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Ep. 121 The Future of Streaming: Live Sports, AI, and the New Ad Economy with Ying Wang
00:29:22
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- [00:00]
A
Market Live is coming up March 10th and 11th in New York City. With us some, just some of the brands and agencies that have registered thus far. And don't worry, we'll be doing several of these announcements with us. Bayer, BMO, Farmers Insurance, Electronic Arts, the Hershey Company, HP, Huntington Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Kenview, L', Oreal, MasterCard, NFL, PayPal, PepsiCo, Redfin, Synchrony, T Mobile, Verizon, Workday, Ah, agencies. Want to hear which agencies are going to be joining us? Assembly, Butler, Till, Canvas Worldwide, Kara Choreograph, Kridera, Dentsu, Digitas, ipg, IPG Media Brands, Magnet, omd, PMG Publisher, Sapien, Razorfish, Wavemaker, WPP Media, and more. Can't wait to see you there. Go register now. Marketecturelive.com March 10th and 11th welcome to.
- [00:59]
B
The AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host at Tech God. Welcome to the AdTech Pod where we speak with the leaders of streaming television. Today we have Ying Wang, the general manager of Xumo Advertising. Ying had previously worked at companies like Freewheel. She's been at Comcast Advertising. Long story short, she's been in the comcast family since 2015, which is a very long time to be there. Prior to that, she has experience working at various broadcast companies as an intern. She is extremely well versed and knowledgeable about the streaming space, so I'm happy to have her here with me today. Ying, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:45]
C
So great to be here.
- [01:46]
B
You've been at Comcast Family, now Zumo for quite some time. I would love for you to run through your whole background, how you got to where you are today, specifically as a, as a female leader in the space. I'd love to hear your growth story and what you had to do to achieve so much success in your career.
- [02:04]
C
Yeah, and I never thought I'd be sort of in one large company for so long, but I've had so many great opportunities throughout my career. You know, I actually, I came to this country when I was four years old. I was born in China. My parents, you know, one was a researcher, the other was an accountant. So they had no idea about sort of anything media or advertising related. But I really got kind of interested in this industry in high school through journalism. I wrote for our like little school paper. I really loved the storytelling aspect of it. I almost went to journalism school. I'm glad I didn't. But in college I was really into sort of our school paper and I did A few internships, as you mentioned, for broadcast, local broadcast stations, just to kind of, you know, be able to figure out how to tell stories about different topics. And, you know, it was my way of feeling like I could have an impact on the world through giving people information, through news. And I loved it a lot. But ultimately, you know, I was trying to figure out, is this the right place to start my career. Usually people who kind of work in journalism have to start at the lowest of the low DMAs and kind of work their way up. And I was, you know, a little hungrier. I wanted to work in a more fast paced environment. So I ended up going to consulting for a few years to pick up some business skills. But in the back of my head, I always wanted to kind of come back into the media space. When I went to business school, I told myself, like, I'm going to graduate, I'm going to get a job in media. But at that time, I didn't even really even know what jobs existed in media. So, you know, I ended up trying a few things. One of them, I worked at Warner Brothers doing digital content distribution. This was the day where people still rented DVDs, bought DVDs. ITunes was big and streaming, especially ad supported streaming, was not on anybody's radar. The second internship I did actually was at Freewheel. And this was at the very early days of Freewheel, before Comcast owned Freewheel. Again, I didn't really know what they did either, but I knew that they worked with a lot of big publishers and that intrigued me because I wanted to work in media. And long story short, I loved the entrepreneurial nature of free will. At that time it was only 200 people. The founders are amazing. We were really helping publishers grow their digital ads businesses. I was hooked. And so I decided to join Freewill full time. But little did I know right before I joined Freewheel was acquired by Comcast, which is, you know, one of the biggest media companies conglomerates in the world. And I was a little bit disappointed. I was like, I wanted to join the startup and kind of go do a lot of innovative things. But it ended up being kind of the best of both worlds because within Comcast, we were still allowed to be very independent. We were on a huge growth trajectory. We were going and acquiring other ad tech companies and kind of figuring out this space. And it was a perfect place for me to kind of cut my teeth, learn about the media and the advertising industry and kind of grow a career from there. And yeah, and so I was at E. Freewill for eight years, I did a variety of different things. I worked with publishers, I worked internally. When we bought Beeswax Sticky ads, I helped integrate them into the company. And then I had an opportunity to go to Comcast Ads and be chief of staff for James Rook, who was running. Is running the Comcast advertising business. And that's where I got to work with the Zumo team. So I think you guys know Comcast acquired Xumo that time. Zumo was just a fast kind of app, Fast platform in 2020. And then in 2022, Comcast and Charter came together to form a joint venture and really bring Xumo into the device and platform space. And during that time, you know, I was really interested in figuring out, hey, how can I help run a business? How can I kind of build a business? And Zumo was sort of the perfect combination of. It had a lot of great kind of growth potential, but was in this transition period, you know, I'd worked with a ton of other publishers in the past, so my skills working with smaller publishers and bigger publishers really translated to the Zumo business. And so, you know, over time, I got to sort of build out this team, and now we oversee all of the monetization across all the different aspects of Zumo.
- [06:27]
B
Amazing. I just so, you know, I actually had Doug Knopper on Pod a while back.
- [06:32]
C
Oh, love it.
- [06:33]
B
And so I loved hearing his story about building it out. He's pretty unfiltered. Like, I think he asked me at the end, was I a little too unfiltered? I said, no, I think you're fine. I mean, it's. You don't work for any of these companies anymore, so you could say whatever you want. But he has a very strong opinion, very smart, really understood the space very early on and saw the potential. And nothing makes me happier than hearing a company that is, you know, grinding it out and working hard and building teams to get acquired by a bigger company. And I think that that's always everybody's kind of hope that they can build something that's so much value. When you joined Freewheel in the early days and you started working across the board with things like advisory services and then moving into operations, how much has actually changed in the streaming space since you started? I know ad revenue has changed, but has there been a lot of developments in terms of how the content's distributed, how it's monetized, et cetera?
- [07:26]
C
Totally. So one of the first things I did when I was at Freewell is I worked on this report. It Was called the vmr, the video at that time Video Monetization Report, now it's the Video Marketplace report. But it was kind of a high level trend of how digital ad spend and ad impressions were growing in the industry. I remember when my first report like 95% of all the ad impressions were on desktop. It was crazy. And then we saw very quickly the mobile start to grow and then this new category called ott, if you guys remember, you know, everyone called it OTT at the time was big with set top box being a big port portion of it. I mean now you think about connected TV like that is the majority of how streaming is consumed. And that happened in a, in a span of, you know, 10 years, which is crazy. So obviously the distribution, the way that people consume it has evolved a lot. You know, when we were working with publishers at the time, you know, people didn't even know like how many ads do you put in a full episode, you know, show. So we actually did a lot of testing with them to be like, hey, if you put this much in a mid roll, this is the amount of user lift you would get versus the drop off. And it was just really fun kind of being in the ground floor helping a lot of publishers really figure out how to build the ads business. Like yield management, like people had kind of very small yield teams at the time. So like forecasting was a big question, how many avails do we have? And to some extent those are still on the same questions. We're still talking about ad experience, we're still talking about how to manage yield. But there's so many more tools now. You know, most of everything was going direct back in the day. Back in the day. It's like not that long ago. And now, you know, you have all of these great tech platforms and players who are helping with monetization, helping kind of, you know, automate a lot of the yields decisions in a way that just wasn't happening before. So I think it's super exciting just to watch it kind of change in the last few years. And now beyond the publisher side, I have so many more tools and so many partners I can work with to optimize my business. It's like, you know, a kid in a candy shop.
- [09:42]
B
It's pretty incredible because you know, I do remember the OTT phase where the argument was, is it OTT or ctv? The ad serving capabilities and market were different back then. Even like you mentioned, like the distribution of content was relatively easy. It was kind of like a direct app. Then it was like, oh, let's do VMV PDs. And it's like, how do we divvy up the inventory? We have commits. We don't have commits. Forecasting, like, it's a very complex industry when you look into it. And having the right tools in place are beyond important. And so with you flipping over from kind of like the technology provider at Freewheel, moving into the publisher side, I could definitely see where there's value and that skill set and education that you learned while you were at free will.
- [10:24]
C
Yep, for sure. And I mean, I got to see how so many different publishers did it too. You know, everyone from the large programmers who had big linear businesses and were trying to transition kind of that linear knowledge into digital and streaming versus folks who are just streaming natives who are embracing programmatic a little bit earlier. And, you know, I feel like we could get to hop. We get to skip a few steps because of some of the experiences I had at freewheels.
- [10:50]
B
Also, like, a lot has changed, not only on the ad potting and user experience and frequency capping and competitive separation aspects of serving ads. Like, I think the biggest growth trajectory that I keep hearing about is live sports. And, you know, February is a really big month for live. We have the Olympics, we have the super bowl, we have the NBA All Stars, and we have like a lot of sport tentpole events happening. How are you guys, as Zumo, addressing that or prepared for that, really?
- [11:19]
C
Yeah, I think everybody's talking about live sports because it's sort of one of the few areas where demand actually outstrips supply. You know, there's so much supply out there, you know, in overall, but live sports is one area where, you know, it's scarce. And what is really cool about Zumo and this gets into sort of our platform story is we are a destination for life sports because we're bringing the cable MVPD apps into that experience. So we're able to directly link to live sports. But also we are the platform where you consume your fast, you consume your AVOD shoulder content. So we can really curate a very great kind of moment around a live sports event. As you know, now I feel like a lot of people don't just consume the live event. There's, you know, the lead up to it. There's all these podcasts about it. There's afterwards, you know, the, the Golden Globes just happened. I did not watch the Golden Globes. I felt like I knew everything that happened because of social, because of podcasts, because everything else. And so I think that ecosystem of content is just as important as the live event itself. The live event is going to create the buzz, but it's about how do we bring audiences, connect them through the whole journey and keep them engaged even after the event is over. But I'm really excited to lean into some of the big moments. Obviously, when we have the Olympics coming up, we're doing some really great partnerships with NBC to have a Olympics hub on Zumo, and we're bringing an advertiser in for the first time to sponsor that. So that's a huge one for us. Obviously, the playoffs and some other sports, we're building some really unique packages that again, not just put people in the game, but also bring them into the surrounding conversations. Because if you think about it, you know, these live premiere events only happen a couple times a year, but the NBA Fast channel is there the whole year where you can catch up on replays, you can catch up on content and whatnot. And it's a great compliment to the peaks of the big live shows.
- [13:24]
B
And you mentioned something about the distribution of content and still feeling like you're there whether you're watching it live or not. And I think that's something that streaming's been able to provide that kind of like traditional television did not. You know, previously you'd watched the Olympics as an example, and if you missed it, you pretty much missed it. Now, if you don't watch the Olympics, you can view it on social, but you can also view clips and highlights on all these streaming apps and streaming channels like Zumo. And I think the, the TV industry has changed so much to where the slicing and dicing of content and repurposing it to be viewed in snippets has improved. And it's become like this whole other group of audiences that maybe don't want to watch the Olympics for four hours straight, but they want to go and watch that one clip of that one Olympic athlete that they love, and they're able to do it. So it's really created a really personal experience in comparison to traditional tv.
- [14:20]
C
Yeah, I can't tell you how much figure skating content I've already consumed going into. And, you know, I know who the, the, the US Team are like I following Alyssa Lou on all the channels. And it's creating a lot of excitement for the actual event. But it also lets you realize it's, you know, these people train their whole lives. It's not just a one and done thing which we see and then we go back to our normal lives. You know, they have, you know, world championships, they have this. They really don't have an off season. And that's definitely what streaming is able to do, is get a. Get a view into, you know, the story behind the story.
- [14:56]
B
Like, we talk a lot about personalization. We usually talk about that as it relates to, like, relevant ads and having ads that are relevant. But I don't think people really value just how much work it takes for a streaming company to be able to create some sort of personalization or ability to personalize the content you consume. And I think it's really an undervalued feature that people kind of skip right by and go straight towards, hey, the ad was relevant. Yeah, but so was my entire feed. When I'm viewing this content outside of live, where do you see things heading in the next 12 to 18 months? Like, what are you really excited about as it relates to streaming television and Zumo in particular?
- [15:40]
C
Yeah, so, I mean, our team, you know, we've. We've been on a very sort of long journey. You know, when Zumo was first acquired by Comcast, you know, the ads team actually was part of Comcast. And, you know, I think over time we realized that the, it was really important for Zumo to have our own voice in market. And so we broke out our team to create a dedicated Zuma monetization team. And, you know, we started really growing our presence in market last year. We were able to, you know, show up bigger at a lot of industry events. We grew our sales team. We're going to do our first new front this year, which is, I'm really excited about. So I know, like, you know, there's still, there's a lot of noise in this space, but there are still a lot of really great kind of publishers like Zuma that people don't know about that. I'm excited to kind of evangelize the reach, the breadth, the capabilities of what we can do, you know, because, you know, we play in so many spaces. Most people don't know that Zumo reaches 60 million monthly active users because they're probably just thinking of, oh, Xumo as the fast app. Well, don't forget about all the channels we distribute across all the other OEMs. We're pretty much on every single connected TV. And then you add on our own and operate devices and that gets you even more scale and growth. And so from a Zumho standpoint, I'm really excited to show the industry what we can do this year. And then from an industry standpoint, I know, I feel like just in General the number of publishers you're seeing in the space. It's really exciting to see the democratization of content fast. And other sort of streaming platforms have really made it a lot easier for content owners to tell their stories and to distribute their content. And then now ad tech has made it really easy for those players to also monetize. So I know everyone's really worried about consolidation of media. You know, these big players coming together and definitely it's going to change the shape of the industry. But there is no lack of great independent new content coming out and players trying to kind of smaller players trying to make their own mark as well. So I'm excited, excited to see how that space develops and how sort of independent ad tech players continue to grow and get stronger in a world where people are looking for options to work for companies that are representing the ecosystem, not necessarily representing kind of your own needs.
- [18:15]
B
I know that Sumo has television sets. You guys also have a stream box where you can just plug it into any television device. Where do you see the importance of audience data, consumption data, even just the unique insights that you get as a TV manufacturer, as a device owner, which I think is rare for most TV companies or streaming companies. Where do you see the value in our advertisers understanding the value that you deliver by, by having access to that, I'm going to say it privacy compliant and respective data.
- [18:49]
C
Yeah, for sure. I think the way I see us more is less of a device owner and more of an operator, like an operating system, you know, and I think that's really important. So we're sort of the software that exists across multiple types of devices, be it stream boxes, be it televisions, kind of where the, you know, where, where the os, where are the kind of ground floor technology that manages the user experience, manages sort of the data and the controls and I think that's really powerful. So what we've been able to do is, you know, initially Comcast Charter have adopted this technology, but we've also been able to distribute and license the technology to other operators. So Cox, Mediacom and others we're working with, you know, both the US internationally and I think that's going to be really powerful to create this network of Zumo, you know, we call it actually entertainment. OS is the name of our operating system. But having that deployed in different places will help make sure that our standards around data and the way that we handle user experience is consistent in more and more TV sets and more and more TV screens. So I think that's really differentiation for Us from an advertiser perspective, it definitely has helped people see us in a different way that we now that we have our own and operated devices. I think in the past, people lumped us in with Pluto Tubi, which very much. We still have a fast business, but now that we are an operator or we have an operating system, we are talking more about what is the whole kind of home screen. What can the home screen bring? How can it create a more immersive moment around some of these live events we talked about? And it gives us just a much more complete story to bring to the advertiser instead of just saying, hey, you want some in stream inventory in some, you know, fast app? I think that is becoming less and less differentiated, though I will say, you know, most people buy us an audience. So as long as we can deliver those audience, we can prove that it's a quality audience. Like, that is what still drives our business. But to be able to go to some advertisers now and say, hey, we can offer you the audience reach, but complement that with, you know, a home screen sponsorship around these live moments and allow you to do some custom activation, like that is what's helping us kind of stand out.
- [21:11]
B
And this wouldn't be an ad tech podcast if I didn't bring up AI. And I feel like I bring it up on every podcast now, but we have to. It's just like too, too hot, too new. Are you guys utilizing any AI to better personalize that experience for your users? Are you using AI in how you serve more relevant ads? Is it something that's in the roadmap? I'd love to hear how it's being used at Sumo.
- [21:35]
C
Yeah, it's always been something that has been part of kind of Xumo's DNA. So AI is used to personalize the kind of recommendations we deliver to users. So when you go on Zumo Play, what you see in terms of your channel list and experience could be very different than what another user sees based on your preferences and user behavior. On the OS perspective, we're building in AI in order to help kind of make it a lot easier to find what you want. And so instead of just, you know, people knowing what shows they want to watch, they can say, hey, I have 30 minutes and I, you know, really like Pluribus. Can you recommend a show for me? So bring in more generative AI to make the discovery process a lot better. So from a user experience, there's definitely a lot of things we're doing from an ad tech perspective. We're definitely leaning into to AI1, you know, just now that we're getting into different creative formats and sponsorships, the amount of versions of creative that we have to do for mocks, for example, like that is starting to increase. And we use AI to help, you know, take advertiser logos and turn them into different types of creative formats that can be used across our platform. And then, you know, we're using AI for yield management and you know, now everyone's talking about Agentix, so that's something that we're testing as well. So it's really exciting that there's more and more tools at our disposal. But I do think like a word of caution and maybe it's more on the buy side, is I do sometimes fear that some of these tools will take some of the nuance out of buying and selling. And you know, ad tech is very nuanced. Not every publisher has made the same. And I worry that some of these sort of agentic buying platforms are just going to go with the default, the tried and true, you know, the big brands that people know about versus really understanding the value of a player like Zumo. We might not be a household name, but we have enormous scale, we have enormous data and you know, time will tell. But I know some of the early AI models tend to oversimplify things and I think we need a good collaboration between the AI and real experts in the ad tech space who can make sure that we're not losing out opportunities just because AI can give you a shortcut answer.
- [23:55]
B
I agree with you on that. I feel like there's historical data where you can make decisions on it, even if that historical data means three seconds ago. And I think that's important. But I also think that there's something called gut instinct and just like really deep understanding of trends that are future facing that I don't think AI in particular can solve for. Like yeah, we can forecast the fact that we might see a spike in traffic for a tent pole eventually and by doing so we, we, we adjust what we need to adjust. But there's also this instinct and gut and knowledge that you have about the way things trend that may be an anomaly that comes from the human element of it. And so as much as I love AI and simplifying operational side of things and maybe customizing, like you said, the UI for the user in order for them to have more relevant content, I do think that some of it is very nuanced and I don't know if AI will solve that problem, at least not yet.
- [24:48]
C
Yeah. And it might seem counterintuitive. I feel like everyone is thinking about how can I use AI to optimize my teams and lean more into sort of tech. I feel like in some ways we're not going the opposite direction. But Xumo historically has been so focused on in the past relying on other people to monetize our supply, and it sort of, you know, didn't allow us to tell our own story, our own differentiation. So we are starting to kind of claw that back and be like, we need to take more ownership of our own supply, our own story, our own go to market. And you can't do that with AI. You have to have people who know and breathe the product and then have the relationships too, to be able to tell that story successfully.
- [25:33]
B
Meaning you've worked in this industry for, I'm not going to say quite some time for a while.
- [25:38]
C
Right.
- [25:38]
B
You know the industry well enough and, and you've. You've obviously been very successful in your career. What advice would you give to people that are either entering the streaming space or in the streaming space in terms of how they can stay up to date on knowledge, how they can keep up with all the changes? Because, like, this space changes, like, so rapidly. What advice would you have for them on that?
- [26:00]
C
Yeah, I think just in general, regardless if you're in kind of the streaming space, any industry that's rapidly changing, I think always have a mindset that your job isn't just limited to your current function or what your JD says. Like, the reason I've stayed at Comcast for so long is because I've kind of always chased where's the white space? Or what's the gap? And even before people gave me permission to do it, I raised my hand and I said, can I solve that problem for you? And then over time, it kind of became my job. And so I think there's a lot of openness, especially in the streaming, in any industry that's going through change, for people to recommend new ideas, new roles even. I said this to some people earlier, but I don't. You know, it's a good chance that your next role doesn't even exist yet today. But it's not. Don't wait for a hiring manager to figure that out. You should figure that out yourself and, you know, talk to different leaders on what's needed, what's missing. And I think that's a really important mindset to kind of carry through just the. The growth mindset, the ability to really kind of fit in wherever there is the opportunity. And to just challenge assumptions. I think throughout my career I've always tried to challenge assumptions of, you know, you know, there haven't been a lot of people who look like me in this industry, can I be as successful in sales. And I've had a lot of great role models, you know, both men and women who showed me that, you know, you can and you know, but it's not necessarily kind of, you know, grain. It's not like drilled into you because you just haven't seen a lot of people like that. So there's challenge assumptions and what you can do. Challenge assumptions around what your role could be in the future. I think that's probably my biggest piece of advice. And then, you know, this might just be a personal philosophy, but I think it's really important to treat everybody the same, regardless if they're the CEO or if they're in sales and support. One, because you can always learn something from them and two, you never know like where people are going to go in your career. So, you know, I'm always very, when people email me, you know, I always take the call. I always try to help out. I, you know, treat everyone with the same level of respect and give them the same courtesy of the time because there is everyone here, you know, is going to do something incredible. You never know. The solutions Architect today, you're the CEO of a company tomorrow. And that's the beauty of adtech is the meritocracy aspect of it and the growth aspect of it.
- [28:33]
B
Ying, thank you so much for joining me today and thank you to the Zumo Team Comcast team for having you. It's been an absolute pleasure and great meeting you.
- [28:41]
C
You too. Thanks for having me.
- [28:43]
B
Of course. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Ad Tech 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.