Ad Tech God (4:07)

So you were part of an acquisition, a pretty sizable one in the video space as part of the Tube Mogul acquisition. And now MIQ is heavy in the video space as well. What do you think you learned moving from what is a massive company like Adobe into what was when you joined probably a much smaller, more nimble M IQ.

Mo Chugtai (4:30)

Yeah, I mean when I joined MIQ we were maybe 200 people. I think we're about 1500 globally now. So that's over the course of eight years. So you've seen, you know, I've seen sort of that transition from, you know, a relatively small sized company to a mid sized company. I think the big thing that I get excited about in that transition is there's just so much pace, so much growth, so much kind of innovation that happens at that stage. You know, when I joined, our founder Gorman was taking, even at 200 people, every single new hire he would interview individually himself. And that's something that really stood out to me, right? Like, I've always been someone who values a personal connection with the leaders that I'm working for. It's really important for me actually to feel like the person on the other line cares about me and I care about them and we're building something together. You know, that's something that stood out in that interview process. And it's been something that, as MIQ's grown, I've always appreciated, is we haven't sort of lost that piece. You know, that was something that Tubemogul did really well as well under, you know, Brett Wilson's leadership and kind of the crew there. You know, Jeremy and I worked together at Tubemogul and, you know, I always say it's. It's one of the best sort of entry points that anyone could have had into advertising. It was such an innovative culture, but just good people, right? People that you'd want to hang out with outside of work. And I think, I mean, it's just so important.

Ad Tech God (5:53)

I mean, I don't think that there's anything better than a culture that at a company where people have personal relationships with each other.

Mo Chugtai (6:00)

There's.

Ad Tech God (6:00)

There's nothing worse, really, than having an executive walk by and you're just a stranger on the street as you're sitting at your desk working with them or standing in a conference room with them.

Mo Chugtai (6:10)

It's insane.

Ad Tech God (6:10)

That culture is important. It is insane. It's not a healthy culture to do that. Like, they're. They're people just like us and we're people like. Just like them. So I love that you guys have that type of personal touch.

Mo Chugtai (6:20)

You know, I just got married five months ago now and, you know, we had a wedding of a hundred people in New York and New Jersey actually. And of the a hundred people, about 10 were from TubeMogul, Adobe, and about, you know, 20 were from M IQ and sort of partners. And so you work at places long enough, you like people enough, and they sort of become family.

Ad Tech God (6:42)

I agree. I think a lot of my closest friends work in the space too, and our former colleagues or partners in some way. We partnered, we became friends, and we continue to work together in some capacity now. For you Mo, you work in the space. MIQ has grown substantially since you've joined. Where are you seeing things trending? Where are things heading for the space for streaming, for video from your perspective and where you sit?

Mo Chugtai (7:09)

Yeah, it's so interesting, man. I mean, when. When I first started, you know, this kind of video and TV business at miq, we were still doing a lot of education around what was possible with streaming. And I remember the very first presentation that I put together was like, you're thinking of CTV as this kind of like unique, distant, alien format that's like tv. What is it doing on a media plan when you're buying display and kind of all these other things. But if you think about it, it's traded the same exact way as the rest of your media buy, right? It's, you log into a dsp, you have audience segments, you're trading, you know, in the same kind of platforms. And there was a lot of education that we were doing, not just with clients, but internal teams also on, like, this is today, this isn't tomorrow. And I think the transition over time has been, you know, we went from like, education about the opportunity to like, helping marketers understand that, you know, audiences were starting to see CTV as the primary platform, not just another platform that they were using. Right. So I would say early Covid days, it was all about, you know, how do you share shift from TV into streaming, connected tv? And I think the place that we're at now, which I'm so excited about, is we're kind of beyond that sort of messy middle where brands are just trying to figure out kind of what is their streaming strategy. Is it a big part, is a small part, like, where does linear fit? And, you know, the conversations that we have today with our agency partners and our brand partners are, you know, here's a. An objective that I have for the business. It's a new product launch, here's an audience that I want to reach. And what is your total video strategy for that audience? Which, by the way, like total video is. It's linear, it's streaming. But it's also platforms like YouTube that like weirdly get sort of lost in. In the dialogue, I think, sometimes. But, you know, it's. It's the biggest video platform in the Internet and it also includes. And I think this is something that I'm talking more and more about social video as well.

Ad Tech God (9:08)

Right.

Mo Chugtai (9:08)

Which is about 60% of time spent on social now is video. And social is very quickly becoming a video first platform. And so when we talk to brands about, you know, video now, we're talking about everything video and just going, how do you empower planning, discovery, audiences, measurement across all of those worlds?

Ad Tech God (9:27)

You talk about various platforms, you talk about omni channel, programmatic. What really sets you guys apart as it relates to maybe like the data and the algorithm and the measurement in this space?

Mo Chugtai (9:41)

Yeah, I mean, it's a good Question. I think the big thing that we tend to talk about is how do you bring these different worlds together? As in, if you talk to any large brand, they are doing, you know, all these things, right? They're doing streaming, they're doing YouTube, they're doing know, they're, they're buying a lot of Meta and TikTok and most brands are kind of back on, on TikTok as well. But most of those things have sat in silo the way linear and streaming kind of sat in silo, let's say, five years ago. And so the conversation that we have with brands is how do you bring that together? So we've built some interesting tech. We're a services business. We don't shy away from that. That's one of the things that really makes it stand out is we're really clear about our positioning in the market. We're here to help marketers execute campaigns that deliver outstanding performance for them. But the way we do that is we're tech enabled. And so we've built technology that sits on top of all these platforms that allows us to manage audiences across the different parts of your buy across social, you know, linear streaming, YouTube, manage planning, do optimizations, frequency capping, sort of across these different worlds, and then do the reporting and measurement in sort of one unified way. So that really, at the end of the day, a marketer is, of course, it's transparent, you're seeing all of those different aspects work together. But, you know, you should be able to lift and shift your strategy between different worlds, you know, in, in sort of a much more seamless way than marketers generally do today.

Ad Tech God (11:11)

That was actually my next question that was popping into my head as you were speaking. We know that linear is still a massive business, there's no doubt about that. Still a huge part of, of the pie. But we know that streaming is really ramping up. I have a prediction, by the way, Love, that streaming will only accelerate in a downward economic cycle. We saw this in 2008. We saw print start to flutter, we saw digital really start to spike because it's more measurable, it's easier to buy, and sometimes even more cost effective. How do you speak to advertisers about how platform planning should be thought of and executed? And what's the smartest way, in your opinion? It doesn't have to be something that applies to all clients, but what's the smartest way to really balance that reach and engagement across linear and CTV and social? Because there's just so much out there.

Mo Chugtai (12:03)

Totally. I Mean, it is a lot for sure. And it's a lot really for any team, any individual team sometimes to manage. And so I think just from a planning perspective, to address your question, what we tend to find works really well with brands is starting with the data. It's about the end consumer at the end of the day, right? It's about reaching the right audience and that's sort of influenceable with the message that you have to deliver. And so a lot of the work that we do is how do you map an audience across all of these different ecosystems using all of the great data that's out in the world today? And so an early example of that, we were probably one of the earlier ones in the space, but an early example of that was using data set from smart TV screens, ACR data to link LINEAR and CTV together. That just allowed a brand to go, you know, all of that data is tied to an Internet connection because your smart TV is a computer these days. And so it allowed a brand to go. Let me input my first party audience and let me spit out a plan across these worlds. What we've done over time is add additional data sets to that. So here's the data set that peaks into the Google YouTube ecosystem. Here's the data set that peaks into the social ecosystem. And put all those together and just put the data in front of a marketer and go, look, I'm not trying to sell you one way or the other. I'm a neutral kind of third party here. But here's what your audience consumes and how they spend their time. And the average consumer in the US spends six and a half hours a day on video. So it is the most influential channel for them. It's just, you know, overlaying your audience against that and going, well, actually, 20% of their time is on, you know, Meta and TikTok. Right. 10% is on YouTube, 20% on streaming. Rest is on linear. And does your plan reflect that?

Ad Tech God (13:49)

Awesome. Where, where do you think we're going to see the most growth in the next 12 to 18 months? You know, whether it's in the streaming space or the data and measurement space. Where do you think we're heading in the next year? Year and a half?

Mo Chugtai (14:02)

Yeah, it's such a good question. You know what, I love your prediction, by the way. Streaming is going to do better in the recession. It's just more addressable and actionable and accountable than other formats. I think we've seen that with some of the recent IPO news and M&A news around performance TV with a few of the folks in the space. I just think there's tremendous opportunity there that's not fully realized. So I think you're right. You know, when marketers are sort of in a pinch, they tend to go towards kind of more addressable, more accountable formats. I think that's pretty exciting for us. And then I think from a tactical perspective, there's a couple of big trends that we're really excited about. I mean, I feel like the AI bit has been kind of. Everyone kind of talks about it. But you know, the areas that I'm most keen on in that world are, you know, how do you use kind of assistants or agents in the workflow for a seller and a trader? And so the areas that we're focused on are how do you use AI for sales enablement? I mean, you know this, you know, from your kind of background. There's just so much complexity in the advertising ecosystem, the ad tech ecosystem. It's unreasonable, I think, to expect a great seller to have a deep understanding on every piece of technology and have great people skills and relationships and all this stuff. And so, you know, AI for sales enablement where you can sort of ask questions and you've got deep documentation kind of backing that.

Ad Tech God (15:28)

It's one of the biggest challenges. If you speak to anyone who runs an ops team, you know, you have a sales guy that's, that's excited and doing his job and trying to secure money for the company and he's being hit with all types of requests from these advertisers. I mean, a lot of times they know and a lot of times they don't know. And being able to just easily pull up a, some sort of chat GPT of the company. Can this client target by this inventory type? In this particular Geo, we want only four zip codes. We want to target only automotive enthusiasts. In Ferrari. Oh yeah, you get six impressions and it's easy to digest in quick. I mean that could be pretty massive for, for a sales org to be able to have that at their fingertips.

Mo Chugtai (16:13)

Huge, huge. I think this is a big unlock and an area that we're really excited about. This is when we talk about like tech enabled service. This is what we're talking about, right? How do we use tech to make our people smarter so they can help customers sort of achieve the outcome that they're looking for on the kind of trading side, you know, we're building sort of similar tech that's like, here's the platform best practices. If you're thinking about sort of Campaign setup, audience, you know, kind of facilitation circle that. You know, the trouble is we talk about fragmentation in ctv. I talk a lot about fragmentation of the different platforms that you need to buy. If you're going to run an effective CTV campaign across the U.S. even just the U.S. right. Let alone global markets, you've got to run at least in three platforms and likely you've got to run at least in five. And so the trouble is, you know, all of the work that goes into campaign setups, reporting kind of all this stuff, it just needs tech to be able to ease that. And so that's sort of the other area that we're, we're spending a lot of time. We've built some planning tech around TV intelligence that helps do the kind of planning before campaign launches. But then we've got a ton of kind of AI stuff on the campaign and audience facilitation front.

Ad Tech God (17:28)

Yeah, I feel like the. What is it coin now? Is it called a meta? DSP is what people are calling it. It's all API driven, it's plugged into one ui. Reporting is in one ui, but you can buy everywhere from, you know, meta to, you know, every other source of inventory that you want. I feel like maybe that that's a direction that, that is really good because people love the DSPs in market, right. They love the basis, they love the trade desk, they love all these other DSPs, stack adapt, anybody else. But I think the, the hard part is you need more than one. And as an agency and as a trader, like, you have to be trained pretty well across these TSPs to understand everything that they do. But having it in one UI to me feels like probably the future, 100%.

Mo Chugtai (18:13)

And I would I. My only build on that because I, I agree with you. My only build on that would be it might not even be a ui. Right. The way we traditionally see it. Like, I just think about like, you know, what is the best interface to talk to a user? This is my product hat back on. You know, if I'm running campaigns, what's the interface that's going to help me kind of get things done fastest? And the interface that I think about is like you're talking to something, you know, maybe there's an agent on the background and that's doing the work for you. That stuff, I mean, it starts to become like Jarvis really quickly. I mean, I think that's, you know, that's maybe where that's headed.

Ad Tech God (18:47)

Awesome. What keeps you in the space Mo? We've worked in adtech for quite some time now. What keeps you motivated to stay in ad tech, to keep pushing forward with the growth at miq? What's that driver for you?

Mo Chugtai (19:01)

I mean, it's an exciting space. Like, there's so many things that are going on at once in the space. It's competitive, it moves fast. You know, it's collaborative. Sort of at the same time, you're often sort of competing and collaborating, you know, with a ton of companies in the space. I just think that that makes for really interesting work that you can do. And I also think, like, you know, when you've been in the industry for a little while, you start to notice some, like, cycles that the industry goes through and, you know, you can start to kind of get ahead of some of those. One of those, you know, that I think about right now is this cycle around walled gardens and open web, for example, which is such a hotly debated topic. You know, I think the part of the cycle that we're headed in on that is, you know, I think collaboration is starting to be the future even in that world, right? Like, the walls are starting to come down a little bit on the big platforms. You know, you've seen The Amazons, the YouTube of the world sort of open up a little bit. And I just think, you know, there's a little bit of a maturity that's. I mean, this is a side quest that I'm going on a little bit, but like, I think the maturity that the advertising space is starting to develop around, like, it's not an us versus them, it's a how do we work together to solve problems for the end marketer who, by the way, like, neither the marketer nor the consumer cares about open versus walled, right? So, you know, it's sort of just a new kind of paradigm. I just back to your question about what keeps me motivated, hungry, excited, is there are these problems, right? There are these kind of paradigm shifts. And, you know, excitement is like 50% of the battle. Like you need energy to bring to big problems like that. And I get really excited about that, personally.

Ad Tech God (20:40)

Yeah, I think one of the big things for me, and even though I. Am I technically out, am I out now? I don't even know anymore. I'm out yet. I'm so like dialed in to everything that's happening all the time, which is sometimes a problem. I think the change is addictive. We get frustrated by it. Like how much change happens on a weekly basis, monthly basis, yearly basis, whether it's regulation or just consumer habits. But it's not boring. Like, if you think about it like, this doesn't change. Someone who's doing paperwork for, you know, buying a house or a real estate agent, the job is very monotonous. It's, it's, you know, you go, you show the house, you fill out the paperwork, you push it to, you know, a loan company, they fill out the documents, they get you approved, and here's your loan and you're funded. Yes, the paperwork changes slightly, but the process doesn't change for us. The entire buying process could change. The devices change, the measurement changes. And for me, I just think it's fun. It's like you always have to be on your toes. You have to read a lot and you have to network a lot. But it's fun to me.

Mo Chugtai (21:45)

Love that.

Ad Tech God (21:46)

Well, Mo, I wanted to thank you for being here today and thank you again for all your support over the years. You've been a great anonymous friend, I guess.

Mo Chugtai (21:55)

Listen, I'm going to get that drink back one day. I know this and I'm just holding that up.

Ad Tech God (22:00)

I'll put it on the market texture card.

Mo Chugtai (22:02)

There you go. Love it. Well, listen, thank you so much for having me. This has been such a delight. And again, I'm so excited about the work you guys are doing and I know we'll do more stuff together in the future.

Ad Tech God (22:11)

Awesome. Thank you so much, Ralph. Speak soon. 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 ad tech innovation.