Bits and Bobs from around the industry:

• Exclusive: Aditude Acquires Hashtag Labs
• Google’s second antitrust trial could help shape the future of online ads
• Unraveling The Mystery Of PubMatic’s $5 Million Loss From A “First-Price Auction Switch”
• Your Day One Recap: DOJ vs. Google Goes Deep Into The Ad Tech Weeds
• Day 2: Stephanie is being emotional and unproductive

Bits and Bobs from around the industry:

• Exclusive: Aditude Acquires Hashtag Labs
• Google’s second antitrust trial could help shape the future of online ads
• OpenX CEO John Gentry On Why SSPs Don’t Deserve The Flack They Catch
• The Deal With Demand Gen; The Brokerages Might Be Broken

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital advertising, publishers are constantly seeking ways to optimize their revenue streams. One of the most impactful strategies for increasing revenue is through higher CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) rates, which directly tie to how effectively ad inventory is monetized. 

But first, what’s an Identity graph solution?

It denotes creating a unified view of a user behavior by connecting various data points across multiple devices, channels, and platforms. This holistic view is often referred as an “Identity Graph (ID)” solution 

Implementing an Identity (ID) Graph solution is key to achieving these higher CPMs, as it allows for more precise audience targeting and better ad personalization. Without leveraging an ID Graph, publishers aren’t just missing out on premium ad deals—they’re leaving significant revenue on the table. Here’s how:

1. Enhanced Audience Targeting

ID Graphs aggregate user data across various devices and platforms, creating a unified view of the user. This allows advertisers to target their desired audiences with precision, leading to more relevant ads being served since it becomes targeted. When advertisers can reach their ideal audience, they’re willing to pay a premium, resulting in higher CPMs for publishers, resulting in revenue uplift.

2. Improved Ad Personalization

With an ID Graph, personalization goes beyond basic demographics. Advertisers can tailor their messages based on user behavior, interests, and intent. Personalized ads tend to perform better, attracting higher bids and boosting CPM rates. ID graphs also support Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) by giving the right data to tailor ad creatives dynamically based on the user profile. 

3. Cross-Device Tracking

Users today interact with content across multiple devices and platforms ID graphs can recognize the same user across different devices, ensuring ads are delivered in a consistent and targeted approach which helps in providing a comprehensive view of the user journey. Advertisers value this cross-device consistency as it offers more targeted and premium ad placements, which can drive up demand and, consequently, CPMs.

4. Reduced Wasted Impressions

By accurately identifying and targeting users, ID Graphs minimize wasted impressions on non-relevant audiences. This efficiency makes your inventory more valuable to advertisers, who are willing to pay more for effective ad placements, thus not only increasing your CPM but also create a frequency cap to enable optimized ad delivery.

5. Strengthened Data Privacy Compliance

In a world increasingly focused on data privacy, ID Graphs help ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. When advertisers feel confident that their ads are served in a privacy-compliant environment, they’re more likely to invest.

6. Access to Premium Demand

ID Graphs open the door to premium demand partners who prioritize quality and precision in their ad buys. This access to high-caliber advertisers means higher bids for your optimized  ad inventory and dynamic pricing as it enables a more sophisticated programmatic strategy including dynamic pricing that adjust based on user profiles and demand.

7. Better Audience Segmentation

With the detailed insights provided by an ID Graph, you can create more granular audience segments. Advertisers are willing to pay more for specific, high-intent segments, as opposed to broad, less-targeted groups that align with the target demographics and behavioral patterns.

8. Enhanced Attribution Models

ID Graphs offer improved attribution capabilities, allowing advertisers to understand better the customer journey and the impact of their ads. Clear, accurate attribution increases the perceived value of ad placements, encouraging advertisers to invest more, as it allows them to understand the campaign effectiveness better and justify spends.

9. Increased Buyer Confidence

When advertisers know they’re getting accurate, reliable data from ID Graphs, their confidence in placing higher bids grows. They have better control over where and to whom the ads are being served which builds brand safety. This trust translates to higher demand for your inventory and, ultimately, better CPMs.

10. Future-Proofing Against Third-Party Cookie Deprecation

As the industry moves away from third-party cookies, ID Graphs are becoming essential for maintaining accurate targeting capabilities as reliance on first-party data increases Publishers who adopt ID Graph solutions now are better positioned to command high CPM rates in a cookie-less future, avoiding the revenue dips that come with outdated methods.

Don’t Miss Out: Get Ahead with ID Graph Solutions

The ad tech landscape is rapidly changing, and staying ahead of the curve is crucial for maximizing your revenue. By integrating an ID Graph solution, you can significantly boost your CPM rates, attracting premium advertisers who value precision, personalization, compliance, and a better return on investment.

At Freestar, we specialize in helping publishers navigate these complexities and optimize their monetization strategies. Don’t let the competition leave you behind—contact us today to learn how we can help you implement an ID Graph solution and unlock your full revenue potential.

 

Bits and Bobs from around the industry:

• IAS Launches New Made For Advertising (Mfa) AI-driven Site Detection And Avoidance Technology | IntegralAds
• Google Reminds Advertisers To Prepare For End Of Third-Party Cookies | Mediapost
• Everything You Need To Know About the iOS 17 Update and Its Lasting Impact on Advertising | Admonsters
• Israeli Ad-Tech Firms Re-Strategize Amid War | Adweek

 

Welcome to the Blood, Sweat and CPMs Podcast presented by Freestar. Our host Kurt Donnell, President & CEO of Freestar is here to add levity and provide helpful pointers for anyone navigating the world of Ad Tech. In each episode, he will interview thought leaders across the industry to get their perspectives on what matters most to them and their take on hot industry topics. Visit our website, freestar.com for more information. Enjoy!

Episode 43

Chris Kane (Jounce Media)

In this episode, our host Kurt Donnell chats with Chris Kane, Founder of Jounce Media, an industry leader in programmatic supply chain management about why Jounce came to be, what it takes for true supply path optimization, and the tipping point of bid jamming. 

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Listen to the episode on now!

TRANSCRIPT

Note: Due to voice recognition software, sound-alike, and misspelled words may be contained in the documentation.

[00:00:04.330] – Chris Kane

I’m interpreting what I hear from those companies, but what I think I hear from them is that they think of Made for advertising as like the junk food of the Internet. And it’s sort of like we’re a grocery store and we’re going to stock the organic apples, but if we don’t stock the junk food, people are just not going to shop at our store and we got to put it on the shelf. We might not feed it to our families, but we have to put it on the shelf.

[00:00:29.210] – Kurt Donnell

Welcome back to blood, Sweat and CPMs. I’m your host, Kurt Donnell. In today’s show, I had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media. Chris founded Jones Media in 2015. Today, Jounce Media is an industry leader in programmatic supply chain management and is trusted by the world’s largest marketers, media companies and advertising technology platforms to enable high efficiency programmatic trades. Chris was previously Chief of Staff to the CEO and CFO at AOL. Prior to AOL, Chris managed a portfolio of enterprise accounts at Turn. A pioneer in the DSP category, he started his career as a management consultant at Oliver Wyman, where he focused on the converging media and technology sectors. You’re truly in for an incredible show today. Without further ado, chris Kane. Awesome.

[00:01:18.620] – Kurt Donnell

Chris, thanks so much for joining me here today, man. I appreciate it.

[00:01:21.290] – Chris Kane

It’s good to be here, kurt, thanks for having me.

[00:01:23.770] – Kurt Donnell

For those of our listeners that may not know Jounce Media, why don’t we start off by you giving a little bit of a background. We’ve had the chance at Freestarter to start working with you, I guess, pretty closely over the course of the last year, and it’s been wildly beneficial and it’s been such a nice partnership. I feel like we’ve learned a lot from you. Hopefully we’ve been able to help out filling a couple of gaps for you, but so grateful of what you’re doing, frankly, for the industry. So maybe give a little bit of background for the listeners on everything you’re focused on.

[00:01:47.270] – Chris Kane

Sure. Well, I appreciate you saying that. And big picture, Jounce Media is a consultancy with an extremely narrow focus. The only thing we think about is how money moves from DSPs to publishers. We don’t spend much time thinking about the walled gardens. We don’t spend much time thinking about cookie deprecation or Attribution. It’s just how does money move from a DSP to a publisher? Across web, mobile app, and CTV inventory. And we built a whole bunch of data systems to be very rigorous about tracking supply and demand. Across web, mobile app and CTV inventory. Some of that’s on the back of public data like ads, text and sellers, JSON some of it’s on the back of private data sharing agreements that we have with large programmatic buyers. And the combination of all of it is under the hood. We’ve built a data set that rebuilds every day and quantifies supply and demand across a million websites, half a million mobile apps, and 50,000 CTV apps. And we think that is a very unique data set that allows us to have sort of the buyer’s view of the supply landscape. And so we do a handful of things on top of that data, but the main thing that we do is operate a Market Insights product.

[00:02:53.830] – Chris Kane

And the purpose of that Market Insights product is similar to kurt, what you were just saying. It’s to enable buyers and sellers and ad tech platforms to just have access to the facts. This is what’s currently happening in the supply chain. This is how money is moving. Insert our opinions about the ways in which the movement of money is continuing to be pretty irrational and just try to drive a conversation in the industry to help buyers focus on the most needle moving supply path optimization initiatives they can undertake. And implicit in that avoid. Some of the supply path optimization projects that we’ve just seen don’t really move the needle. And so we think we can remain very focused on that and it’s a long road, but it seems to me that the industry is clearly moving in a direction that is increasingly rational over time.

[00:03:49.770] – Kurt Donnell

I agree. And I will give the plug right now if you don’t already subscribe to Chris’s Monthly or the John’s Media Monthly Report. It is absolutely fascinating and full of insights and I will say actionable insights. You mentioned something a moment ago that you guys have an opinion. It’s one of the few things that gets published that actually has a little bit of a it gives you the so what and a little bit of a what should I do with this and how should I think about things. We were chatting earlier and it feels like sometimes people toss things out without much of an opinion and I think you guys have done a very nice job on that.

[00:04:19.300] – Chris Kane

Well, there’s sort of like a Venn diagram of people with opinions but not facts and people with facts but not opinions. A lot of people shouting a lot of opinions on Twitter, but it’s like, let’s back this up with some evidence, please. And you get the opposite as well. You get the incumbent measurement companies who are very focused on reporting the facts. Was this ad served to a human? Was it brand safe? Was it viewable? But that kind of misses some basic business judgment. Having opinions about whether inventory that meets some of these standards is actually high quality and the opposite inventory that maybe fails a brand safety standard on a premium news outlet is probably high quality and a missed opportunity to block. And so I just think there’s this missed space in the market for companies to have a combination of data and facts, but a willingness to form business judgments and have opinions on top of those facts. And we’re trying to fill that space.

[00:05:22.100] – Kurt Donnell

I think you guys have done a good job and make it very digestible that’s the other piece is every month in the dozen or so pages of the initial portion of the program. Obviously, it’s more of a data appendix side of it toward the back end, but it is a very easy to consume thing. And I think there’s an element where marketers sometimes don’t want to get into the minutiae of our industry. And you guys do a very nice job of digging in there and giving them the broader picture, but with enough detail to understand what they’re doing.

[00:05:48.380] – Chris Kane

Frankly, there’s a lesson that we took too long to learn there. I love the minutiae. I’ve been in Ad tech for more than ten years now. I was at a DSP for a while, I was at AOL for a while. I’ve been running Jouts for eight years. I love all of the little ins and outs of auction dynamics and supply chain transparency. I love it. I love it. I can’t get enough, and thankfully our clients love it too. Freestar seems to engage lots of other companies on the sell side of the market, ad tech companies, DSPs, marketers don’t want to engage in all the minutiae, and they shouldn’t have to. And I think to a large degree, same goes for agencies. I wish I’d recognized that earlier. I think because I enjoy the details and because the companies subscribe to our research, enjoy the details, I assume that that means that brands and agencies want to engage at that level of detail, and they don’t. And so number one priority for me, and just more broadly for the Jounts team this year is to take everything that we’ve learned studying the supply chain over the last five or so years and up level it in a way that’s meaningful to marketers.

[00:06:57.410] – Chris Kane

And we’re trying to do that in a variety of ways. Probably the most tangible one is a white paper that we published on our website called The Marketers Guide to Supply Path Optimization. Ten pages of what matters, which we think sort of speaks in a language and a level of detail that’s meaningful to brands and agencies. But we want to do more to just make all of the supply path optimization work that we’ve done over the last five or so years accessible and sort of digestible to brands and agencies.

[00:07:23.330] – Kurt Donnell

I do think it’s starting to resonate at that level where I think for a while you even said the word supply path optimization, the buy side would sort of shake their hands or shake their head, kind of say, what are you talking about? I was an event a few weeks ago that had a very interesting mix of large supply side players and large buy side players up to the agencies. And agencies really were pushing this pretty hard and pushing it at the holding company level down to the individual agencies so I feel like we’re finally making progress on this goal of true supply path optimization. I think we’ve been talking about it for years. It feels like just in the last twelve months we’ve really made some progress there. If we were going to say zero is the starting point and 100 is sort of perfect supply path optimization, where do you think we’re at on that journey at this point in time?

[00:08:07.900] – Chris Kane

Mainly I feel like the target keeps moving. And so I’ll give you an example, like back to what you were talking about with brands and agencies starting to engage around supply chain efficiency, I think we have reached consensus on the benefits of transacting through maximally direct supply chains. And it was a little startling to me three or four years ago that not everybody agreed on that we would get pushback from SSPs about why they resell some other company’s auction. They’re like, oh, we have this benefit and that, but I don’t hear that anymore. There’s no one any longer claiming that multi hop reselling is beneficial. The IB Tech Lab has done a bunch of work to not only sort of like help the industry get to consensus, but then put out a bunch of new standards to make it easy to verify which supply chains are direct or not. And now that whole notion is at a level where the investment team at a large agency can say no multi hop reselling and that’s like a meaningful statement. They’re not going to get spin from ad tech companies about pushing back against that idea and there are just like clear steps you can take to enforce that business choice.

[00:09:14.650] – Chris Kane

And so along that dimension of directness we made a lot of progress. I don’t know, 50% done, 70% done, we’re getting there. But as we’ve reached consensus as an industry and been able to operationalize this challenge around Directness, a bunch of other things pop up. We were talking just before we started recording about made for advertising inventory that’s exploded in the last couple of years, some ways of sort of injecting low quality supply into the connected TV supply chain that’s just popped up. And we’re so early there that we’re still at that stage of having to educate brands and agencies, deal with the, in my view, sort of empty pushback from ad tech companies about why these things can be valuable. We will get there. I kind of know I’ve seen this movie before. We know how this is going to evolve, but it will take years. And I’m reasonably confident that as the industry starts to form consensus around Directness and Made for advertising inventory and certain types of CTV intermediaries, that there will be two new things that pop up. So it just feels like the target keeps moving.

[00:10:24.870] – Kurt Donnell

I do think the MFA side of things, a nice euphemism for Arbitrage mainly is getting a little better. It does feel like as I talked to the demand side, they’re at least calling it out. And I think everybody’s turned a blind eye for a long time because everybody’s making money along the way, which goes to the advertiser side, honestly, to some extent, where they’re just trying to go deploy budgets and not being as efficient and dedicated as they should be, maybe to quality inventory, but then culling out some inventory that shouldn’t be there. And I think that’s a tough one. I do think the fact that it’s getting a little more light shown upon it is important to ever cleaning that one up because it is robbing dollars from the high quality publishers on the internet. Which kind of breaks my heart because our whole business, real quality publishers and maybe it feels like it is getting bigger, but I do think there’s a bigger light shine upon it by the trade desk and yourself. And so at least people are talking about it. So thank you for that piece.

[00:11:20.800] – Chris Kane

Well again, I appreciate you saying that and I think it is getting better and it just to be clear is mainly web publishers who basically have no organic audience manufacture clickbait content and monetize the hell out of landing pages to recoup their traffic acquisition costs. That’s what I mean when I say made for advertising. And so in some ways, yes, I think we and the trade desk and some others have made a good dent in being able to raise awareness and educate brands and agencies about the ways in which that inventory probably isn’t actually advancing their business goals, even if it is brand safe and high viewability and so on. Having said that, the math would say this problem is not getting better, it’s getting worse. We track this up pretty closely and the portion of the bid stream that leads to made for advertising inventory has doubled in the last two years. It’s a good business and it’s a good business because there’s just an enormous opportunity to capture irrational demand. And so for every DSP that is sort of forward thinking and blocks Made for Advertising, there’s another nine that don’t. For every agency that says we’re really committed to blocking Made for Advertising inventory there’s another nine that don’t.

[00:12:35.190] – Chris Kane

There’s just a big opportunity to capture irrational demand. And I think what’s been most eye opening for me is to see the way that exchanges sort of wrestle with made for advertising inventory. I’m interpreting what I hear from those companies. But what I think I hear from them is that they think of Made for advertising as, like, the junk food of the Internet. And it’s sort of like we’re a grocery store and we’re going to stock the organic apples, but if we don’t stock the junk food, people are just not going to shop at our store, and we got to put it on the shelf. We might not feed it to our families, but we have to put it on the shelf and the exchanges I think are in a really tricky position because they do have to put it on the shelf. They do have to monetize this made for advertising inventory. They do see that it’s a growing part of their business which I think gives them all a bunch of heartburn for sure. And so on the one hand they have this financial requirement almost to monetize this junk food of the internet.

[00:13:27.910] – Chris Kane

On the other hand, these exchanges are building deeper partnerships with brands and agencies, and they’re having these sort of awkward conversations with brands and agencies where someone sits down with an agency investment team and say, like, look, don’t. Tell the pub dev team that I told you this, but you really don’t want to buy from this publisher that we work with. And we can help you manage that. But these are companies are having to play both sides of the market and it’s a very delicate dance that they’re attempting to navigate at the moment.

[00:14:00.890] – Kurt Donnell

It’s fascinating. I will admit I had not thought of the morality of stocking the organic apples and junk food of the internet exactly in that way. Do you think this is on the buy side due to a lack of an understanding of it a laziness in a certain way and maybe that has too much of a negative connotation. But is there a way that we can help the buy side get better about this?

[00:14:24.960] – Chris Kane

I think the number one thing that the buy side can do is move away from sort of like what we call domain oriented or property oriented media planning towards seller oriented media planning. If buyers think of the internet, let’s focus on web inventory. If buyers think of the web as a million websites then they won’t even start attempting to know what those websites are. You can’t, you’re not going to know about a million things. You have to automate it, right? And so you build a bunch of automation for brand safety filters and viewability optimization and so on. And when you do that you drift into made for advertising inventory. If a marketer says hey, I need to run video with $4 CPM and 80% viewability well guess what? You’re not going to find that on any legitimate right, legitimate throne on any reputable publisher. You’re going to find that on this sort of low quality clickbait inventory. And so when you think of the internet as a million domains or when you think of the web as a million domains and then you automate quality controls, you drift away from premium supply in a sort of counterintuitive way and into this junk.

[00:15:30.470] – Chris Kane

But you don’t have to think of the internet that way. You don’t have to think about the internet as a million websites. You can think of the internet as a few dozen publishers. Freestar we would think of as a publisher. Handful of other sales houses we think of as publishers. Collectively, those sales houses represent 20,000 different domains. You don’t have to think of 20,000 things you can say, like, oh, there’s this company called Freestar. They’re very reputable. They’re a signal for quality. I trust them. If they’re selling it, I’m buying it. Similarly, you can think of conde nas and dot, meredith and hearst and discovery, and you can say, oh, these are portfolios that I trust. I don’t need to check every domain in the hearst portfolio. Hearst is just this company I trust, and I’m going to buy from them. And if you do that, you stop having to think about the internet as a million microscopic little websites, and you can think of a few dozen very scaled publishers that you want to do business with. If you do that, if you just literally just make the logo slide of, like, who are the publishers that I buy from?

[00:16:24.650] – Chris Kane

And you share that with senior people at an agency, senior people at a brand, decisions get made very differently very quickly. And I think that’s the number one sort of like, shortcut that buyers can take.

[00:16:36.990] – Kurt Donnell

Well, for our listeners on the demand side, there’s a cheat sheet of that logo slide, and it’s in chris’s report every single month. So another reason to go download that. He’s kind enough to include us, but it’s because, honestly, we’ve made some changes based on the feedback you’ve given us. There’s a couple of publishers we had that we didn’t realize had some copyright issues, or a portion of the site was to UGC or something. And so we’ve very intentionally cleaned up our own supply so that we can be a reputable source and we don’t have those weird outlier things. And so I think that’s a good thing for every publisher to do, whether you’re in sort of the ad management space where we play or even a big publisher yourself, where you acquired some website and there’s a chunk of that site that’s not maybe up to the standards of the rest of your things. It’s getting noticed now. And so I think looking yourself in the mirror and making some short term taking short term pain for some long term gain for the publishing side is actually a good thing to clean up your own supply, and I know you advocate for the same.

[00:17:30.690] – Chris Kane

Well, there’s just one thing I want to react to there, which is sometimes when I say this, the thing I just said, oh, you don’t think about a million websites, you can think about a few dozen publishers. It seems like baked into that is a recommendation to shut off the long tail. I don’t think buyers should do that at all. I think it is in the buyer’s self interest to continue to buy tens of thousands of domains deep into the long tail. But the quality publishers in the long tail are not going it alone. They are partnering with a company like Freestar and so that’s the way you reach into the long tail as a buyer with confidence. And so it’s important to be funding these high quality independent content creators, local news, mid size publishers. But just the direction of the industry has been this move toward aggregation where companies like Freestar aggregate the high quality, small and mid sized publishers. And now I can think about Freestar as the signal for trusted inventory, rather than having to vet each of those publishers individually.

[00:18:32.530] – Kurt Donnell

It’s been interesting to see the market shake out. And we had not really talked about this, but what was the role of the DSP on the buy side and then the SSP portions of what the SSP originally was? Set out to do was aggregate that supply in the way that Freestar and Cafe Mediavine, being probably the three largest players in the space, have now done. So it’s been interesting to see the market shake out and now SSPs and DSPs a little bit in a turf war to a certain extent. It’s just interesting to see how all.

[00:18:58.430] – Chris Kane

Of this, the SSPs of 2010, which is when I got in the industry, honestly looked more like freestyle. Today they were the exclusive representative of a certain publisher. But with the advent of header bidding and header bidding like things, well, now it’s no longer the case that publisher A partners with Exchange A and Publisher B partners everybody partners with everybody. Yeah, the financial requirement of a pure play exchange is to literally work with every publisher on the internet. And so any scaled exchange now sells the very best of the internet and the very worst of the internet. They sell the whole thing. That’s how you get to be a big exchange. That actually can be the case in some cases with sales houses as well who have non exclusive partnerships. But when we look at the Freestar portfolio, you are the exclusive representative of these publishers, you functionally are the publisher, you’re their agent to the buy side. And yeah, I think you’re right that that probably is what SSPs should have been or could have been, and it’s just not the way the industry evolved.

[00:19:59.700] – Kurt Donnell

Yeah, I mean, through no fault of their own. I mean, header bidding obviously evolved over time and jeez, we’re still seeing that in the in app ecosystem, there’s still not full transparency in the bids and all of that stuff from a real time bidding standpoint. So the industry continues to evolve. You mentioned CTV earlier, and that is a relatively nascent market. Again, do you think that space is learning from the mistakes we’ve made or maybe mistakes the wrong way, the evolution of the desktop mobile web business? Or are they falling into some of the same traps?

[00:20:30.930] – Chris Kane

Well, what’s happened in CTV is we’ve taken a bunch of web concepts and we’ve shoehorned it into CTV. And in some ways that’s actually been I’m framing like it’s a very negative thing in some ways that’s a very advantageous thing because we can just move faster as an industry. And so, for example, like the basic ability to validate authorization, we’ve spent years with an inability to do on the web and rapidly that’s getting adopted in CTV through app, ads, text, and a bunch of other variations for that in CTV, that’s a great acceleration. We borrowed a thing we learned on the web, brought it into CTV, might have designed it a little bit differently if we had thought it from the ground up on CTV, but the benefits of moving quickly were worth it. There’s a bunch of other things where we’re like really awkwardly shoehorning web concepts into connected TV, and I think two things fall out of it. Thing one is that there are supply chains on CTV that would meet quality standards on the web, but just like to the point of having basic business judgment, just like fail basic business judgment, like a direct path to a monstrously scaled pool of CTV supply from a publisher that no one’s ever heard of.

[00:21:44.450] – Chris Kane

It just doesn’t quite check out for me. So there are some things where applying web standards to CTV has allowed low quality inventory to be transacted and sort of like pass all the quality checks. And the opposite is happening as well. There are pools of CTV supply that the more that I learn about them are obviously high quality. Typically cases where a company that’s sort of like loosely analogous to Freestar in the CTV space, who has exclusive representation rights for a content owner, is trying to monetize that inventory but gets treated by DSPs. And frankly, companies like not companies like us, frankly, Jounce Media specifically, we say, oh, that’s a wasteful intermediary. And I was like, no, you got to take the time to actually learn who these businesses are. And some of them are wasteful intermediaries, but some of them really have exclusive representation rights for quality content that’s syndicated into these multichannel apps. And I think right now in CTV, there’s space for a whole bunch of shenanigans, which there is not as much space for on the web. And unfortunately, in an attempt to sort of clamp down on those shenanigans, we’re doing a little bit of not successfully separating the wheat from the chaff.

[00:22:58.170] – Chris Kane

And DSPs are blocking high quality supply.

[00:23:02.170] – Kurt Donnell

I think this is a good reminder that humans will always have jobs and machines won’t take over everything because we do need people to make actual judgments about things and we leave it to machines. There’s a lot of false positives or false negatives.

[00:23:16.350] – Chris Kane

Is so understated in the industry. Everybody’s so data driven. Good for us. But marketers need to be marketers and agencies need to act like agents and they need to just make some business judgment calls about whether they believe this is quality supply. And like, you know what? Your intuition is usually right. It’s more right than it is wrong.

[00:23:38.020] – Kurt Donnell

Yeah, I think it goes back to the human nature of sort of risk aversion and a loss feels worse than a win feels good. And being able to say that I partnered with XYZ verification Company to pass this check and everything. There’s a CYA element that the person can look at the client and say, see, look at this report. I did all the things versus, hey, I actually won. And I improved your ROAS by 15% by doing this, that, and the other thing. I think it’s just a CYA endeavor more than anything, to be honest.

[00:24:07.680] – Chris Kane

I think that is it is large. That is largely the service that verification companies provide. It’s their scapegoats and that is a real value that they really do provide to brands and agencies. They’re the throat to choke when something goes wrong.

[00:24:20.240] – Kurt Donnell

Yeah, that’s sad. I wish we’d get more value out of that as I ponder this a little bit more. But yeah, I appreciate this. As we record this. Anyways, you’re getting close to publishing your State of the Open Internet Report. Are there any nuggets that you can share with us in advance of that coming out here imminently?

[00:24:38.780] – Chris Kane

Sure. The themes I don’t think will be a surprise to anybody who sort of reads our research on a regular basis. We talk a lot about Bid Stream Bloat and how there is just this seemingly never ending movement toward publishers issuing more and more duplicate requests for the same impression and how we are potentially approaching a tipping point where the buy side is going to forcefully push back on that. And I do believe we’re sort of at a tipping point there for a variety of reasons. Maybe we come back to so that we talk a lot about Bid Stream Bloat and how the industry is on a very unsustainable course, economically unsustainable course, regarding bid request duplication. We also talk about blind spots and what blind spots in the bid stream do to marketer economics and publisher economics. So to be specific about that, growing blind spots around addressability and in CTV, growing blind spots, or maybe not growing, but persistent blind spots around content, understanding exactly what content you’re going to buy on a connected TV device. But I think that the macro here is particularly on that point about blind spots. The walled gardens, every time we’ve written this report, just take more and more and more share from the Open Internet and that’s slowing down.

[00:25:59.200] – Chris Kane

That is still happening, but that is slowing down in a really marked way. And I think advertisers are recognizing, in my judgment, largely because of Apple At T, that they are now fully saturated on some of the walled gardens. They are fully saturated on Facebook and Instagram, they are fully saturated on YouTube. They just can’t spend more in a way that they can justify because it’s becoming harder and harder to recognize which impressions are valuable and then measure. Whether those impressions actually create outcomes. And so implicit in that there is a rebalancing of investments toward the open internet, which is something I wish I could have said in the last five reports we wrote. We just couldn’t. And it really is happening now. Marketers, particularly smaller marketers, are just increasingly aware that they have to get smart at buying the open internet and they just cannot continue to rely on every year increasing their YouTube investment by 30%. So that’s encouraging for me, but I also think that the bloat in the bid stream the existence of really low quality supply, multi hop, reselling, chronically non viewable inventory. It’s hard to be a smart buyer on the open internet.

[00:27:05.850] – Chris Kane

Like it’s frankly not that hard to be a smart buyer of YouTube inventory. It’s hard to be really good at buying the open internet. And I think if the industry is going to compete on a zero sum basis like oh, publisher A needs to steal share from publisher b, well, the incentive is to just do a bunch of underhanded tricks that at the margins squeeze a little extra spend out of a DSP. If the industry wants to grow, it’s going to be really essential to build a supply chain that buyers can trust.

[00:27:36.050] – Kurt Donnell

Yeah, I think the wall gardens have had a bit of an easy button on them right where you knew sort of exactly at least where it was going. The targeting was so dialed, you had a pretty good understanding of that and it was easy to do. And I don’t know if those similar easy buttons exist across the open web or haven’t been built as much or we haven’t told the story or taken enough of the waste out of the supply chain to make it.

[00:27:59.210] – Chris Kane

Well, I think to go back to sort of the number one thing that I was sort of suggesting that buyers should be doing, the open interest is not that hard to buy. If you pick 50 trusted publishers and we work with marketers who spend approaching $100 million a year individually and only buy it from 50 publishers, you can scale massively with 50 large publishers. And if you do that, you just don’t need to worry about all of the traps in the supply chain. Like Freestar is not going to bamboozle you, neither is Hearst, neither of these other 48 trusted companies. And you can just start to think like a marketer and say like, oh, none of these companies have the scale of YouTube or the scale of instagram, but hey, collectively I can spend $100 million with these 50 publishers this year and I don’t now need to obsess about fraud verification and brand safety. This and viewability that I can focus on, I can focus on my creative optimization, my audience definitions. That I think is the basic recipe to buying with confidence on the open internet.

[00:29:02.250] – Kurt Donnell

I love to hear it. And as a company that helps support the open internet has been the biggest believer in that deserving more of a share of wallet I’m cited for that. I love to see that pendulum swing back and it’s something we’ve been hearing about a little bit, talked about probably in this podcast in the past, and I’m thrilled to hear that you’re seeing that. The data too. I think it’s a good sign for the internet as a whole that it’s not stuck in three or four big publishers hands. That’s a good thing. The one thing you had mentioned here maybe circle back to was that tipping point on bid jamming from a publisher standpoint, and I will say we’ve fallen in this trap for a while. There was a belief that the more places you’d said something the better, because we saw better results because of it. We saw financial gain coming out the other side of traveling as many paths. We on the Freestar side, have trimmed that back materially here over the last twelve months and we’ll continue to do that. But there has been an actual financial benefit for publishers.

[00:29:52.710] – Kurt Donnell

So I don’t know if you have any advice for publishers or data you’ve seen that say actually there’s ways that you can win by not doing that, or at least not materially hurt yourself while making your supply more valuable because you’ll gain trust from the buy side. Is there any data you’ve looked at on that?

[00:30:07.190] – Chris Kane

Just to play this back to you, I think what I hear you saying is, hey, when you get really carried away with this, the math doesn’t work. But adding one more header bidding partner really does help you make more money. And I think we hear that over and over again from every publisher who’s willing to be honest about it. Now, there’s some publishers who are not willing to be honest, who go on stage at conferences and say we’re going down to three SSPs and they can say that, but the data would suggest no one actually does that and then no one actually does that because you would leave money on the table. And I think this is the perfect example of where we need as an industry to sort of get clear on like are we fighting a zero sum game where publisher A needs to still share from publisher B or are we growing the industry? The thing that is collectively rational is for every publisher to work with one, maybe three SSPs and obsess about creating ultra high efficiency connection points through those one two, three connections to every DSP. That would put the most money in the pockets of publishers overall.

[00:31:12.910] – Chris Kane

It would also be very beneficial for buyers and it would reduce the unit economics of these ad tech companies who could then reward publishers and buyers with lower take rates. Sure, that is individually irrational for any publisher. The rational thing for any publisher is be obnoxious about having 25 different SSPs that you work with, integrate every one of them through prebid n tam and open bidding, just blast DSPs in order to occupy as much of the bid stream as you can, because that is what maximizes your yield. And so there’s just too many publishers, they’re all going to hold hands and say, let’s do this thing that’s collectively rational, they can do this thing that’s individually rational. And I don’t see a way for publishers to unwind this. Buyers have to unwind this. The change has to come from the buy side. It could be DSPs making decisions to only transact with each publisher through one supply chain, building publisher direct connections. It could be agencies saying, oh, I’m going to run my whole business through these three SSPs. There’s a variety of ways to sort of come at this problem, but the change has to come from the buy side.

[00:32:16.200] – Chris Kane

And just to say it in a slightly different way, the buy side has to starve low value supply chains of demand in order for it to be rational for publishers to turn off those supply chains. And it is happening. But I just think I hear over and over again from publishers of frustration that they want to control this change, they want to drive this change and they just can’t like it’s just change it’s going come from the buy side.

[00:32:42.850] – Kurt Donnell

I mean, we know that anytime we turn something off, there was some level of incrementality to it. Measuring that can be challenging and it may be infinitesimally small, but if a bidder was winning something, there was incrementality to it because it beat everybody else in that instance. So it is hard every time to do it. And there’s reasons probably outside the scope of our chat today, whether it’s sort of solvency and financial stability of certain partners that are good reasons to turn them off, or the account management just isn’t juice, isn’t worth the squeeze to keep managing that partner. But there is incrementality that goes away every time you turn off a bidder in today’s current landscape as it exists at the moment.

[00:33:19.710] – Chris Kane

So play that out, play that out. Just I think two steps further. The first is publishers artificially keep SSPs on life support. Publishers tolerate past due invoices from SSPs. It allows the failing ad tech companies to stay in business a little longer. And if you play that out and then one step further, what that means is that we really have seen consolidation on the buy side of the industry. The trade desk is winning, google is winning, amazon is winning. You just see other DSPs having a hard time reaching that level of scale. There really is consolidation happening on the buy side of the market. There’s not really on the sell side of the market now. There are winners that are starting to emerge. It will happen, but it happens really slowly because publishers are just so motivated to maintain as many connections as they can for as long as they can.

[00:34:22.200] – Kurt Donnell

Yeah, I think it’s fair and I do think we are seeing the changes. I mean, EMX obviously a casualty of late. I do think the tier two, tier three SSPs are in a challenging spot here going forward and we’re making business decisions as a result and probably making their lives worse. As I say this, I shouldn’t mention out loud, but I mean, we have to as a business well, it moves.

[00:34:43.700] – Chris Kane

Very slowly and then it moves really fast because once publishers start to turn off certain partnerships, you really accelerate the decline of that business. And we observed this with EMX, it was sort of like a business that was active with certain publishers until it wasn’t and then it was like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Lots of publishers turn it off, you want to be the last money out and it wouldn’t be surprising if there’s more of that that happens in the next year.

[00:35:10.280] – Kurt Donnell

Yeah, sadly there will be. This has been fantastic, Chris, and I appreciate the opinions, as always. Somebody will come on here and share actual thoughts, which is lovely. And so I do need one more thought from you, which is, what is some advice the current version of yourself would give? A younger version of yourself? I’m sure there’s some good stuff.

[00:35:28.380] – Chris Kane

Well, I think I’m, from a career point of view, lucky in a lot of ways, but mainly I feel like there are a lot of people around the industry who have been sort of frustrated by trying to do the right thing. And I’m talking about sort of like senior managers all the way down to junior traders trying to do the right thing and believing that they will be rewarded for it. In a lot of cases, just not like the long term, so far away that if you play for the long term, you often sort of take a personal or a company penalty for having done that. And I feel really fortunate to just been in a handful of positions where I could just kind of make a commitment to sort of just trying to be an honest broker, don’t have an agenda, don’t sort of do the hustle, just be honest and it’s going to work out. But boy, I’ll tell you, especially during COVID and even earlier in my career, there’s a lot of heartburn that I had of like, am I setting myself up? Is trying to be an honest broker a flawed strategy?

[00:36:35.560] – Chris Kane

And it wasn’t, it’s working out nicely, but boy, it would have been nice to sort of hear that from the future, that this will work out fine if you just try to do the right thing and try to be honest about it and present the facts, it’ll all work out.

[00:36:48.850] – Kurt Donnell

It is a long game and it’s tough to know that in the moment, but a former coworker of mine, I think it’s maybe a Beatles quote of something, but the classic, it all works out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out yet, it’s not the end. And I think you got to remember that in your career at times, and being able to put your head on your pillow at night and sleep well, knowing you’re going to be on the right side of history, means a lot and you do get rewarded. It takes a long time. There’s a lot of folks that made a bunch of money doing MFA or whatever it is, in between those moments, but it is the better way to live your life, and I try to do that. I think our company tries to do that and certainly you do, and we’re grateful for that and I appreciate you calling out the people that maybe aren’t as much right now. So thank you so much for joining me today, Chris. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. I will say it again, if you don’t download or get his emailed reports every single month, you are missing out.

[00:37:36.450] – Kurt Donnell

They are fantastic information and really appreciate your time today.

[00:37:40.150] – Chris Kane

Kurt thank you.

[00:37:44.610] – Kurt Donnell

Thank you again to Chris for taking the time to chat with us and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. If you have a spare moment, please check us out on Spotify, Google Play, itunes or your listening platform of choice. Please leave us a review and subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode. For feedback or suggestions for guests, you can reach us at podcast@freestar.com. Special thanks to Matt Hanlein for our music and to Caroline Romano for helping with the editing production and making sure people know this podcast exists. Until next time.

Welcome to the Blood, Sweat and CPMs Podcast presented by Freestar. Our host Kurt Donnell, President & CEO of Freestar is here to add levity and provide helpful pointers for anyone navigating the world of Ad Tech. In each episode, he will interview thought leaders across the industry to get their perspectives on what matters most to them and their take on hot industry topics. Visit our website, freestar.com for more information. Enjoy!

Episode 42

Natrian Maxwell (The Trade Desk)

In this episode, our host Kurt Donnell chats with Natrian Maxwell, GM of the Emerging Channels at The Trade Desk, about his thoughts on what will be coming to fruition in the next 3-5 years, the value of social, and finding your passion later in life.

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Listen to the episode on now!

TRANSCRIPT

Note: Due to voice recognition software, sound-alike, and misspelled words may be contained in the documentation.

[00:00:04.570] – Natrian Maxwell

I think the folks and the platforms who’ve been doing it right for such a long period of time, this is an exciting future for them because now you can finally run at full speed and actually do and provide the value that you’ve been doing for such a long period of time. But now you have less noise in the macro that will distill that in packed down.

[00:00:28.970] – Kurt Donnell

Welcome back to blood, Sweat and CPMs. I’m your host, Kurt Donnell. In today’s show, we’ll be speaking with Natrian Maxwell, GM of Emerging channels at the trade desk. Natrian focuses on Immersive inventory channels including gaming, mobile app, audio, digital, out of home, retail, media and social. He started his career 16 years ago working with mobile publishers and large advertisers at Right Media Exchange, one of the very first programmatic exchanges. Prior to the Trade Desk, natrian spent four years at Amazon building their programmatic, offering Amazon publisher services and expanding into international regions such as APAC, LATAM and EMEA. When Natrin’s not slaying the ad tech dragon, you can find him reading, collecting sneakers and playing video games. I’m so excited for you to hear our show today. So let’s get right into it.

[00:01:18.150] – Kurt Donnell

Hey Natrin, thanks so much for joining us today, man. Really appreciate it.

[00:01:21.230] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, thanks for having me. I always enjoy my time chatting with you.

[00:01:25.310] – Kurt Donnell

You’re a very nice friend of the Freestar family. We’ve appreciated the support over time. We’ve actually had you speak with the company before and it’s fun to have you join the pod today. So maybe for the folks that may not have met you yet, why don’t you give a little bit of a background on how you found yourself into the ad tech world? A little bit of a journey, as we all have.

[00:01:44.080] – Natrian Maxwell

Absolutely. So what’s odd about me, I would say, is that I’ve essentially been a career ad techer, so those people are starting to come to the forefront now. And I’ve spent most of my professional career in ad tech. Like most people, this wasn’t even a thing when I was going to college and it wasn’t really like something someone aspired to be. But where I came into the ad tech ecosystem was I was working at Yahoo. And we used to have a team which was predominantly smoke jumpers is what they referred to them as, which is like when either new acquisitions take place or a business is not performing the way that it should be, they send somebody in who has an operations background. So sort of like the firefighters who jump into the smoke to put out a fire.

[00:02:35.080] – Kurt Donnell

Sure.

[00:02:35.920] – Natrian Maxwell

And you’re supposed to essentially kind of come to it with a consulting mindset and understand what needs to happen or what should we do here and write up like a POV on what needs to take place. And so one of those projects that I got handed to was Right Media Exchange, and it was just right after the acquisition, they weren’t sure what they were doing with it. It was sitting sort of idle. And so they were like, hey, we do most of the partnerships with telcos and mobile providers, and so we want you to go over there and understand what is it, what is programmatic and ad tech? We have no idea. And so I went over there, and immediately I was just, like, really intrigued. I was like, wow, it’s like a stock market. It’s like a stock exchange, but it’s advertising. This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. And I remember telling them things, like, every second we see a million ad requests, and they were like, oh my God, I can’t even imagine all that is happening. Right? And it was so funny. So then that project ended, and then I just remember having that moment where I was like, I don’t want to go do anything else.

[00:03:41.980] – Natrian Maxwell

I don’t want to go to another project. I just want to stay here.

[00:03:44.900] – Kurt Donnell

That’s awesome.

[00:03:45.900] – Natrian Maxwell

And so they were like, okay, well, let’s find you a job. And so I found a job at Right Media Exchange, and now it’s been 16 years later, and I still haven’t left ad tech, and every day I’m still learning so many different things. So it’s truly been enjoyable.

[00:04:01.880] – Kurt Donnell

It is amazing the scale at which we operate. Like, if you think about a billion of anything, a ridiculous amount, but we just toss it around all the time of like, oh, billion ad requests yesterday doesn’t make sense. What’s going on? Cruise has been interesting because you’ve now straddled the fence, obviously the trade desk now, but maybe just share quickly the rest of your journey. After the Right Media days, I’ve seen a couple of SSPS and now a DSP, but just walk people through just so they’ve got the background quickly.

[00:04:28.310] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, absolutely. So the way my mind works, I’m always curious. And I think if you’re a curious person and you’re an ad tech, you always try to understand what else is happening, and you try to get closer to the dollar and you try to get closer to the sun to understand how it ultimately flows from the beginning to the end. And so through that, I’ve always had career opportunities arise when I’ve become extremely more curious on how to get closer to the origin or the destination. And so through my career, I’ve gone back and forth between the supply side, the demand side, and I’ve also worked with several contextual data partnerships. I’ve worked with a variety of different types of identity brand safety and partnerships there. Through my journey, I’ve been at Turn, which was at one point the largest DSP in the world, which was then a moby, and I think they recently acquired by another company. I’ve worked at Openx in the past, working directly with hold codes and agencies. That was a really brutal time of character development in my life not OpenX, but more just working on the agency side. The way that it works, the speed at which it operates at just the way that they think about purchasing media and planning was just really quick paced and it happens fast.

[00:05:51.810] – Natrian Maxwell

I spent about four years with Amazon helping them build Amazon Publisher services, rolling out their header bidding solution, starting to explore data like contextual data, lakes, identity, things like that. And then most recently I’m now at Trade Desk where I get to focus on a lot of the emerging channels, a lot of the future growth engines that are coming in the ad tech ecosystem.

[00:06:15.440] – Kurt Donnell

Interestingly at both Amazon, I guess, the Trade Desk now, you sort of have done these kind of startups inside of a big company where really you built out the publisher demand side at Amazon a little bit and now inside of the Trade Desk working on emerging channels but just building out the publisher team. I think when you started it was what, three of you guys working on the more publisher direct side of things?

[00:06:35.570] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, we were really cozy together. So there’s a few of us and whenever there’s a few of you who are starting an initiative, there’s always that opportunity to be really scrappy. Right. And I think what’s really rare today, at least at the companies that I’ve seen, is a lot of times when you join a company, they’re pretty mature. The strategy is already in concrete and a lot of folks essentially just have an operating playbook. When you join a company, maybe you’re trying to squeeze a few basis points out of it or sign a couple of partnerships and they need your help there. But what’s been really cool about both at Amazon and also now at the Trade Desk is that when you start at an established company but you create a brand new channel or brand new endeavor, you get the backing of that mature market and you get the built in demand base that you have there. You get the built in support structures and systems at place, but you also have the autonomy and the freedom to completely run into an open field and understand how you’re going to define that, how you’re going to develop it, what is that structure ultimately going to look like?

[00:07:48.040] – Natrian Maxwell

And it’s really just green pastures ahead of you as you try to create a brand new offering within an established company. I truly think that’s the best opportunity that a person can have, especially in today’s world. It’s like being an entrepreneur, but you have a safety net to some degree. Right.

[00:08:07.180] – Kurt Donnell

Not bad names to trade off of either.

[00:08:11.290] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, it could be a lot worse, trust me. I’ve been in some funny places trying to sell things. I think when I was 16 I was doing door to door sales with hair clippers.

[00:08:20.770] – Kurt Donnell

Really? Yeah.

[00:08:21.840] – Natrian Maxwell

We’ve gone a long way since then, so trust me, it’s a lot easier when I tell you that people answer.

[00:08:27.240] – Kurt Donnell

The phone when you say it’s the Trade Desk calling.

[00:08:29.520] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, it’s awesome.

[00:08:31.890] – Kurt Donnell

Specifically now, as the team has grown, you work with some wonderful people, need and will a couple of my very favorites that have been there for a little while. And obviously the team has grown. I don’t know if pivoted is the right word, but you really are kind of owning the emerging channels piece of that business business, maybe walk us through those. Most of our guests, we tend to focus kind of desktop, mobile web, a little bit of in App, a little CTV, but you actually are working outside of, I think, all of those channels really now.

[00:08:56.670] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that one of the strongest value propositions of Trade Desk is that it’s an Omnichannel DSP, right? And so ultimately we have to be able to help our brands and our agencies find the best impressions, wherever those may be, whether it may be global, that’s part of it. Whether it be in Display or mobile web or mobile app, that’s part of it. But there’s an also very large ecosystem that sits outside of those core channels and I often refer to that as our emerging channels. Now, I jokingly always say this, but once upon a time, CTV was an emerging channel, right? Yeah. Hard to believe that now. But for me, I focus on a lot of what’s going to be coming to fruition in the next three to five years from now. And so a lot of the areas that we’re looking at are surrounded by digital out of home is like a big one for us. Retail media networks is another big one for us, gaming is a huge one for us, audio and podcasting is also another one for us. And social. Now, the one outlier there that I mentioned is social.

[00:10:05.570] – Natrian Maxwell

But the reason I continue to bring up social is just because I would say that all the changes that are happening at the macro level around social have historically made it pretty challenging to be able to navigate within those walled gardens and be able to really bring them into the omnichannel focus. And so I think now with things that are happening around like Apple’s Att Framework, with the macroeconomic situation that’s taking place now, we’re starting to see a lot more of these social companies be open to working with their brands outside of their closed walls and starting to understand how can they play within the open ecosystem of programmatic today. And I think that’s creating some new opportunities for us to engage with those.

[00:10:52.450] – Kurt Donnell

Types of partners on the digital out of home side. I’ve always just been curious about that. It feels like there’s a lot of corollaries from the programmatic pipes that could be connected there and they aren’t quite yet. Have you seen that market start to grow for you guys?

[00:11:05.370] – Natrian Maxwell

Absolutely. So last year digital out of home was the fastest growing channel that we had at the trade desk and I would say globally. Also we’re seeing significant uptick in terms of adoption from variety of brands and agencies. We have some great partnerships that we have now that are extremely innovative and leaned into programmatic today. So, like, Place Exchange is a phenomenal one. X Media math guy there named Ari who’s phenomenal. We also have Vistar Media who is like, sure, yeah, so Vistar Media is a big one for us. Hivestack is another massive one for us. These are people who have been deeply rooted in programmatic for years, and now they’re starting to bring things into the digital out of home ecosystem that start to look and feel of that of a programmatic native company. I would continue to say though, what else is also happening kind of at the same time or in parallel is that we’re starting to see a lot of media owners. So originally what happened, let’s rewind maybe like four years ago, majority of screens and things were large billboards that were static in nature. And then we started to see a lot of those start to convert into digital signage.

[00:12:18.350] – Natrian Maxwell

But in parallel, what we’re also starting to see is place based advertising, which is screens that start to look and feel native to the environment in which people walk through and navigate. You might see these like when you’re in New York and you’re like walking past the street corner and you see a screen on the street corner or taxi toppers, or you might see them at grocery stores now. And so you’re starting to find a lot more screens that are digital first pop up in a lot of the locations that most people have a lot of foot traffic through. And that’s really allowed us to accelerate in terms of just like first scale and coverage. But also a lot of those programmatic signals that our programmatic brands and agencies look for across some of the other channels such as mobile and CTV, et cetera.

[00:13:06.250] – Kurt Donnell

Something we’ve thought about a little bit. As you see even the second screens popping up on ATMs or gas pumps or even the things that look like little Android devices all over the place. I think we’re going to see that ecosystem converge a little bit with kind of where we’ve played historically in the desktop, mobile, web, video, that side of things. Feels like that’s all going to converge here through the same pipes soon, which is awesome, I think. So other piece of this you’ve mentioned, obviously audio and podcasts. My understanding is that’s been heavily direct sold. Are you seeing that shift to be more programmatic here over time or is that staying more direct sold?

[00:13:41.310] – Natrian Maxwell

No, I think it’s definitely moving into the programmatic ecosystem as well. So I would say there are some companies that have really leaned into that. So like, Series XM is like a massive one with Adswiz and Pandora. They also have SoundCloud as well that they power. But I would say now, because of the way that people are digesting and consuming, a lot of that audio content fits really naturally inside of a programmatic ecosystem, right? So historically it was something that folks maybe spent a small amount of their time on or a small amount of time discovering new shows and entertaining themselves. But I would say that probably in 2020 is when we were all forced to stay home. What happened is we saw an acceleration of the way that a lot of consumers wanted to spend their time and find new ways of entertaining themselves. And so at that time, what happened is a lot of people started transitioning from watching TV or maybe they extinguished all of their Netflix shows that they’ve been meaning to watch. And then they started to dabble into some of the podcasts and then they started finding great shows like Serial.

[00:14:52.000] – Natrian Maxwell

I think that’s usually like the first one people lean into, right? And then now they’re playing it on their smart devices at home. And they’re like, Me, I’m like, Honey, honey, come into the kitchen, listen to this show called Cereal, right? And now we’re sitting around listening to our smart device. Well, fast forward. Now 2023 people are back to work. We’re all mobile again. But guess what? I’ve changed the way now that I interact with audio moving forward, I still listen to my streaming. I still listen to my podcast. I bring that with me. And so now as I’m out and about, I’m on my mobile device and I’m consuming content. This is where signals become really rich in that environment. And so for folks who’ve said like, no, I’m just going to stay direct only, I think what they’ve started to realize is, wow, I actually have a lot more supply now than I used to. I really need help with demand now that I have so much leftover supply. And then two, what I’m starting to realize is that a lot of these impressions that I have in the audio channel, the podcast channel, are really rich for us.

[00:15:55.090] – Natrian Maxwell

The CPMs are great in this environment, and a lot of the brands that are interested in combining the Omnichannel experience from audio into some of the other channels they’re working with has increased significantly. And so now when you have conversations with like PNG or Unilever and they’re able to use that same data driven approach in audio, I think that’s really compelling for a lot of those brands and agencies. And they’ve ultimately started to work with a lot of the audio publishers to be able to extend their campaigns into the audio and podcasting side of the business as well.

[00:16:28.840] – Kurt Donnell

That’s interesting. Are you guys doing a lot of that Omni Channel attribution or at least matching it up on their behalf? Are they typically coming with some of that on their side?

[00:16:38.320] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, so it’s actually both. Right? So a lot of them today are using their first party audience segments across our entire platform. So whether it’s CTV or Display or audio or even gaming, they lead with that first. Right. And then they leave it up to us to be able to go out there and look at the 13 million bid requests that we see every second and understand what are the best 800 or 900 impressions that we can find for them. In many instances, that’s going to be in audio or podcasting. In many instances it’ll be in CTV. But the good news is today is that with our device Graph that we have here at Trade Desk, we’re able to identify who those users are, we’re able to do targeting and we’re able to do attribution and measurement and be able to take all those insights and funnel it back into their entire marketing campaign, which is really powerful for those brands.

[00:17:27.610] – Kurt Donnell

I mean, I think you guys have done a great job and both your, I guess, market share and market cap and everything reflect how good of a job you guys have done there. From that standpoint, it’s been fun to see and we’ve been lucky enough to get to partner with you guys directly and sort of see that shift a little bit. You’ve sat on the SSP side and the DSP side of the world. What do you think that landscape looks like right now? How do you see that changing over the next couple of years? Obviously, Trade Desk was one of the first DSPs to go a little bit more publisher direct. It’s not sort of open to everybody at this point in time, but you guys are leaning in and it makes complete sense. What’s your take on that shift over time?

[00:18:03.280] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, so to your point, I’ve been on both sides of the house, and so I often have this Switzerland approach to being like, okay, I don’t ever pick a side SSP, Pepsi or Coke. I’m just like, let me just understand both sides to better understand the challenges they’re dealing with today. I was just thinking about this last week and I was about to write something about it, but then I just wanted to stew about it for a little bit. But what I’ve been noticing lately is that there’s a lot of folks, a lot of content being generated about the demise of the SSP and how they’re dying off, et cetera. I don’t think that’s true. What I do think is happening, though, today is that the conversation of value is at a high point, whereas historically it’s been something like, we’ll get around to it. We’ll tackle that when it becomes a problem. We’ll get to that later. So maybe it was like priority three or four, but now with the macroeconomic situation that we’re in now, I think it’s essentially jumped up to priority one or two for a lot of folks right. And so how that plays out in the market and what that looks like, is this it’s?

[00:19:14.510] – Natrian Maxwell

Where are we spending our dollar? And any amount of that dollar that’s taken out, how much value are we getting in exchange to that? Right? It’s almost the same conversation that’s happening between consumers and mobile apps, which is if I give you my information, my private information, how much value do I get in return for that? Right? And so I think this is the question that’s ultimately playing itself out and it’s playing itself differently across the ecosystem. And so what I mean by that is this is that as long as there’s a fair or equal or more value exchange between the amount of the dollar that’s being taken and the amount of value that’s being replaced with that dollar, we’re good. Right. I think that the challenge is that what we started to find is that a lot of platforms or a lot of companies seem to be extracting more value than they’re adding to that transaction. And I think that’s what we’re starting to see some tailwinds on. And I think that’s where we’re starting to see a little bit of reduction in the entire ecosystem today. Right?

[00:20:24.580] – Kurt Donnell

Yeah. The articles that say the SSPS are dead, there are, I think, different tiers of SSPS. The people that are really adding unique value, whether it’s on the identity and attribution side or bringing some unique demand themselves, I think they will have staying power. I think the folks that have been heavily reliant on being resellers or just buyers through other SSPS and those things, I think it’s going to be a tough slog for them. I think you guys have done a good job on really pushing supply path optimization. I talked to Will about that somewhat regularly on how there’s different classes and quality of inventory and everything. And I think the trade desk has done a very nice job of calling that out and putting it front and center for people to think about, which is good for those of us that usually on the right side of history are really quality inventory, not doing the made for advertising arbitrage stuff. The fact that’s getting called out warms my soul a little bit. It wasn’t really adding a lot of value the entire time and it was taking dollars out of really quality publishers pockets.

[00:21:18.960] – Kurt Donnell

And so I’m excited to see some of the supply path optimization stuff, some of just the calling out of quality of inventory not being what advertisers really want. And I think you guys have done a good job leading that charge and I think that’ll happen at all elements of the chain, like the quality DSPs want to go through quality SSPS to quality supply. Those other paths are not efficient and they’re taking more value out. So it’s been good to see you guys sort of be leaders in that space.

[00:21:42.640] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, I agree with you fully there. I think what’s funny and kind of being I always jokingly say, like, I’m old and just grumpy now because I’ve been in it for a bit. But what I think is funny is that when you do come across companies that are operating really clean, great valuable exchanges like Freestar, for example, it’s that they’re not worried. They’re like, this is such a great thing. We’re so excited that a lot of the bad players are going to get rooted out. This is great for us. We can finally maximize our value to our customers, right? So that’s what normally happens. But you already knew they were good players to begin with, so you’re like, okay, yeah, right, we knew that. But then you have the inverse, right? You have the other guys who are like, oh my God, it’s Groundhog’s Day. I think I’m going to start my own digital agency. Things are looking really bad right now. And I giggle because I think the folks and the platforms who’ve been doing it right for such a long period of time, this is an exciting future for them because now you can finally run at full speed and actually do and provide the value that you’ve been doing for such a long period of time.

[00:22:48.020] – Natrian Maxwell

But now you have less noise in the macro that will distill that impact. Down. So very excited for folks who are creating that value within the ecosystem today.

[00:23:00.790] – Kurt Donnell

I think it’s one of those things in life where there’s always a buck to be made somehow, but you got to lay your head on the pillow at night and be proud of what you’re doing and be able to look yourself in the mirror a little bit. And I guess we’ve always tried to do that. Not everybody’s perfect, and we have our moments where we slip up from time to time. But I think if you do that, more times than not, the tough times aren’t quite as tough. People that are living on the margins probably going to hurt a little bit for sure. You made a random comment a little bit about social and that opening up. I’m hearing just more chatter about the advertising world, maybe getting the advertiser side of the world, getting a little more interested in the open web. Again, obviously social, social all the time. We’ve seen some of the earnings reports and everything is coming out of the Facebook of the world and Twitters of the world. I think those can be a little bit misleading because TikTok is kind of eating their lunch. So I think that maybe just reallocating some of the social dollars around.

[00:23:51.690] – Kurt Donnell

But obviously the digital market is still growing. What’s your take on that? Are you guys getting any flavor at all from the buy side? That the open web is getting to feel better and maybe it goes back to cleaning up the supply path a little bit or some of the supply, but I don’t know. Any thoughts on that?

[00:24:05.490] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, sure. The way that I sort of think about this is that a long time ago, when I started really the metric that a lot of decisioning planning, forecasting, and measurement was done was just based on Nielsen data. That was truly the way that we operated. Right. And when agencies and brands used to reach out to us, it was sort of that Mad Men era where it was, hey, I’m running this campaign. Where do you guys think I should run? Right? And I would have my Don Draper moment, and I’d be like, you know what? Sounds really cool and custom for you? I would take these sets of supply and let’s run there for you. And they’d be like, oh, great ideas. Oh, brilliant.

[00:24:51.700] – Kurt Donnell

Right?

[00:24:51.890] – Natrian Maxwell

And I’m like thank you. So that was like the mathematic era, right? And then what happened is that we started going into more of like the walled gardens. The Facebook who could do one to one targeting at mass scale. And they were wielding a lot of power around and they were doing a lot of things, and they were capturing a lot of that budget. And it was working really well for brands and agencies for quite a long period of time. But then what started happening, though, is a consumer started getting really concerned about how their privacy was being used, where it was being used, and we started seeing that play out in parallel. What we started also seeing is that the methodologies that a lot of the social platforms were using would vary or change, but they would lose trust with some of the brands and agencies. And so then brands and agencies started saying, hey, I don’t know if I can just solely rely on your data for measurement and how we’re performing. So what that did was it created sort of this environment now where they’re using deterministic data and probabilistic data and sort of checking each other’s homework to see if it’s really playing out right.

[00:26:04.470] – Natrian Maxwell

So that started to transition. And then I think what we started to move into now is the MathMan era, which is we started to see a lot of agencies and brands start to bring in a lot more data scientists and a lot more data teams internally to understand how they can take control of their first party data. Right? And so now that we have that, what I think is we’re starting to see now is a lot of these people saying, well, actually, when I look at the open web, I’m noticing that our performance data, our measurement data. The actual outcomes of our campaigns are either just as good as what we were getting during that deterministic era or even better now, because of the reach and scale and the interoperability that we have within the open ecosystem. Right? And so now, if I’m a large brand, I still find value in social platforms, but. How I use them has changed significantly since changing into this MathMan era. And I think what they’re trying to do now is say, okay, we’re very comfortable with how we use our first-party data. We’re very comfortable in terms of how we’re buying now.

[00:27:13.500] – Natrian Maxwell

What we’d like to do is expand our visibility into these closed ecosystems and be able to use these insights that we’re learning in the open web there as well. So now they’re asking, how do we open up those walled gardens so that we can ultimately use our data more holistically and understand more of the ecosystem together so that we can drive value across all of our marketing campaigns? And I think that’s sort of where we’re at currently, and that’s the trend now. And so I’m very excited because it almost feels like these conversations are starting to happen at the social level where they’re trying to understand, okay, how do I give my strategic buyers more access, more visibility, more measurement? And I think that’s sort of where we’re at at this moment in time.

[00:27:56.740] – Kurt Donnell

I love that. Did you coin the mathmen term? Can I steal that? Who do I need to attribute that to when I inevitably steal it?

[00:28:05.100] – Natrian Maxwell

Yeah, take it. I don’t know, I just felt like that’s what’s happened now. Like, everyone’s like a data analyst these days. So I’ve just sort of been comparing Math Men and Mad Men.

[00:28:14.190] – Kurt Donnell

I do love that, though. We jokingly touched on at the beginning the billions of signals that we see on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and being able to use that. It’s been, I guess, the reason why I’ve leaned into the programmatic side of the world for, I guess, almost a decade now, is we’re going to do better with math than we are just sort of I want to do this splashy campaign and put it on this, that or the other thing. And the amount of direct dollars I still get seen thrown around kind of blows my mind when it’s tough to measure your row ads on that at certain times and everything. And sure, you can go look at this, and I did this giant flashy thing or this event or whatever that is, but there’s math that will show what works and what doesn’t work. And the best way to test that is programmatic advertising because you can turn it on and off and test and learn and iterate so I love the space, and obviously you do. You’ve been doing it for a long time. So I will wind things down here with the question I ask everyone, which is, what is some advice current day Natrian would give a younger version of himself?

[00:29:12.670] – Natrian Maxwell

And is this specific to programmatic or just in general?

[00:29:16.020] – Kurt Donnell

No, this is life.

[00:29:16.850] – Natrian Maxwell

This is life.

[00:29:17.330] – Kurt Donnell

We wrap up every episode with this. We try to give people a little chance to find some nuggets to live by here.

[00:29:24.040] – Natrian Maxwell

What do you got if there was one thing I would tell my younger self, aside from take care of your hair, it would probably be something like this. I think that one mistake that we often have. And keep in mind, I have a 19 year old and a 16 year old, and so I’m like right at that point now where I have to teach them how to be adults. And what I tell them and what I would have told my younger self is I think we do it wrong in America in that we always tell people like, find your passion and then go do that. And I often think that was probably bad advice. And here’s why is that. Oftentimes when you’re 19 or 20 or 21, you don’t even know what you’re passionate about. And the reason is because you haven’t even done enough things to know what you’re not passionate about yet. And I would say as I look over my career in programmatic in general, 16 years later, I didn’t get passionate about programmatic until about two years ago. And that was because I’ve done it so long now that you have to develop a certain skill set or a master of a certain skill set before you can truly start to look at something and say like, I am passionate about this because I am now getting back a certain amount of input from this thing.

[00:30:55.730] – Natrian Maxwell

So you almost have to do something for a really long time, even though you’re not passionate about it, before it then becomes a passion, which then you can do something you’re passionate about. So if you chase a passion too early on and you’re not good at it, it’s not going to be something that you want to continue doing. For me, it’s golf. Like, I was terrible at it, but I was like, can I be passionate at golf? No, it’ll destroy you. Right. You have to do it for a long period of time before it then becomes your passion. So the advice sorry, that was long winded. But what I would say the advice is just do a lot of things. Do a lot of things and try to find what you’re not passionate about and that will ultimately help you find something that you are passionate about later. So that would probably be the advice I would have given myself.

[00:31:46.550] – Kurt Donnell

I think that is tremendous advice. And you mentioned the word curiosity earlier, and I talk to our team about that all the time. Whenever you’ve got curiosity, you’re going to be successful because you’ll go pull on the random strings and then you will find that thing that leads you down the path to the thing that is your passion eventually. But you won’t know that. You can’t know that until you try such good advice. I will agree that golf will drive you. Absolutely. But once you get hooked, man, is it a passion.

[00:32:13.070] – Natrian Maxwell

Awesome. I love it. You’re giving me hope here because it is terrible out there right now.

[00:32:18.700] – Kurt Donnell

Thanks for the hope. It is the most infuriating and addicting thing on this planet. Malcolm Gladwell is a good podcast about that very thing. Awesome man. Well, hey, I appreciate your time, as always, and the partnership. It’s been so fun to see you be so successful everywhere you’ve been and always. Cheers on the sideline, my man. Thanks so much, appreciate the time today.

[00:32:39.650] – Natrian Maxwell

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate everything and we’ll talk here soon.

[00:32:47.250] – Kurt Donnell

Thank you again to our special guest Natrin for taking the time to chat with us. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you have a spare moment, please check us out on Google Play itunes or your listening platform of choice. Please leave us a review and subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode. For feedback or suggestions for guests, you can reach us at podcast@freestar.com. Special thanks to Matt Hanline for music and to Caroline Romano for helping with editing, production and making sure people know this podcast exists. Until next time.