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The Science (And Art) Of Scaling Native Ads
00:46:07
Native advertising has been around for a long time. But creating a native ad unit online is way more complicated than a standard programmatic placement, because multiple teams and systems have to compose it on the fly, says Priti Ohri, CEO and...
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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. I'm Alison Schiff and thanks for listening to Ad Exchanger Talks. We love tickling your ears with ad tech Intel. My guest this week is Preeti Ori, CEO and co founder of Advertible, an ad tech startup that describes itself as a version of SaaS, as in NAS native as a service. We'll talk about what that means, exactly what needs to be fixed about native advertising to make it more scalable, why AI is central to the future of native advertising, and the importance of culture, inclusiveness and eq. Culture and community building are just as important as building product. But before we get started, please set yourself a reminder to register, if you haven't already, for programmatic IO taking place on September 29th and 30th in New York City. We've got an extra special discount for our podcast listeners. 25% off your ticket when you use the code PODCRUSH, all one word and all in caps. We have a ton of great sessions on our agenda, including a spicy panel diving into the remedies phase of the Google Ad Tech trial in Virginia, a fireside chat with Alvaro Bedoya, who's suing the Trump administration for his illegal firing from the ftc, execs from Disney, Netflix, and the Chief Investment Officer of Digitas exploring the future of ctv. Plus a lot more. So grab your ticket, they're selling fast and we'll see you there. Prehi, welcome to the podcast.
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A
Thank you for having me. So excited to be here.
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B
Fun fact. Lay it on me. What is one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know?
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A
So I've been in media for a long time. Media, advertising, marketing, ad tech, whatever you want to call it. And one of my early jobs was at Viacom, more notably MTV Networks.
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B
Yes.
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A
And I handed out petty cash until there was a robbery and then I hightailed it out of there and went to ad sales. So, yeah, I have had experience giving out wads of money to production accountants to make sure that they can pay off whoever they need to in order to get their productions done. So that was one of my first endeavors into. Into media.
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B
I mean, I want to make this into a true crime podcast almost. Did they find out who did it?
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A
Maybe it was an inside job? No, let's just say it's good that I got out of there. It was not me, right?
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B
No, no. Was accusing you of nothing. Yes. So I. I want to talk More about your background. But first, you just came back recently from a month in Italy, right? I mean, it's been a very packed year for you, which we are going to get into. But after Cannes, you and I saw each other in Cannes. You went to Italy to kind of decompress. And I mean, if it were my story, if I had gone to Italy for a month, it would have involved the consumption of a lot of pasta. But what, what was your month like in Italy? Where were you?
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A
Yeah, so I was in Montalcino. It is a small town in Tuscany, right at the top of a hill. So imagine an old fortified village. It has a church, it has a bell tower and there's a fort and a hospital. It was perfect. I spent a month basically sleeping in because no one's awake in America yet. So I slept in. I ate a lot of pasta. Steak is excellent there as well. And if you don't, if you haven't tried it, Brunello di Montalcino is one of the best wines that Italy produces. So I drank a lot of really good wine. I did, I did work as well. Interestingly enough, as you can imagine, my Internet was not great. And so I would drive to Siena, which was the next largest town. It was about an hour away. I found a co working space and I would take calls from there. And in true Italian fashion, I got a 10 page contract that I had to sign. But they only accepted cash for the payment. So one thing that was to note, they don't have a POS system to pay for the actual space itself.
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B
So your own petty cash, I guess.
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A
Yeah, basically I had to find an ATM. It took me 40 minutes to walk through the town and find an actual bank that I could get my.
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B
That is wild. I can't remember the last time I handled cash actually.
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A
Yeah, different problems. It was great. Really uses a different side of your brain.
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B
So I want to talk about all the different ways in which you've used your brain over the course of a long career that is still continuing. It's been like I think more than 20 years, right, since the MTV ad sales job. That was the early 2000s. You spent time managing accounts for Intent Media. You did market development at LeafGroup for a bit when it was still Demand Media. It's like nearly five years at Data Zoo before the Roku acquisition, you were a VP at Owner iq, head of Programmatic Product at Inmar Intelligence VP and Global Head of Product Strategy at Emoto when it was still kicking under Ericsson. And then you co founded Advertible a couple of years ago. I want to put a pin in Advertible just for a moment because we are going to get in the weeds. But first, that is a really like wide and deep purview of the ad tech industry. How did those experiences shape you and your vision and start you on the path to entrepreneurship and also just shape you as a person?
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A
Totally. And yeah, I mean all of those experiences sort of tie together advertising, marketing, media in between. I also did some work on the brand side in luxury goods space at Coach and lvmh and they gave a different perspective as well. And I think, I think the easiest way to describe it is that, you know, we always talk about career paths and how the modern day career path is not linear. And I think for me it was about following breadcrumbs or nudges or indications as to what was motivating me or driving me and where I was finding gaps and then using that to take me to the next place. And so I think the most interesting way to put it is I started in ad sales and I very quickly was like, this is not for me. I'm going to go to business school and save the world in some way. Instead, I ended up with a lot of handbags and realized that in that space my two biggest questions were a, why isn't there A, software doing my job and B, why am I making millions of dollars of investments without real time data? And so I was getting this nudge of data exists. We're now in the, you know, I think it was like 2009, 2010 and it was a time where there was a proliferation of digital data. And my, my thought was, okay, I, I can't make decisions without it. I'm going to go somewhere where I can find it. And that's how I ended up in, in ad tech in the first place. And so first at Intent, I did client services, got to know sort of the other side of it, who the consumer is, what they're interested in and how technology is making their life easier. But also what are the challenges of building a small company from the ground up. I went then to Demand Media and there it was really helping the sales teams within more of an ad network to understand, okay, so what do brands and advertisers want in terms of the actual what matters from a monetization perspective for a publisher? And then how do we make it unique and interesting for advertisers? And when we started selling programmatically, that unlocked something in my brain that went ding, ding, ding, ding. Ding. You need to go do this. And that is how I ended up at Data Zoo. And at Data Zoo, you know, a lot of folks, you probably recognize this as well, is that you have one company in your career that kind of shapes who you are and kind of puts you on a trajectory towards more of what you're going to become. And for me, that was Data Zoo. It really helped me to understand the early days of ad tech and be part of that DNA that was building that foundation. And so, you know, between 2014 and 2019, let's say, like that was like the time where ad tech and Programmatic specifically was becoming a real, a real thing, a tangible selling point. It was, you know, when we were all submitting for the Forrester Waves and you know, like impressing, impressing Joanna and all of those things. It was the, it was a fun time where, you know, we're educating the industry on identity, putting together what a graph is and explaining how graphs work and what's the difference between first party, second party, third party data and so.
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B
And zero party data. That's a new one too. Yeah, yeah.
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So it was really that crucial time that was super exciting to be part of and then taking that interest in data and moving into, okay, so how can advertisers use it better? So moving into a world where data was the focus at owner IQ and how brands and retailers were sharing that, which then turned into retail media. And so it's just kind of like, yeah, following the evolution of this thing and listening to what was motivating me and kind of finding my way along that path using that. And you know, at Ericsson we had, we had telco data and so that was like, you know, another form of data to help validate the, the buy side. But then how do you build a unique sell side? So Emoto was interesting in that we had both buy and sell technologies, which is where we developed a native offering specifically for that exchange that we had as part of our portfolio. And that then unlocked the, hey, native is an untapped market. It is something that not a lot of exchanges and SSPs have invested in. It could be interesting if we could develop something that is extensible and that is an out of the box solution for anyone to use.
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B
So Advertible. You founded it, Co founded it in 2023. I'm going to read what it says on the tin and then we'll talk about what you do. Like in plain English. So Advertible redefines ad rendering by giving SSPs unprecedented visualization, visibility and control over how their creative actually appears post bid. And it's native as a service. And that pretty much does make sense to me because I've been at Ad exchanger for over 11 years, so my brain is effectively broken. But let's pretend we're trying to explain what that means to a regular person or maybe someone on the brand side or the pub side that's not as technical. How would you do it?
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A
Yeah. So need of advertising by definition is an ad unit that looks and feels like the publisher that it's on or the content that it's surrounded by. So just think aesthetically, it fits right in and it is an ad unit that typically has been higher engagement, it blends into the background so it's not intrusive, it's not interfering with a consumer's experience with the page. And so it definitely will have a better impact for the brand on the consumer that's reading the content. Now, the native as a service, I don't think I'm going to explain to a regular person, but it's essentially the ability for a platform, in this case the supply side platform, the ssp, to be able to deliver a whole new product service without having to invest in an engineering team to build it, which would take 12 to 18 months to build a new product in ad tech.
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B
I don't mean to be negative, but what's wrong with native advertising from your perspective, that needs fixing not just from a creative point of view, but also in terms of the ad tech, in terms of how SSPs handle native bid requests, the challenges around bid request processing, latency, bid response, timing, scalability, all of that stuff.
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A
So the core fundamental problem, even before we get into all of that, which is in my mind the execution of it, just the building of the infrastructure itself is challenging because unlike a standard format like a banner or video or whatever, that's using a singular can use a singular type of infrastructure. Native actually combines front end, back end, app, AI designers. So you now have five, let's say five teams that you have to invest in just to make this one thing work. And in order for it to work, there are different variables associated with the actual ad unit itself. So you have this container that sits on a website, that container couldn't be a standard IAB size, it can be a custom size, so determined by the publisher, it can flex between sizes. So that's one variable. You have the assets that make up a native ad. So a native ad is essentially not pre built. So in Banner, Creative, the agency or the brand or Whoever will come up with what that creative asset should look like fully baked. In native, the flow is a bit different in that the same people will determine pieces. So there's a headline, a logo, an image, a caption, anywhere from two to, let's say, 13 different assets that could live in one AD unit. Those assets are hosted by the demand side, and when a bid comes through for the demand side to bid on, they can decide how many assets they're going to send through. And the rendering actually happens on the supply side. So no one's sending through anything fully baked. It's now on the SSP to say, okay, I got it. I'm going to catch these assets and I'm going to make them make sense. Regardless of how many variables I just received, and regardless of what size that container is, I have to put all of these things together and I have to make them land properly on the page. Now, because you have, let's say, five different teams working on making this one unit work. One team does one change, doesn't inform the others, and there's no auto correction. The ad unit breaks. So all of the effort that's put in from anyone actually goes, you know, to waste because the actual ad doesn't render, after all. And so there are broken templates. There are. There's latency, as you're mentioning, because now those assets have to be delivered to the SSP. Not all SSPs have the capability to render, so they might pass it to another SSP and that SSP will deliver it. So there's a lot of, like, lag that's happening in this process, primarily because it is complicated and there are a ton of different variables involved.
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B
I mean, it seems like ad tech plus, right? I mean, ad tech is already complicated. There are so many hops. And native creates a set of unique challenges that are even more complex than just regular programmatic placement.
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A
Yeah, and on top of that, the original promise is that the ad will look and feel like a publisher and blend in most SSPs. That that's another variable to add on that is very, very challenging. There are thousands of publishers out there and. And so the ability to do all of this in real time becomes an exponential problem versus a one plus one kind of a thing.
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B
Native, to me, has always been really interesting because it feels like you could either do it really, really well. I got a dog barking who agrees with me.
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A
Clearly he's very excited about native.
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B
But native is either done really well or it's done really poor. It doesn't feel like there's an in between. And if you do it really well and it's thoughtfully done, it can be super valuable. But if it's not well done, it immediately either feels forced or it appears broken. Or you can alienate an audience and damage trust because it's just not labeled properly, for example. So how do you strike a balance there, you know, and make things not just look good, but also, you know, you're appealing to an audience that maybe doesn't even like advertising at all.
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A
Yeah. And if you go back to your thought on it's done really well. I worked at Demand Media when our core offering was really around delivering native ads, essentially where there was involvement between a brand and a creator and the content itself was part of the ad. And so that in concept is great, but it's not scalable. So those really great versions are few and far between and are very, very difficult to scale. And so what we found, the gaps that we discovered and the way to make it a great experience is you need flexible technology that can render with the look and feel that can solve for all of these problems. Right. So the tech that we developed has essentially a sizeless container. So our ad unit will fit any size ad slot that's out there. There are no restrictions whether it's standard IAB size or it's custom or whatever. So the sizeless nature means that it'll flex and fill anytime. It has asset prioritization. So regardless of whether you give us, you know, just an image and a headline, or if you give us everything down to star ratings and whether you're eco friendly, all of that needs to render somehow into a logical, into a logical space. Then you have the ability to render across web and app. So we have that built right in. And then we use AI that helps to make sure that we are mapped to every single publisher that's out there. And we're matching the look and feel so that the style does take on the text, the colors, the fonts, anything additional. Plus we can make it look and feel like a brand or a retailer or a social network if anyone wants to do some sort of audience extension across the web. So our, the actual creative capabilities are. They're infinite in terms of possibilities. But because of the way it's built built, the variables scale with the technology.
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B
What are the CPMs for this kind of advertising?
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A
So typically what we've seen is that CPMs for native are 20 to 50% higher than Banner. And what we typically do is we'll take an inbound banner request and we will transform it into a multi format. So it gives optionality to the demand partners on whether or not they want to invest in native. They can bid back with native assets. They want to do banner, they can keep bidding for banners. And so what we've seen is that from the banner baseline, we've seen an increase of 20 to 50%.
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B
So one more question before. Oh, go on.
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A
That's for native image specifically. We can also do native video, outstream and CTV as well. So those other formats would absolutely render a much higher cpm.
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B
I'm glad you broke in and brought up video because I want to talk about CTV and streaming in the second half. One more quick question before we take a quick break. How easy is it for an SSP to start working with you guys? I mean, is it just a matter of plug and play? Like how much integration work does it need?
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A
Yeah, so it is plug and play technology. We have basically 150 lines of code that we give to the tech teams. And we have seen partners integrate in as few as three days and we've seen other partners take as long as three months. So I would say on average it's about two sprint cycle for any engineering organization. It's pretty lightweight. And that in itself is for the module. We have two parts to our technology. One part is the actual module that goes directly into the exchange. We have that coded in five different languages, which kind of covers most exchanges that are out there. And then on the other side is our rendering technology, which houses all of our sizeless rendering, the AI for publisher matching, et cetera. So all of the actual rendering happens after the auction closes. We get called to do the rendering. So we're outside of the auction. There's no latency created through our interaction and we simply render on behalf of the ssp.
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B
And it sounds like an SSP can integrate basically as quickly as it wants to. So if it makes this a priority, then it'll do it faster. And if it falls down the list of priorities, then it'll take the three months or however long.
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A
Yeah, exactly.
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B
All right, cool. So we're just going to take a super quick break and when we're back, we're going to keep talking about native. That's what this episode's about. So stick with us.
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A
Thanks.
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B
All right, we're back. And before we get into the weeds on native ads again, I wanted to spend a moment or two talking about culture and support and like community building, which is just as important as building technology and products. So I'll just toot your horn A little bit, so you don't have to. You founded Desi Us, which is a community for South Asians and ad tech. Desia. Oh, of course. Great. I love that I mispronounced that.
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A
They see us.
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B
Oh, they see us. Excellent. Okay, that is super clever. Did you come up with that?
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A
No, but it.
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B
Love it.
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A
It was creatively come up with at about 3:30 in the morning at the gutter bar in Cannes.
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B
Oh, right.
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A
Find somebody else. Yeah.
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B
The one positive thing to come out of the gutter bar.
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A
I guess so.
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B
Desi, which is spelled D E S I U S a community for South Asians in ad tech and helps create opportunities for people in the industry. You're very passionate about supporting women in tech because the disparity there is still quite real. And you were just honored at our event in June, Top women in media and ad tech. Uh, it's an award program that we host Ad Exchanger and Ad Monsters together. And we recognize and celebrate the women who are making, you know, an impact in the greater digital media and ad tech community. And there are a lot and they deserve to be recognized. And the specific award that you won was in the entrepreneurial achievement category. And that's really what I want to talk about. Entrepreneurship and working hard and building businesses, but without forgetting the human side of things and culture. And I just don't think we talk enough about those things overall. So what advice would you give to CEOs and leadership so that they can foster a positive environment, inclusive environment where everyone can do their thing and thrive and the business can also thrive more because of that culture?
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A
Yeah, I mean personally I, as a small team, we don't have those like daily team like huge team meetings that I used to have at some of the other companies I worked at. And so in, in recognizing that I still needed that connection, I have found different groups that I can be part of that sort of like satisfied those pieces of, of me and different parts of different facets of my personality. So I have a founders group that I'm part of. I have a few different women in ad tech groups. The Women in Programmatic Network, Advanced Women. They've done excellent jobs of bringing to the forefront different challenges for women in tech and solving for different levels within the career they see us is really about what do the challenges look like for a minority. And it primarily was around like business facing folks. Now it's, you know, it's expanded out and so we have different, you know, engineers, product people, etc. So the community is growing. But you know, I think the, the theme that connects all of these is that we're all just human beings at the end of the day, looking for support and connection. And the ability for us as leaders to authentically be ourselves and to live and not try to be someone else will ultimately enable our teams and the people around us to feel comfortable to do the same. And when we are doing that and bringing our special gifts to the world, everyone benefits from it because we do what we do better than anyone else. And when we're allowed to do it with freedom, we'll excel at it. And so I think just having that ability to share authentically gives others the platform to do the same.
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B
Hell yeah. Speaking of entrepreneurship though, I was thinking about the whole hustle porn thing recently, which is so ridiculous. Like, I wake up at 4:30 in the morning, I run 10 miles, I take a cold shower, I swallow a raw egg, and then I'm out there closing deals by 6am like hashtag rise and grind or whatever. And I know that's ob not what you're about. So how do you foster like work life balance at Advertable? Because I do think that gets lost a lot in tech.
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A
So I mean, for me, and it's probably the same for most people if they can take the moment to acknowledge this. You don't grow through experience. You don't grow through just doing a bunch of shit. You grow when you stop to reflect on what you just did. So those moments of spaciousness are equally as important and are equally part of the productivity cycle as the doing elements. And so, yeah, I wake up and as soon as I wake up, I text my co founder and if it's, you know, or he'll text me. And then our first message is always good morning. You know, and there's that humanity and like, hey, it's another day and we're lucky to be here together. Let's acknowledge each other and like, make sure that, you know, we start our day on the right foot. So we always start by just even saying good morning, whether that's at, you know, 7:00am or 8 or whatever it is. And then we jump on. We chat. We have a regular connection. You know, we don't just talk when something needs to be done. We talk whether we want to talk about my mom complaining about the insurance company or if it's, you know, what are we making for breakfast or lunch or we're talking about customers and what we're trying to build and what our strategy is. And so I think that is part of it. So Maintaining connection, communication. There's always transparency between what we're doing. And then I actually try every evening. You know, since I started on this journey, I realized that your, your nervous system is in overdrive most of the time, especially living in places like New York. Whether you are interacting with people or not, you're taking in a bunch of unnecessary energy. And so being able to like remove that from your system and to reset and to, to ground yourself is really important. And so I have started, you know, since I started this journey, I have always been a big journaler, so I write a lot, but also meditating both in the morning when I get up and in the evening before I go to bed. And then I also dance. And so every evening I'll try to go to a dance class. That is a priority. And if there's work that needs to be done, I'll come back and I'll do it afterwards. And my co founder is not one that's like, okay, it's five o', clock, we're not going to talk after this. I mean we. I was checking my microphone with him last night at 10pm and making sure it works. So he's, you know, just making sure that we acknowledge the humanity in what it is that we're doing and being there for each other through whether they. He needs to do something for his family, I need to do something for myself or for my family. We just have to be honest and say, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to dip out for a little bit and I'll be right back.
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B
What kind of dance, by the way?
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A
I do Zumba and I did, I do it at two different places and I actually got our group to do a live performance last year and then this year we did it in a more organized fashion and we had judges which we didn't realize were watching us. And we got a near perfect score for Apeta. Pretty proud of that.
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B
Opposite the hell yeah.
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A
I'm gonna send you the video right after this. Don't worry. Please.
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B
Can I embed it into my write up of this podcast?
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A
You know, I don't know if it's necessary. We'll leave it to everyone's imagination.
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B
My cousin's wife is a Zumba instructor. Part time, actually.
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A
She's a really happy person.
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B
She is actually. So yeah, there's a relation. Well, I hate to segue us back or I don't hate to, but I'm going to segue us back into nerdy ad tech things. We talked about this just for a hot Second before the break, you guys are developing native video and you're really eyeing native CTV as your next thing. So what are the opportunities there? What are the challenges there, like bringing this whole native as a service thing to streaming and like, what kind of progress have you made? And I don't know why I just pronounced it native. That was so weird.
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A
It's natively over pronounced the word. Yeah, so it's, it's actually fully live and working. So it is. Yeah, it is. It is functioning. And so the way that it works for native video is the same as it is for banner. So where the image would go in native image, the video will get placed there. You still have a headline and caption. All of the other elements, they just surround the video for ctv. What will happen is we'll take in an inbound CTV request, we'll transform it into a native video request. We will, if we don't have assets, create the assets, and we'll be using AI to do that. We're still working our way into ctv, but functionally it's working. We're just not doing it yet with any customers. But the real opportunity here is retail media as a vertical or as, as an overall demand source is, is an opportunity that has been untapped in a smart way. So we did, you know, few years ago when I was in, in the retail media space. I know a lot has evolved in the last few years, so I'm not going to say that it hasn't changed. But, you know, audience extension was all audience targeting. Do a banner. But what most people don't realize about retail media and the way that the advertising actually functions is the teams that are advertising. The brands that are advertising on these retailers are what we call shopper marketing teams mostly. So they're teams that have a direct relationship between the brand and that retailer. So Hewlett Packard selling something at Staples or PNG selling something at Target. So there's a specific person responsible for the advertising for that retailer specifically, which means I am Hewlett Packard. I have a printer on sale for one week. This one week, it's going to go from 59.99 to 49.99. And it's only at Staples and it's only for this long. So you can imagine that there is a lot of variability and there's a time element to making sure that these ads deliver without having any hiccups because of the promotion involved with it. Native then presents itself as a really excellent format for these types of ads, especially when you want to take them off the retailer's website and expand them across the open web. And so what's happening here is you have a time element, so you have one week for this promotion. You have a variable in terms of the price on sale, you have a call to action, you want to get it back to the retailer site, you have the image of the actual printer and you want to make sure maybe you're calling out the retailer as well as the brand in the actual ad itself. So there are a lot of different components that make retail media a great candidate for using native. In addition, those same retailers want to have full funnel experiences for their customers. So that brings in higher engagement formats like ctv, like video, like Outstream and then performance. Native can be both performance as well as branding. And so I think Native is interesting because it is that sort of mid funnel that can connect everything. But then bringing in CTV and Outstream and video helps to elevate the overall value of the, of the message that the advertiser wants to have out there.
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B
And then what else is next for native advertising, we're talking about new channels, but are there other breakthroughs, other things you're eyeing like using more AI to make programmatic Native even more personalized, even more context aware?
- [36:37]
A
Yeah, exactly. So I think that we're using AI today and we have AI orchestration in place specifically for matching publishers. But every single one of those components can be clickable and can have some feedback into the overall cycle. So let's say we can start to use feedback from the call to action or from the image or from even the placement of each of these components to help drive higher KPIs. So we can say, all right now the higher awareness delivery unit is going to look like this versus a performance unit that can look like this. So there's more KPI driven optimization that can happen using AI. Additionally, I think that the AI engines themselves, the, you know, the ChatGPTs of the world, the perplexities of the world, the, you know, they themselves are going to start advertising within the content and I think native is going to be a very natural fit in for those types of environments. And I think there's just, there's, there's more that can happen in terms of content and context as you mentioned. So bringing either helping advertisers that don't have the ability to, let's think of long tail that they don't have an agency helping with asset determination and things like that. We can start to use AI to develop what should the headline be, what should A caption be and start to help do some of that work on behalf of advertisers. So I think there's a lot that can happen just using the AI that's going to be an extension of what we're already doing and helping to further reimagine what rendering could be, whether that's for brands, agencies, DSPs, but then primarily on behalf of the SSP partners we're working with.
- [38:30]
B
I have a little bit of a philosophical question, sort of. So I interviewed the new CEO of IO, this guy Douglas Daeger, pretty recently about their pivot to privacy focused products. That's just why we were talking. They own AdBlock and AdBlock plus and they also started the Acceptable Ads program. Um, and I asked him like, as an aside, basically what the quote unquote right type of online advertising is in his view, like what online advertising deserves to exist since they own ad blockers and the Acceptable Ads program is about ad filtration. And he had an interesting answer. Um, he said it right away. It's like Instagram ads, but not creepy. Like Instagram ads are, are native ads. They're visually appealing, they fit into the content around them. People seem to like them. Meta is like this data collection machine, of course, but like, putting that aside, it is kind of the ideal form of advertising because it looks like Instagram and people like Instagram. It would just be nice if it didn't cost people their, their privacy. But like, do you, do you agree, is that like the ultimate form of advertising? And what, I mean, if not, like, what is the right type of advertising online that balances relevance with respect and still gives value to brands and publishers?
- [39:56]
A
I mean, I do agree, I think that obviously because I'm in native, I want to.
- [40:01]
B
Yeah, I know it's a little bit of a layup, but yeah, but I.
- [40:04]
A
Think that in addition, like, the interesting thing here is that there are a lot of companies that advertise on Instagram or Facebook and are not doing anything across the open web because of the heavy lift that it requires and the resources it requires to develop or further their campaigns. Those native assets can be used if, if you're doing native advertising, you can reuse those same components for open web advertising. And I think a lot of folks aren't doing that or haven't done that primarily because of the template issues that I discussed before. But with something that's sizeless and that can adapt what's already handed to the, to the DSPs, we can help to render social ads that exist into open web Types of placements. So I think we can help to make that reality come out of those walled gardens and into the open.
- [41:07]
B
And beyond. Native ads. Like what emerging? I mean, there's a. I guess there is a world that does not involve only native ads. What emerging tech, what trends in ad tech? Like, what are you keeping your eye on? What's interesting to you right now outside of what you focus on every day?
- [41:22]
A
I mean, I think, I hate to say this, but AI is really interesting because mostly because it is a step change in, in the way we are thinking and working and moving. And, you know, advertising aside, it's impacting our lives and the way we think as a society, how we interact with problems, how we start to think about things. Like, you know, you get to a point where, how is this going to impact higher education? Are we going to need all of this? You know, you can talk to a chatbot about your strategy and you can get the best feedback from whatever's out there that can help you think through larger problems, which. Look, I went to business school and you go through two years of learning how to structure your ways of thinking. Now you have tools at your fingertips that can help you do that. So I think more than anything, it's. We have an opportunity to A, utilize it for good and then B, Understand. Sorry, understand a better way to. To do it with controls in place. Because I think the scary part is that it can get out of control and it can take over. And I think we're nascent enough right now where we could put those. Those sort of practices in place where we're aware of what's happening while also allowing it to be part of our natural d. Daily evolution.
- [42:54]
B
No, I agree. My main concern, and I worry about it in myself, is relying too much on an LLM to help with writing. I mean, I have been on deadline and working really fast and I will admit I've been like, finish the sentence for me and then they'll write a terrible sentence. Like, oh, yeah, that's the point I wanted to make. And then I'll rephrase it. I'm using it as tool. There is some utility there. But I'm also well aware of the unconscionable amount of scraping that's going on. And then I don't want my own mind to get, like, scooped out, like to get scraped. Right? Like, I don't want to become too reliant on something.
- [43:35]
A
You're not having it come up with all of the content on its own. You're still feeding it the core idea, the concept, the ultimate story that you want to get across is still coming from you. It's just helping to facilitate structure.
- [43:57]
B
Yes. And I hope that is how it remains and that I remain a relevant human being on this planet. We're pretty much out of time, and so my last question, because we were recording this on a Friday, I wanted to ask you what your plans are this weekend and if you're going to rise and grind. Hashtag rise and grind.
- [44:18]
A
I'm going to hang out with my niece and nephew, maybe take them for some ice cream. And I am going to take my mom to Zumba with me tomorrow morning and maybe do a little bit of cleaning. We need to. It's like spring cleaning at the end of summer, you know, I need to do some purging.
- [44:35]
B
Absolutely. I just moved, and I cannot tell you how much I threw away and yet how much crap I still had to move. But the process of throwing things away and culling what you own, getting it down to what you actually need, what a freeing process. I really. I loved it.
- [44:53]
A
How many boxes of media ad tech marketing flag did you bring with you? I'm not gonna ask.
- [45:01]
B
How many did I bring with me?
- [45:02]
A
How many did you bring with you?
- [45:05]
B
I mean, I didn't just pack, you know, like you pack up your kitchen and you write kitchen on the side. I didn't, like, pack a box of ad tech stuff and write, like, ad tech swag on the box. It was all intermixed. But I had to quantify probably a good, like, two and a half boxes of tote bags and mugs and T shirts and socks.
- [45:23]
A
I found my favorite. My favorite T shirt. And whoever's out there from Mopub. Mopub used to have the best T shirts. And I have three of them. And I've kept them. It has now been over 10 years. They're still the best T shirts.
- [45:42]
B
Well, next time I see you, I'll give you my. Because I have so many tote bags from antique companies in general, I can spare one. I have a Mopub tote bag, so it's yours if you want it. Oh, pick it.
- [45:53]
A
Done.