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Ep. 62 Mergers, AI, and the Future of Video Advertising with Jenn Chen from Connatix
00:26:40
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- [00:03]
A
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- [00:54]
B
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 chat with some of the top revenue leaders in our industry. On this episode we're joined by Chen Chen, Chief Revenue Officer at Kinetics. Jen has been a leader in the edtech space since 2012, starting her career at AppNexus before holding key roles at Seismic and now Kanatics. In October of 2024, Kanatics merged with JW Player to form JWP Kinetics, creating the industry's largest independent video technology and monetization platform. Jen, I'm super happy to have you here. Welcome to the ADTech Godpod.
- [01:43]
C
Hi, thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
- [01:46]
B
Thank you for being here. Really big news in October with the merger. I almost totally forgot until it was mention mentioned right before this recording. That's pretty big news for you guys. I'm super excited to hear about it later on in the pod.
- [01:59]
C
I can't wait to share more because I think this is, this is a long time coming and we, we often joke that it's the industry's worst kept secret. So we. It's nice to end the year being open about it, right?
- [02:12]
B
It's, there's been so much change in acquisitions the last few months. I thought maybe it would slow down in the fourth quarter of the year, but it hasn't slowed down. There's. I'm. I'm hearing. Well another one happened just today with Audigent. I think it'll be like three weeks out from when this episode's released. But it's, it's just endless, endless acquisitions and mergers.
- [02:33]
C
Yeah, Bright Cove last week Bright Cove last week.
- [02:36]
B
Media Ocean, Innovid. Innovid. And that was huge. It was 500 million, which is a huge deal. There's never a day of calm in our industry. Let's just say that. Jen, I'd love to hear about how you started in the industry. You've worked at Appnexus, obviously a very familiar name to everyone that works in this space. And Seismic. Can you kind of take us back to when you started in this space and what brought you to where you're at today?
- [03:01]
C
Sure. I didn't start out in tech or in ad tech. Actually, I started out in banking. I was an aspiring curious financier working at Lehman Brothers in the worst of times. So that was in 2008. And I think through that I just saw a lot of different types of businesses, learned a lot about different industries, and it got me very curious about the Internet. Joined a small startup after banking. It was obviously a very tumultuous time and I felt like I wasn't learning enough for what I envisioned out of undergrad. So I joined a startup to see if I could start building and using some of the theory and the financial skills I learned to apply in a real life setting. And then that startup called Scoop street was where I first touched marketing and advertising because it's the lifeblood of any online business. And while I knew how to read a P and L, I actually didn't know anything about marketing. And I stumbled into kind of managing our Facebook advertising. I was doing biz dev. I was doing a lot of things that are typical of a startup. First hire, and then it got me really curious about advertising. And when, when we sold the startup, it was when I connected with some people who worked at AppNexus at the time. And for me, because it was such a blind spot and because I saw the growth through what was happening on, on the Facebook advertising side, I realized I wanted to learn a little bit more. So I really stumbled in just because I was curious. And I think that's the story for a lot of people who, who go into ad tech. It's not like there's a degree on advertising technology or a major that you can, you can focus on in school, but here we are. And I think epnexus is really my training ground. I'm very thankful for the years I've spent there because it was like undergrad, like my analogies that AppNexus was like undergrad. Seismic was like my MBA and then kinetics. Now minted JW P. Kinetics is My first real executional executive job after I've been trained really well from the prior two companies.
- [05:15]
B
Well, I mean, working at AppNexus must have been quite the experience. Like, I think it came from the founders of Right Media and obviously Brian O. Kelly's involvement, its acquisition, and what's happened since then. It's a pretty incredible company to learn from. And I feel like a lot of these early players, especially Appnexus, they've all become industry leaders now, right? They've all kind of grown in their careers and they've seen the evolution of the industry and sometimes the lack thereof of evolution, but they carry with them so much foundational knowledge of how it all works that it just really sets them up for success, I think.
- [05:52]
C
So I'm definitely the beneficiary of that. And the alumni community is so strong, as you mentioned. In fact, that's how I got to know Ari, and we just talked about Ari before we went live on the podcast. So that's how I got to know him pretty intimately during our early days, or my early days in ad tech, his later days, because he'd been at DoubleCoop before, but we were in the trenches trying to build innovation and incubated ideas within somewhat bigger company at Apnexus. And then that's coming back. Like a lot of ideas, actually. What's old is new and what's new is old. But a lot of those ideas are still very relevant today in what's happening with the industry.
- [06:33]
B
So I think, like, even the return of curation has been pretty fun to watch.
- [06:38]
C
Exactly, exactly. Curation, contextual.
- [06:42]
B
Yeah. I'm just looking forward to, you know, verticalized ad networks. That'll be fun. It's been quite a journey for you. I mean, looking at working at Appnexus and Seismic, what could you tell me about Kinetics and how do you personally feel those three particular roles or companies have really contributed to your success today? What is the highlight or the milestones that you'd like to share?
- [07:06]
C
Oh, there's so many. I guess I'll start with the present, since it's so fresh. Working on the merger has been an unbelievable experience. Being an executive at the table, orchestrating it, versus I think there was many, as you alluded to acquisitions and corporate change of control events in EP Nexus or adep. Nexus and Seismic. But I wasn't. I wasn't in the room. I wasn't in the process, you know, kind of early, early stage to finish, but I was a part of the aftermath. And the. You Know the pre and post a little bit, but the, the learnings have been really about how do you take everything that you've ever done in your career and like put it all together, right? So everything from financial planning and analytics and knowing how to run a model and plug numbers in, that was from my early days in banking. Understanding strategy and figuring out, you know, the evolution of multiple businesses and how they come together in a more unified go to market. That was much more from my seismic days because at seismic, we had done nine acquisitions of various sizes. Nothing, nothing is as transformational as JW P Kinetics, but, but a lot of acquisitions, including the largest one, Rockefeller, that touched the programmatic world and the programmatic business unit that I, that I was running at the time. And so it was my job at that point, not necessarily as an executive, not a C suite executive, but as a VP level executive to come up with the bottoms up story. Right, the grassroots story. How would clients, the story of nine companies coming together. What is seismic? We rebranded. We were, when I was hired, it was DG Media mine. It was a public company. So that was an interesting piece of how JW P Kinetics is now getting rewritten as a, as another big entity in our space. And, and then there was the upnexus like fundamentals, right? Of like how does ad tech work? What, what exactly is monetization coming together with a SaaS video business? How does programmatic and how are the APIs coming in? What are the different yield management and auction dynamics that can now play into the tons of data that are already on the JWP platform from them touching content and streaming content. I mean, just to give you a little bit of an idea, we now touch multiple client profiles from not just those who play in the ad tech ecosystem like DSPs and SSPs and advertisers, we also work in a very deep way with underlying technology for broadcasters. And that's very, very different how you would tell the story of what programmatic even means to them. And so at the scale of having over a billion hours of video streamed and 300 billion behavioral signals and now going from 10 billion to 200 billion advertising impressions, it's just orders of magnitude larger as a business. And so you really, I think you really stress test, or I've really stress test the muscle of, of processing a lot of information and still remembering the fundamentals of, of the ecosystem.
- [10:18]
B
Yeah, but processing that much information, especially at the scale that you're mentioning, which are huge, without understanding that foundational piece of it, it just becomes that much more difficult, especially as a, as a revenue leader. Also like understanding the space is really important. I think it's often an undervalued skill set for many. You can be a fantastic revenue leader, fantastic salesperson at all levels, but if you don't know the fundamentals of how the technology works, you're going to be left behind. And so I, I can tell obviously from your experience that you really understand like the ground level technology of it, which then helps you in being a leader and leading your team to be able to have those. Right conversations with people.
- [11:01]
C
Definitely. And in the ultimate clients as well. Right. Especially as a revenue leader. I think what you can often fall as you get more and more senior into the trap of is you don't relate to the clients as much anymore. You're sitting behind spreadsheets and you're sitting behind strategy documents and board meetings and you don't have that ground level feedback from when you were covering as an account manager or as a sales leader or sales rep or now. I touched a lot of different types of functions as well when, when I was at AppNexus and seismic. So it's all coming together because I, I miss some of that and I can still do some of that and I'm able to talk to people who are technical, especially on, on you know, some of our newer go to market initiatives that the decision makers are more technical and be able to, to kind of still whiteboard and get into the weeds. That's definitely been a product of having gone through such great places like, like AppNexus and Seismic.
- [12:00]
B
When you think about JW Player, the thing that really pops in my head is like web formats, but I think it's under underrepresented that you are across various formats. I think as a JW player historically was, was just web and mobile web. Correct. But now it's, it's across the board on all different types. Are you finding, are you finding getting access to I guess direct on page video that much more valuable than that additional hop that maybe you would have had to use before? Are you finding that those data points are better? Are you finding the signals you're receiving are better for your advertisers?
- [12:37]
C
So funny enough, the kinetics business and the JW business, at least in online, were very similar in trying to solve for exactly that. And the hop that people often forget is the hot content and kinetics historically came from the perspective of monetization first. So we wanted to touch the content with the video player and monetize that Content and therefore we built an entire ad stack behind that and that's the primary investment. JW also did that. They were very much trying to get rid of that hop, but not in terms of like what you mean by hop, like SPO hop. They were just trying to touch the content and create signals and allow the editorial teams and product teams of those publishers to then get rid of the hop. Or you know, to use the analogy again, they put the control back into non programmatic monetization stakeholders within the publishers to then determine what to do with that hop. And so they invested in editorial tools and content tools and technology first and then the programmatic monetization stack lagged and then vice versa. Right. For connect. So we smash them together in this merger beautifully. So I hope where the content still sits as that glue of where all these rich signals for both revenue people as well as editorial and content people and that rich data set can hopefully be enhanced even more so by. I think this is where you're also going by looking at CTV and being able to take some of the JW player platform in CTV and their use cases there. Empowering again that uncommon denominator of content in a different medium and connecting all those dots and still having the same sorts of use cases for the end client of revenue. Good user experience, content creation, interesting content. All that still applies just in the form of a connected TV or a smart tv.
- [14:49]
B
There's been a lot of change over the last quarter in the space as we had mentioned. What do you think has tailwinds behind it? Like where are you feeling the true opportunity in 2025 is for the advertising space as it relates to, you know, video or connected television.
- [15:06]
C
I like acronyms and keeping it simple. So I think it's. You said ctv, so that's a C. It's contextual, it's convergence. You meant, you mentioned curation, but sort of like the opportunities created by thinking about mixing Data Creative and the inventory. And so I'm talking about curation not necessarily in like how it's cut and dice into a deal ID or anything like that, but more broadly speaking of like how do we create new asset classes that are not just cookie based inventory? Right. And like how do you, how do you create something really interesting that that merges together all different types of signals that may have not existed because people are being stress tested to create something new to perform off of that is outside the cookie.
- [15:57]
B
What do you think are the biggest challenges as it relates to that? Because cookies are going away I think probably faster than we all think, but it's going away. Where do you find the biggest challenge for you? You know, talking to clients or talking to publishing partners. Where do you find it's the most challenging for you to kind of convey the value and the importance of, you know, being direct on page and what that means for everyone?
- [16:23]
C
I think it's performance because there just isn't performance data and insights, lags, targeting. Right. And we, we still haven't gotten rid of every cookie and there's going to be a lag before people realize what happens in other targetable attributes when they're getting used, such as, you know, various packaging that's done through curation, contextual, even like certain creative units that are also different. Like all of this is still to be proven. We've had a much longer time looking at the cookie based performance and attribution. We've had very little time to prove that any of this new methodology works. So that's the biggest challenge and there's nothing that we can do about it except to encourage people to try. And then sort of like the second order of that is when you know, how do you convince people to try? You're asking people to do more work, unfamiliar work, maybe new setups, a lot more manual work potentially to test strategies. And so that's like the, the residual hurdle as well of like trying to bring something new. You have to ask people to do more work.
- [17:33]
B
So I've been focusing a lot on the player on, on site, but outside of that you do quite a bit as it relates to content discovery. Are you finding that AI in particular is playing a huge role in improving that as a solution to your partners?
- [17:49]
C
I think this one is a blessing and a curse. So let me explain. The blessing is that we as technologists or we as JW P. Kinetics have been investing in machine learning, sort of like AI light in terms of creating new types of content using a lot of our internal tools for some time, I think think generative AI might be the new thing. Right. Like are we taking advantage enough of what's already out there and incorporating it back in to our original thesis that whether or not people like it, AI is coming in and automation of content and content creation is going to change the space. So we sort of prepared for it, but and we think we're ahead of that by taking some of our content curation and creation tools out to market over the last couple years. The curse of this is that unfortunately it's really affected the online publishing space in terms of search traffic, in terms of the destination for consumers. Right. They're not. They often go to a chatgpt first over what they used to do, which is to go to the website. Even something as previously prevalent as going and searching for a Thanksgiving recipe is now immediately showing up on ChatGPT. Like, and curate, curation is. I use the word more broadly, but that's another thing that's happening. Like ChatGPT is curating. We don't have editorial curating. So, you know, curation can be good and bad, but when AI is starting to curate, you lose page volume, you lose maybe some creativity, you might lose a lot of jobs. And ultimately, you know, you're, you're not seeing the growth that you saw 10 years ago in, in the online publishing space.
- [19:47]
B
You're also losing reliability. It's scary because Nobody Fact Checks ChatGPT. It could get pretty scary. You know, something as simple as looking up historical info. It could be very inaccurate because the source that it's reading from is inaccurate, because it's not confirming that this is a reliable source of information or something as simple as, like, the recipe that they gave you, it pulled from some site that happened to be on Reddit and the guy put on there, you need to cook your turkey for 82 hours and now it's burnt. So there's, there's no fact checking happening. While if you go to a traditional site, at least, you know, like, you know, Chef John is, you know, a chef for 15 years, he's reliable, his recipe is very thorough. You know, it's all written down correctly. But on ChatGPT, you're just not sure they're getting better with those sources. But they're still, it's still far away from that.
- [20:41]
C
Right, exactly. Which is why our perspective is that AI has to be a means to the end, not the end itself. Right. It has to be a tool that allows and still places the ultimate responsibility and power, but really responsibility on the humans or the professionals, the experts, as you mentioned, to have the last say.
- [21:03]
B
Right? I totally agree. You've been in this space, can I say, for a long time, Jen?
- [21:09]
C
I mean, of course, 2012, it's, yeah, it's been a. You know, it's interesting. Our whole space hasn't been around for that long, so I think you can say that.
- [21:17]
B
Right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, you know, it's like, you know, since 2012, what, what keeps you around. I, I know why I'm sort of still in it, but I'd love to hear your opinion on, on why you're still here, why you enjoy it, and why you hope to see yourself in it in the future. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you want to quit and, you know, start a cafe.
- [21:36]
C
That sounds nice.
- [21:37]
B
That does sound nice. That's been my dream. Yep.
- [21:40]
C
I think the, the answer is also a C word. It's community. I think it's about the community and the people and the creativity. Oop, that was unintentionally a C word that, that's created within the community that we come up with ideas and it's so quick to execute. I think that is the main difference between the career path I've chosen and the road not taken. If I had stayed in finance and I followed a lot of my peers into their paths, you just can't really get things done as quickly. Like it's, it's much more bureaucratic, it's often political. In, in some of the industries I've been around for much longer or I guess the opportunities to innovate are fewer and farther between versus I think in our industry you have an idea, you can see if it works or not pretty quickly. And the only constant is change. That's very exciting.
- [22:37]
B
You know, my identity isn't known to all, but it's known to some. And one thing I've noticed is the sense of community that we have in our industry is like unreal in comparison to other spaces. I have same friends who are attorneys. They're not as tight knit. I have friends who are, who are. My, my neighbor's a doctor, he doesn't hang out with other doctors. Got one other doctor friend. Everybody else does something different. But in our space, especially with me, I think a majority of my friends work in this space. Which shows you that it's, it's not just work, that it is really relationship driven. Of course value matters. Of course you know, your, your, your product that you're bringing to market matters. But a lot of it is just we've all become this nice community of people that help each other out and work to grow our businesses and kindness.
- [23:25]
C
I think you mentioned that at some point. Yeah, I think it's a very kind community for the most part.
- [23:30]
B
For the most part. I'd say like 99% of people in this space are pretty good. You got the few rotten apples, but for the most part everybody's pretty nice and supportive and kind. And I've interviewed a lot of them in the 50 something episodes now. And it's just nice to hear the outreach I get when I announce a podcast Guest and I get a DM or a message and they're like, oh my God, we love that person. They're my work wife, they're my work husband. Like, they're my best friend of 15 years. I've worked with them for five years. Love that person. So glad they're there. It's cool. It's really nice to hear that across the board. It's amazing. And Jen, you know, last question before we, we wrap it up. There's, there's a lot of change, a lot of stress, a lot of growth targets. Obviously with, with your recent merger with jw, that adds some stress to life, right? A lot of work deadlines to get done. But how do you, how do you check in on your happiness? And I think that's something people don't often ask themselves.
- [24:28]
C
Really good question. I think it can be hard because it is so fast paced to slow down and check in. I think a couple things, a litmus test is, am I laughing at work? Are there opportunities to laugh? Am I feeling uplifted by my team, by a meeting, by, you know, ultimately, you know, something that has happened over the week. I also think it is very idealistic to think that every day you're gonna be super happy. I think that I take the perspective, like you kind of track the day by day, but you also look back, you know, week by week, month by month. And I've always noticed there's ups and downs for sure. And so when there are downs, you know, do you still have the right community, the right people to talk to about those downs and be real with people about those downs and why was down, whether it's inside your company or outside of it and get back up. And I think that's, that's kind of the marker like, can you still get excited about something and do you still feel like you can change that down? Do you feel like you have agency over what you're doing and to create the next happy moment so that, that kind of keeps me going.
- [25:46]
B
Jen, I want to thank you for being here and thank you to Kinetics and thank you for your team that brought you here. To Sarah and everyone, truly thankful for your time today.
- [25:55]
C
Likewise. Thanks for having me.
- [25:58]
B
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 adtech. 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 ad tech.