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- [00:00]
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Foreign.
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Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
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This episode is brought to you by Zadac Z. Zeta's AI platform unifies paid, owned and earned media into one powerful growth engine, optimizing performance in real time and driving measurable outcomes with confidence. Don't Hope for higher ROI. Expect it with Zeta. Learn more at zetaglobal.com ADExchanger.
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Foreign.
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I'm Allison Schiff and you are listening to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast where we talk about data driven stuff and things. My guest this week is Tal Jacobson, the CEO of Paron, a programmatic ad platform that focuses on CTV Digital, out of home and retail media execution. They're investing in AI, including their own agent because of course. But Tal is quick to point out that Pereon has been investing in AI for a long time before the hype train left the station. We'll talk about Pereon's most recent quarter, why DoH is having a moment, the role of AI agents in programmatic Buying and selling Today and in the future, and lots of other good stuff. But first I've got to do a quick plug for our next event, Programmatic AI, taking place May 18th through the 20th in Las Vegas. As the name denotes, we'll be talking about all things AI related, from AI in media planning and agentic optimization to the responsible use of AI and the human advantage. Yay humans. We've already started posting speakers on the event website, including folks from People Inc. Horizon Media, Walton Isaacson, lots of others. Check it out. Podcast listeners get 10% off the price of their ticket when they use the code POD10. See you there folks. Hey Tal, welcome to the podcast.
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A
Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me.
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B
So you know the drill. What's one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know?
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A
Oh, I think not a lot of people know that my first professional job was an animator. I was actually doing animation, so that's I thought I was going to be an animator for Way for Way Terra Line, and somehow I got pulled into working for companies that built software for animation, which was Macromedia that got bought by Adobe and got pulled into this line of business, but that was my original passion, animation.
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B
It's interesting how that path sometimes materializes. My mother had a similar career journey because she was an art student. She studied painting and she was always very creative, but her first job was in business and then she ended up in logistics and then she ended up being the VP of a corporate design company. So they would sell wall covering and paint for these huge buildings in New York City. But it did tap into her creative side a little bit. But she discovered that she had a very good mind for business that she didn't know about when she was sketching away and painting at Brooklyn College in the. In the 70s.
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A
Yeah, well, I think, you know, business and creativity has to go hand in hand. Right. Anything moves so much if you can't be flexible and creative about. Okay, so everything changed. What now? Then you're not going to be able to succeed. I think you have to have this right.
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B
We have a right brain and a left brain, which equals one brain.
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A
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
Okay, so I guess let's talk business. But I want to go back into the past a little bit, to a time before you joined Parion, before it was even Parrion. So it was founded before the millennium, back in 1999. It was an email client, totally different version of this company called Incredimail. And it rebranded to Perryon in 2011. Then there was this eventual pivot into ad Tech in 2016 when you guys covered, sorry, acquired Undertone. And then over time you evolved into what you are today. Big focus on video and CTV and digital out of home. So I know it was before your time that Perry on pivoted from like search arbitrage into programmatic. But what sparked that move away from search? I'd imagine Google was one of the big reasons.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So you're absolutely right. I think, you know, we've been around since 1999, so 27 years now, and it's. It's quite an old company that got pivoted so many times with so many different CEOs. I was, I was at a journey. My journey was a bit different when I joined Pereon. I was one of the people that built a different company called Similar Web, if you know it.
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B
I do, yeah.
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A
But after we built that from scratch and scaled that, the previous CEO of Bayern called me and said, we actually need to pivot this company. Can you go over, let's build that. And we've scaled that into so many different things in my first three, four years in the company and I was running one of the sub companies of Perry. But then three years ago, the board asked me, can I take over and rebuild this again? Which again, for a publicly traded company that's been around forever, pivoting over and over again is quite challenging. For every company is challenging. But the new. I think what we realized when I took over is we have to rethink everything. Like the world is changing. The previous billion was focusing on, on mainly on supply, on inventory. And that was about to change dramatically. We were built as a holding company that, that wasn't sustainable and AI was about to take over. And we knew that three years ago that this is going to be, this is going to be bigger than anything else. So we pivoted away. We basically replaced nine out of 10 executives, we rebranded everything, we consolidated all our subprints, all our technologies. We actually sunset a lot of the previous technologies that we had. So a lot of the old things that Perian did four years ago, three years ago, we no longer have. And now we're focusing on one main thing which is how do we make sure that marketers can actually succeed in this insanely fragmented ecosystem which nobody is connected the dots now with AI, it's actually possible. So that's our new journey. We've built a whole platform around it, we've acquired a few companies with advanced technologies and that's, that's our path.
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B
I sometimes think of fragmentation as ad tech's F word, you know, and you know, you're talking about pivoting and having to pivot multiple times. It is really challenging to have to do that more than once because I'd imagine you get almost like dizzy. You know, you can only pivot so many times before you have to stop and take stock. Otherwise you're just like spinning.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So we're not. You're absolutely right. I think again, in 27 years of this company, the world changed quite a bit. Right. So especially in that you have to realize is what, what I'm trying to figure out, what I'm trying to solve for the world, is that still an issue? Am I solving for the right thing? Am I solving in the right mechanics? And I think, listen, you know, Perion made was extremely successful. Well also four years ago, five years ago. But it will change. Search is still big, but it's not the growing part. You know, next year ethic is going to get to over a trillion dollar and the majority of growth is going to come from the closed garden. So you know, YouTube meta tik tok, Reddit. So the majority of growth is going to come from there, not necessarily from supply, necessarily from supply management, not necessarily from supply management at the open web. And we needed to, to make, we need to make a pivot. It doesn't mean that we constantly need to pivot. It means that when the world is changing, we shouldn't be afraid of change. The company.
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B
You know what I just realized as you were talking, I have a couple of colleagues who I think might have been born after Intermail was founded. Just absolutely crazy. So the world has definitely changed a lot in that time. But I want to fast forward to today and Perion stock, you know, it's been up and down. It's been, it's down from its peaks over the years, even with, you know, bumps from AI, which we're going to talk about later. But your most recent quarter tells a different story. It's a very positive story. There was solid growth overall. CTV was up like almost 60%, 62 million for the year. So how do you make sense of like the market's reaction versus some of the on the ground momentum that you know, you're seeing in your day to day?
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A
Yeah, well, I know you're absolutely right. In Q4, which was the last earning, we saw growth across everything. Our revenue, our contribution, X Tech, which is our profit, our EBITDA, our cash flow. You know, CTV went up almost 60% out of home Group, tremendously. Retail Media Group. There's a lot of the time there's a disconnect between how a stock behaves, which is human emotions and bigger picture of the, of the market and our comp. Our company perform right. We tend to focus on the performance of the company. We were always profitable. We always focus on generating positive EBITDA generating, cash generating and that's what we're always going to focus on. At the same time we realized that our stock is not where it needs to be and we actually use over $118 million of our own cash to buy our own stocks because we realize that it is a bargain in our eyes. But you know, the way the market is behaving now has nothing to do specifically with us. We look at all the companies, even huge companies like Cloud Strike and Microsoft and Amazon, everybody's getting a hit with everything that goes on. I think the market is going to correct itself. But in the meantime, the only thing we can actually control is our company. So we're going to continue to focus on execution.
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B
Well, execution. And there's been some M and A that's directly connected, I think to some of the growth that you're seeing. Green Bids in particular. So just to refresh our listeners in case they, they don't remember some of the details, but you guys bought Green Bids last year for $65 million. It's an AI powered media optimization solution. Not at least to my understanding. I don't mean to lump Everyone together into a bucket. But it feels like cyds or chalice. And you can use it to optimize campaigns inside of walled gardens like YouTube and Meta, and that helps boost efficiency. But how is Green Bids different from those other companies that I mentioned? And how are you guys using that technology to differentiate yourself?
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A
Yeah, so a few things. One, even before we bought Greenbits last May, we had AI infrastructure for performance. So we launched Performance CTB, which is basically an AI agent that goes across all channels. Disney+HBO, NBC runs the campaigns, understand which channel, at which creative, at which time, at which neighborhood is performing better and just reallocate budgets and change created. When we bought Grand Bids, they had a pretty sophisticated AI agent that can run across on trades. DV Meta. And now a few days ago, we launched our AI agent for TikTok. And now we combine everything into one infrastructure. I think the most interesting part, part, and that's what we're trying to solve, is how do we make sense of everything that goes on right now? If I'm a brand, like, I don't know what Nike do United, which basically runs across all channels, you need one infrastructure that can run across all channels, including digital, out of home, by the way, and come back and say, I think this would do better. I think that is is actually a waste of money. But we don't want that to tell us. We want that to make a decision and change it. So one AI agent I think can run across all channels. That's what we're focusing on. I think that's actually the future. When you think about other ethic companies, you know, I think other good companies are out there, you know, Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok, Trade Desk, great companies. Every company is focusing on a specific vertical of inventory. We're kind of different. We're not focusing on specific inventory. We're focusing on the goals of the advertiser. So we're not. If it's open web, that works the best, great. If it's out of home, absolutely great. If it's Netflix, if it's YouTube, if it's Meta, if it's TikTok, if it's Reddit, we don't actually care about which channel. We only care about the performance and the ROI that the appetizer gets. And that's kind of the difference between, you know, us and some other companies that are focusing on specific inventory.
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B
My recollection of Green Beds is that it launched with this big sustainability angle. So like AI bidding that cuts carbon emissions by optimizing ad delivery more Efficiently. And that was the sales pitch. And then it had to pivot a little bit because it's. I don't think the sustainability pitch really resonated with people. I mean, of course, everyone cares about the planet, but it was really more about just wasting less spend and being more efficient with your budget. That whole narrative spending seems to have faded from the conversation lately. The sustainability one. So, I mean, do you still see the green focus, like the green and green bids playing a role in how clients think about tools like this today? Or is that not even the mindset, it's just sort of like a nice byproduct?
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A
Yeah. So we actually. You're absolutely right. Greenbits started from saying, you know what, if you're wasting too much computing power by buying the wrong inventory, you're wasting carbon. The good thing is, if you're wasting carbon, you're also wasting money. So it goes hand in hand. Now, it's true that a lot of their clients started by saying, you know what, we kind of have a budget of $5,000 to reduce karma. But once they saw the performance, they said, okay, though, that's great, but here's another $100,000 to increase performance. Right. So it started from this. It pivoted to that. We kept the Kalbuna mission into order reporting. We think it's still very important. So we didn't. Didn't just removed it. We still count it and we still think it's an important KPI, to be honest. You know, you know the statistics. CMOs every 18 months are getting replaced. No CMO is going to keep their job because they save Kalman, they're going to keep their job. If the CFO can actually show growth in revenues, at the same time, there's a big shift in what AI is going to bring into our future. So big private equities are now looking into the next big dramatic issue that we're all going to have. If imagine every phone in a year from now is going to have AI agents on it, and your TV is going to have agents and everything is going to have agents. Your car has agents. At the end of the day, we're not going to have enough electricity to run everything. So electricity is going to be the bottleneck of everything. And when that comes, agents that are going to optimize for less energy, this carbon are going to be prioritized because nobody's going to have enough energy to run everything. We're going to hit the wall. I think the fact that our algorithms are started from this, that's going to be a big benefit in the future.
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B
What an interesting and strange world. And I guess expected that the rise of AI will create an environmental issue that will be solved by AI
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A
self sufficient. Yeah. I mean the world is changing. Yeah. Yeah.
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B
Well, one more question before we hit our break. You were talking about the future that is actually close ish to the present where we'll just have agents all over the place doing all the things. It's like a little premature for that. But I want to focus on the day to day process of media buying and planning at agencies and brands. That whole hype versus reality question, like how is AI today actually changing that process?
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A
Right. I think there are two layers, right? There is the immediate layer which pretty much everybody's using now, which is how do I take information and structure it in a way that makes sense and anybody can use that. I mean if you, if you go ahead and install cloth on your computer and do cowork and add the marketing layer into it, you can actually tell it, listen, I have $100,000. I want to run a campaign omnichannel. That's my goal. What do you think it's going to, it's going to build you a whole omnichannel planning the reality of it. It has nothing to do with performance or reality because it doesn't get the information you need. It doesn't get CPMs, it doesn't get readability, it doesn't get the attribution that you need. It does not get to connect to your, to your CRM to see if that actually moved the needle for sales or not. So there's a whole layer of basically information which is very accessible to everybody. And I think a lot of people are getting confused thinking that this is the AI revolution, which is not that. That's basically a very basic way of using AI. The layer of execution is the interesting part, which is AI agents. That's what outmax does. Now it sounds futuristic, but it's really not. I mean when you think about it, AI agent has been around for, I don't know, five, six, seven years. Like when you look at Tesla driving itself, that's an AI agent, right? So that's an AI that does physical things or does things. Right. When you fly on a plane, you know, the majority of flight, nobody actually touches the wheel, right? But that's an AI agent. It's been around for what, 15 years. But we're all now surprised by AI agents. With us, Outmax is that AI agent that can fly the media plane. If you Will it runs across all channels. It optimizes for performance. And performance can be anything, right? It can be app install, it can be view completion, it can be go to a website and put something in the card. It can be fill up a form, doesn't matter as long as you can define it and put attribution to it that AI agent can run and optimize for you. And we actually saw up to 90% performance uplift within four weeks. We actually showed that at our last earning the case studies on our website. But the majority of brands are seeing anything between 40 to 90% uplift within a few weeks just by letting an agent run. Now I think it's a good thing for marketers. You know, I've been doing marketing and technology for almost 30 years. Even though I'm very technical and I love to solve technical issues, I actually love the storytelling better. I think marketers are getting into the marketing part because of the storytelling. If agents can actually solve the execution part and they're going to have a lot more time figuring out the magic part, the emotional connection to the brand, the emotional connection. Why would I want to drink Coke vs Pepsi United vs anyone else?
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B
Right?
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A
That's the cool thing about marketing. I think marketers became too technical in the past 10, 15 years. I think now's the chance to reinvent this. Marketers can actually do marketing now. Let AI do the technical parts.
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B
Right? So the pendulum, it swings again. So we're going to take a quick break and when we're back we'll just keep talking about AI. So stick with us.
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A
Foreign.
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C
I'm Sarah Sluice, Editorial director of Ad Exchanger, and I have with me here the chief Growth officer of Zeta, Ed C. Who leads the charge in helping businesses and CMOs achieve measurable, high impact marketing outcomes. Thanks for joining us, Ed.
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D
Sarah, great to see you. Thanks for taking the time with me today.
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C
Yeah. So what's different in, you know, the year, the year 2026, about how brands and agencies are approaching ad tech?
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D
So Sarah, I think it's a really, really interesting time. For years we've all been talking about ad tech and Martech and all these different things. But at the end of the day, as a marketer, what am I responsible for doing? Helping make people make marketing decisions, helping them make buying decisions through a series of touch points. AdTech and MarTech are actually artifacts of our history of how we bought Meteor and how we managed our own touch points. What's finally happened with today's technology is we can release some of Those artifacts and bring ad Tech and MarTech together, I think that's going to be a huge thing. We're seeing more and more people doing that, and it's releasing marketers to have the freedom to really say, how do I reach Sarah? How do I recognize Sarah? How do I reach Sarah? How do I offer something relevant? And how can I see the results of the communications I'm having with Sarah?
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C
So, yeah, let's talk more about that freedom that comes from blurring the lines between ad Tech and MarTech. What else happens when you kind of unify things and blur them, bring them together?
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D
Well, a couple of things happened, Sarah. Instead of saying, how much did this channel produce? We actually started saying, how profitable is Sarah? To us, it changes from measuring a channel to doing what marketers are really responsible for, creating a profitable customer and saying, what did each touch point? What did each offer? What did each thing actually contribute to the profitability of that particular customer and allows the marketer to actually say, I'm managing a supply chain, and I'm managing the most important supply chain to a company, the customer supply chain.
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C
So how does that unified customer view then empower marketing teams and agencies once they know about this profitable customer?
- [26:17]
D
Well, one of the big things here is it lets them do the really unsexy side of marketing, waste management. And that is incredibly important. Making sure that you're able to stop the wasted impression, the extra touch point. We have all probably in the last two weeks, bought something and then got another impression trying to sell you the thing that you just bought. It helps take those things out, things that you would never buy. It allows us as marketers to say, I am being able to recognize a pocket of opportunity with precision. I can reach that pocket of opportunity again with precision. I can be more informed of what relevant items I can bring to that person, and I can leave enough data to actually say what's working, what's not, and see the results. It's incredibly empowering, it's incredibly freeing. And as a marketer, it helps you have a better conversation with your cfo, which some of those conversations haven't always been so positive.
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C
Okay, so less waste, more profit, better meetings with your cfo. Thank you, Ed, for weighing it all down for us.
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D
And it slices bread along the way, too.
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C
Wonderful. Thank you to Ed, and thanks to Zeynek for supporting our podcast.
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D
Thank you, Sarah.
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B
All right, we're back. And, yeah, we were talking about AI before the break, and I'm. I'm going to stick with it. Specifically, we were talking A bit about Outmax, the AI media trading agent. My question is, who's embracing it and who's maybe being a little more cautious? Like, what reaction are you getting from advertisers right now?
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A
I think every advertiser that is focusing on performance is very happy to test it out. I mean, there's no. We always tell advertisers, listen, there's no barrier to test it. Give it some testing budgets, Let it run side by side, see the performance. If it doesn't work, we don't even charge you. But it does work. Very, very impressive. Pretty fast. But when you think about it, you know, especially when in. In stock markets, Algo trading has been around for 20 years. So no human can buy at that scale in real time, making decisions in milliseconds, and the algorithm, so no human can compete with that. So that's how it works.
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B
The point you were making before the break about AI agents, although they weren't exactly called that, being embedded in so many things that we didn't even think about as you were talking, I was thinking about a recent experience. My cousin has a Tesla, and she drove me home in New Jersey. I was visiting New Jersey last month, and it was really a wild experience. I mean, she was sitting in the driver's seat just chatting with me, and she. She didn't drive me home. It drove me home. And it was strangely cautious, actually. Like, it stopped a foot and a half before the stop sign, then it crept forward to the stop sign. It was a busy intersection and it waited forever. Like it waited for the perfect, perfect moment. And while we were sitting there, I was thinking, ah, yes. Like, this is kind of when you need a human in the loop. Because there were maybe like seven or eight opportunities where my cousin's wife could have just made the turn, but we were waiting to see what the car would do. She wanted to show me because it was cool. So, yeah, it just reminded me of how you have these tools, but human intervention can actually make it more efficient sometimes, or you just know what needs to be done. The machine is a machine.
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A
Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. I think that's the reason why we don't let out Max, just run in the wild. There's always a human that keeps monitoring that to make sure that, listen, it's real money going through real pipes in milliseconds. We want to make sure that it makes the right decisions. Now, will this technology evolve to a place where humans don't need to monitor that? Probably. But for now, as long as we're you know, running big budgets. We want to make sure that we have the right decisions, I guess. You know, media budget is. It's not the same like stopping at the stop sign with a car. That's even more dangerous, right?
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B
Yeah, exactly. And this isn't an episode about self driving cars. But what's also interesting apparently is that you can't, you can't just sit there and like read a comic book. You actually have to be paying attention or the car will start to yell at you. Which is good, at least at this point. What do you think about AD cp? That protocol for unifying ad platforms through one interface so you can set up campaigns more easily. That's an initiative right now, basically setting up a campaign, you use an AI chatbot. Do you feel like that's the future of campaign creation in your mind? And actually are you part of adcp? I don't know.
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A
Yeah, we are. We are in active conversation about this. How do we integrate that? Anything we do at PIN one. So the R platform is becoming fully agented. So the way you're going to interact with our platform is fully through a chat. Less buttons to click, more conversations, everything is going that way. And that also reduces the amount of time for training. When you log into a new system, it takes so much time for you to feel comfortable with that. If you have a chat box and just tell it and say, that's my budget, that's my goal. I want people to do this. Here's how we're going to measure that. What do you think? Then you know, the system will come back and say, here's how I would build this. You feel comfortable with that. You would say, you know what? That actually makes sense. Let's go. And then it will go. I think it's a great way to interact between machine and people. I think we're at the verge of an even greater leap between how agents are going to interact with other agents. So a human will give the inputs, but then agents. So the basic, let's say the PayOne agent will interact with the Disney agent and say, that's the audience I'm looking for. Do you have it? Yes. That's how much I'm going to pay for that. But I would need you to use this application to see if the actor works. So agents are going to interact with other agents. We're preparing our entire infrastructure for that, for outmax to interact with other agents. Now. It's a future that I think is going to get here way faster than what we can imagine.
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B
I was at the Market Live event in New York City recently and there was an address by. I'm blanking on his name. He was really good. He's a VC I believe from a blitz scaling and he was talking about B2C to A to A to A to A, you know like so it's a consumer driven initial action and then A to A to A agents operating in the background and it's sort of obfuscated so that the task can be completed. But there's human direction at the beginning and all of that is going to be happening very quickly and become pretty ubiquitous.
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A
Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely getting there.
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B
So I wanted to ask you one other question that's been on my mind a little bit before we move on to digital out of home and retail media, which I know are big folks focuses for Parian. But it's been on my mind because of how easy it is for AI to spin up like inventory packed, lower quality websites. So like back in 2020, which is like a thousand years ago, Perion bought this company called Content Iq to help publishers optimize revenue through monetization tools, data driven content, that sort of thing. And then a few years ago like parts of the business came under scrutiny for like during the MFA crackdown and we wrote about that. But how did you like manage that process? I don't want to call it like fallout, but I'm sure there were some lessons learned from that experience. You ended up shutting down Content iq and how do you vet and maintain like inventory quality today, especially now with the rise of AI like slop all over the place.
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A
Yeah, you know, as I said, I've been the CEO sit for two and a half years. One of the first decision I made was we need to focus on advertiser outcomes, nothing else. And we looked at all our assets and we said what can provide high value and what is part of the future? And you know, CIQ with some other assets didn't meet those criterias so we actually decided to shut them down. So it was as simple as that. We weren't able to pivot into the future while still using ghosts type of things. Now we actually have, you know, as part of the Green B acquisition we actually bought, we actually got an AI algorithm that we call Soda now which is basically reducing the amount of low performing inventory with publishers. So even if we work with a publisher, we would basically buy the high quality inventory. So we're very much focusing on high quality inventory now. That's part of the pivot
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B
is this episode is brought to you by the word pivot. So let's move on and talk about a different type of inventory. So Digital out of Home, which I always find so funny when I see it written out as an acronym like DO. So let's zero in on DO. Um, and Hivestack. It's a programmatic DO platform that you guys acquired at the end of 2023 and it helped drive a lot of revenue last year, like 95 million in revenue. There was a big jump in Q4. But beyond Perrion's results, what's happening more broadly in the digital out of home space that's fueling that growth? Is it better data? Is it stronger measurement? Are advertisers just rediscovering outdoor as like a high impact medium? What's, what's driving it?
- [38:09]
A
Yeah, well, I think, you know, again, I've been doing marketing for 30 years. I only been exposed to digital out of home or out of home ecosystem in the past three to four years. And it's, it's quite fascinating. You know, it's a, it's a medium that's been around for 190 years in the US and only now people are gathering all the information about it. Because with Programmatic, you can now leverage data from companies like MasterCard. We just integrated MasterCard data into our system. We integrated our DCO into our system. So creatives are getting built by themselves based on data. And it's being perceived now as a performance channel, which I think is the first time in out of home history. So we can actually prove to retailers that out of form actually drives reperformance. And we have so many use cases on our website. I mean we've, we've, we've showed that to I think Burger King and Lululemon and Uber and Estee Lauder and so many others that we can drive real performance. Now I think the cool things to understand is everybody's talking about how AI is going to change the world the same way. Like 15 years ago, anybody said nobody's going to continue to buy physical stores, it's all going to be online. Well, statistics shows that in the U.S. 87% of people still buy physical stores, not online. 87. So online is only 13%. Which is, that's, that's quite fascinating. Right. So our digital of home and retail media is a lot of time focusing on how do we drive people back to physical stores. When you think about it, digital of home is the perfect tool to let people know that there are pro, there are promotions around them now.
- [40:28]
B
I read a pretty interesting article just a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal about Gen Z embracing malls for an interesting reason. I mean, well, a few reasons. One being the immediacy of it. Like even overnight delivery is like not fast enough. Like they want the immediacy of being able to walk into a store and walk out with the thing right then. But also there's kind of a novelty to it because a lot of them came of age during COVID and so they didn't get to walk around stores in a normal way. And so there's this weird mall revival that's happening right now with really young people, which is maybe to be expected, even though it seems unexpected on the surface.
- [41:16]
A
Yeah, yeah. You know, I think my prediction for the future, which is kind of a strange prediction which has nothing to do with ethic, is I think social media is going to be flooded with AI content and people are going to realize that it's not the reality and they're going to look for real experiences. And I think that's why things like stranger things with the 80s type of vibe, people going to the mall is compelling. Now people want to go back to feeling real things and not imaginary things. So I think people are going to look for more real experiences. So that's maybe why people are going back to malls, back to physical stories, back to cinema theaters and less spiritual.
- [42:14]
B
I love seeing a movie in a movie theater. If there's a really brief theatrical window or if there's simultaneous distribution, streaming and theater, I always go and see it in the theater. I just like take my money. I just, I want to sit in a seat. I want my feet on the sticky floor and I want the big screen. But yeah, so I also. You're reminding me that I haven't seen the last season of Stranger Things. I need to do that. Well, I want to, I want to take us into retail media, which is also heating up. You guys were up 42% last quarter. Partnerships with Walmart, Albertsons. There's clearly a lot of momentum, even though there's also almost like a meme quality to how many retail media networks there are out there. It's like everything is a retail media network or a media network now to, to cite Eric Suford, but what are some of the struggles that advertisers are facing still, like, as this space evolves and keeps growing? I mean, the promise of a retail media network is closed loop measurement. I don't know how, how real that is yet, but it's definitely the promise. So yeah, what Are some of the challenges still for retail media?
- [43:28]
A
Yeah, well, I think, you know, the fact that you can use first party data on consumer behavior, that was always fake, right? That's why Google with Edwards is, is so important. You have real intent. Somebody wants car, car insurance, he writes car insurance, car insurance. What can go wrong? Right? You go on Amazon, you want a Daiso vacuum cleaner, you write Dyson vacuum cleaner, you get that. Great. We're using that. So we've, we, you know, we connected with the Walmart Connect, Amazon Al Data, MasterCard. We have all of those data sets of, of consumer behavior, consumer intent and we're using that to leverage other channels. Right. So if you want to do out of home with consumer data obviously anonymized, we don't know the people, but we can target audiences, then that became an extremely good and effective way to drive sales back to physical stores. Right. We don't have to own that data, but we should know how to leverage that data. So the combination in between multi channel, you want to make sure that a user, again going back to storytelling, the user, the consumer experience the same story, right? So if I'm on Spotify and I'm running, I want to hear the same thing, the same ad that I can see in out of home while I'm running, right. That's kind of an immersive experience and that will drive, you know, better connection between consumer and the brand. So leveraging that for us, you know, we think that's the most important thing for retail, which we actually called retail media, which is how do we leverage data into those channels?
- [45:34]
B
Right. More of a, of an omnichannel thing. So we're, we're nearing the end and I wanted to ask if you're open to doing a lightning round. So five second answers or less, like for real, like no, no rambling. Because people never take me seriously when I say let's do a lightning round. And they just answer every question like it's a, I don't know, like a legit question. These are just like yes or no's or quick little nuggets. So shall, shall we do it?
- [46:02]
A
Okay, let's, let's run.
- [46:05]
B
Which LLM do you prefer,
- [46:09]
A
Claude?
- [46:12]
B
So the Internet, in three years, will it be more open or even more locked down?
- [46:20]
A
More locked down?
- [46:23]
B
Are you sad about that?
- [46:29]
A
No, I think it's part of evolution. Things are always changing.
- [46:35]
B
There's going to come a point where AI fully drives the bus and agents take care of all the programmatic buying and selling on their own. That As a statement, yes or no, is that the future we're heading toward?
- [46:50]
A
I think it's more nuanced. I think the end of the day, yes, algorithms are going to run everything. But even now, algorithms are not an autonomous thing. You need people around them, you need companies to control them, you need pipes to connect them. So it's more nuanced.
- [47:12]
B
And yeah, that was kind of a ridiculous question for a lightning round. Humans in ad ops by 2030 still kicking or doomed?
- [47:27]
A
Different. Absolutely. I think the manual work is doomed, but I think manual work for every single occupation is doomed. I think people need to figure out how to add value, how to solve problems,
- [47:44]
B
how big of an issue is made for advertising still? Because people don't really talk about it anymore. Is it a solved problem?
- [47:56]
A
I don't actually.
- [47:56]
B
Long pause.
- [47:57]
A
No, I don't actually. I don't actually know. We're not, you know, we're. Since we're focusing on outcomes, we're. We're letting algorithms figure out what will be the best inventory for that specific outcome. And sometimes you do need cheap inventory at a big scale to get that the right outcome. Sometimes you need less inventory. We're not, we're not at the inventory part. We're on optimizing for performance. So algorithm will, will, will decide that if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
- [48:33]
B
Last one. What is your most hated ad tech or marketing buzzword or bit of jargon that you just like, hate when people use AI? AI. So what are they supposed to say instead?
- [48:50]
A
I don't know. We've been doing AI for the past 15 years and nobody said that. We called it machine learning. Why didn't we say machine learning 700 times an hour? Now everything is AI. It's just another phase of technology. I think people are using it too much. Maybe I'm using it too much.
- [49:15]
B
I don't even know how many times we said it in this episode, but I do hear what you're saying. It's. Yeah, it's a little too much. So, last question with a look ahead. We're going to look toward the future. You've talked about Pereon's growth ambitions through 2028, which feels pretty far down the line. It's hard to even make a prediction six months from now because things are changing so rapidly. I can hardly get people on this podcast to give me a prediction for like next week, honestly. But I'm going to ask you to look all the way out to like 2030. So assuming that the Earth has not crashed into the sun by then and we're all still here. What do you think is the single most realistic big change that you see coming in ad buying and measurement that doesn't have to do with AI?
- [50:15]
A
I think the whole, the whole idea behind instead of RTB doing a Gentex, forget about AI for a minute. If it's AI, not AI. I think the fact that you can actually tell someone that's the outcome I want, not the impression I want and not the CPA I want and not anything else. Just outcome driven. That's. That should be the only single truth of everything. Anything else is just noise. I think the world is going to get there. Currently, media buyers are still buying CPMs or CPCs, which they. They work very hard to translate that. But that's going to change.
- [51:02]
B
All right. I think that's a pretty reasonable prediction. Well, thanks. Thanks for the time. Tal and I gotta go and watch Stranger Things. I got things to do. We gotta go.
- [51:24]
C
This episode was brought to you by Zeta. Zeta's AI platform unifies paid, owned and earned media into one powerful growth engine, optimizing performance in real time and driving measurable outcomes with confidence. Don't hope for a higher ROI. Expect it with Zeta. Learn more at sataglobal.com adexchanger.
- [51:49]
A
Sam.