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Context Vs. Cookies With Dotdash Meredith's D/Cipher Lead
00:44:49
Dotdash Meredith’s Lindsay Van Kirk says the cookie-based buying tools she helped develop in her early career at AppNexus placed too much value on unreliable third-party audiences. But contextual tools like DDM’s D/Cipher, which she now oversees,...
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- [00:13]
Allison Schiff
Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
- [00:34]
Anthony Vargas
Thanks for tuning in to Ad Exchanger Talks. This is Anthony Vargas filling in for our usual host, Allison Schiff. Our topic for today is contextual targeting. Contextual is back in vogue thanks to the weakening of other ad targeting signals like third party cookies and mobile device IDs. But it's a newer, more advanced form of contextual that seems to be winning budgets, one that combines publisher first party data about their content with audience data that can extend reach and find new unexpected adjacencies. Back in May 2023, Meredith launched its own contextual targeting solution, Decipher, to capitalize on the intent driven audiences that flock to its specialized site verticals. The move seemed perfectly time for Decipher to gain a foothold in the market before Google Chrome implemented its plans to deprecate third party cookies in 2024. But Google has since changed those plans, making the future of the cookie and the future of cookie alternatives like Contextual a bit more uncertain. Still, the investment seems to have paid off for Meredith, whereas other publishers have had mixed results. Launching in house Ad Tech with me today to discuss why that is and how Decipher is changing DDM's monetization strategy is Lindsey Van Kirk, who joined the company at the beginning of this year as SVP and GM of Decipher. Lindsey, thanks for joining us today.
- [01:55]
Allison Schiff
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:58]
Anthony Vargas
So before we dig in here, we usually like to start these episodes of Ad Exchanger Talks with a more lighthearted question. So here we go on that Lindsey what's the best contextual fit for targeting? Lindsey Van Kirk what kind of content do you spend your personal time online? Reading?
- [02:15]
Allison Schiff
Oh, that is a really great question. So if you had asked me that a couple of years ago, it probably would have been about British murder mysteries, the best TV shows that were out there on all of our new streaming services. I am a absolute television junkie and I love finding new shows. But about five years ago I became a parent and I now have two children. So I spend an exorbitant amount of my time looking at parenting best practices, things to do with those tiny humans on a daily basis to keep them entertained and engaged. My oldest just started kindergarten so I'm now like exploring the world of what it's like to be a parent whose kids in the public school system. So if you were trying to find me on the Internet, the best spaces would probably be around content that's tied to being a parent these days.
- [03:15]
Anthony Vargas
And you joined Meredith in January 2024 after previous stints overseeing edtech products at Zander and Operative, as well as working on tech products for the financial and real estate markets. What was it about the opportunity to oversee Decipher that appealed to you? And how did your past experience kind of inform that?
- [03:34]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, that's a great question. So the earliest job that I had working in ad tech was at a company that, at the sort of boom of social gaming, when it was on Facebook or other platforms, was doing work to help brands find very integrated ways of engaging with those gamers or those audiences. So I'm dating myself a little bit here, but things like taking custom farms in farmville and helping brands like Frito Lay activate in those spaces. So my early career was really focused on these natural ways that consumers were engaging with advertising in spaces where it wasn't interrupting their experience. And after that, I found myself at AppNexus where we were building out core advertising technology, first for networks to interact with one another and then for publishers just kind of consider options for better ad serving, yield management, and building out an ssp. I spent some time working on our marketplace products, helping buyers and sellers connect better with one another. And in my last few years that I was there, I oversaw the launch of the demand side platform Zander Invest, kind of as the product leader for that part of the organization. And so I've worked now across all of these different parts of the advertising ecosystem and the supply chain. But really what drew me back to Dot dash Meredith into this specific opportunity was that the concept of Decipher and finding the right ad to meet the consumer in a moment where they're interested in a specific question that they're trying to answer or a particular topic that they're really passionate about, fit with sort of the origin story of how I found myself in advertising to begin with. And so I was just really drawn to the mission of Decipher from a consumer perspective, just given that it's finding that space where you can present the consumer with both the content that helps answer their question and other things from our advertising partners that are really relevant to that moment, that mindset that they are engaged in at that time. So that's really what drew me to this product to start.
- [06:01]
Anthony Vargas
And for those unfamiliar, give us just like a quick overview of Decipher and how it works, you know, and especially like, how is it similar to and different from other contextual targeting approaches?
- [06:12]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, that's a great question. So first and Foremost, as many people probably know, the dot dash Meredith portfolio of brands is incredible. And we really touch consumers at every point in their daily journey because we've got content that spans across all of these different consumer verticals. We've got investment content on Investopedia and financial guidance. We've got health guidance for folks on Very well health. We've got personal interest items and beauty on People and Birdie. And we've got Home with Real simple and Better homes and gardens and all of these turnkey brands. And obviously we've got a strong food footprint with food and wine and all recipes and all of these vast properties. And so we touch the consumer lifestyle in all of these different moments. And because of that and because of the approach that DDM takes to how we meet consumers where they are and answer their key questions, we understand what someone is trying to accomplish and their mindset when they come to one of the articles that are on any one of those myriad of properties, Right? And so if you are a parent like me, who is on parents.com reading about what it's going to be like when your kindergartner first starts school, we know that you're a parent. We don't want to know anything else about you. You are actively parenting in that moment. And so we're able to, from the articles that we have and from the content, we're able to know why someone is coming to our properties. And we've spent years building up that consumer trust where we are, for many consumers, just the place where they come to answer these key questions about their day to day. And because we have just the immense scale essentially of the equivalent of a platform, we can see content consumption patterns that allow us to better understand the moments of these different consumer groups. So things like we know if someone is looking at an article about painting a children's bedroom that they might be in the market for a new house or a new car. They're thinking about how to engage with their kids, maybe they want to travel with their children. And so we're able to build these connections and better create rich pictures of consumers in these moments and in these mindsets that they are coming to us in. And because of that, when we meet our, when we meet consumers with advertising in all of those spaces, it performs incredibly well. It outperforms all of the digital benchmarks every single time. When we have a, let's say we have an advertiser who is advertising a stain removal product, we know we have a ton of relevant content about stain removal for your home. Your clothes on, Real simple Better homes and gardens, all of those properties. We also know those same consumers are reading our barbecue recipes on food and wine and all recipes at scale. Chicken or the egg, who's really to say? But if you were delivering the ad for that stain removal company, you would deliver it on both of those types of content and they would both outperform the benchmark. And that's the key to how Decipher really works. When it finds the mindset of the consumer. When you meet them in the topics that they're really interested in that are relevant not just to them, but to each other, you're able to deliver incredible outcomes.
- [09:54]
Anthony Vargas
And like you kind of just like alluded to, a big part of deciphers like sales pitch is its ability to really surface these intense signals or to glean the purpose of a user site visit. So like, when you think about how this kind of goes beyond just analyzing what content they're reading in a given moment, you know, like, how does, how does Decipher bring in Meredith's first party data on like user browsing behavior to improve the contextual targeting and then also like, you know, what role does like kind of like AI and natural language processing play in all this too?
- [10:24]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing that I think is important is that the decipher capability goes beyond contextual because we're not just looking at the keywords on the page. So like traditional contextual would have you searching for terms and matching against those terms on a page to help you sort of find the right moment to match that ad to that page. Right. And what we do with Decipher is we look at the content on the page, but it's really a key for the mindset of the person who's coming to that page. The data that we see that we use to build out all of the engagements with decipher, it uses 11 billion signals that we have across our portfolio tied to user engagement and patterns like I was describing. So there's a lot of just rich data that goes into how we build out the connections between the content that we see on the page and the way that we're using AI for some of that is that large language models are good at understanding content. Right. That's kind of the core of what they've been designed to do is to be able to look at lots and lots of content at scale. We as a probably the largest publisher in America, have the largest content corpus that you could see. And so we use AI and LLMs to help us understand the connections between all of the content that is in our portfolio and to really drive the understanding of that content at scale, because that's what it's designed to do. And so that's primarily how that underpins all of the tools that we have for Decipher.
- [12:21]
Anthony Vargas
And when it comes to kind of like bringing in some of like the, you know, like the audience, like behavioral data as well, what's like kind of like the, you know, the connective tissue that allows that to happen? Like are you kind of like does like a user have to be logged in and then you're like kind of like looking at what like all the activity associated with that email address. Can you also look at what like non logged in users are doing? What can you kind of tell us about that?
- [12:46]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, sure. So again, we rely on a lot of the signals that we have as the publisher to kind of build in our understanding of how consumers understand our content. We also have a robust research team that helps us actually drive our understanding of these consumer mindsets at any given point in time. And again, what we're really looking at here is why is someone coming to this page, what is interesting to them or what is their mindset and how can we find the right advertising partner to meet them? Meet that consumer with what they need to know at that moment. And when we do that, it really works.
- [13:33]
Anthony Vargas
And do you also, when it comes to decipher and what kind of data signals you're bringing in, can you also layer in like the advertiser's own first party data on their customers as well and kind of like match it against DDM's audiences?
- [13:48]
Allison Schiff
Absolutely. This is something that we have done in the past with some of our larger partners and it's something that we think is actually core to like a part of the way that Decipher works. So again, one of the reasons why Decipher is so powerful is that we're a publisher and our job is to really understand our audience. And we are extremely good at knowing what our audience needs to know and who they are when they come to our properties. But we have clients who know things about consumers that we cannot know. And so we do have the capability to bring those things together to really understand what can we know about the consumer together and how can we then use the content to help predict what that consumer will do next. And what we have found when we have done this with other partners is that when we bring those two types of insights together, the content is a much better predictor of what you will do next than any kind of cookie alone is. And so when we have put that out into the world and when we take like when we have partners who have taken that risk with us where they wanted to like combine data sets together or combine understandings and put it head to head against a pure cookie, the cookie list decipher portion of that campaign outperformed the cookie campaign and was way more efficient from a KPI perspective. And it's just such a fun exercise to do with our clients because we start to figure out what can we actually learn together about consumers. And it really helps us bring. It bridges the gap between the advertiser and the publisher in a way that I think a lot of ad tech has historically kept those two parties at arm's length. And so it's a really fun way of getting deeper into what can we learn about consumers together.
- [15:48]
Anthony Vargas
And then like, when it comes to kind of like layering in all these like, you know, additional kind of like audience data layers on top of like a contextual match, do you think advertisers view like just solely content based contextual targeting is like too old school of an advertising strategy? In an order to really kind of like grab their interest and, you know, get bigger access to their ad budgets, you really need to kind of like offer this capability to layer in all this, like additional audience data on top of like, you know, what Dot dash Meredith has in terms of data on its content.
- [16:22]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, that's a great question. I think that there are a couple of points in there that I think are interesting. The first is that I think that advertisers are looking for performance. They want their ad dollar to go as far as they possibly can. And I think that the specifics of the tactic are kind of less interesting than the results. And that was one of the other components of Decipher that really drew me to this offering, is that across all of the case studies that we have, across all of the marketer verticals that we work with, across every component of the brand marketing funnel of KPIs that you could be looking to achieve, Decipher works and it outperforms the cookie every single time. And that I think is the most important thing that we need to focus on industry wide. Especially because cookies were broken to begin with before we started taking them away from the advertising experience. They were this sort of easy button way of trying to find the audience that you were that you thought matched well to your product. And so I would argue that kind of cookies are the oldest school kind of broken mechanism that we have for trying to find consumers. I don't know if you ever looked at your cookies from any of the legacy third party data providers. At one point, I think in 2016 or 2017 I looked at mine and I saw myself in all of these groups that I did not identify with. And my favorite one was that I do not personally self identify as a 65 year old white male golfer. And so Callaway was really wasting its dollars on me for a number of years. And I think that's really the problem that we're trying to address with Decipher is that finding the right audience to match your product, the people who are actually interested in knowing that your product exists, in knowing that there is something that can also help solve a problem that they are already looking to solve, is way more powerful than like, is it contextual or is it a cookie or is it some type of other identifier? Right. Like the methodology as powerful as the one for Decipher is like the outcome is the thing that matters the most. And I think that's really what we're focusing on here is like cookies or no cookies. It doesn't matter to us because Decipher beats it every single time. And you can also so see how when you limit yourself to just these specific, very nuanced audiences or very specific keywords, you're just limiting the number of users that you can actually reach who have the potential of being interested in your product. And that's really part of the solution here. It's not just about finding the right person, it's about the scale with which you can find those people. Because the open Internet is vast and it's been way too small now for way too long since Apple took cookies away. Signal degrades every single day with users making choices about ads that they can see or blockers that they put on their browsers. And so like from our perspective, like cookies are for the most legacy thing you can use. And when you think about how to achieve scale of your message and to achieve the outcome that you're looking for, that's what we help our marketing partners with the most. And that's what we think resonates when we talk to them.
- [20:10]
Anthony Vargas
So Lindsey, I wanted to ask you a couple more questions about just like kind of how Decipher is sort of like transforming Dash Meredith's like monetization approach. In his Q2 earnings report back in August, the CEO of Dash Meredith's parent company, IAC, Joey Levin, said that Decipher is now part of more than half of the premium campaigns run by Dash Meredith. He also said it's helped return previously challenged categories like home and food back to growth. And programmatic ad rates were also up 36% year over year in Q2, which Levin credited in large part to Decipher. So how is the solution changing the monetization picture for Dot Dash Meredith? You know, is it, is it unlocking new demand that DDM didn't previously have, like pulling in new or bigger ad budgets, or is it really more like. Are the positive impacts that Levin was talking about, they're really playing out more in the bidding dynamics with advertisers willing to pay more to apply these new data layers?
- [21:12]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that what we're really seeing, like I was mentioning before, is that advertisers are really focused on performance. And we know that that has sort of become the new standard for all CMOs, is really ensuring that every dollar that you're spending is going as far as possible. And what we're finding from a monetization perspective is that our clients who test and use Decipher are seeing that incredible performance with it and they're doubling down and they're coming back to us to help them with their problems again and again. And that is really what Decipher helps unlock. And I think the other piece of this that's meaningful is that when you look at the types of inventory that traditionally gets bought programmatically, you're really seeing just a small slice of the Internet if you're using SSPs and DSPs that have all of these different caps within the supply chain. And when you're layering on audience targeting on top of that, everyone is trying to buy a small sliver of the Internet that has cookies or other identifiers on it. And what Decipher really does is it unlocks the inventory for Safari and iOS consumers or anything that has all of that privacy baked into it in terms of the signal loss. And that's really driven a lot of the capability of it. It's driven a lot of the performance, and it's one of the things that underpins a lot of the growth.
- [22:56]
Anthony Vargas
Back when I spoke to Meredith CEO Neil Vogel just after Decipher was released, he told me it would be a fool's errand to try and wean advertisers off of cookie based targeting while cookies are still in play. Since then, we've seen Google Chrome backtrack on its plans to kill third party cookies in 2024. So I guess My question is like, you know, does that make it, does that make for a tougher roadmap to wider adoption for Decipher or is there more advertiser demand for cookie alternatives even though cookies are still around than the company may have thought previously?
- [23:29]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, well I think that again it, it genuinely comes back to performance for a lot of the buyers that we're talking to. And when we, when run tests with the advertisers who are excited about Decipher and who are thinking about how to future proof their businesses for when cookies do eventually go away and make no mistake, we like they are still going away. It will just be a user choice now as opposed to being a browser mandate that is going to I think continue to drive the appetite to test and to find new solutions. And again, I think marketers are under immense pressure and continued pressure to ensure that their dollars are going to the right places. And again, cookies just have not worked for marketers for a long time. They've been given them sort of false precision on the audience that they're reaching and they've made it more expensive for them because again you're trying to find a small group of like impressions that have an identifier or cookie associated with it. And so I actually think that this is positive for marketers who want to find alternatives and who are excited to put things head to head against one another so that they know what their new normal is going to be compared to what they've had in the past. And we encourage all of our clients, every time they talk to us about Decipher, to test, to put it head to head with their cookie targeting tactics. And this announcement allows us a longer window with many of those clients to actually do that head to head to help everyone along the journey of getting to a cookie less world. If you know how your new technologies compare to what you had before, you can get a lot more comfortable with what the future is going to look like when you only have those new technologies. And that's I think the path that we're walking with a lot of our advertising partners right now.
- [25:44]
Anthony Vargas
We've seen other publishers of similar size to Meredith release their own in house edtech platforms. Some of those efforts have found success, but we've also seen pullback from some like Washington Posts like Zeus platform. So like what like in your opinion, like is Dot Meredith doing right in building Decipher and how is it succeeding where other publishers have kind of failed?
- [26:08]
Allison Schiff
Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about just what I think we're doing really well here from that product management lens. So, like you mentioned, I've overseen a lot of different products across my career in ad tech. And I like to joke that one of the things that I kind of bring to the table with the DDM team is that I built a lot of the products that I think broke a lot of the way that the supply chain is supposed to work for buyers and for sellers by really keying in on all of these sort of identifiers as the primary way that you. That you find who you think is the audience for your product. And so some of the things I think that we're doing well, that I think matter to our advertising partners are we are, again, of a scale that is at the platform level, and that is significant for our marketers, because when you look at the way that tests usually run, the question is, can I get something to work and then can I get it to scale? And with Decipher, we can answer both of those questions for marketers as a yes, if we can get it to work and we can get it to scale, which I think is meaningfully different than a lot of the other content creators that are out there. I think the other piece of this is that we, like I said earlier, touched so many parts of a consumer's life and with so many different topics that we can see connections that others may not be able to draw. And then the last piece of it is that we are focused on our primary job, which is to answer questions for consumers with the absolute best and editorially driven content that they can get out there. And that is always the focus.
- [28:10]
Anthony Vargas
So, Lindsey, you mentioned that you see Decipher as a way to correct some of the things that you've worked on in the past that have kind of, you know, broken the way digital advertising works a bit. What more can you tell us about what you meant by that?
- [28:23]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, absolutely. So I spent about 10 years at App Nexus and then Zander after AppNexus was acquired by AT&T. And a huge part of what we were working on in the last few years I was there, I worked on the DSP side of the business. So I launched Xander and Invest into Market under that new brand umbrella. And a lot of what we were focused on was how we could bring proprietary data from AT&T to bear for buyers to use as part of the way they were activating across the open web. And we were very, very focused on the empowerment of the trader and how to make sure that they were getting the best results, the most efficient buys and using all the right tools that they had from us to achieve the outcomes that they were focused on. But reflecting back, and now being at a digital publisher, when you focus so heavily on the buy side and looking just at how you can affect the way that a buyer transacts in a programmatic ecosystem, what you lose in that process is really the true connection between the buyer and the publisher. And in that way, you also lose a little bit of the audience. Right, because so much of what we were building was focused on looking at how to bring all of this data together to create a picture of the consumer that we had. But that is still just historic information. That's information that looks at someone's past and their past activities and things like what they were doing currently with their subscriptions. And maybe you collected some information about them as a human, but what it doesn't tell you is what they're interested in right now. And so we were using these sort of legacy methodologies to understand people, but we lost really two things. A like who is the audience that we're actually buying from and what more can we know about them by working more closely with the publisher? And the second piece was what is an actual more real time signal that we could use to understand what someone's mindset is right now? And so I think both of those things that connecting back to the actual owner of the content, the people who are writing for a specific audience and what they know about those consumers, and looking for more real time signal around how you can help advertisers perform better feels to me like. So we're sort of redoing some of those problems that relied on you looking for identifiers and looking at history and all those things of the past.
- [31:10]
Anthony Vargas
And how does the kind of new sort of pivot to this new form of contextual that decipher kind of embodies, how is that a, a benefit for publishers in the sense that it reverses some of those trends that had been kind of baked into the ecosystem. And then how is it also a, you know, a benefit for buyers too?
- [31:31]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, great question. So on the publishing side, one of the things that we know, especially being a large scaled premium publisher, is that the consumers who are on our properties are all real humans. We are, we know that these are people who are actually reading our content, but not every person who reads an article comes with an identifier associated with the impression. Right? And so we have this really vast known universe of consumers who are on our properties, but only a very small portion of Those ad impressions, when you put them into a programmatic ecosystem get transacted on because all of the parts of the supply chain that do supply shaping and QPS capping and all of those things that we talk about, when we talk about how supply gets into demand channels, they're all relying on signal for whether an impression is likely to transact as they should, because you can't listen to the entirety of the Internet. But the signal that we are keying off of in a lot of those instances as a programmatic ecosystem is, is there an actual identifier here to allow an impression into auction? And what we have with Decipher is a signal that actually allows you to not just look at the impressions that have a cookie or an identifier against them, but the entirety of the supply that we have available of those known humans who are reading our articles. So from a publishing perspective, the universe just gets so much bigger in terms of what you can offer to buyers from the scale of supply that you actually have. And on the buy side, like I was saying earlier, there's really two things that are happening for buyers. You're using these historic signals to try to predict the future instead of looking at a more real time signal. And you're also getting throttled by all of these different players in terms of the scale of the audience that you can actually reach. And so when you bring those two things together, when you expand the universe of supply that is available and addressable and you make that signal available to buyers to activate against, a marketer can achieve real scale of an audience that they are looking to reach who is actually interested in taking action for the product that they want to offer to them right now. And we can do that at scale. And that's really the problem that this solves. It's a real time signal that allows you to understand the entirety of the sort of humans that are on our properties.
- [34:17]
Anthony Vargas
And then, Lindsey, when we think about how like that's these, this like contextual signal manifests itself in the supply chain, what's kind of the difference between like how that shows up versus how like, you know, say like an identifier would show up?
- [34:29]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So the first thing just to make sure is really, really clear is that again, traditional contextual really looks to help you match the words that are on the page with words that you want to be associated with your specific campaign. Right. So that's like looking for the word cruise when you're trying to sell a cruise brand in the travel category. Right. We don't really look at the words on the page when we're doing the matching for our advertisers against the content that we're running against. We're really looking for what does the content tell us about the mindset of the consumer and then how do we then translate that into matching that audience to the right advertiser? When you look at the way that that shows up, primarily right now we're doing that packaging and providing that to our buyers. And it really, when we deliver that on an IO, it's running through our ad server. When we're delivering that programmatically, it's running through a deal ID because we're able to combine the supply that actually adds up to that audience into that deal ID unit and make that available for our buyers to purchase. So we have values against the taxonomy that we have built out in the bid stream. But the easiest and most turnkey way for us to make that available is to use the deep understanding of the consumers that we have through our research and data science teams and to prepackage that for our buyers to purchase.
- [36:10]
Anthony Vargas
How do you see, like Decipher helping Dot dash Meredith avoid some of the monetization challenges that publishers deal with? Like, you know, like being demonetized by brand safety or needing to rely on third party tech to parse the tone and intent of content. Is it fundamentally more freeing as a publisher to be less beholden to third party ad tech products like those?
- [36:29]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, I think that I wouldn't say that we're fully liberated of our relationships or of our need and how we work with our third party adtech partners. I think that there are lots of ways that buyers want to buy media and there are lots of great things that our partners on both the DSP and SSP and sort of data layers provide in that exchange. What I do think is important about the way that Decipher operates for our partners is that when you are buying media through any of those ad tech platforms, and again, like I kind of come back to having been a person that kind of built some of these problems and for me it's personally kind of freeing to now be like solving them. On the other side of things, from the publishing perspective, the scale of those platforms is limited because you just cannot process all of the impressions that are on the open Internet at any point in time. Right. Like the scale problem is tremendous within adtech and so rightfully so. All of those players on the supply and the demand side have found ways of sort of Limiting the number of impressions that they have to process based off of what they believe is going to transact historically. And the single greatest indicator that something is likely to go into auction and be sold has been the presence of an identifier for a really long time. And so what is exciting again about Decipher is that when you look at this inventory that we have that has a cookie and that doesn't have a cookie, there's a huge audience there that is all real humans coming to our properties to answer these questions that they have. And because it is premium content run by America's largest publisher, it is naturally already brand safe. You know that these are actual humans who are coming to our sites. And so when you look at the two fold problem of is it brand safe and can I find humans when I don't have a cookie or an identifier on them? That's what Decipher really unlocks. And whether that's through, whether we're unlocking it in partnership with some of our SSP and DSP partners, whether that is because it's part of our direct business, any of those things will help us solve that problem where these markets are already constrained when they don't have to be. And that I think is one of the things that's really exciting is looking at the problem now from the other side of the ecosystem. There are so many things that you assume that you can do that you like, even on the DSP side or the SSP side that you just, you can't know until you're actually at the publisher as a part of the engine that is generating all of this amazing content. And so you make so many assumptions within third party ad tech around what certain things mean at different points in time. And with Decipher, we just don't have to deal with any of those challenges. Right. It is kind of fully unlocking that whole audience, regardless of the signal. And again, we have third party adtech partners that we work with who are great partners to us in helping to build Decipher into the ecosystem. But they're still, we still have a long way to go.
- [40:10]
Anthony Vargas
Okay, and then I just had a couple more questions about just like sort of the future direction for Decipher under your leadership. How would you kind of like describe the current state of Decipher's development as a product and what kind of direction do you want to take the product in?
- [40:25]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, great question. So Decipher is about a year and a half old, that is, I think 18 months in toddler speak, which is the language that I speak now as a parent. And so I think we have a lot of we've got so much performance and strength of the testing and the adoption that we've seen with all of our advertising partners. I think there's a couple of areas that we are continuing to grow in. One is we're continuing to invest in the tools and technology that allow us to continue to build these audiences at scale and in partnership with our advertising partners. So continuing to just make sure that every audience that we build, whether it's a standard audience, whether it's a audience we built specifically for one of our marketing partners or whether we're doing that data combination or collaboration with the advertisers first party data, just that we have a lot of sort of robust strength in the technology platform. The second is that we're working again with all of our partners to find ways that we can bring more decipher and decipher segments and audiences and deals into the programmatic ecosystem and finding ways to help our partners who are sitting on the other side of that dsp, make sure that they are buying most effectively on our decipher audiences. And we're continuing to leverage our capabilities of looking deeper into the content itself to continue to understand the consumer experience and the intent behind the page that someone's on. So whether that's unpacking the image, whether that's looking at some of the sound bites associated with an article, just continuing to build out a really rich picture of all of the full consumer experience when they're on one of our articles.
- [42:30]
Anthony Vargas
Last I checked, Decipher doesn't offer any self serve buying tools and advertisers have to work directly with DDM sales team to use it. Is that still the case?
- [42:41]
Allison Schiff
That is still the case today, but that is another item that we're exploring to find the best ways for our advertising partners to access all of the power of Decipher.
- [42:54]
Anthony Vargas
And then something else I was curious to just kind of pick your brain about a little bit. You know, dot dash Meredith has like a generative AI content licensing deal with OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and you know, in some of his recent comments, Joey Levin suggested that beyond just bringing in new revenue, this partnership will also bring more scale and better optimization. To decipher, I was curious like what can you kind of tell us about that? Does that kind of like tie into a little bit of what you were talking about about like, you know, bringing in insights from other like, you know, content types, whether it be imagery or you know, audio clips like, and what other kinds of applications do you see for this kinds of this kind of AI partnership to improve a product like Decipher?
- [43:40]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, it's a great question, Anthony. So I can't go into all of the details and a lot of the specifics of how our partnership with OpenAI works, but I will say that a huge part of what we're working on with that team is finding ways that we can continue to leverage their tools to improve the way that Decipher operates.
- [44:03]
Anthony Vargas
Okay. So I guess we'll have to keep watching to get more details on that. Lindsey, thanks so much for a really fascinating discussion and for, you know, giving us some more insight into the new direction for dot dash. Meredith, really appreciate your time today.
- [44:16]
Allison Schiff
Thank you so much for having me.