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Teads On The Brain
00:41:30
Now that Teads and Outbrain are one, the vision, explained CEO David Kostman when the deal was first announced, is to become an “end-to-end, full-funnel platform for the open internet.” But what does that mean in plain English?
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- [00:00]
David Kostman
Foreign.
- [00:13]
Alison 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. Foreign this is Alison Schiff. You're listening to Ad Exchanger Talks and you'll never believe what happens next. Also, doctors are stunned by this simple health hack. My guest this week is David Kostman, CEO of Outbrain, soon to be the CEO of Teeds, which will be the name taken by Outbrain and teeds starting in Q2 now that the merger is complete. So what's on tap for the combined company? We'll get into that, plus why David is ready for the industry to move beyond its perception of Outbrain as a purveyor of clickbait. It's a new day. We'll also get into generative AI what Outbrain is doing to avoid MFA and promote quality, the question of publisher data and who owns it, and lots more. Let's talk about it. Hey, David, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:27]
David Kostman
Hey. Hi. Any son. Thanks for having me.
- [01:31]
Alison Schiff
So first off, our favorite question. What is something about you that not a lot of other people already know or that someone couldn't find out just by taking a glance through your LinkedIn or Googling you?
- [01:46]
David Kostman
Okay, so the fun fact is that by the age of 30, I lived in eight countries and 1, 2, 3, 4 continents. So that's a fun fact.
- [02:01]
Alison Schiff
Can you list them? I want to know.
- [02:02]
David Kostman
Sure. So Germany, Belgium, Brazil, Austria, Israel, where I spent most of my years growing up, France, UK and in 94 I moved to the US I'm living in New York.
- [02:19]
Alison Schiff
How many languages do you speak? Hebrew, obviously. English, obviously.
- [02:23]
David Kostman
So I would say good, like pretty proficient. I would say in five, which is English. I'm trying Hebrew, Portuguese, French and German. And as a derivative, I can sort of get around in Spanish and Italian. Okay, let's test you on the Hebrew.
- [02:47]
Alison Schiff
Please do not. Oh, it's totally pathetic. I really should speak it better. But I will blame the. The yeshiva system that doesn't teach it properly. But yeah, by the way, I mean, speaking of, you know, looking at someone's LinkedIn, I was looking at yours before this podcast to do a little preparation and I noticed that you and I started at Outbrain and Ad Exchanger respectively, I think within days of each other. Because you started well as a board member at Outbrain in July 2014 and then you became the co CEO in 2017 and the CEO of Teeds in February. We'll talk more about that later. But I started as an associate Editor at Ad Exchanger in June. It was late June 2014.
- [03:40]
David Kostman
So yeah, quite a journey for both of us for a decade. Very interesting things in our industry.
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Alison Schiff
How different of a company is Outbrain today than it was in 2014 when you got involved and I was just a cub reporter at Ad Exchanger.
- [04:00]
David Kostman
It's very different. And I think the obviously the biggest difference is really the merger with Teens. But you know, we became sort of much more demand advertiser focused over the last few years, which is obviously also helping to support our publishers. We broaden our capabilities more on branding, not just performance, continuing to invest in performance, but also delivering on branding and video. And I think the culmination of that shift is really the combination with Tease, which is something actually, since I joined our brain, tried to make it happen probably three times with teens, which was always like the dream scenario of combination because of the value proposition that we can bring together. And I'm really thrilled and I think it's great for the industry, great for, for our brain and Teeth that we managed to finally make it happen this year.
- [04:58]
Alison Schiff
That's so interesting. I didn't realize you'd courted Teeds for that long.
- [05:03]
David Kostman
Oh yeah. So we've been, we've been at this in different flavors about three times. We were very close to doing it and in the past it didn't happen because of variety of reasons related to governance and control and other type of considerations that were really not related to the industrial logic and how great it could be. Everyone realized that this is, I think, the best combination for the open Internet in terms of the value we can bring to advertisers and to the ecosystem of publishers and CTV and media owners. So the logic was always there. Actually the desire of the two management teams was always there. We became pretty close friends, but it was governance issues. And I think what happened about a year and a half ago, the parent company of Teeds, Teeds was owned by Altice, which is a big telco, and the parent company had to basically liquidate some assets. So they said, okay, at this point we need to sell some assets. They came to us, they actually had a process around the sale of Teeth that was run by an investment bank. And you know, we managed to get to the finish line. I think a lot of it also due to the understanding of everyone of the tremendous amount of joint value that can be created. So I think the Altisse, the owner of Teeth, still has a very big stake in the company and they will hopefully enjoy a share price when that appreciates and the market becomes a little better.
- [06:39]
Alison Schiff
Yeah, the market. Well, I want to talk more about the rationale with the Outbrain and Teeds merger in a second. I'm going to put a pin in it though, because I want to go back again to around 2014, 2015, which was when I started at Ad Exchanger and I was learning about this industry. And my main association back then between Outbrain and Taboola and companies like that is that it was primarily Chumboxy, which is. I'm sure our listeners are familiar with the term, but for anyone who isn't, Chumbox is, you know, like the grid that's full of like thumbnails and caption headlines at the bottom of, often at the bottom of sites and they direct traffic to other sites and pages and it's often like associated with lower quality links and content. And a fun fact from the Wikipedia page, the term derives from the practice in fishing known as chumming, which is using fish meat as a lure to hook fish. But chum is Outbrain's origin. I mean, even though content recommendation would be the kinder term and obviously there's been quite an evolution, but I think it is a difficult moniker to shake. And do you think you've shaken it?
- [08:03]
David Kostman
Okay, I would call it we're driving audiences to create value for publishers. So even in prior years, about half of the clicks we generate are really driving more traffic and audiences to read more relevant articles for them. And we don't get paid for that. I mean, we get the data, but we don't get paid. So I think if we all look at sort of the criticality of publishers thriving, I think that helps them in a tremendous way to continue and engage audiences. And you know, the other part of it, the monetization, I would call performance marketing. And which is really driving real value for advertisers around performance, which is conversions of leads, site visits and others. I do acknowledge the perception that you mentioned. I think over the last few years we've done at Legacy Outbreak, which is now teed a lot to actually move away to significantly improve the quality of advertising. I think one of the big benefits of this combination for publishers is much better monetization, more video and much better quality experiences. So we're very focused on sort of improving the experience. Also on the publisher side, the CTB sides and I think really with the combination with these and moving sort of to the full funnel, I think we moving away from that quite significantly. And we have been for the last, I would say three, four years and really decoupling also from the other competitor in terms of where we focused. If you recall, I think we talked about in the past. I mean, we launched Onyx, which was a video product targeted at brand advertising. So that's something that we've been on a journey and the combination with is really the last step in sort of a totally new journey for us and.
- [10:06]
Alison Schiff
That other competitor, Taboola, to take a brief stroll down memory lane to 2019. It was 2019, right, when there was the proposed merger between Taboola and Outrin. And then, yes, September 2020 it was announced that the deal was off and we, we covered that. And you'll have to forgive me for reading the lead on the story that I wrote about the deal not happening. It's pretty on the nose, but I thought it was funny. You'll never guess which two content recommendation engines have decided not to merge.
- [10:43]
David Kostman
So you see, you created something that engages someone and you know, that probably the headline was attractive enough. I would call it, you know, smart, smart writing.
- [10:56]
Alison Schiff
But, but seriously folks, why exactly did that fall apart and are there like, any regrets?
- [11:05]
David Kostman
So it was a complicated process. I did believe it sort of makes a lot of sense to combine. I mean, it's a very, by the way, very different logic. The combination with Teeds and when I talked about a few minutes ago, and it's really about creating a much broader attractive value proposition here. This potential combination was really about efficiencies and sort of reduction of cost because the two companies honestly overlap in what they do. So it was a smart deal financially. We announced the deal and then sort of COVID happened. The deal dragged out with a very long regulatory review process. Very long. And even in September when it was terminated, we were still in process in the, in the uk. So that was a year after the deal was announced. It was becoming more and more challenging to keep it together. I think there were some attempts to change the terms of the deals that, you know, were not acceptable and we just decided to, to move on and separate and not, not proceed with it. I have no regrets about it when I look back.
- [12:19]
Alison Schiff
Well, fast forward to August of last year and like we've said a bunch of times, more like teasing it. Now we'll get into the meat. There's the merger with Teeds. It was a billion dollar deal. It just closed in February and Altice had bought teeds back in 2017 when Telco still thought they wanted to run advertising businesses. And then most of them, I think, with the exception of T Mobile, just decided to Abandon ship after spending quite a lot of money to assemble these assets. Going back to something you said though, about courting Teeds multiple times. Did you try to buy teeds before 2017, like before Altice came in?
- [13:07]
David Kostman
Well, it's a great question and it does take us back in memory lane. We bid when Teens was sold to Altice. We were the other alternative then, so we offered Teed stock for stock deal. We were still private at the time, so it was very difficult to value that deal for, you know, the Teens team then and Altis offered them a cash deal which was very attractive and basically we got bid out. At the time I wasn't the. The CEO wasn't on the board and I told Jaron, wow, this is an amazing deal. It makes so much sense as a board member. I love it. The terms made sense and then we were pretty close to doing it then. This is. Yeah, 2006. 16. Yeah. And then Altis came in with a cash offer and the T management decided to go with that. So that was this very disappointing then. And as I told you, since then we tried another couple of times and we're very close to it. So.
- [14:12]
Alison Schiff
Well, now you've been able to put a ring on it. So congratulations. And when the deal was first announced over the summer, Ad Exchanger wrote about it, a lot of people wrote about it. And you told us that the goal here is for Outbrain to become, and I'm just going to quote an end to end full funnel platform for the open Internet. And that is jargon, lots of buzzwords. Explain that in English, please.
- [14:42]
David Kostman
What we're looking is to really much better serve brands, whether it's enterprise brands or small medium businesses across the funnel, when I mean to deliver to them both on their branding objectives and on their performance objectives. And there's also a great connection between the two. I think that everyone understands that sort of you need to correlate your spend on branding and your spend on performance and see how each one impacts the other. A There's also a lot of talk in the industry with advertisers around how do you do that, how do you measure that effectiveness? And when CMOs need to justify the budget, that's what they need to do. And I think that's sort of. It's the combination really comes to serve better in a different way and provide a great alternative in terms of scale and reach to the walled gardens. And that's sort of when you look at the sort of notion of a full funnel, when we talk about the omnichannel is the, the ability to really take and identify the user journey across ctv mobile web applications, games and connect those dots. So allowing an advertiser to have one place where they can sort of run a campaign that is omnichannel around all these different platforms and deliver on the different objectives.
- [16:08]
Alison Schiff
And I went on Reddit last night just to see what those folks think about the deal. And Redditors are known for being unfiltered and you know, having unvarnished points of view. And of course it's all anonymous. And there was a thread on Reddit from August when the deal was announced and one person left this comment using the C word again, by which I mean clickbait. And the comment is this seems like more video ads will be inserted into the feed clickbaitier and then they have an exclamation mark. So let's say you had that person, whoever they are or any other naysayer about the TEEDS deal standing in front of you. What would you say to them to convince them that this is not clickbaitier?
- [16:50]
David Kostman
Look specifically on that. So we are being, you know, very careful. I mean the TEEDS advertisers, I mean the premium advertisers. Teeds has more than 50 joint business partnerships with the sort of top premium brands of the world and they look at it as a trusted partner. So it's not that tomorrow we're going to take and put any of the ads in the feed unless we do refresh what the feed means and is. So there's a great opportunity to actually do something worth, say for example from a brand safety and agency. There's a full fee takeover for these brands. That's totally fine from a sort of brand positioning to be there when it's 100% share of voice across the whole screen, no adjacency, no brand safety issues. So we're working on sort of enabling the right supply for the, for the teens advertisers from the end of the article and potentially in the, in the feed. And we're going to be very cautious on how we do that. At the end of the day, every brand that also does branding is looking and has huge performance budgets. Now when you look at the combination of the two companies where T is really the leader in video and branding and has expanded into CTV and Outbrain Legacy. Outbrain is a very, very strong performance oriented company also for brands, enterprise brands, even sort of before the TDS deal we had a tremendous amount, about 40% of our business is different than the one you described in your C description, but is sort of household brands that want to drive performance, credit card visits to a car dealership, subscription to Disney Plus. So we had all these advertisers. Now all the TE's advertisers also have performance needs. And we're going to do it in a very smart way where it's respecting the trust that Teeth has built with them, the premiumness of that brand. And this is also one of the reasons, when we thought about the name algorithm, is the acquirer. I'm the CEO of the combined company, but we decided to sort of proceed with the name Teens, which we think really better reflects sort of the idea of where we're going as a company and sort of where the platform wants to be positioned and what it will do. So I think, I assume that in a year we won't be talking about those C words much.
- [19:30]
Alison Schiff
Are you retiring the Outbrain name completely? Will there be any part of the company still called Outbrain?
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David Kostman
So we will still have what we call the direct response business. That's Outbrain direct response, which is mostly focused. I mean, I'm looking at the segments of bias. So the biggest focus of the company is brands, whether they're enterprise brands or small and medium brands and their agencies. We will have a segment that is dealing with direct response advertisers, which is affiliates and search and other marketers.
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Alison Schiff
And one more question before we take a quick break. You mentioned refreshing the feed. Does the feed, news feed, does it need a refresh in general?
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David Kostman
I do think it does. I do think it does. I think we've been even over the last few years very focused on a better experience, you know, looking at the ad density, the quality of the ads. And there's been a significant shift even now. And also, Alison, I would say the feed looks very different in different geographies. If you look at the feed in certain European geographies, it's very different than what you see here in the US And I think it's part of it is really the type of demand that we were able to deliver into the feed and drive performance, which has been, you know, different mix in in many other countries. I mean, the traditional outband business is about 60% outside the US and it's. It's been a great grade and will continue to be a great canvas to drive performance for all kind of advertisers.
- [21:07]
Alison Schiff
All right, well, that's a good spot to take a quick break and when we're back, we'll talk a little bit More about the deal. We'll talk about publisher data and we'll talk about three little letters mfa. So stick with us. All right, we're back and we're going to stick with the TEEDS deal just for a few more minutes. Where do things stand with the integration and what does that entail? Not just from a technical perspective, although I am interested in that, of course, but also from like a human and culture perspective, because it's a lot of people.
- [22:05]
David Kostman
Yes, it is a lot of people. It's close to 2,000 people. And the one thing we did is that from day one we were very clear about the new organizational structure, so we truly merged the two companies. So it's not run separately and it's a decision we made at the beginning of the process, which was also due to the fact that we're very close with the team's management team. Again, as I said, we were this, trying to do this, so. So we knew what we're getting into and we decided that it would be much better to be very clear from day one about the new structure, the new management and everyone from day one knew who they report to, where they sit in the organization. So we did that. When we announced the deal, the deal had involved some cost reduction in terms of headcount. So we also did that in the first week. So we launched as a unified company a very effective way. I think within the first few days the offices are merging. There is a leader in every region that is the one, one leader that combined the two teams. So I'm very excited about how this has progressed.
- [23:21]
Alison Schiff
When are you going to update your LinkedIn? So it says CEO of Teeds and not co CEO of Outbrain.
- [23:29]
David Kostman
That's not good.
- [23:32]
Alison Schiff
Just asking. Maybe after this recording. One more question about the deal and I don't know how much you can share on this, but how much innovation and investment was there into the TEADS technology over the. I don't know what it was seven or eight years that it was owned by Altice because like we talked about during the first half, like other telcos, Altice didn't end up doing that much on the ad tech front front other than having the ambition for it. So I'm curious about how much they invested in in the tech over those years.
- [24:08]
David Kostman
So actually one of the positive surprises was that the tech is great and this is something when you look from the outside. So we knew the business very well. We knew the amazing relationships that Pets has with agencies and with brands. We never even in the previous attempts went as deep as understanding the technology and what we found was extremely positive and there was investment in the technology. So tease both on the creative side has unique capabilities also leveraging AI to help to help brands take their creatives and make them suitable for every environment whether it's ctv, home screens, mobile and others and really create assets that deliver performance and they do it in a, in a. In a really great way sort of. We call it elevated outcomes and it's just beautiful experiences that drive real outcomes for brands and that's a lot of technology the last couple of years AI. The other thing is that also on the publisher side I think TEEDS has you know build a very strong value proposition. One of the uniqueness of by the way both legacy Outbreak TEEDS is that the supply is exclusive and it allows us to technology to just deliver better value because we control it. It's not like a DSP that is bidding. So we control the supply too. As you know from many of the podcasts I've been listening to in the industry, I mean even the DSPs are not talking about how they connect directly and Curate supply. The SSPs are going directly to advertisers and in our case, I mean both companies have been built ground up to be end to end which delivers much better outcomes, just much better performance outcomes, attention completed views, etc. Whatever your objective is and also does it in a more efficient economic way. And TEETH has been investing in technology where I think they were a little bit late to the game but catching up very nicely which was also sort of a great discovery in the due diligence is on the CTV front. So I think we, we found a very, very strong tech technology base there and the. They have a great development center in, in southern France and now we have three big development centers in southern France, Israel and. And Ljubljana. And when you look you don't see the whole organization but many of their tech people and product people line in the very senior positions in the organization.
- [26:53]
Alison Schiff
What is the. The TEEDS stock ticker gonna be? Do you know what that is?
- [26:58]
David Kostman
Yeah, yeah. Right now it's Outbreak. So they came into the outbreak so it's OB and in Q2 we will be moving both the formal company name and the ticker into TEED as a company and the ticker will be T.
- [27:13]
Alison Schiff
E A D and Outbrain went public in 2021. It's. I mean the stock hasn't performed super well. Why do you think that is? I mean and how would you make your case to like to the Bears.
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David Kostman
And I think the, the whole industry, I mean 2021 as, as we all recall was a crazy year. And I think the whole, if you look at unfortunately, I mean I think the whole eth, you know, public company sector normally trades at much lower multiples than unfortunately software or other sectors. I mean there's reasons that investors have in terms of the predictability of the business, the stability, the sort of how dynamic the changes are. I think with the joint company now, with the new teams, I mean from a financial profile point of view, it really dramatically changes our company. If we, we were doing about $900 million of revenues, we have now about $1.6 billion of ad spend on a combined basis. People in the public market value a lot the profitability. So we're going from about close to $40 million of adjusted EBITDA. The guidance we gave in our last call is a minimum of 180. So I think there was actually already what I would call re rating of the stock. I mean if you look at our stock like a month ago, it was at a very different level. And I think investors started realizing what a transformative deal this is over the last month. I think since sort of the trade desk and since then it's been a pretty steep decline. I mean the last couple of weeks has been quite tough on the public market. So it's a combination of what you see in terms of the world, which we will not get into, but the world is, you know, not a very predictable place these days. And then so how that impacts the macro and then people sort of the macro economy will get impacted. It could impact advertising and I think generally the sector, if you look at the whole everything has been over the last two, three weeks pretty red.
- [29:28]
Alison Schiff
Changing tax a little bit. I wanted to ask you about publisher data. So back in 2021 I had a chat with Jaron Yaron Galai who was co CEO of Outbrain at the time. He's also one of the co founders and we were talking about a bunch of things, but we talked a little bit about third party cookies and I asked if Outbrain uses third party cookies and he said yeah, of course. But unlike most ad tech companies, Outbrain powers the news feed experience for publishers. And that means that when engagement happens, Outbrain considers that to be also its own first party data. And so I asked him whether that data should belong to the publisher and he said I'm not a lawyer, but first party data can belong to two entities. Which I thought was an interesting response. But my question is how do publishers feel about it? Because it feels like they'd want to own that data, but maybe two entities can own the same first party data.
- [30:34]
David Kostman
Yeah. So in this case it is considered first party data, which is one of the big drivers of our predictive algorithms. And it is the publisher owns the data and we own the data and we can use it. And in order to really improve the overall ecosystem of the open Internet, I think publishers are totally fine for us also using it across the Internet. Look at both Teed's Legacy and Outbrain. Most of the algorithms are driven by context and by an interest graph that is very unique and that is really built through the unique data assets and signals that we have by being code on page on these publisher sites, both us and teeth in the middle of the article and we at the end of the article.
- [31:22]
Alison Schiff
Well, let's zoom out a little bit and talk about some of the challenges facing the open Internet, of which there are a few or maybe more than a few. And one issue which I don't think has gone away, although people are talking about it less now, and that's MFA made for advertising sites and content recommendation providers. They drive traffic, but they've also taken some flack for where they drive traffic, in some cases maybe to MFA content. So what are you guys doing to make sure that you aren't serving as maybe even an unwitting distribution vehicle for low quality content?
- [32:04]
David Kostman
Okay, so yeah, that topic has sort of a little bit quieted, but maybe we'll start with fact. So when you look at the traffic that is being driven to what is considered as mfa, both us and our competitor Taboola, we account for, I think less than 10% of it or 15%. The rest is coming from all the big platforms, like 80 plus percent if you look at the Jones Report. I mean, we are a very, very small driver of traffic to what was then considered mfa. What we've done over the last couple of years and we talked about it, it's very consistent with what we've been talking about on this podcast is in terms of the quality. Basically we have some programmatic access to the Aubrey Network, so we blocked all mfa. So you can't get to. There's no. It's MFA free from any programmatic access. And we've been very, very selective with the companies we work with. I think there is, you know, real value in some of them. I mean, I don't think it's one. One size fits all. And I, I think this classification to some extent is problematic. But what we've done is basically eliminated it. So if you don't want to be sort of, you know, on an MFA as an advertiser, you won't be in, in the outbreak, sort of, and obviously in the new teeth. I mean, we are MFA3 for all these brands and we have been again, trimming down a lot of this type of, of publishers we work with.
- [33:42]
Alison Schiff
How do you define mfa? I think there are some industry standard definitions now, but it can get, I guess, a little bit mushy. Or you could define it however you want to, or you can take parts of a definition to create your own. Right. I mean, maybe paid traffic counts as MFA according to one entity, but another entity would be fine with it. So how do you define mfa?
- [34:09]
David Kostman
I agree with you. It's a philosophical question and a tough definition. I mean, you know, if you take one extreme, you could argue that, you know, any authentic great publisher, to some extent, you want to sort of make money from, from advertising. But I think if, if really the sole purpose and is to just get an arbitrage and the quality of the content is certain, I think that's, that's sort of how I look at it.
- [34:40]
Alison Schiff
So I'd love to talk about generative AI for a minute. I saw something about an image optimizer where Outbrain uses AI to create new images for ads like based on campaign performance. And maybe there are other tools. But where does generative AI come into the product roadmap for Outbrain teeds or only teens? I don't know, for you guys, whatever you're going by.
- [35:08]
David Kostman
So first of all, I mean, yes, we've been using it on the, on the creative side and I've been working with the tool. It's actually quite amazing. I mean, it allows an advertisers to very quickly a create a campaign and then continuously test the effectiveness of different images on the performance of the campaign in a way that you could have done before. And it sort of feeds itself in terms of you trying your images, you amend them, you crop, you change some colors. I mean, there's endless variations that you can do and it's all done by those algorithms. And then you test the effectiveness of the campaign. We have about 70% of the legacy Outbrain advertisers have used that tool, which is huge adoption and they've seen a much faster, better workflows and ability to launch campaigns and change them and much better results. We're also looking at sort of, I think I mentioned earlier on the teed's Creative studio side, there's a lot of work with AI also on the creative side. And then we believe that AI will be a very important sort of infrastructure and the LLMs in order to optimize the whole journey of, of a user between the branding and the performance and analyzing the interaction between those two. When you look at sort of the longer term here, we believe we're going to be, and we are the strongest on the open Internet in delivering branding results and the strongest in delivering performance results. The combination which I call brand format, I didn't invent that, but I'm bringing that back from sort of the past. I think the ability to deliver brand formats and combine the two will require a lot of these AI and machine learning models in order to create the sort of optimal journey and connection between your branding campaigns and your performance campaign. So it's a big investment. Sort of. We have also. It's great when you actually combine a company that an opportunity. You need to define new systems, reinvent a lot of things and sort of everything is AI first. Everything that we do right now is AI first. We're looking at every aspect of our business, both from the sort of when you look at the customer journey, the user journey and then every internal process where we can use it. It's been very, very effective for us also in internal processes. So I think it's. We are at the beginning of that.
- [37:43]
Alison Schiff
Sort of revolution, I think a portmanteau in the business world combining two words into one. They often sound, they're like, like fidal and stuff like that, which I hate. I like brand format.
- [37:56]
David Kostman
Oh, thank you, thank you. I'm having a lot of discussions, our marketing team around it. I love it because I think it really reflects really flex, what we want to do as esteets is being able to deliver on branding and performance separately in the best way and then connecting the two, which I think we, we know really drives the best value for advertisers in terms of their outcomes.
- [38:22]
Alison Schiff
Yeah, I mean, brand and performance do need to communicate to be combined. I mean, they're treated separately so often and that's been a perennial issue and they're just part of a continuum.
- [38:38]
David Kostman
Thank you, I appreciate that. It's going to help me internally to drive that adoption of the brandformants.
- [38:47]
Alison Schiff
Well, last question. You presented at the Needham Growth Conference at the end of last year and somehow I got myself on the mailing list where I see some of the investor notes and summaries from Needham. They send them to me in my email and they shared this list of takeaways from the conference and apparently you and a bunch of other CEOs that were speaking at the event, you were asked, I guess it was on stage what your hidden skill is. Something that quote unquote doesn't go on your resume but that has been mission critical to your professional success. And your answer was bringing people together and looking at situations in a holistic 360 degree way. So make that real for me. What's an example of a time when that soft skill helped you solve a real hard problem?
- [39:47]
David Kostman
First of all, thanks for reminding me. So at least I'm going to be consistent. If you'd asked me and didn't remind me, I would not remember exactly what I answered. But it is for me it's about, I think the ability to bring people together and always, always look in any business situation or in any personal situation, what's the win win like how do you create something that is great for everyone? I think it's very important. I mean even in this combination, you know, with teeds, I mean, that we talked about. So it's been a critical factor here. I think the fact that sort of the TEEDS team wanted to combine with us, the fact that sort of we looked at this in an emotional way and how do we create the best outcome for our teams internally and for our customers without sort of looking at sort of just the personal interest of people. I think it's been a, a great, don't know, skill set and something I, I, I advocate and try to adhere by and I think it served me very well and I recommend it to everyone. I mean, always look at it in terms of how do you create a great outcome for everyone or just for yourself?
- [40:55]
Alison Schiff
Well, here's to bringing people together and to brand formance.