first taste of digital entrepreneurship in 1998.

Feeling like he had the necessary skills to run his own company rather than take directions from others, Juan joined, one of the first digital portal networks in Spain and simultaneously created one of most successful online travel agencies in Spain, was sold for close to US$600 million in 2007, instantly making Juan a prominent member of Spain’s digital community.

In 2008, Juan saw that digital advertising relied too heavily on offline sales teams and failed to yield significant returns on investment. He and Jorge Rincón, a co-worker from, invested more than US$160,000 of their own money to co-found what was then called ADTZ. They hired a group of developers to create ADAM, but initially, the technology did not find much market traction amongst digital advertisers. Fortunately, Facebook had just began to sell advertising inventory, so Juan reached out through mutual friends to establish a partnership. ADTZ became Facebook’s first certified marketing partner in Spain and the sixth worldwide. It soon became the DSP market leader in Spain and acquired a prominent competitor from the UK in 2016, Glow. At this point, the company changed its name to Adglow.

Juan is a successful serial entrepreneur who has never let success get to his head. He currently serves as a professor at Instituto Superior para el Desarrollo de Internet (ISDI), volunteers as a mentor in Wayra (Telefonica’s start-up accelerator) and reinvests in the entrepreneur community as an angel investor.

About Adglow

With social network ad spending predicted to make up 16% of all digital advertising by 2017, more and more advertisers are beginning to target consumers on popular social media platforms. Adglow helps advertising agencies and brands achieve a 40% higher return on investment for their social media campaigns through its proprietary demand-side platform and campaign management tool, ADAM, and its in-house management services. ADAM concentrates its users’ campaigns from various social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) into one dashboard and lets them monitor the strength of each investment in real-time, prompting them to make adjustments when ads stray from preset objectives. The company has managed over 300,000 advertising campaigns since 2008, maintains offices in 13 countries around the world, and has handle campaigns for some of the largest advertisers in Spain and other countries.
