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Ep. 106 Redefining Quality in Ad Tech: Erez Levin on Marketing Effectiveness and Media Value
00:27:55
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- [00:01]
Erez Levin
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AdTech God
Is brought to you by Adelaide Media Verification and measurement are undergoing major disruption.
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Erez Levin
Legacy players are pivoting to performance. Advertising AI is reshaping brand safety and.
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AdTech God
Attention is replacing viewability. Adelaide is leading the shift with au, a new way to assess media quality that scores placements based on their potential to drive attention and outcomes. Before your ads run, think of it.
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Erez Levin
Like a credit score for media. Finally, a clear view of quality.
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AdTech God
Before you buy, take the guesswork out.
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Erez Levin
Of your investment strategy and try Adelaide AU on your next campaign.
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AdTech God
Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTech God. Welcome to the AdTech God Pod where we speak to those focused on quality in our industry. Today's guest is Erez Levin, who I refer to as the quality Guy. He spent the last decade focusing on just that. Quality is obviously an important aspect for him. If you've ever followed him on social media on LinkedIn or X, he seems to really hone in on that topic in particular. And so I thought it would be really interesting to have him with us today. A little bit about him. He's spent 13 years at Google. He's really moved up from a senior account manager to a senior data transformational lead focused on US agencies. He's built a great reputation. He founded an advisory firm called Emmett Advisory where he supports buyers and platforms. There's a little bit of a different podcast. Usually they work for larger companies, but because I'm such a fan of his I wanted to have him on the POD today. So are welcome and thanks for joining me today.
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Erez Levin
Thanks for having me man.
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AdTech God
You've built one heck of a reputation online. I am a huge fan. I love your perspective. You and I have kind of bantered back and forth, you know, in DMs or on social media before. Can you just take me back to your career, what you did at Google, your time there another and then we could talk about why you're so focused on quality today.
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Erez Levin
Yeah, I can weave that second part really into the first because I actually I joke that I was kind, I'm kind of a marketer by nature. I remember loving advertising, being fascinated by since I was a little kid. And so it was sort of natural for me to always sort of think about this space. And actually I think I'm pretty unique. Even through all my time at Google and been through this industry. There's very other, very few other people in the ad tech world especially that I met that also studied marketing. And so I did and so I entered this space and I kind of got to understand the intricacies, how marketing worked, how it's always worked in history and how it works today. And a few years into my career really entered into the digital space. But after a few years went into Google I was on the search side and then I switched into the programmatic world into what was still then Doubleclick and I spent a few years on the sell side. So I was on the sort of buy side of the ad exchange for a few years. So plugging the ad exchange into the various DSPs and then I switched over to the DSP side and I was focused, sort of sat in between product and sales and integrated all of the SSPs and really got to focus on emerging formats and how we were buying and how we were measuring those things. And so I think sort of tying it back to my marketer nature when I started to see things within Google but sort of broader within the industry because I had one foot out working with various companies in the ecosystem is that some of the fundamentals of marketing effectiveness were being violated and increasingly so. And I tried to solve those things and was successful in some ways. In some ways I'd say I fell short or haven't fully accomplished them yet. But ultimately I pinpointed a lot of those challenges and issues in the industry to a lack of focus on quality, on media quality, audience quality, creative quality. And that's what I've been trying to to push forward for almost a decade now.
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AdTech God
This is tech God and this is a commercial message. Finding the right audience shouldn't feel like doom scrolling with Experian. It doesn't. Experian syndicated audiences help you reach holiday shoppers, car buyers and more across over 200 top platforms with over 3200 pre built audiences. There's no more doom scrolling. It's just audience targeting you can trust made simple. Learn more at experian.com marketecture again that's E X P-E-R-I-A N.com marketecture what do you think is the fundamental mistake people make when or as a marketer that they make when we talk about outcomes and quality? Where do you find people are confused about when it comes to, like, what is quality? What does quality mean in terms of your data set? What does quality mean in terms of your publisher or your supply path? Why is it so hard for us to determine what is and what is not quality? It feels very simple to me. You know, know where you buy, take a look at the quality of the journalism, take a look at the quality content, take a look at that. But there's obviously more to it than what I'm describing, right?
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Erez Levin
Yeah. I think it may be helpful. Why it's not easy, and I don't think it should be easy, is I like to use the analogy, people talk about marketing being sort of this art and a science. I like to use Karl Popper's analogy. He looked at sort of the sciences overall and he said how there's sort of the range. You have clock sciences and cloud sciences. So clock sciences. On one side, it's like a grandfather clock. It's precise and it's predictable and it's very rational. You know exactly how it's going to tick and how fast and everything else. On the other side, you have clouds. And so there's actually a lot of science behind clouds. We know different types and how fast they move, and we can predict a lot of things, but they are inherently unpredictable. You can't perfectly predict. They're irrational. There's too many variables. And my sort of a takeaway from that is we have treated marketing, especially the last two decades in the digital era, more like a clock science, when it's actually much more of a cloud science. And so I don't think marketing can ever or very rarely can be easy. Right. It's not. You can't really predict what's in a person's brain and all the ads they've seen and which car their grandfather drove and which soda they sort of started drinking as a kid because that's what their parents preferred. And so there's so many other variables here. But I do think that, you know, digital made it easy to follow the wrong type of measurement that looks good on paper and is convincing enough, but doesn't necessarily tell the full story. And I think we just sort of like did that on repeat with all the incentives of the system sort of pushing towards that. And so I think that's why we sort of ignored quality and especially in Programmatic, where as long as it had a cookie and it achieved some sort of vanity metric, whether that was just being viewable or leading to, or being correlated to some conversion down the line that you could tie back, then it was worth the same. It didn't matter if it was on the New York Times or if it was on some, you know, MFA website, for example. And so that was sort of the idea of starting to consider. And what I've been trying to push for is how to think about quality. It's still a very broad term. How do we start to narrow that down, what it could possibly mean, different attributes, different principles, and then move the industry towards not valuing all media the same.
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AdTech God
Do you think that there's, there's an understanding of the importance of, you know, the, the ad placement, as you mentioned, the quality of the publisher, as you mentioned? Are there clear guidelines that you can provide or that you can talk to your clients about, about what kind of puts them in this particular bucket? Because if it is a cloud and not like a ticking clock like you mentioned, and things are constantly moving, what is the right way to continue to ensure that ads run on quality? And that kind of moving target that continues to move and evolve over time doesn't end up being miscategorized, I guess, in the future.
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Erez Levin
Yeah, so this is, I don't, I don't claim, you know, this is easy. The way that I think about it is I don't like the. Actually one of the reasons I don't like the word premium is because it's still sort of this binary. And with quality, I try to position it as it's a range. And so I don't think it's like only showing up on quality media or with quality audiences. And it's actually just pay the right price. And so I think there's nothing wrong with low quality media. You can see a small ad somewhere, it doesn't matter. But if you see it enough, times like that does have an impact. There's lots of research over decades to prove this sort of like mere exposure effect. And so it's just a matter of not overpaying for low quality media. And quality is determined ultimately by its effectiveness, but most of that effectiveness is determined by not, hey, I served a couple of ads to a person and then saw that they bought a good. It's, I serve this, these types of ads to this population versus those types of ads to another population. And based on those criteria, I saw that this one performed X percent better than the other One and that's how I can assign some value to it. And so that's, that's how I generally try to frame it. And there are so many variables and you can't boil down, you know, the whole ocean. And so it's not thinking about all of them, but which ones have the most impact on effectiveness. Fortunately, there's a ton of, you know, multi, multi decades of insights to get us to a baseline. But then we build from there and every marketer can try to gain a competitive edge over their peer set just by slightly optimizing and again not paying the same for all of these impressions, ignoring most of these important dimensions of quality.
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AdTech God
What do you think impacted quality? Like when I, when I look at quality as you described it, one thing comes to mind is kind of an ecosystem or an industry that was built primarily on scale. And there's this massive scale, this unbelievable amount of inventory that almost makes it impossible unless you eyeball it or use, I'm going to say it AI to determine what is and what is not quality and quality, like you mentioned, what is the right outcome you're looking for, what is the right performance and metrics, what are you actually seeking for? But do you think it's this weird fundamental problem that we have in terms of like the open web is so big and so vast and so hard to track on a quality level that it's become honestly a thorn in everybody's side. Like overpaying becomes difficult for you to monitor and track quality of the publisher becomes difficult for you to evaluate unless you're doing it in a very time consuming manner. So what do you think has actually caused this lack of quality over the last decade or so?
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Erez Levin
Yeah, so I do think it all sort of stems from the buy side marketers specifically, but also anyone who supports them not caring about quality. And so that's what created the incentives. Like MFA was a direct byproduct of advertisers don't care about quality. They will pay good money, top dollars, top CPMs and let lots of their spend move to sites that they've never heard of and aren't vetting that have 20 ads on them because they weren't checking. And so I think the like proliferation of low quality media and this sort of like growth of the Internet with really bad stuff too, like not just clickbait but misinformation, disinformation, like all the worst things is because advertisers incentivize that effectively. And so, and I don't think, you know, don't Let perfect be the enemy. That good. I think there's really easy ways for marketers and granted you still have to like maybe create a site list and you have to vet it. So is that harder than just like trusting your DSP to go and do all this for you? Yes, but anyone who's done that sees that it pays off dividends and so investing even a little bit to do to put in some quality controls beyond again, like vanity quality controls. Oh, I'll put a blacklist and that's good enough. No, no, no, like we're sort of past that for the most part. And so I do think that there are low hanging fruit quality controls that are not totally, you know, really strenuous sort of endeavors that buyers can do get significant benefit for themselves. And going back to my point, cheaper. There's nothing wrong with cheap reach, it just needs to be cheap. Like cheap enough. Like it has to be really inexpensive to justify itself. And so that doesn't mean never spend on some of these sites. Just don't pay top dollar and make sure that your, your dollars go further and ideally even spend more on the higher quality media in the process.
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AdTech God
I feel like we're really good or the industry is really good at blaming the supply side of the industry in terms of like, look at the quality of the publishers and the publishers are horrible. Look at the ad placements and look how many, you know on this particular page, how much is sponsored content in comparison to like true written content? Because you have these MFA sites that are like four articles, 10 ads. And then you look and you're like the ad to content ratio is just completely out of whack. And then the blame goes to the publisher almost immediately. Like, look what you've done, look what you've created. And then the way I view it is the publisher gets addicted. They're hooked. They're hooked to this revenue. It's easy revenue. And then they lean in, right? They go, hey, if this is what people are buying and they're buying it and the marketers are happy with the performance that comes out of this, I'm not really doing anything wrong. I'm just building a site that's ad heavy and I'm running it and the marketers keep spending and they're aware of where they're spending, so there's no issue. But it rarely shifts to the other side where it's like, look, your KPIs are absolutely ridiculous and unrealistic. You are also totally okay with it because you want to buy at a 15 ECPM but you know, the quality is at 25. And so people have started to kind of funnel in their inventory in order to for you to hit your KPI so your client's happy. But nobody ever blames that side of the business. It seems like they blame the supply side. Why do they have these 50 sites that look like crap but perform really well? And the blame shifts. But I think it's the marketers who have the money who need to say, hey, no, I'm not spending with you like unless you are hitting these particular quality guidelines.
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Erez Levin
And I'm, I'm guilty of that as well. When I first started and I was first on the supply side and then on the buy side and the topic that you probably know that I'm very passionate about is sort of video and video misclassification and buyers sort of treating all video and thinking about these vanity metrics like completed views. And I saw firsthand when buyers started to either mislabel their video and sort of put those small little sticky ads and thumbnails in the corners. And I first was really mad at publishers for sort of gaming the system. And then slowly but surely I said like maybe they're just, that's their incentives. And then I was mad at agencies cause I thought they were doing it. And I realized no, this comes down to the marketer. The marketer is the one that's creating these incentives. And I'm still not even mad at the individual marketers. It's not even the cmo, even if they know about it is procurement is squeezing them. So there's this sort of accountability sync. It's not any one person, but if anyone can change it, it's going to be those marketers demanding that they get sort of better effectiveness for, for their spend.
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AdTech God
It's totally. Incentives across the board are wrong. Let's just say that I think it's everywhere. Having worked in the industry and seen the publisher types that flow through as a media buyer, as a seller, like it exists. And when the whole MFA hot topic came up, I think that was last year when everybody was up in arms about MFA and people started creating these tighter allow lists. I know because I talked to people like the lists are still 20, 30, 40,000 domains long. So yeah, maybe it's not completely open. Like hey, we've opened this up to the entire open web and it's 150,000 or 200,000 sites. Sure, it's now 20,000 sites, but that's still nearly impossible for you to ensure that it's quality inventory. All the time. Unless there's some sort of solution in place or process in place to vet it.
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Erez Levin
Yeah, yeah. And if they were to, you know, whittle those down to a small number of sites, then they wouldn't be able to scale or their CPMs would get really expensive. And that doesn't sort of satisfy the criteria that they have from their procurement teams or whoever else that don't understand how advertising works. So those are the challenges. The fortunately, and this is where, you know, I spent a long time at Google saying these changes are inevitable. Like this market can't stay in inefficient and get increasingly less efficient over time. At some point some smart marketers are going to see how to do this the right way. And, and eventually enough of them do that you sort of have this tipping point. And so I think we're getting there. Like there are plenty of smart marketers that are doing this. Some fortunately are vocal about it and talking about it and sort of inspiring others. Others are being quiet because they see it as an opportunity to sort of take advantage of an inefficient market. But the change is in my opinion.
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AdTech God
Inevitable on the supply side of the industry and on the supply side of the business as these marketers focus their, their media spend on publishers of quality and their allow lists and their PMPs are a reduced number of sites. What is the, and I kind of know the answer. This is a rhetorical question. What is the long term and kind of like midterm benefits to these publishers? Because what I've seen buying media is you create this massive list of publishers and when you pull your post campaign report you're seeing that a lot of the money is being funneled towards those that are hitting the KPIs and those are often lower CPM, lower quality. And you're missing out on that higher quality, possibly even higher performance, better brand association sites because of just the way those work. What do you think happens to this long tail publisher list as people start to shift their focus to hey I'm okay paying an extra X percent on inventory because now I know I'm running on Netflix instead of like Bobby streaming channel. And that makes a huge difference in terms of the sustainability and lifespan of these long tails publishers. But I want to ask you your, your opinion.
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Erez Levin
Yeah, I mean I think about it as like we've treated the buy side has treated media like an undifferentiated commodity and so it's all sort of had this like race to the bottom effect now. Higher quality media is separating from the package and buyers that want it and willing to pay more for it are doing so. I think the long tail, it probably is a lot of commoditized media. And so that's going to be cheap, it's going to be cheaper than it is today and it should be. But that's not to say anyone who is creating really unique good content that audiences are coming to and willing to spend time on and maybe even give their data to and maybe even watch more ads intentionally in order to access it, then those will do well. So there's still plenty of opportunity for niche sites. But if you're just another recipe site, you know, shelling turkey chili recipes like I'm sorry but you don't deserve like significant monetization. It's that you didn't earn that. You can get whatever you can get, but it's going to be commodity prices.
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AdTech God
Why is it always cooking sites by the way? Because those sites are unreal. Like the, the, the number. I can't even tell what is the actual recipe and what is an ad. I don't know when that happened. Maybe 10 years ago.
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Erez Levin
I saw it, I saw it over, I saw it over the years. Like I really like observed this. I had, I had like macro level view of like so much spend of the Internet and then micro level view and I went in, I'm a really curious person and I saw campaigns just shifting all of their spend towards these types of sites. And what bothered me the most, again, these like small video ads that were getting top dollar CPMs because advertisers treated them as if they were premium, you know, large sound on in stream ads.
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AdTech God
It's nuts. That's a whole different.
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Erez Levin
Well we're, we're and the, and the, and the, and the premium publishers are the ones that, that lost the most I think even more than the advertisers. Like I feel for the, those premium publishers the most.
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AdTech God
Of course, like true journalism, true content, good content, premium content costs a ton of money to produce. And the unfortunate part is they're spending millions, hundreds of millions to get this content that they want that's unique, that's valuable. And the users are there, but the users are also there on Those, you know, 10,000 Long Tail publishers who are paying almost nothing to get their content. And so it's kind of sad to.
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Erez Levin
See this for a penny cheaper the advertisers will buy that. Yep.
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AdTech God
And so I'm going to keep bumping my price up until I hit that sweet spot of the typical fill in revenue and CPM and it's pulling away from these premium guys are like no, really our, our true lowest price we could sell at is 10 bucks and you're buying this junk at, you know, 8:50. But we don't know what to do. Question for you. So there are a lot happening in the space. Obviously Agentic is playing a role. AI is always in every single one of my podcasts for the last 12 months super hot. I don't know for how long, I don't know how much of it's actually going to pan out to be good or bad for the industry. But where do you view things heading in the next 12 to 18 months and how do you see, I guess the ecosystem growing and getting better.
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Erez Levin
So I see a decommoditization happening where higher quality media is going to get valued more. So we're going to see lower volume of spend there will still be spent going towards lower quality media but it'll be cheaper and probably the stuff that is truly undifferentiated, the, the MFA and that kind of stuff, I think that'll mostly disappear. It'll be kind of a penny stock situation, penny CPMs. But you're going to see advertisers or publishers start to differentiate themselves based on their quality, which I generally think is like how high attention your ad units are and then how valuable your audience data is. And that's what advertisers are going to value. And so sweet spot if you have high attention sort of ads and good audience data, ideally, you know, first party data. So CTV will do really well. But I think that's sort of the shift away from this like average CPM bundling everything together. Advertisers are going to care more about quality. That doesn't mean every impression is priced perfectly, but we start to think about quality adjusted reach. And as long as you're doing a pretty good job and paying more for really good, really effective stuff and less for less effective, lower quality, I think most advertisers, again on the enterprise side where I've mostly been focused, will do well and I think that's going to have severe impact on the landscape. I also think the, the really premium media is going to leave programmatic. It has been over some time. I think it'll be even more so because there's going to be such a, you know, small amount of, of supply there. And so those publishers will leave sort of this like auction model. They can sell it at the right price, they can sell it sort of on their terms, you know, direct deals and and programmatic, guaranteed and things like that. So that's generally what what I envision. The SMB market is different and it's a little bit hard to predict because can't reach them all. They're not. The enterprise isn't necessarily rational, but SMB is a little bit harder and sometimes they're just more short term focus, which is totally fine. It's understandable they can't think as much about the long term. That's not as much of their priority for sort of growing their brand. But I think we get back to closer to marketing effectiveness principles applied for sort of the head of the industry.
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AdTech God
At least from you kind of shifting from working in corporate America into starting this advisory firm of yours. Emmett, what do you think that's really taught you about the industry and the people and for the people listening? Because it varies from agencies to brands to ad tech at this point. It's kind of everywhere. What advice do you give them and what have you really learned over the last year, two years of you starting this?
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Erez Levin
Yeah, I think the biggest thing this is for me too. Like you know, I'm not a, it's important to not be like an absolutist or perfectionist. Really important to sort of like understand what the North Star is. The North Star is a more effective, more effective buying, you know, effectiveness for the marketers and what that trickles down into there is still a big market that buys irrationally. And I don't expect anyone in this ecosystem to say like I'm not going to take your money because I don't think that's going to be good for you. There's very few folks that can sort of do that. But ultimately what you want to do is start to build solutions knowing that we're going to get to a place where more buyers are going to be more rational, more discerning. They really want to understand effectiveness but not necessarily with you know, vanity metrics and you know, quote unquote outcomes, but really want to, you know, sort of go back to those, those fundamentals and so point to those North Star. Like see if you're sort of at an organization working on things that you think are net positive, moving us in the right direction. You're somewhere that's not necessarily somewhere that you're proud of and think that's building towards that better future. You know, like that's, that's my lens of the world and I don't blame anyone for, for what they're focused on. And I think a lot of people really have conviction in some of these other things, outcomes in agentic and whatever else. I just would say, like, look at, you know, other voices that are providing alternate viewpoints. That's not just sort of where the, like broad consensuses, which I think has been known to be wrong. I think everyone knows and sees the consensus has been wrong for a long time. We know that attribution has sort of been gamed and it's more correlation, the causation. It's not necessarily incremental like all these types of things. And so if you sort of sniff that, then, you know, trust your gut and at least look and question things a little bit more than I think the industry has in the last, you know, 10, 20 years.
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AdTech God
Yeah, I feel like a lot of people who, who work at, at companies in particular become complacent and just comfortable with the status quo. I think one of the biggest parts of social networks, whether it's Twitter or LinkedIn or anything else, is the fact that there's so much banter and conversation going on. It could be a fantastic article that comes out and you'll find somebody who is skeptical, they ask their questions, question status quo. If your gut is telling you something isn't right, it's okay, like, you don't have to fix the world, but sometimes it might just be you who sees it, raise a flag, bring up the conversation. And unfortunately there's going to be companies that do nothing and they say it is what it is and there's going to be companies that are going to listen and they're going to say, you know what? Nice. I like that you noticed this. We weren't aware. Let's take a look at how we can make this better. So I agree. Just ask questions, create a fake Twitter, name a pseudonym and go at it. You never know. You never know what happens. So, Erez, thank you so much for being here today. Good luck to you, good luck to your advisory and I hope to see you soon.
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Erez Levin
Thank you. Also really appreciate it.
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AdTech God
Thank you too. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates. So follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going, going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.