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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 Allison Schiff, and you're listening to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast where we pull apart the ad tech ecosystem to see who's really creating value and who's just extracting it. My guest this week is Danny Spears, chief operating officer at Ozone, a publisher alliance built to give digital media companies more leverage in a market dominated by platforms and what Danny refers to as corrosive intermediaries. Zing. We'll get into the erosion of publisher revenue. A growing frustration with platform provided measurement and attribution, AI's massive impact on the publisher industry. Why the future of quality journalism may just depend on a little collaboration and lots of other good stuff. And honestly, some not so good stuff. It ain't easy being a publisher these days. But first, it's time for you to get your ticket to programmatic AI, taking place May 18th through the 20th in Las Vegas. We'll be talking about all things AI related, from AI in media planning and agentic optimization to responsible AI and measurement reinvented. The agenda is already looking quite snazzy with Top folks at JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, AI People Inc. WPP Media, Horizon Media, and much more. So check it out. Podcast listeners get 10% off the price of their ticket when they use the code POD10. See you there. Hey, Danny. Welcome to the podcast.
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A
Hello, Alison. Great to be here. Thank you for the invite.
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B
Pleasure. Yeah. So what's one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know? Maybe a hidden hobby, a career detour, Something from before ad tech? Really? Anything?
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A
Okay, so this has never been shared before. Not many of my friends know this, but when I was. When I, as a youngster, I, My. My mother took me to ballet. And so, you know, a lot of my friends associate me with, you know, playing football and, you know, more physical sports. But, yeah, I've got a past in ballet.
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B
Like a Billy Elliot kind of vibe,
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A
or possibly, yeah, this is pre Billy Elliot even. And who knows what I could have been if I'd pursued that course, but
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B
here I am, here you are in publisher monetization. So I want to talk about what you did before the Ozone project. And we're going to talk about what Ozone is in a minute, for anyone who doesn't know. But we're not going to go so far back. We're going to go somewhere between ballet and. When you were at the Guardian, you were there for nearly two years, 12 years, including a few, the last three as a programmatic director. So you saw a lot of things. You were right there, like in the trenches. But was there anything that you saw when you were at the Guardian around margin pressures or walled garden dominance or monetization challenges, like the existential stuff that made you think or realize, yes, publishers, and I know this firsthand, like, need to rethink how they're showing up in the digital ad market.
- [03:41]
A
The answer is yes to all of those things. And I think maybe kind of the experiences that I had at the Guardian over those years and the things that I learned kind of go a long way to kind of explaining my, my mindset and my perspective on the app market today. And so namely before I, before I was responsible for the Guardian's sell side, I was responsible for the Guardian's buy side. So we had a publisher training desk that was fairly well scaled. Our focus, our specialism was on direct response advertising. So we were working with kind of outcome focused advertisers optimizing to CPA goals. So, you know, I like to think it was an art form back then. And I suppose that meant that I had the mindset of a buyer, albeit within a publisher organization. And that created, I realized, incredible opportunity to join up the transaction from both ends, both sides of the ecosystem. So naturally, I think as I realized that I was in quite a unique position and I should be clear, I had a team around me and some fantastic people kind of beside me as well. I became more and more fascinated with the nature of the supply chain and particularly how value was being extracted without either of the primary actors, the publisher or the advertiser, being kind of made aware of it. So I suppose that got me to kind of this obsession around supply chain forensics, I guess. And, you know, that that was a grounding that kind of remains with me today in terms of kind of what I'm, what I look for. I think perhaps naively back in the day I had this view that, you know, the programmatic supply chain was imperfect and that we could fix it 10, 15 years later. It looks pretty flawed to me from where I'm standing. So maybe that's where I was slightly naive. I'm not sure it can be fixed. I think it's imperfect. And I think, you know, the, the more that buyers and sellers interrogate it and understand kind of the moving parts and the areas of manipulation, then at least you can kind of make objective and informed decisions about how you operate in that imperfect world.
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B
I mean, yes, we do Live in an imperfect world. And I don't think there is any such thing as perfection, but maybe we can get to a point where everyone communicates better. And it's not like buyers are from Mars and sellers aren't from Venus or something. And it doesn't end up with publishers getting strip mined. Because when you said extracting value, my first thought was yeah, like right to the bone, you know.
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A
Oh yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, I like the term strip mined. Mean you've used it, you've said it before. I have, I think, you know, whilst buyer and seller are often kind of characterized as being diametrically opposed and I suppose that, you know, can be simplified as the publisher wants a higher price, the buyer wants a lower price. I know there's a lot more nuance to it than that. I think actually, you know, because of the challenges in the middle of the transaction, actually they're increasingly well aligned in terms of where the concerns are and also the opportunity for them to kind of work together to shine a light on some of those kind of dark corners that exist in the transaction as well. Your point around strip mining, I think that's a very kind of emotive and a really good term for kind of how I feel about the publisher ecosystem and what it's been subjected to over the last 15, 20 years. I think we've seen the ads tech ecosystem I think is an incredible thing. It's fast moving, it's vibrant. There's lots of businesses that have popped up over the years and continuing to innovate. I think those are kind of great signs of a thriving ecosystem. I think my call out is the fact that those businesses have been built upon stolen publisher assets and I suppose leveraging content and leveraging audiences without the explicit permission of publishers. And that's an issue that existed 10 years ago. And I think whilst the market kind of evolves and we talk about the challenges differently, it always, almost always comes down to the same thing, which is about publisher first party assets, how value is created. And I would characterize it as the battle for control over those first party assets and their distribution.
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B
And we'll talk more about publishers taking control of their own destiny, which I think is really important because I hate the narrative of helpless publishers just being strip mined. Right. I mean, to use that term yet again. But publishers have really been through the wringer and the past few years have been this perfect storm. Right? There's signal loss, there are traffic issues, AI is now eating search volume like for lunch, just keeping the lights on is expensive payment terms, chatgpt and perplexity. Just slurping up content without sending referrals. Licensing deals aren't some kind of panacea. Right. Even if you can get some kind of deal going. Some. So the publishers you talk to, what's their mood these days? Are they anxious? Is there cautious optimism? Because things are changing and at times of change you can maybe change them for the good. Is it just quiet determination? Like let's get through the day. Like how would you characterize it when you're in the room with them?
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A
Yeah. So I mean, I think that the publishing industry is an incredible thing for many, many reasons that I'm sure we'll talk about.
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B
I agree.
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A
And you sit at the heart of it, Alison. And I think it's important, I'll answer your question. I think it's important we sort of have that reality kind of check around the challenges that exist. I mean challenges in the publishing industry are not new. You know, I've kind of, I've been in this space for 20 plus years and there's always been bumps along the way. I think the publishing industry's ability to respond to the challenges that are kind of thrown at it is kind of quite remarkable. But I think there's something unique about this moment which is I suppose, the magnitude of those challenges and the extent to which they're all coming at the same time. It feels like the perfect storm in lots of ways. And I suppose the drivers that I think about are, I suppose on the demand side you've got the economic kind of pressure that comes with uncertainty on both sides of the Atlantic. You know, the uncertainty, particularly kind of caused by Trump's tariffs, which was deferred through last year, is impacting how marketers choose to invest, either reducing their spend or shifting that spend towards kind of outcomes focused products. And that is not a world which is which, which the publishers typically are native to. That's kind of a platform dominated world. So that's kind of a real consideration, you know, from, from the outset. Then you've got some of the things that you've alluded to around traffic referral changes. You've got kind of the ongoing Google core updates that, you know, continue to shift, you know, the landscape and publishers have to respond to that. More recently you've got kind of the emergence of AI overviews and then, you know, a broader level, that shift in consumer behavior and how they're engaging with, you know, rep content as well. So big kind of moving parts on both sides of the equation. You know, demand levers and you know, supply factors there as well. And then in the middle you've got some old favorites. Brand safety, I'm being tongue it, not my favorite. And the old enemy, yes, brand safety which continues to undermine publishers ability to monetize quality environments that are being engaged in by you know, high value users. And I suppose that is a long standing challenge. I think we should be clear, you know, these are a very good example of corrosive intermediaries that are solely focused on margin reallocation. They do a good job of taking money from publishers and moving it into the pockets of intermediaries through you know, various schemes to kind of reward their customers. And that's, that's a real challenge and that hasn't gone away. So you've got real adversity there. I think it'd be naive or even irresponsible for us to kind of dance around that. And meanwhile you've got some really, really interesting work that's going on in different places. And just to kind of cite a few examples, you know, across our community you've got the likes of, you know, the Daily Mail, great example in kind of how they're investing in user experience and the premiumization of their UX and investing in more kind of content creator kind of programs as well about distributing or extending their influence off platform which I think is very interesting. And you've got work. One of our customers, one of our community in our media who then they themselves describe themselves as a small operation but I think a fantastic example of a business that has rewired its strategy to shift or make the pivot away from Google kind of SEO towards distribution on third party platforms and one of the biggest providers of content to Apple News these days. I think that's a great standout example. Elsewhere BBC investing in identity infrastructure and doing incredible research work around AI and the LLMs and their inadequacy. And I think one of the headlines that's caught me over the last couple of weeks is the announcement of, you know, publisher collaboration in the UK and the Spur Group. So that is a group of publishers who are aligned around the challenge that they face at the hands of the LLMs and who have a very kind of clear focus and very clear organization or coordination around regulatory engagement and setting standards as well. And I think again there's a lot to be excited and enthused by. There's a lot going on and I think that's what continues to excite me about the publishing space.
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B
There's almost not time to have an emotion. They're just busy. There's just so much to do. I have to say I do love the term corrosive intermediaries. It's very visceral. But I want to talk about OZONE now, bring you guys into the picture. So for anyone who doesn't know what is OZONE in a sentence or two and how does it fit into this bigger question of how publishers can show up with more leverage. Leverage as a noun, not a verb in the market.
- [15:42]
A
Yeah. So OZONE is a community of publishers that was founded in 2018. So we were as shareholders of four of the largest UK news organizations in the Guardian, my former employer, News UK Telegraph and Reach plc. So these are four publishers who you will know, you know, they compete, continue to compete with one another on a day to day level. They report on one another as well. So that, you know, they are competitors of the, you know, in the truest sense, but yet were brought together eight years ago by the shared challenge that they face in the digital ads ecosystem. And that's the challenge that's presented by the platforms, their dominance and monopolistic behavior and also I suppose the disintermediation that comes at the hands of adtech as well. And so I think kind of a very interesting example there of how despite competition on the front end, actually finding areas of commonality and identifying where collaboration can create value was really kind of the heart of what became ozone. And early on our focus was in building a light layer of technology that would enable those publishers to work more effectively as individuals. And that quickly evolved into what ozone's become today. And I sort of characterize the areas in which we operate. I boil it down into three areas, which is we have a premium demand proposition. So that's where we enable our publishers to compete as a collective for platform budgets. And that works incredibly well. Underpinning that we have what we call the audience connection platform that I can tell you more about. And then secondly, we have a software and services business and it's worth just kind of contextualizing this. We work with many of the largest, most sophisticated publishers around the world. They tend to be resourced and investing in their own capability and so their needs kind of differ from one customer to the next quite significantly. So our role is to understand how can we complement where can we support them. And I suppose that explains where we supply both software and services like operational services and development services as well. And then thirdly, not a business line as such, but something that we hold kind of very important hold idea is I Suppose our community kind of program, and that's about a few different things really. It's about giving our publishers a voice around the things that they all care about. Brand safety being one good example of that. Secondly, you've got facilitation. You know, sometimes OZONE doesn't have a particular kind of stake in the conversation, but you know, bringing for example, data protection officers, enabling them to have the conversations that they want. And so that can take lots of different forms. I think very well established in the UK market. We're slightly earlier on that journey in the US But I think again there's a really powerful vehicle there for kind of community representation and something that I'm really proud of as well.
- [19:15]
B
You brought up the buyer perspective. I want to talk a little bit about buy side for a second before we, we hit a break. Advertisers and agencies, they all say they want quality. And I know they do. I mean, of course they do. They want fewer hops in the supply chain. They want efficiency. They say they care about supporting journalism and trusted content. And I do believe that they believe that. But how well do those like stated intentions match what you're actually seeing in terms of how they spend and what they do and how much they work with these corrosive intermediaries?
- [19:49]
A
So I think I kind of agree with your statement. I think there's always a kind of a nod of recognition when we tell the OZONE story and explain why we're different and why we kind of hold the principal beliefs that we do, that there's a better way of doing things. But we also, I think, recognize the fact and we've learned that buyers and brands have different needs. There's some that, you know, believe in the long standing argument that they should invest in journalism, you know, from, you know, for societal reasons. I mean, I think that's really important to be clear. But I think we've also kind of, we also believe that we have to be. There's pragmatism that comes with that, which is the product has to deliver results. Ultimately they're making investments in OZONE or in publishers and it's on us. It's incumbent on us to demonstrate that that investment was a good one. And I mentioned the investment goes into the platforms earlier. Again, we have to recognize Facebook and Google in particular have done an incredible job of building out measurement capability and creating the perception of a closed loop that gives buyers real confidence that a pound or a dollar in equals something greater coming out. And actually, I suppose related to that, they've almost removed the sense of investment risk that comes with that spend. And again, that's very different to where the publishing industry has been historically. I think a real kind of point of frustration that's worth kind of calling out frustration for publishers is the that fact, fact that, you know, those platforms and their methodologies are, you know, are fueled by premium publisher inventory and premium publisher data. You know, they have the audiences and the contexts that are driving results to advertisers. But those attribution mechanisms are geared to attribute that to the platform product. And that is a real challenge from a publisher perspective and a very clever design feature from a platform perspective. And so I think there's something there that we've had to kind of really grasp around delivering results beyond kind of making principled statements that buyers should be spending in Ozone or premium publishing because it's the best thing that they can do. We have to be really good at delivering results. And that's where we've been investing very heavily.
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B
Isn't it so nice when you can support society but also get outcomes? It's a twofer. So that should really be the argument. Right.
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A
Critically important.
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B
Okay, well, we're going to take a quick break and when we're back, we'll talk more about AI. I have some questions for you about spoilers. Love to talk a little bit about how you approach tech development. So, yeah, stick with us. All right, welcome back. And before we go down some nerdy rabbit holes, give me a quick status update on Ozone's. I was going to say launch in the US but you've actually been here for a little while. Started out very UK focused, but now you're, you're really international. So how's that going?
- [23:43]
A
Yeah, it's. It's going well. We've been super busy. I think you kind of alluded to. I still get it. When I'm in the US very frequently, I still get it. You know, that comment around. Oh, Danny, you must be new here. And I think, you know, the reality is we've been working very hard in the background over the last few years to build relationships with publisher leadership teams, consult them on Ozone's go to market in the US And I suppose really to help us understand what our path needs to look like, where we need to be different as well, both from a cultural perspective and also in terms of our product and capability. And I think that served us incredibly well. It's allowed us to launch a product that our publishers are fully behind and ensure that we have those deep, trusted relationships. And so today we have an Incredible footprint of brands we're incredibly proud to work with, including the likes of News Core titles so New York Post and Dow Jones through to the likes of Washington Post, CNN, People Inc. And the likes of BBC Studios and McClatchy. So brands that occupy slightly different positions in the market but add incredible depth and incredible engagement to the overall proposition. And I think what's worth kind of just mentioning is the fact that, you know, because of the nature of the businesses we work with on the publisher side, everyone being slightly different, you know, we have to provide different products in different markets to all of those folks as well. So there's no one size fits all. And in totality that means we've got again a good solid base in the US as we dial up the brand facing proposition. And that means we've got reach of about Two thirds of US adults in the UK we have about 85% reach I think by latest count. So in totality, just across those two markets we've got lots of coverage into Europe as well. But in those two markets around a quarter of a billion adults available to brands and buyers. And which is particularly interesting from a multi market perspective. And actually that talks to one of the other launches, Premium World, which enables buyers who want multi market execution to extend their campaigns into other markets with ease, removing that friction that they've experienced historically. And so that's all last year we went from five markets to 36 markets in a very short space of time. And again it talks to I suppose depth and capability in our proposition servicing different types of brands and buyer need.
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B
Premium World kind of sounds like a theme park for publishers.
- [26:49]
A
Sounds fun.
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B
Doesn't it feel like where they take their families? Well, let's talk a little bit about supply path optimization because it sounds really great on the tin, but I think in practice it can sometimes just translate into let's find the cheapest route and that's not always correlated with quality. So there's kind of a challenge there. And it's, it's the year of our Lord 2026. We've been talking about SPO for years and years. But what is like real SPO look like to you for Ozone Publishers, like what is a healthy, optimized, mutually beneficial supply path actually look like between buyers and sellers today?
- [27:31]
A
Yeah, so I think we've got a very clear principled view that you know, a direct transaction is best and for us that looks like execution via our console straight into the publisher ecosystem. But I think what we've realized or what we've reminded ourselves over the eight years, I think this was kind of. We took a decision early on, in fact, was that, you know, we can have a principal position, but buyers have their own workflow and they have their own needs. And so from the very outset, we took the view that we have to be flexible, we have to interoperate with their technologies of choice. And that does mean that we've integrated with all major ad technologies through the DSP end of the landscape through to SSPs. And that does mean that we can support a buyer who wants to activate Viya, a specified dsp, but equally, you know, agencies, you know, Relationships. And I think it was something, Something I said has triggered. Triggered some.
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B
Oliver the dog has strong opinions about supply path optimization.
- [28:54]
A
Are you going to continue that? I could have continued. Sorry, I'm not sure if that's just natural real life noise.
- [29:02]
B
I mean, basically someone is walking outside the front door and that's what he's reacting to. But I also like to think that he cares about the fate of publishers.
- [29:10]
A
I think that's right. I think I triggered him.
- [29:15]
B
Well, I want to talk a little bit about attention and measurement because there's been a lot of talk over the years. I'm really curious about what the publishers that you work with think about attention as a buying metric. I just don't know how much talk about attention has translated into action. Because attention metrics feel like a better signal than impressions or viewability. And it makes sense, right? If someone's paying attention, that's a, that's a good sign. But it doesn't feel like publishers and buyers are using it as a currency or a planning signal or an optimization lever. It just, it feels aspirational today still, rather than an actual buying metric. And I've been an ad Exchanger for almost 12 years, and one of the first stories I wrote was, I think it was about the ft, the Financial Times, experimenting with attention metrics. And I think you could still write that same story today.
- [30:15]
A
Yeah, so, I mean, I think quite clearly, you know, a consumer's eyeballs having engaged with an advert feels like a really important building block for impact. And I think actually this is an area that we've invested in fairly significantly and some time ago. So we have a capability called OZONE attention index. So that enables our buyers to understand how much attention any of their investments capture and how they benchmark, you know, relative to their peer set, their industry peer set. So, you know, it's a data point and it's metadata that we're actively collecting and that creates real Opportunity for optimization in flight as well. I think where my head goes to when you ask this question is around kind of means versus the end. You know, ultimately the advertiser wants some form of return on investment, whether that's a shift in key brand metrics or kind of what I'd refer to as a hard outcome in terms of a sale conversion. And so I think, you know, actually as we shift towards a more outcome focused, you know, approach, actually this kind of gets taken care of in the wider flow. I think it's a really important input and it's, it's, it's also an item that premium publishers have and hold advantage around. They should be rewarded for their superior attention to the extent that that moves the needle. I'm not sure that is historically, or rather I am sure that that is not historically how the programmatic market has recognized value. And I do think that's something that we can stand to address as we move towards a more outcome centric kind of mindset.
- [32:30]
B
So this attention tool and premium world, the theme park, where are you making all these things? I've heard of something called Ozone Labs. Is that like your tech development division?
- [32:42]
A
So Ozone Labs is a new launch. So actually these have kind of really present preceded the launch of Ozone Labs. This is really in our core business, you know, we consider that core product. Ozone Labs is, you know, an area of innovation. So I think, you know, my backdrop, the way I contextualize this is we've got, you know, a very fast moving market. It feels more so than ever. I don't think it was ever slow, but it feels to have speeded up. And we've got kind of major shifts in terms of technology as well. So this does feel like a moment of kind of real significance, significant transformation. Of course AI is kind of very much at the heart of that now. What we haven't done and very deliberately, you know, where the ad tech marketing machine and you know, has been glittering presentations and new kind of brand launches with you know, references to AI. We've decided to kind of, we decided to hold back from that. And that's not because we don't have focus or belief in AI. It's in fact because we've been very deliberately focused on the groundwork. And over the last 18 months or so we've been rebuilding the foundations of our business from the ground up. So this is kind of heavy duty efforts from a data engineering, data pipelines perspective to essentially ensure that we've got the foundations to thrive in an AI geared world. Now a lot of that kind of talks to internal capability and creates opportunity around kind of workflow improvements in our core business. But I think where it gets very exciting, this is the link back to Over Ozone Labs is it creates an opportunity to accelerate the pace of innovation. And Ozone Labs is essentially our vehicle to do that. It has dedicated focus and dedicated resource. It's focused on kind of the mid time, the midterm and helping our industry on both sides understand what technologies hold. And the two kind of areas of focus reboil down into audience and advertising. And that's where we're working with marketers. We're doing a lot of hack days to I suppose unpack new capability, to rapidly prototype and test together what we can build quickly and where that new value can be unlocked. And then the second area is really around content. And I suppose this talks again to the world of the LLMs and the risk and the opportunity that that presents for the publishing industry. And our focus right now in that area is very much on pure R and D. So we've got a research program that's designed, the objective is to help the publishing industry and our publishing community deal with the data asymmetry that exists between them and the major LLMs. And that's about starting to uncover some of the decision making, understand how content is being used, the telemetry that exists between the user's prompt and the publisher's content being leveraged with or without permission. And again, we're not entirely sure where that takes us. Therefore it's well suited to kind of Ozone Labs, this sort of frontier exploration. Whether that kind of comes back into our core business, we'll kind of see it's worth also saying we've put our agentic efforts. So the work we've done around ADCP and ARTF fits into that bucket as well. We've got buyer and seller agents that are live and we're experimenting with. And again, we'll see where, we'll see where those go. I think, you know, our sense is that some of these are going to kind of become products potentially in other areas we're going to learn some, you know, we're going to surface some really kind of key strategic considerations for our industry. And you know, maybe those will be things that we step away from. But this means that we've got kind of a stake in the game, we're at the forefront of innovation and we're much quicker and more deliberate in kind of forming opinion as well. And I think that stands to serve our community on both sides of the Market really well.
- [37:22]
B
So you're not just changing your name to Ozone AI and calling it a day. Because I do feel like that's what some people are doing.
- [37:28]
A
I. Yeah, I'd be, I'm not aware of any plans. I'm certainly not pushing that agenda. And I think that talks to the point. Right. I think there's kind of varying degrees of AI innovation from rebranding exercises to, you know, incredibly heavy investments in different areas of the market. So it always serves to kind of probe that a little bit deeper.
- [37:50]
B
It is a very interesting time for publishers. Right. Because there's a lot of pressure just on the content production side to use AI to be more air quotes efficient. At the same time, you want to show that you, as a journalist that you are very important and you, your brain is still a viable thing that people should pay you to use, but you also have so much work to do. So you want to use AI for help with some manual tasks. And it's the same on the ad ops side. And of course, this applies to professions and industries, you know, far and wide. It's not just advertising, it's not just publishing. But it is a very tricky dynamic because you kind of need to rely on this live wire that is trying to, I don't know, take. Take over the world. I don't mean to be bombastic, but that's kind of what it feels like sometimes.
- [38:49]
A
Yeah. And I mean, I link the first part of your kind of question, your comments back to kind of some of the items we touched on earlier, which is around how traffic referral is shifting, what that means for publishers, business models. And I'm quite clear that there's material impact on a lot, if not most publishers in that regard. You know, traffic volumes are decreasing, but the makeup is shifting from, I think, you know, publishers who are creating, you know, original content, who are investing in journalism, which is differentiated. You know, they're the folk that are getting, you know, front door visitors and subscriptions and building real meaningful relationships. And I think that's. That's important. Right. That means the pendulum is swinging kind of back towards quality. Again, not to overlook the, you know, the challenges that that kind of creates in rewiring business models. I think from an. I think you're right. I think there's huge opportunity from an operational perspective. And again, you know, the work that's been done at Ozone really excites me. I think I've referred to it as kind of democratization of data. You know, previously there were these, you know, there were data Sets that I was incredibly interested in, you know, exist. If they exist in different places, other folk, the, the experts knew where they were. But I found it very difficult to kind of understand, you know, how do I extract value from that. I'm not an analyst, I'm not a data engineer. And you know, I've personally seen a lot of benefit. You know, I can now experiment with, you know, analytical kind of treatments and different data visualizations in a way that I could only dream of. Dream of CO 6 months ago I think it's also kind of asking some really kind of profound questions about how we go about things. You know, the opportunity is to accelerate the rate of innovation, accelerate prototyping and product delivery. But then it raises some really fundamental questions about the roadmap, the annual roadmap. You know, that that concept feels like, you know, dinosaur and I think kind of gets quickly thrown out the window. And I was overhearing, you know, the P and E team talking the other day, you know, excitedly about how they feel like they're rolling rocks downhill using AI. But with that comes further consideration, right? Which is, well, what does this mean for go to market? Because it doesn't work that we're delivering new products and capability and prototyping at a rate of knots, but yet we can't communicate it. So it's really kind of asking some organizational kind of and cultural kind of questions of us that I think are fascinating. And you know, we're trying to kind of navigate our path through those and you know, take a considered kind of position on that. But I think it's, it's super exciting and I think that does kind of explain those mixed feelings that, you know, all of us hold, which is there's real risk, there's real downside. It feels like there's lots of exploitation out there, which I feel very uncomfortable about. And yet, you know, there's real benefit in certain areas. I guess, as ever, how do we take the upside whilst navigating the downside as best we can?
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B
As you were speaking, I was thinking vibe monetization. People are vibe monetizing in a way instead of vibe coding.
- [42:20]
A
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, again, we're seeing some really interesting innovation outside across our community. As you know, teams are getting their hands on new capability and able to do things they could only dream of maybe even a few months ago. And again, that talks to organizational change. I mean, we've been hell bent on getting Ozone's own AI capability rolled out across the organization, which is kind of a big A big task. There's lots, lots in that. You know, I shared some of the questions considered areas of consideration but you know, also, you know, governance and you know, how do you bring different types of people on a journey, some who are kind of very naturally excited about this and some who kind of, you know, feel more concern and anxiety around it. All of which is valid and yeah, so much, so much to think about in that space.
- [43:21]
B
So last question. Imagine and you do this pretty frequently. I imagine you're talking to a mid sized publisher and they just feel like very overwhelmed because everything we're talking about now is as exciting as it is. It's overwhelming too. They're excited but also worried about AI. Same about platforms just making money, all of it. If you could give them one like really practical piece of advice that they should keep in mind. Maybe write on a post it and keep by, you know, their laptop for the next. I don't know, I'm gonna, I was gonna say 12 to 18 months but I feel like it should just be the next six months because things are changing so quickly. But what piece of practical advice would you tell them to write down on a post it put by their laptop to prioritize above everything else, this is the one thing they should do. What would it be and why?
- [44:15]
A
I think for me, as you put me on the spot with that kind of question, I think distribution control. And I say that because at the start of our conversation, value, all value is derived, starts with assets. And the question that I learned at a level in a level business studies that I think kind of I continue to come back to this day, the consideration is, you know, what product to whom, where and under what terms. And I think, you know, in this digital world that's platform dominated, you know, the demand from partners is hand over all your assets and we'll do the rest. And that always risks the publisher being rendered to the position of raw ingredient supplier, losing all agency. And I think again it comes down to being very deliberate around how you create value in your assets and then what you do with them. And I think the link there, this is true the last 15 years and we've got to take the learnings from the programmatic market and apply that to this new world of content licensing, whatever it looks like, I think there's real opportunity there, but real risk that it plays out in an all too familiar fashion.
- [45:52]
B
Forget writing distribution control on a post it like frame it, dip it in Lucite. That is good advice for all time. It was good advice 15 to 18 years ago, and similar challenges are cropping up now. Just the players are a little different. So distribution control guys always comes back
- [46:11]
A
to the same thing. And at the heart of that, there's a question as to, you know, of the value, the incredible value that the publishing industry creates. How much of it do they get to retain for themselves versus have extracted? And, you know, that consideration is just critically important for this, for the future of sustainable journalism and content creation.
- [46:35]
B
I'm going to let that be the mic drop, okay?