B (4:17)

Yeah, I do remember Gilt.

A (4:18)

And one of it was Henry Blodgett, the Business Insider, as it was known back then. And, you know, again, as fate and serendipity would have it, another company, and it was a CDN that was called Panther Express. The head of Panther Express was Tony Katzer. And Tony Katzer will be the guy to who I forever owe my career in ad tech to. I tell him every time I see him, every time his name comes up, Tony Katzer was the one who punched my ticket. Without him, I don't know where I would be, but certainly not anywhere near where I am today. So Tony got recruited out of Panther Express to go work at Media Math. He made good on his promise. He said he would come and fetch me. And he did. He pulled me into Media Math and thus began my journey really on the corporate side of ad tech, working for Joe Zawadsky, visionary guys like him. And then I just. One day as I was working for Joe, one of his investors invited me out to dinner with this Swedish startup that I'd never heard of before. It's a company you mentioned in the introduction called Bert. Bert was an analytics company. Analytics was new to ad tech. I met these guys, they started asking me a bunch of questions and the next thing I knew, my own little cottage industry had been born. And so for the last like 10 or 15 years, what I've been doing is finding all of these really smart, really clever overseas ad tech companies that are trying to break into the big US market. And so I identify them, I figure out what's new and novel about them, I figure out how their messages would resonate with the US publishing community. And then I start making introductions to this network that, you know, this robust network that it built over the years and you know, and try to level the playing field. Adlib is the DSP agnostic buying platform that helps agencies and marketers scale Programmatic, smarter, faster and more profitably run premium campaigns across CTV Audio, Geo Fencing and YouTube all under one roof with zero trafficking headaches, no bloated fees, no complexity, just enterprise grade performance built for growth. And Ad Lib isn't just a platform. They are your partner. Their team helps you win new business, expand budgets, improve ROI that keeps clients coming back. Unlock programmatic and getadlib.com g e t a d l I b com. You know, for, for these companies that the only disadvantage they have is that they're not American. You know, then of course the pandemic came and the world got much smaller and the need for that sort of thing decreased. And you know, what is a guy at my age and in my position, I think that's a fantastic thing. All of these overseas ad tech companies are doing really, really, really smart things. You know, there used to be a big gap between, you know, US ad tech and, and ad tech coming particularly from Western Europe. That gap has now closed. I could even make arguments that much of the ad tech coming out of Western and Northern Europe is better than the ad tech you find in the United States. And so, you know, I continue to Try to identify these companies that are coming out of other parts of the world and import them into the US Market and, and you know, connect them with the publishers who in this day and age are obviously struggling a little bit, need all the good tech that they can get.

B (7:34)

What do you feel is the hardest part? When you know, whether you're reaching out or whether they're reaching out to you to, to work with you directly, what do you think is the determining factor, deciding on working with them? And I know when there aren't 10 people reaching out, sometimes you just decide by saying yes. But what's like really the one thing that you look for and go, wow, I actually believe in this product. I think that there's a good market fit.

A (7:56)

Yeah. So I mean, you know, it, it is, it is. In my case, the answer to that question will always be something that we haven't seen before, you know, a new and novel product. And that becomes increasingly difficult with every year. So, you know, Spiny, for example, I had never seen or for that matter, hear of a, you know, of a content analytics suite. I know that Parsley had one. I'm not suggesting that it was, you know, rudimentary, but it was just a less sophisticated model. You know, Spiny's model came along. It was an absolutely spectacular piece of technology. But, but I think I have to sort of reverse engineer my answer to that question, atg and say it's not so much what I think, it's what I think that the publishers think. And so I try to sort of insinuate myself into their position. I try to think about what they've heard before, how they will respond to the pitch. When I go through the benefits and value propositions that this company has been talking about, I ask myself, will this resonate with these companies? I mean, you know, for example, if you're talking about another, you know, header bidding solution or another wrapper, you know pretty well these companies are going to gloss over and you know, they're not going to pay any attention. If that's what you're bringing to them, you might as well not bring it. You know, the challenge on the other side is that when you do have something new and novel and you're breaking new ground and all you have ahead of you is green field. You know, these companies, particularly in this day and age, these giant publishers have two big problems on their side, the first of which is they are incredibly risk averse. You know, they don't want to be the one that brought in this piece of tech and saved Themselves. Look, if it works, you're a hero. If it fails, you're fired. Right? Yeah. And I think the second thing is that you have, you know, you have so many stakeholders in Comscore 50, you know, you have so many departmental stakeholders, you have so many stakeholders within each department that trying to get consensus and trying to get a product move forward has at this point reached the challenge that I'm not sure anybody who isn't already sort of insinuated into the process, you know, anybody trying to crack into new things this day really has a big challenge ahead of them.

B (10:03)

From what you've seen with the publisher market in particular, like it's, it's, we like to say it's under attack. There's a lot of challenges. The open web seems to consistently see this decline of traffic even prior to LLMs. Like we're starting to see the, the walled gardens really capturing the users and keeping them there. The source of news is no longer necessarily going to CNN.com, yes, they go there, but they'll see the post on Facebook or an Instagram screenshot or an image or a quick summary. What becomes more important for publishers now with the industry changing so much and the traffic steadily on a decline so.

A (10:38)

Well, I mean, you know, you sort of answered your question with your own answer. I mean, you know, it's that traffic. It's obviously also the trust and the credibility and that relies more on obviously the consumer than it does the, you know, the publishing outlet itself. I mean, I'm sure that these publishers are all producing very credible news, you know, fact based, researched and sourced appropriately for the most part. Obviously there have been some scandals on the editorial side of some of the big pubs, but I think, you know, the big problem that they have and you know, one of the things that I think has changed and for the better, you know, it's one of the things that I feel is a very promising change is that people are now starting to really question where they're getting their news from. You talked about, you know, Facebook and other social media driving people to the site. I mean, you have to sort of hope that that happens. It's not the best thing for the publisher, obviously, that their traffic isn't coming directly to them, but it's coming from social media outlets. But better that than nothing because at least when they arrive at the, you know, particular outlets, real website, they are getting credible news from credible sources. You know, there's a documentary I watched the other day on PBS about Alden Capital. I'm going to not speak too ill of Alden Capital because a really good friend of mine works there. But they have this documentary that I recommend to anybody working particularly on the, on the, on the sell side. It's called Stripped for Parts. It's the story of Alden Capital and talks about how all of the local news in our country is going away literally at like two or three or five publications a week. And you know, and, and it's a really interesting documentary because these journalists, not just for the sake of their own jobs, not just for the sake of their own greed and their own futures and their own paychecks, you know, but for the love of the industry and the, you know, and because of the importance of local news and what happens when local news goes away, have really activated and taken up this crusade to make sure that, you know, local media sticks around, that it continues to remain financed. You know, I won't talk about NPR and public television and the funding around those things because those are just two hot potato subjects that I, you know, don't care to get into for what I'm sure are obvious reasons. But I did really like the fact, you know, that some promising news came out of this documentary, this PBS documentary, you know, that, that, that the, that the pulse seems to be changing, that the publishers seem to really recognize the importance of their job and how they need to, you know.

B (13:13)

Hello, friends.

A (13:14)

Guess who? That's right, it is I, the replacer.

B (13:19)

Once again, I've been called on so.

A (13:21)

You can play the new Call of Duty Black Ops 7 with three expansive.

B (13:26)

Modes, 18 multiplayer maps, and the tastiest zombie gameplay you've ever freaking seen.

A (13:34)

Call of Duty Black Ops 7 available now. Rated M for mature. Maintain the credibility and how the public has begun to react.

B (13:46)

Where do you think things are heading overall when it comes to the ad tech space? AI's utilization is becoming more and more common. I'm not sure if you were at marketexture Live that we just had a couple weeks ago, but Terry Kawaja has a way of speaking and a way of talking about the industry. He's very much so a very bullish on the industry person. I understand why. I totally get it. But for the first time, really publicly, he kind of came out and said, you know, there's a lot of companies that are pretending to have AI and then I look at their solution and it's nothing. How do you think AI is going to benefit publishers? How do you think it's going to play a role in the growth of the space? Even though we're seeing a little bit of headwinds, if you can say that towards the industry just because of all the change.

A (14:27)

I think you can, and I think it's exactly right. I mean, you know, I do think, you know, ad tech in general has this, you know, attitude towards the bright and shiny. It's always been that way, you know, for as long as I've been around. And again, I've been around as long as any in this industry. You know, we have talked about these bright and shiny objects that people seize on. And so, you know, suddenly everybody is, you know, got a dot AI domain. They're, you know, built on machine learning and all these things. And you know, I think they, they do a huge disservice. I think the reality of it is, is that there are useful advantages of AI for the most part. You know, I'm not that pro, or to steal your term, bullish on AI. I do think that AI moving forward will have some, how shall I say this diplomatically, you know, some use and value, but I think at the moment it does more harm than good. You know, I don't think that people really fully yet understand all of what it like, you know, for example, I'm going to just, you know, transition off the industry for a moment. You know, if I were working in biotech or pharma research and somebody told me that you could synthesize a protein in a day that used to take 10 years and that will lead to a breakthrough cancer drug and be like, AI is the greatest thing I've ever heard. Right. I mean, you know, easily you say, you know, there are solutions for which AI is absolutely like they are going to cure cancer. There's no question that with the use of a powerful technology like that, you know, can you say the same thing about, about publishing or that ad tech industry? No, I don't think so. I don't think the ad tech, I'm sorry, I don't think the AI is there. I don't think that the AI people haven't really figured out what the applications for these things are. I mean, going back to Spiny for a moment, Spiny had AI recommendations baked in. It was useful. You know, don't get me wrong. But it was not the core feature. The core feature still remained the content analytics platform. Could it learn, you know, could it machine learn and make recommendations on which content you should, you should create more of? Because it's. Yeah, I can, but that's a pretty rudimentary task. And so, you know, I'm, I'm not sure I get quite what all the AI hype is. I do think that if you ask me this question two or three or five years from now, we'll give you a very different answer. But at the moment, you know, I think it's a lot of smoke, very little, you know, very little fire, a lot of hype and not a whole lot behind it.

B (16:44)

One of my colleagues posted about this just the other day about the, the overemphasis of AI across all of like the marketing material across the messaging in market and that people are getting a little bit of AI fatigue and it, it's a little bit crazy like the amount of like AI usage already and even just us talking about it today. But it' such a hot topic. But there's so much push towards AI is going to revolutionize the industry and it's going to do this. But like we're not even there yet. A lot of it is hypothetical. We talk about operationalizing things and increasing efficiency with AI. I'm not necessarily sure I've seen anything that's really done this at scale. Sure it's on a few beta partners, sure it's rolled out to one or two partners overall, but not at scale. Even with the gen AI solutions in market, there's been some acquisitions in the market. There's talks of more. I hear a lot what happens. The creative that's being spun up is, is not of agency quality. Right. It's not done with a team of experts. So yes, it's here. Is it replacing? Not necessarily in my opinion.

A (17:51)

Yeah, but you know, the reality of it is, is that right, like you know, people are assessing things, I assess things like this. I mean going back to what I said at the very beginning, right. New company from some foreign country comes along and starts telling me it's pitch starts talking to me and I start asking them questions about their benefits and value propositions. And you know, one of the things that immediately comes up is AI. And you say like look, you know, as a marketer my job is to talk about things that the audience I'm targeting wants to hear and that's what they want to hear. So don't blame me. The reality of it is, is that you know, everybody has to your point, you know, jumped onto this buzzword. They want to be part of this AI revolution. And so if you come in there and start talking about AI, you're just telling these people what it is that they want to hear. And you know, and there is a fair argument behind that. I don't support it. And I don't do it myself. And I think that if you have really good AI, then you should talk about it. But if you're talking about it just merely as putting a hook in someone's mouth and you don't really, you know, back it up, but you're just sort of using the, you know, the current nomenclature or the current trend just so that you can attract more attention. You know, again, going back to the way things were back in the day. Back in the day, you could sell what we used to refer to as the three wheeled car. You know, you'd say to somebody like, you know, the tech isn't quite ready yet. We have a three wheel car. Drive it like this and we'll give you the fourth wheel and we'll straighten you out, you know, but for now you'll be fine. You could just go down the road on three. Now you, you, you can't do that stuff anymore. The buyers, especially on the sell side, the publishers, they're way too sophisticated. They have been burned way too many times by, I'm not saying bad ad tech vendors or bad actors who have tried to sell products, but you know, we work in an industry that works at a breakneck pace. You're under a lot of pressure to get your product into market as quickly as, you know, to try to get an exit as quickly as you can. And so there are defensible points of view for companies like this that say to themselves, what do you want me to do? My investors are demanding that I roll this thing out. My investors are demanding that I have AI and machine learning. You know, I do actually have this type of thing. And so are they window dressing? A little bit? Sure. Are they putting lipstick on a pig? I don't know that I would go quite that far. You know, I, I, I, I, I get it. As a guy who is a, you know, former, former marketer myself, you know, it's tempting to talk about and it is real. I just think that people tend to exaggerate. The hyperbole is really what the problem is, not the AI.

B (20:17)

So what are you excited about, Michael? Like where, where do you see things going? Where do you see an opportunity? As someone who's been in the industry for quite some time, what are you bullish on?

A (20:25)

I, I mean, you know, I remain bullish. I, I am, I am a dedicated, you know, fully bought into the sell side. I absolutely believe in the publishers. I'm glad to see, you know, it's really encouraging to see that all of these publishers are sort of Starting to really stabilize. You know, that the audiences, people talk about these audiences going away. You and I talked about it, you know, leaving for social media. Now I see all those trends starting to change. I think social media, I mean, you know, I have children, my children who were social media addicts a year or two ago are, you know, less and less on a daily basis using social media. You know, I have been very anti social media, you know, sort of since the beginning. I don't know if you saw. Professor Galloway was on the Today show this morning talking about the harm that social media has done to men, particularly young men in the United States. You know, I think there's a number of us that are out there, guys my age that are, you know, have not been fans and will not be fans of social media. And so I'm glad to see that social media is starting to give back the audiences to the publishers. I think the publishers are, you know, really starting to say to, as I said, you know, stabilize and do better. You know, I'm sure you saw the news last week about the Daily Beast and how successful they've become, the turnaround that they've undergone. I do think the Daily Beast is, is a model for what a lot of publishers are going to start seeing in the next couple of quarters and years. And so I'm incredibly optimistic about the, you know, the sell side of the equation. And to me, the sell side of the equation is the very core because without it, there is no buy side. Right. There's nothing to buy on.

B (22:09)

Thank you for saying that. Because most people don't.

A (22:11)

And so, I mean, if we don't, if, you know, if we don't work together to make sure that publishers stick around, you know, it harms the, the buy side worse. They don't have anywhere to, you know, to transact their buys and put their creative. And so, you know, like I said, I'm a, you know, tried and true dug in sell side guy. I always will be. I got a couple of years left in this industry unless the industry will be kind enough to keep me for a few more, because I'll stay as long as it will have me because I love it that much. And you know, and, and I do think that finally it took a long time. There was a lot of zigs and a lot of bad zags. But I do think things are finally starting to turn around and that, you know, we're starting to see really important improvement.

B (22:54)

When you look at the, the gaps in the market today and as you build and think about the future, where do you see yourself fitting in? And, and what type of concepts do you have in mind if you want to talk about them or ideas do you have in mind that you think would be beneficial to the space?

A (23:11)

You know, I hate to keep answering your questions ATG with a question or, you know, or, or filling them in, but, you know, it's, to me, the only answer to that question is, you know, look, I, I'm not, I'm not a, a guy who complains about isms, but, you know, the industry is not particularly friendly to, you know, people my age. So, you know, I, I, I, my, my hope is that, you know, people will start to understand the value that guys my age bring. Uh, we do have a lot of experience, right? The joke I make in all this is I say the exact same thing. You know, you say you walk into a doctor's office, God forbid you a very serious operation on your brain. I'm going to offer you two doctors. One doctor has done the operation once, one doctor has done it 10,000 times. Which one of the two doctors do you pick, right, to do this delicate surgery on your brain? And people always say, well, obviously, I take the guy for 10,000 to say right now, just think about that in the context of ad tech. We've been around a long time. We've seen a lot of things. We've been through a lot of battles and a lot of wars. We've come out of these things a little bit scarred, but still in one piece. And so, you know, I, I think that, that, that, like, you know, I'd like to stay in the industry as long as the industry will have me. But if I'm being honest, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find work. And, you know, and some of that has to do with a personality like mine, which, you know, I openly admit, rub some people the wrong way. But a lot of it also has to do with the fact that just, you know, you sort of take a look at my, you know, my cv, you know, I get recommendations of people like, you got to take this off. Your thing is too long. Nobody cares about anything longer than 10 years. And you say, really? Like, is that the way these things go this, these days? You got to cut your LinkedIn profile down because nobody wants to see that. Your experience, you start talking about experience. Experience is a bad word. You know, what kind of industry or what kind of, you know, what kind of environment am I living in when experience turns out to be a disadvantage? And so I realized that that didn't exactly answer your question. But that's kind of the best answer I can give you. You know, I just continue to sort of stay on the same track of what I'm doing, other than this one project that I mentioned to you earlier, which I'm happy to talk about, if you think that the environment is suitable for it. Sure.

B (25:31)

Yeah. I would say, like, if you want to give a. I mean, I'm always happy to hear about the ideas in market. I mean, go. Go for it.

A (25:38)

So I've been working on this idea now for a couple of years that I sort of loosely refer to as Ad Aid. Ad Aid, you know, comes in the style of, again, for people my age, Farm Aid and Live Aid, in these big concerts of many decades ago that were really sort of charitable concerts that, you know, big musicians put on for, you know, good causes. And so, you know what, what I've always thought about that in the context of ad tech is, you know, we talk about all the time about how advertising, you know, there's the old joke about advertising. Say, I know half my advertising doesn't work. I just don't know which half. And so you say, you know, it's really both halves. Neither half works. People don't want to see ads. They're overwhelmed in ads. They see them. They view them as intrusive. And for a long time, the way the industry has met the increasing intrusivity, if that's a word, it probably just made it up, or the increasing intrusiveness of ads is to say, so you don't want to look at my ad. You don't like the ad. Okay, I'll tell you what I'm going to do now. I'm going to have a, you know, a screen takeover. I'm going to make it more intrusive. You're going to try to figure out a way to circumvent me. You're going to turn on ad blockers. You're going to configure these settings in your, you know, in your browser. Yeah, so. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to say, well, you know, originally the covenant was, hey, listen, you know, we're providing you this content. The least you could do is watch our ad. That was always a fair exchange. You know, you say, I'm consuming all of this content for free. I like free content. It's good for everybody because I can consume unlimited content because I don't have to worry about paywalls. And then suddenly, obviously, all of these things changed and people had to start pay for content. And they didn't like that. And the advertisers had to get more aggressive because people were just ignoring their ad. And so what I've been talking about with adyen for a long time has been, you say, instead of making this experience worse for the end user, why don't you try to do something to make it better for them? You steal their data and you sell and you profit on it. They don't like that. You cut off the enjoyment of their YouTube video by sticking some midroll in the middle of things, which is an obnoxious, unwelcome intrusion. Also not good. Why don't you try to figure out something that would make the experience better for the end user? And the only way I could figure out how to do that was to give them something, let them gain something from that experience. So the idea behind Ad Aid is you say, you know, you can have ad aid sponsored ads, and these are ads that you know will work in ib, in standard IAB units. You don't need to change your creative. You don't need to change anything. You just need to layer a button over it that says, this is an ad aid ad. And the hope would be that people will start clicking on it because they will derive a benefit from that experience. To date, there has been no advantage to a user clicking on an ad. You say, well, you learn about a product or you learn about a service. No, you don't. No, you don't. Nobody clicks on ads click through. Rates remain fractions of 1%. It's been that way for eons. And it's not going to change. How do you get people to interact with your ad, to care about, give them something to care about. And so if they can participate in the process and derive a benefit from it, then maybe somebody will actually click on an ad and care about the content of that ad. And so that's all ad aid wants to do, is try to figure out a way to say, you know, we could take you through to a landing page. We can make donations to, you know, charities or other causes. We can do something good. You know, you have companies like Bombas that give away a free pair of socks or Patagonia or, you know, Dawn Dishwashing Liquid. All of these companies out there that have these environmentally friendly products or that care about things, you know, the generations of people that are coming up in this day and age care. They genuinely care. And so, you know, this will play right into their hands and say, like, I'm taking an active role you know, I'm doing something to the benefit of my community or to my population or to my country or to my preferred charity or something. So, okay, it's an ad. I still don't love it, but at least I'm deriving something beneficial from the ad experience.

B (29:40)

That sounds really interesting. I'd actually be curious to see if there was a incentive. We'll call it incentive, but a incentive for users to click because it goes towards a charitable contribution or environmental or some sort of fairness, if that would actually increase the click through rate. I would guess that if I was on a website and I saw something like, you know, whatever, engage with this ad and you'd be helping donate to some sort of service, even if it's a dollar or a penny or a quarter of that ad impression, or even if it's a direct donation, the chances are I would be highly likely to donate or be involved. Especially if it's a cause I care about. I'd love to see it happen.

A (30:21)

I, I mean, and you know, and if you can determine, if you can determine that cause yourself, right? If you have control over that gives you even more control over the experience. Right. I think there's one last thing that I would say. I mean, you think about the number of celebrities and athletes, right? Like everywhere you go, you see LeBron James, you see Shaquille O', Neal, you see Kevin Hart, you see, you know, the two brothers. Who am I thinking of, the Manning brothers, right. And you say these guys are compensated to the tunes of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars by all of these giant brands. Let these brands take 10% of that spend. So, you know, if you're Shaquille O' Neal and you have 10 or 12 major brands that are paying you tens of millions of dollars, we're just talking about shaving a frack. Like you're still making $100 million this year in, you know, in, in, in ads. And so like you're doing just fine, you're a billionaire, you have enough money, we're going to just cut a little bit off this and we're going to reallocate that money to something a little bit more important than you going out and buying, I mean no disrespect by this, you know, another Lamborghini. And so, you know, I think that these athletes who are genuinely good people, many of them have foundations. You know, those foundations help. Like, you know, they would be very pleased to give away a portion. They're giving away a portion of that money already. This is just giving them one more channel to put that money towards. And so you say, you know, if you think about the hundreds of billions of dollars that are circulating around an advertisement just to celebrities and athletes, if we could just get a tiny fraction of that money, you know, allocated into different places, you know, things would go well. We presumably could fix or help a lot of things. And so that's the idea. Now the question is, you know, who in the audience is going to call me tomorrow and tell me that they want to help make this thing happen?

B (32:12)

Maybe, you never know, maybe someone's listening and they'll drop you a quick email or LinkedIn message and it becomes a reality very quickly.

A (32:19)

We can hope. We can always hope.

B (32:21)

Michael, I really appreciate you being on here. I am really glad that the introduction was made. So thanks again for being my guest and looking forward to talking to you soon.

A (32:29)

The pleasure was mine. I'll try to think up some things for the redux, which hopefully will come one year to date.

B (32:34)

We'll do it. We'll make it happen.

A (32:35)

I appreciate it. Thank you, sir.

B (32:38)

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 and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.