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- [00:00]
Alison Schiff
Foreign.
- [00:13]
Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you. Just a quick little intro before we get into it. I'm Alison Schiff. You're listening to Ad Exchanger Talks, and I'm recording this snippet from my apartment in New York City. But the episode you're about to listen to was recorded live in Cannes with my guest, Samir Amin, VP of data driven marketing and Media at reckitt, one of the world's leading CPG companies. Their portfolio includes dozens of brands, everything from Lysol and Mucinex to Clearasil and Dorex. We'll talk about the state of digital media. There's some room for improvement there. Reckitt's wholehearted embrace of digital transformation, and lots of other good stuff. But first, just a quick plug for programmatic IO New York. Taking place on September 28th and 29th at the New York Marriott Marquee, the open web is being reborn, and we'll be there to stuff your mind full of innovations, insights, and practical information. Come mentally hungry podcast listeners. You get 10% off the price of your ticket when you use the promo code POD10. So what you waiting for? See you there.
- [01:31]
All right, well, welcome to this special episode of @Exchanger Talks. For those who are watching, the reason why I and Sam from Wreck it are sweating so profusely is because we're on the back of a yacht during Cannes lion week. Tail end. So we survived, which is nice. What's one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know? We have a brand new setting, but I'm still going to ask my favorite old question.
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Samir Amin
I think the most exciting thing I've ever done is running with the Bulls in Pamplona.
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Alison Schiff
Stop. Amazing.
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Samir Amin
Yeah. It was something I didn't expect to do. But do you mean, like, you were
- [02:11]
Alison Schiff
just walking down the street and all of a sudden you found yourself running with the bulls?
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Samir Amin
No, no.
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Alison Schiff
That would be surprising.
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Samir Amin
No, there's the event that happens every year over the summer. So we got taken there as part of work and, yeah, like, we had a choice of running the first day or second day. And I thought, okay, let me. Let me brazen up the courage to do day one. And it was phenomenal. It was such an exhilarating experience. When you run into the stadium with the Bulls, you kind of know what it feels like to be a professional footballer cheering you. Yeah, exactly.
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Alison Schiff
Do you feel that way as a brand in Cam?
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Samir Amin
I don't Know if everyone's cheering me on. But they do want meetings with you. They do want meetings. Yeah, yeah. I think Cannes is a great place to connect and it's a great place to meet people, but I think it can be super overwhelming and you've got to be super intentional about what you want from it and what the key meetings, the key partners you want to discuss. So yeah, being part of Cannes, it's amazing. It's beautiful. Very fortunate to be here. But you can waste a lot of time if you're not intentional.
- [03:24]
Alison Schiff
What do you want out of it? Why do you come?
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Samir Amin
I come to sort of connect with new potential partners and see what our existing partners are doing. So as an internal team we focus a lot of internal processes, OP models. So it's really good to take a step back and see what else is out there and re sort of challenge our current processes and say, is there a better way? Is there a different way to do the same thing more effectively, quicker, cheaper, etc. And to meet so many partners here is mainly the goal of coming here to highlight the blind spots that we have in our thinking.
- [04:09]
Alison Schiff
Can I somehow summarize what you said with two letters? AI. Is that right or.
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Samir Amin
Yeah, yeah, AI is. It's a key enabler for us. We see opportunities of how we can eliminate some of the grunt work that exists in some of our processes. And AI can be a massive enabler of connecting data sets that have never been connected. The broader, the kind of generate insights that a human would take years and years to figure out. But everything has been AI fear for a long time. So I think it's now over the last couple of years since ChatGPT people have really sort of seen the power of AI for not from an enterprise level, but from a consumer, a day to day everyday person. Like my dad uses ChatGPT and he's amazed by my wife, even my kids. And when it gets to that mainstream, it's part of everyday life now.
- [05:14]
Alison Schiff
And so you were here to be tactical and you were having meetings with potential partners, taking the temperature, which was hot. But what about, I don't know, setting the tone for what the industry needs to be thinking about to make itself better. And I ask because I, and not to be cynical, sometimes feel like I'm having a lot of the same conversations over and over again. The only difference being that I'm wearing linen and I happen to be in the Riviera, which makes me feel like there's not a lot of progress being made. And I know that's the cynical point of view. But what do you think, like, when you're having conversations that aren't just about, well, what's this new thing you're working on and how might I use it? And you zoom out and because there are these perennial problems that seem not to go away. Is that tone being set here or is it just getting repetitive?
- [06:04]
Samir Amin
I think it's a great question. And one of the key things we do also at Cannes is meet up with the WFA members. So it's people in similar positions at me at similar global companies and we have a meeting, we normally do three or four of them a year. And we set the agenda of how we can elevate the industry. What are the main pain points. And the first couple of sessions, I. It was like a therapy session. Everyone was like, having similar frustrations with partners with, like the industry in general. Lack of data, lack of clarity, lack of standards, transparency. Yeah. 100 measurement limitations. But then slowly we started putting initiatives together and prioritizing because once again, there's 100 issues and we're never going to solve 100. But it's just making sure that we were laser focused in what we were all saying consistently to ensure that the standards that we have, because it's our money and our brand team's money that we're investing and we need to make sure that we get a return on that. So regardless of what rupee dollar pound we spend, it's done to drive effectiveness and eliminate waste within that kind of ecosystem. And there's a lot of waste in the ecosystem.
- [07:27]
Alison Schiff
It's rather wasteful. It also. It is your money. It is your money. Does it ever cross your mind, like, oh, my God, I'm financing all of this craziness in Canada. Not personally, but brands together.
- [07:40]
Samir Amin
Yeah. And I think it's one of those things that we owe it to our brands, we owe it to our shareholders that every pound or dollar we invest is behind the things that are going to grow our brands. And that's where we look at in the supply chain to see, okay, where is the fat? Where is the untransparent sort of processes. Yeah. Processes which we need to get more visibility on. And then when we find it, do we need it? And that's what we've done over the last seven or eight years at Wreck it is clean up and get smarter. But the smarter we get, the smarter other people get in the industry get. So we'll always have to kind of play catch up. And there's a lot of good people out there that also get tarnished with some of the bad stuff that happens. So it's finding the partners that really want to help us grow our business. And by us doing well, they'll do well.
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Alison Schiff
Where is the fad that you're finding where, like the gristle, the choke points,
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Samir Amin
it comes in three or four different places. Right. So there's untransparency and costs of what you're paying. Like, there'll be hidden data costs. There'll be hidden fees that you won't know what they're contributing to. There's lack of transparency in the inventory that you're buying. So you always need the right technology to assess, especially in the programmatic space, where there's like thousands and thousands of websites that you could potentially advertise on to make sure that they're brand safe, they're brand suitable. There's gaps in data in terms of the reporting that you get. So there's so many issues that we need to solve and try and standardize. But it comes hard to standardize because what I look for and what my competitors look for or what l' Oreal looks for or what Nike look for or what Coca Cola will be all different. So I do have sympathy and empathy for the media owners where they're trying to keep everyone happy by doing that they're not trying to keep in it. They keep no one happy, basically.
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Alison Schiff
Right. And of course, they're also just trying to make money and survive because, yeah, it's hot out here, but cold out there for publishers and media owners right now. Unless you're a walled garden.
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Samir Amin
Yeah, no, and. And I think that's where I think last can. I came here and I made a. In a conscious effort to speak to a lot of the programmatic partners just to understand because it's. I'm a TV guy. I came from a TV background and digital. I understand the trading mechanisms, but, like how everything works. I wouldn't say I'm the expert. And a lot of the time, I think a lot of the partners ended up trying to contradict each other rather than try and grow the industry. Right. And that just made me even more cynical and skeptical of saying Hutch. Actually, you're basically saying that person doesn't have those match rates, that person doesn't use the data properly. We do. And then you have a meeting with someone else and they say the same thing.
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Alison Schiff
Yeah.
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Samir Amin
And therefore I'm saying, like, you should be looking to grow the whole industry and make it make advertisers feel safe that investing in this area, regardless if it's me or someone else, you're going to have good return investment and good effectiveness of your marketing budgets. And I think that's where the Wall Gardens have done a relatively good job. You kind of know what you're going to get with them.
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Alison Schiff
Sure.
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Samir Amin
Yes.
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Alison Schiff
I mean, they've become also the must buy. Right. Like, no one's going to blink if you include them on your media plan.
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Samir Amin
I'm not to say they. They don't have their own issues as well, but it's. It's like for you, YouTube. I know, it's. It's a channel that I watch. Right. I know there's ads on there. So do I lose any sleep knowing that if my ad's going to appear, the only issue I have is the suitability of the content around it? And then we put the right filters and we put the right systems in place and have the right brand safety and suitability strategy for each of our brands. And that sort of mitigates any of the risks that exist in those platforms. And that's one of the things that I've always said, it's up to the advertiser to do that. I can't delegate that responsibility to the platforms. Their main, as you said, the main motivation is to raise money and raise revenue and profits for their company, which is their right to do so. Our job is to do the same for us. And how do we meet in the middle to ensure that everyone wins is what I look to do.
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Alison Schiff
So, one more before we take a quick break. You talked about focusing on TV back in the day. So you spent 15 years at media agencies. ZenithOpta Media, OMD, some others, mostly doing TV planning and buying, like you said. And then you joined ReKT in 2012. You've been there ever since. What motivated the move from Agency Land to Brandland? And clearly something was working for you because you. You've been there a long time.
- [12:47]
Samir Amin
So. I loved Agency life and I made so many great friends. It was such a fun industry, but a period of time I felt like Peter Pan. I needed to grow up.
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Alison Schiff
Sure. Too many sneaker parties.
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Samir Amin
Yeah, parties. I think I was 36 when I left the Agency Life. I also wanted to accelerate my earnings, which was very hard to do at the agency at that time. I also, even though I loved the culture, I didn't really enjoy my job. I think the agency, when I was there, was consolidating all the negotiations, which I love doing. That was the fun part of working at the agency is like Doing the deals, really driving and extracting value for your clients. But then one person was in charge of all the negotiations for the whole entire group. And then you would just get a deal that you would administer for your client. And it was then from negotiating to just administrating a deal and making sure the value got delivered was not really interesting for me.
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Alison Schiff
That's fine.
- [13:50]
Samir Amin
Yeah, yeah. So when the opportunity came at Wreck it, to be honest, I didn't think I'd stay more than two years. Back then, Reckitt had maybe not a great reputation in the media side. It was a great marketing company, but from a media perspective, it was just buying like volumes of GRPs, quite low quality, and for them it was a numbers game. So when I got there, I saw a wealth of opportunity to really put the right structures and the right focus on media. Because I love media. I know that it can grow brands. I've worked on every single brand you could imagine through my agency life, and I've seen TV spots literally sell products within seconds. When we were Sony Music, you'd see ad for a album that didn't really have a right to exist. And then straight away on itunes, you see the sales of it and therefore you knew that media worked. And when I went to Wreck it, there was a lot of opportunity to put the right infrastructure, the right focus on the right forms of media, not just buying cheap tv.
- [15:01]
Alison Schiff
All right, well, we'll take our quick break and when we're back, we'll talk about the digital transformation at Reckitt, because you've been very involved in that and also a little bit about television wastage, but why there's still value there, so stick with us. All right, we're back. And when you got to wreck it in 2012, what was the state of the digital marketing organization? Because I remember you telling me that when you arrived, it was still a very TV centric culture. And maybe that's why you got hired, because you know a lot about TV.
- [15:48]
Samir Amin
Yeah, it was. It was still spending really bad. 85% of its money, 90% in some markets on TV. And the extent of digital was more about the online video. So back then there was an explosion of impressions available on, on, on digital. And we, we saw that being cheaper than tv. So we basically moved a lot of investment from traditional TV into the digital space to buy a lot more impressions so we could basically create element of profit that could reinvest back into the business. But that strategy was most probably a year later, we found it wasn't mostly the Smartest thing we did. The quality of impressions that we were buying were very, very poor. So even though we were investing in digital, we didn't have the right data, the right technology, the right capabilities, and we wasted a lot of money.
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Alison Schiff
I guess you learned a lot though, right?
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Samir Amin
You have to mess up to 100% and. And what you found is that we were using digital.
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Alison Schiff
There's a guy going by on a boat, and they're just. They have a party. I don't know what. What are we doing here? Recording this podcast. We should be on that boat.
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Samir Amin
We should be on that boat. Absolutely.
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Alison Schiff
But go on.
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Samir Amin
So I. The thing that we did was we tried to treat digital like tv. Right? And we kind of said an eyeball is the eyeball. And then through the learning, you realize that actually what you need to be successful in TV is most probably the opposite in digital. So TV was always about scale. It was about going in with the media owners with volumes of money to negotiate big discounts that could really help us drive weeks on air. The right level of reach and frequency against the right target audiences. On digital, it's about, like, the data and having an element of understanding who your target audiences are, because you could waste a lot of money and, like, back then, and I don't think it's improved that much. Like, Nielsen would say that 50 to 60% of your impressions are off target. And. But we pay 100. So it's like going to McDonald's and like, none of us would say, actually, I'd want a Big Mac. Pay for a Big Mac and then suddenly get a chicken nugget.
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Alison Schiff
Yeah. Or just like a little sliver of burger.
- [18:19]
Samir Amin
Yeah. And. And say, oh, yeah. But I think we've been conditioned to accept that. And that's the thing with digital, which I, I kind of say is that you. It's like when a way to ask you, do you want dessert or cheese? You always have to make a choice versus actually, I want both. So if you want reach, that's fine. We can give you reach, but we can't give you high dwell time. If you want high dwell time, then you have to sacrifice reach. And those two are really necessary for us to resonate with the consumers through our comms. And that's where by, once again, TV does a great job of that. But TV has its own problems because it's declining in many markets. So one of the key things we realized is that we had to try and create a competitive advantage that we created in TV over the years in digital. So around 2018, that's when we started our digital transformation. And it was very humbling because I mostly didn't have all the right technical knowledge or qualifications to be in charge of it. And that's one of the great things I love about reckitt. When they see potential in people, they put you in an environment where they stretch you and really say, okay, what do you need to make it work? And I was super fortunate. I had a boss that really believed in me and gave me the resources. And the team that I managed to hire were phenomenal. Like, I was the dumb one and I'm still the dumb one in the team. They're really, really smart and they really helped us get to where we are today. But it's been a journey of learning, investing in the right technology, the right capabilities, and we've managed to really improve our digital effectiveness across all social, programmatic, connected tv. And the markets, most importantly, have done a fantastic job of embracing the strategy we've, we've sort of deployed through the center.
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Alison Schiff
I mean, I was going to ask how you were able to get buy in because change is hard, but it sounds like it was just there.
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Samir Amin
No, it was, it was hard work. It was there because I think the business knew it needed to pivot. I remember the first like board meeting on the hygiene side of the business. I was there to pitch for money to start the transformation. And I knew if I pitched it to say, who wants to be part of Sam's data driven marketing transformation, none of the SVPs or EVPs would have put their hands up.
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Alison Schiff
You'd have to speak their language.
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Samir Amin
So what I asked them was like, how many of you want to improve your marketing ROIs? And then every hand went up and then, okay, now I know what you want. This is what we need to do to achieve that. And all of them were brilliant. They all wanted it. They, they also, more importantly, made the time. So each month we would basically have a steer code which all the EVPs and the President would, would attend and we'd give them status updates of like and they would say, what are the things we need to unblock? Because a lot of the time they don't have the knowledge to help, but they have the cloud to unblock to make sure the teams work today. Exactly. And it was also a great forum for us to then go to the market to say, this is a perfect opportunity to show the, the presidents and the, the EVPs of what you're doing, which you wouldn't have got access to. So therefore we'd go to the markets to say, hey, would you want to show some of the great work that you're doing to them? So they would have the opportunity to present, like, how they've improved their marketing, rois, what sort of test and learns that they did all the capabilities they built. And it was also a case when a market didn't want to do it and thought they were smarter than the global team, where they'll say, okay, now you can come to the forum and also explain to the presidents and VPs why you think you're smarter than us.
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Alison Schiff
Yeah.
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Samir Amin
And then they would kind of fall back into line and saying, actually, well, no, I think I can make it work. And I think the biggest thing about any form of transformation is the mindset of the people.
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Alison Schiff
Oh, yeah. I mean, if people are dragging their heels for whatever reason, then it just makes everything way harder than it has to be.
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Samir Amin
And that's why with the mindset, you create the right incentives, and that way we move that pace. And that was one of the great things I like about Wreck It. We might have been slow to the transformation party, but once we've identified that this is the route we want to go down, the whole company mobilizes towards achieving that goal. And we. We work with BCG at the start, and they benchmarked us, and our capabilities were, like, nascent. So for a company that prides itself on our performance, it was very humbling to see that we didn't have the capabilities, the technology, the talent, the data to outperform in this space. And then two years later, we asked them to do the same, and we'd move from nascent to above average in two years. And that was one of the key things where everyone's like, oh, we're brilliant. But the average had also moved on.
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Alison Schiff
Right.
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Samir Amin
So it's not like there's a finishing
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Alison Schiff
point and you're just done and you
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Samir Amin
don't have to maintain it 100%. So, as I said, like, the smarter we get, the smarter everyone else gets. So we've really got to push ourselves and think about how do we get smarter and learn better? Because the industry is always moving. Technology will all advance. And we also got to make sure that what are the right bets we want to make to drive a competitive advantage in this area?
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Alison Schiff
What's the breakdown now? TV to digital media, Online video within Wreck It.
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Samir Amin
This is the first time as a collective digital is higher than our TV spend.
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Alison Schiff
And so you mean this year?
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Samir Amin
This year.
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Alison Schiff
Wow. Okay.
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Samir Amin
Yeah. So I'd say most our TV spends roughly about, about 40%. And digital would be 60. But within that would be BVOD and subscription board and CTV and social and tv.
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Alison Schiff
It is declining the newer television. But there is a lot of value you can get from it still, particularly for a CPG company because everyone needs what you had in theory and the price point is quite accessible. It's not as if you have such a long consideration period. So the so called wastage can actually be valuable to you. So is that how you think about television?
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Samir Amin
100%.
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Alison Schiff
How do you measure that?
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Samir Amin
So when I was in the US we worked with Nielsen NCS and you could look at the sales by demographic and what was the key aha moment. I think on Lysol 52% of our sales came from the wastage. So people that we weren't looking to target, which was women 25, 54. And that was the kind of aha moment to say actually do you want. We need to have a, a more varied segmentation of audiences than just going after one demographic, which is what TV strong point is. And that's how we also use digital was not to drive incremental reach to TV because the penetration levels we were having versus the reach we're achieving were fine. So we had 15% penetration. That means 15% of people bought our brands. Our reach was around 60% and therefore in a given month, so therefore we have nearly 45% gap of people that basically are aware of our products but don't buy. So driving that 60 to 70 using the likes of Bigod or Facebook or YouTube was what we were doing before, but it wasn't really working because it was still the same message. So how we use digital was to really segment the audiences to say okay, why is that 15% aware of our
- [26:37]
Alison Schiff
products but not buying it, but not crossing over. Right. And you keep spending against the same thing, you're not going to achieve what you actually want them to achieve. Which took is to buy the thing.
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Samir Amin
Yeah. So we then we realized, okay, like people might not believe that this product or brand is relevant to their life stage or lifestyle. They don't believe that it works, they don't know how to use it. So we have three different segments there that we can then create comms that allow us to talk to them in a different way.
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Alison Schiff
Education.
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Samir Amin
Exactly. And we've seen and that's how we've used digital to really grow, to really leverage the strength of digital. Because that's the power of segmentation. TV is great at one message to multitude of audiences, but the expression of that will appeal to some and won't appeal to others. Through digital, we can really not personalize that scale, but we can look at these millions of people behaving the same way and thinking the same way. These millions of people behave in the same way and, and these million people behave and act in the same way. So realistically, we can create differentiated assets. Still not diluting the core message of the brand because that is still. We don't want to talk like Lysol doesn't want to talk about Taylor Swift tickets. Right. It's all about core disinfection and how we express that to the convenience of it, the safety of it, the efficacy of it based on our target audiences is how we use digital.
- [27:56]
Alison Schiff
And I have a message from Captain Obvious. Okay, so you and I, this is the first time we're meeting, but we spoke before we talked about data quality last year for a story that I wrote about a study that was conducted by compliant and it found that it's a good thing you're sitting down. Advertisers who prioritize data quality and high integrity inventory see 33% lower cost per action and 32% lower CPMs, which is significant. But also like, of course, if you prioritize quality, quality like it will be good for you. And yet there's still such an obsession with scale and volume and it's detrimental. So what is the, what's the blocker there?
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Samir Amin
I think defining quality is, is one of the key things. So for, for me, quality is mainly the audience I want. So does that channel give me the audience? Does it give me the brand safety and suitability protocols that I have in place? There's people that will say my content is quality because of the production value of it. Right. So it's not used user generated content. It's not a little person on a camcorder or their phone. So therefore for me, quality is making sure that the inventory aligns to the standards that you've set yourself.
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Alison Schiff
Yeah.
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Samir Amin
And the standards are going to be different by advertiser. So for us we would say, okay, it needs to be brand safe, it needs to be viewable, it needs to have this type of view. For this type of share of screen, it has to have data standard. So making sure that people don't drop a cookie before consent and it becomes harder and harder to find the quality at scale and still keep the price point the same. So you're still. CPMs might increase by going after that, but what you end up doing, your actual conversion goals will decrease because you're actually buying quality audiences that are, that resonate with your brand, you'll have enough dwell time to relay the message. So therefore, the key actions that you want will reduce by a certain period of time, rather than just buying a bulk load of inventory that meets some will meet your standards, pure, like law of averages, and others won't.
- [30:13]
Alison Schiff
I mean, people know this already from their regular lives. If you buy a dupe handbag or something, or if you buy the original, yes, it's way more expensive, it's probably going to last longer. I mean, it's not a complicated concept, but you pay for quality.
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Samir Amin
Yeah, but I think what, what people assume is that the quality is there by standard. But I'm sure a lot of marketing teams that will think, oh, digital is much better targeting than tv. It's only much better if you have the right quality of data, otherwise you can waste a lot of money and pay for it. And tv, as I said, the wastage kind of comes free. Right. So anyone outside your target audience you don't really pay for, while on digital, you pay for every single impression, even if it is on target. And I think that's what the digital ecosystem has done. It's conditionalized people to expect that everything's perfect, everything's great. But if you don't have the right technology, the verification partners or the partners like compliant, and you'll end up wasting a lot of money. And that's why it's a lot harder to win in digital or to be successful in digital, because the ecosystem is getting super complex and you've got to make those choices.
- [31:34]
Alison Schiff
So penultimate question. You just mentioned standards in passing. I know you sit on the WFA media board and other media leaders from a lot of different big brands there, there's Danone and l'. Oreal and I said Danone because we're in Europe, we say Bannon in the US, Nestle, PepsiCo, others. And the idea is that if the biggest brands in the world can align on the same standards, then they can actually move the market together. So how close are you to actually achieving that? And what does it take to get competitors to agree? Because, I mean, you're not competitive necessarily with PepsiCo, but yeah, I mean, there are definitely competitive brands that are trying to row in the same direction.
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Samir Amin
Absolutely. So there's certain things that obviously I won't share. So my transformation story, I won't share with them and all the things that we do. But when there's agnostic, like industry initiatives like Wreck it, we're A big company, but we, we're not as big as the PNGS or the Unilevers or l'. Oreals. So what we do need to do is make sure that they asking the same questions and have the same standards as us for the industry to move on. So in those forums and it's like chat mouse rules and everyone basically feels free to speak their mind. And it's, it's one of those forums where I do share that. Okay, from a brand safety, this is what we are doing at Reckitts and then the PNG person, unilever person would say similar things to say actually there's alignment there. And I think most of the time every like human nature, we always focus on the areas where we disagree and start with that.
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Alison Schiff
Right. And try to resolve that before realizing you have consensus on something. And that feels good.
- [33:23]
Samir Amin
And I think that's where the good thing with the media board, everyone wants to improve. Everyone's super passionate about media and what it can do for the business. They're super knowledgeable. It's a great bunch of people. And we start off with consensus. And Matt and Tom who run the media board there are brilliant and they will always try and get off with, with the consensus. What are the things we all agree on, what are the things we want to move on? And then we look at prioritization and then we basically will then have to inform agencies that these are the new standards. And it takes a little bit of time because we're all global functions and we all have to then make sure that our markets are aligned to it as well. Then the agencies get the feedback. So does it move as quick as we want? No, but I don't think anything in life does. But are we making progress? And I think we have in, in setting the standards on brand safety, we're looking at sort of areas of retail media, of how we can standardize some of the KPIs and reports and the attribution windows. Because this is an area that a lot of advertisers are putting money into. And it's very hard to assess whether Walmart or Target or Amazon is better at delivering what your goals are because they all specialize and have different strengths in certain areas. And that's why it becomes hard because it's not just us saying yes, you have to do it. There's a lot of work that has to go behind the scenes. There's a lot of capex expenditure that these media owners have to put in to deliver what they want. So yes, I'd like it to go quicker, but the reality is it'd be great if we had a magic wand and just make everything as perfect. But
- [35:02]
Alison Schiff
there's that saying about perfect and good, right? Like you can't let perfect if it get in the way.
- [35:06]
Samir Amin
And that's what for us it's all about progress. And that's why we're here. We had a meeting with a few of the retail media vendors to highlight our concerns. None of them really pushed back, but said look, this is going to take a while, involves investment to change some of the existing processes and we'll have to come back to you in how and when we can do this. But they also said that everyone else, everyone has to play the game. It can't be just them.
- [35:32]
Alison Schiff
Oh yeah. Otherwise it doesn't do what you need it to do.
- [35:35]
Samir Amin
Exactly.
- [35:37]
Alison Schiff
So last question and it's a different topic but I know you have an opinion on it and I think it's an important question to ask as everyone all up and down the quasi is talking about AI and then you have agency leaders in the air conditioned Palais almost having their own separate can. So you started as a media planner, like in the trenches, so, so you know instinctively when an AI output feels off. But now a lot of the grunt work that like built those instincts is being automated and it just makes me wonder about the next generation of people who never spent time in the trenches where they're going to get their experience. And I, I wonder the same, not just for the advertising industry, but for writers too. I mean, I cut my teeth writing articles about local municipality meetings in suburban New Jersey. It taught me how to talk to people, it taught me how to construct sentences and be clear. And sure, I could just dump my notes into Claude and it would write something and maybe I could take that and mold it into a piece that's serviceable. But I only know how to do that because I did the grunt work.
- [36:54]
Samir Amin
And I think it's a worry, I think from this industry, but also the next set of graduates. I have this conversation with a lot of my friends and they're saying like, is it worth my child going to university? And I don't have the answer. I have an opinion. I think there's elements of good that AI can do and as I said, it eliminates a lot of the grunt work. Like our AI transformation at Wreck, it has alleviated a lot of the grunt work that people didn't like doing. It speeded up processes, it connected data that had never been connected before. It created insights.
- [37:35]
Alison Schiff
There's definitely different types of grant.
- [37:38]
Samir Amin
Yeah, exactly. I think where we are most probably struggling is identifying the jobs that we should keep for humans to learn to get better. And basically these are for AI and the entry level jobs. I think, like we have SVP's in our organization that were grads and part of the grad scheme at Racket. And we pride ourselves in having a industry best in class grad scheme that gives people exposure across sales, across marketing, across media, across trade to have a really rounded knowledge before they actually go into the commercial function. And I think we will still keep that going because as I said, we're proud of it and it can be the next leaders, but it's finding the tasks that are not going to waste their time, but they're going to learn from. And that's where we've got to be disciplined to say these tasks, even though AI can do it, we're not going to let it do it. We're going to focus on the big ticket items where we basically know it can add disproportionate value. But these tasks we're going to have to leave for these people because they learn and they'll grow and they'll understand that, that this is a mistake in a report. The tacit knowledge required to, as they say, the human in the loop. You're gonna need to be useful and understand what you're gonna use and what you're not gonna use based on the output of the AI.
- [39:13]
Alison Schiff
I really like that answer. I haven't heard anyone say that, that there are certain tasks that could be automated, but they should be sacrosanct because that's how you teach the next generation of people. All right, well, my brain is done. I don't know about you, so we could talk about more, but I think we're, I think we're done.