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AdTechGod Pod
Ep. 77 30 Years of Chaos, Change & Curation A Candid Conversation with Bob Regular
00:34:47
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- [00:01]
Ad Tech God
A word from our sponsors. Media verification and measurement are undergoing major disruption. Legacy players are pivoting to performance. Advertising AI is reshaping brand safety and attention is replacing viewability. Adelaide is leading this shift with au, a new way to assess media quality that scores placements based on their potential to drive attention and outcomes. Before your ads run, think of it like a credit score for media. Finally, a clear view of quality. Before you buy, take the guesswork out of your investment strategy and try Adelaide AU on your next campaign. Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, Ad Tech God. Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your go to for conversations with AdTech founders today. I'm thrilled to welcome Bob Regular, the CEO and founder at Infolinx. Bob is an entrepreneur through and through, having founded companies like Kitara Media and many, many more. I'm looking forward to chatting with Bob today. So, Bob, welcome to the Ad Tech godpod.
- [01:14]
Bob Regular
Hey, thank you for having me. It's good to be back in church, so I'm really appreciative of the opportunity.
- [01:21]
Ad Tech God
Thanks for coming. Confession is later after the episode. Just make sure you make a donation on your way out.
- [01:27]
Bob Regular
We need a lot of confession at ajtech for sure.
- [01:29]
Ad Tech God
Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do. It's. It's pretty incredible. It seems like, you know, we had chatted prior to this about all the changes and the constant changes. You know, having been an entrepreneur for so many years, I'm sure you've. You've witnessed and experienced so much.
- [01:44]
Bob Regular
I am absolutely stunned to say this is my 30th year anniversary in the digital media space. Even saying that out loud almost makes me cringe. But it is completely inconsistent that nothing is consistent except change. We are constantly changing. You can't get comfortable. You have to just be almost a narcissist and love the craziness of ad tech and want to be an entrepreneur and otherwise, you know, it's. It's just not for the faint of heart. For sure.
- [02:14]
Ad Tech God
We love the pain of working in this industry.
- [02:17]
Bob Regular
We love the madness. We really do. And as I said, it's been 30 years. So as you get older, you know, it's not a surprise. You would just like things to be simpler and more calm as you get older. I feel like as the industry evolves, it just gets crazier and crazier and more chaotic. It's kind of like inverse, you know, to what you're looking for as you, as you grow older. But the wisdom helps on occasion, and.
- [02:39]
Ad Tech God
We'Ll dig into this later, but I feel like the cycles are very similar. So it's, you know, the device cycles between, you know, the boom and the changes that happened in web, the boom and the changes that happen in app, the boom and the changes that we're seeing in connected television. It seems like a cycle. But before we go there, how did you get into the industry, Bob? So 30 years is a long time to work in digital advertising. It's really from the beginning of it all. How did you start and what brought you to where you're at today at Infolinx?
- [03:04]
Bob Regular
I grew up in Newfoundland, Canada, and I was always excited with the idea of being an entrepreneur. It's a sort of a small community in the far northeast of Canada. Wonderful people and very comfortable experience. And I just always wanted to be an entrepreneur. So one of the early things I was excited to do was moved to the U.S. you know, I came to go to Penn State and I met while at Penn State, one of my best friends, gentleman named Greg Smith, he sat me down in the computer lab one day. I was doing a communications and business degree and he sat me down and said, let me show you this really cool piece of software called Netscape. He showed me the browser and he was writing, you know, some code to build a website. 1995, and he said, I think this is just going to be the next big thing. I think it's going to be really amazing, this Internet thing. And he started showing what was possible and putting up photos and text and it just looked like a really creative canvas and looked like so much possibility. And he started teaching the HTML code and we started learning to write onto the server. And basically we spent the better part of our last year at Penn State hacking together, building stuff. And we really imagined this idea of, you know, what those, this web could be. And we started a company together. Now that company, unfortunately, was never going to sustain us. So I ended up getting a job as a producer director for a CBS affiliate. And he went off and got a normal job as well. And we did this company on the side and we started building websites for companies. And we were going out learning how to build and program and do graphics and creatives and, you know, code and all this kind of stuff. And I, I, I got this job at the CBS associate and one of the first things I pitched them from my company was how would you guys feel like about having a website? And they sort of reacted with the general manager, I still remember to this day, said who needs a website? Who cares about that? And I said, well, I think it's a really good idea. And he said, well, tell me about this thing. And so I told him about the idea. I could build this TV station's website and news portion and maybe I could broadcast the video on it. And. And he said, listen, whatever kid, you want to do that, go for it. We're not going to pay you any money for it. I said, no, no, no problem. Just do it, you know, under my company, and it'll be free. And I did. So I built their first website in 1996, and, you know, became really popular. I learned just sort of how to push the newsroom computer information to the site and the video to the site, and there's just a lot of fun things to learn. And the business started to take off. The NBC affiliate next door said, oh, this is a really great website. They've reached out to me. So would you build us a website? I kind of worried about the conflict of interest, right? So I went to the general manager. How would you feel about building the NBC website over there? And he said, I don't care. Websites don't matter. It's fine. And so I went over there and I said, listen, you know, I'll. I'll build your website, and to tell you the truth, I'd be happy to do it for free, but I would like you to put a TV commercial for my new web development company in the news show every night. And at the end, have the anchors say, you know, this website was brought to you by my company. And they said, sure, that's a fair enough trade. And I said, okay, great, and did that. And then my company took off and I started getting opportunities to build websites for all kinds of corporations. And, you know, I eventually had enough of a business that, that we left and started building that business. And then eventually we sold that business a couple, three years later. And I ended up in a large corporation. And I really didn't like it. It didn't fit my entrepreneurial, you know, needs. I was, I was going on visits to, you know, large corporations like Victoria Secrets or Harley Davidson to talk to them about whether or not they wanted a website. And they look like projects that would take 100 years get going because they, they were not believers, right? They didn't really understand why they needed it and what was the purpose of it. So I was looking for the next cool thing to do. And so that's where I got bitten by the ad bug. Another colleague of mine had started an Ad network. And it was an ad network, and the idea was to put ads on websites and everybody was on dial up and you had mostly downloadable software. And so we basically built an ad network through the.com crash9, 11. It was all madness. And then we eventually put that company into another entity that the time was called Sideor. And sidew was, you know, one of the first ad networks that put ads inside of software. Because at that time in the early 2000s, most folks were still on dial up. So you just did not have broadband. Right. Maturely. And so you had to build an SDK that went into software that would cache the ads and run the ads and, you know, then it would upload the report to a server that somebody could look at later. And it was all very primitive, but it was all sort of the early days of trying to make programmatic work. We didn't call it programmatic at the time, but that's basically what you're trying to do. And because, you know, I'll tell you this fun little story. At the time, it was terrifying, but now it's sort of funny to look back on, you know, this software that we had created. The SDKs that would go into software would talk to the Internet. And of course, when you got online, that Internet connection would happen in the background. So one day I get a call from a Washington Post reporter and she says to me, so listen, you know, we've been receiving emails. I think it was probably 2001, 2000, something like that. We were receiving emails from some customers that, you know, there's these. This activity going on in the background with your company where it's talking to the server and people are really curious what it is. Could we come in and talk to you about it? Sure. Sounds really strange. It doesn't seem that odd to me, but happy to talk to you. Right. I was just. I was as green and naive as you could be. So the reporter comes in, takes lots of photographs of me and is telling me, you know, this whole Internet advertising thing is really cool. And she's writing this story about this fact that we're putting ads in software and isn't it all great? So I'm telling her all about the company and, you know, how we're helping software applications make money and the technology, how it works. And, you know, I was really excited about ad serving. Right. And on Saturday morning, the front page of the Washington Post, which back then, you know, the paper was actually read and everybody got a copy, was my picture on the front of the. Above, the Headline on the front page of the Washington Post is this man watching you? And it was a whole article about.
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Ad Tech God
That's a real nice article, Bob.
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Bob Regular
It was really awesome, right? And so the whole article is about the notion that, you know, when you have Internet connections from your computer, how do we know what those Internet connections are sending back to servers? And maybe that's covert information. And maybe he's watching you. And all my neighbors read the paper every day. So I'm like, at my local coffee shop and they're, like, looking at me. And it was so obvious. Everybody had sort of wondered if I'm like some sort of crazy hacker, you know.
- [09:57]
Ad Tech God
Bob, it's funny. Even now, you know, 2025, you have people that are like, how do they know what I'm looking at? And why. Why is it I looked at something a week ago and I can see an ad for it today? And every site I go to, I see the same shoe that I shopped for three days ago. How is this even possible? And so it's funny that, you know, back then it was Bob's watching you. And today everyone's like, wait, so how is this being done? And I think sometimes we forget that because we work in the industry, we know how it's done, we know why it's done. But for people outside of the industry, they really have no idea.
- [10:32]
Bob Regular
That's true. You know, it's always taken from the point of view of being malicious as opposed to the point of view. It's just a marketing technique, right, to try and improve performance. I definitely became very interesting cocktail subject matter for a period of time after that Washington Post article. So, you know, my. My career has evolved with lots of, like, crazy moments. You know, my ad network at the time, I was running with a number of folks that are now very memorable in the industry. You know, we had Ofer Drew Kerr, who now is the founder of nex, and he and I were building this ad network side or together with, you know, Erie Zohar, who basically started Exalate. And so there's lots of, you know, alumni along the years are really brilliant people that, you know, we built really interesting stuff together. And the radiant business that we had, we were the first seat holder inside of the right media platform. I had gotten a call from Aaron Letcher, I think it was in 04, and he said, you know, I'm working for this guy Mike Walrath. We got this really amazing algo, but we don't have any, you know, UI or anything around it. We have no customers. Yet. But we have this really amazing algo we're going to call it Right Media. And we need an ad network to work with, to put it in so we can create liquidity and figure out if this thing works. I invited, you know, Aaron in and talking to Mike and eventually Brian O'Kelly. And so we made a decision that we're going to give Right Media a chance. And so we built UIs with them around it. Brian camped in our office for, give or take, 6 plus months building first iterations of Right Media. And, you know, sir went through that programmatic journey, right, of the concept of programmatic bidding, conversion optimization, the ability to change your bids based on what your conversion values are. So, you know, in the early days, you were inventing all of this from raw cloth and figuring out the models and the methodologies, and it was a direct feedback loop. You know, Brian would be in the middle of the night writing code, and the next morning you come in and look at your reports and everything was, you know, upside down, either in the good way or in a bad way. And you collaborate. You know, I don't know what you did last night, Brian, but it's all messed up or it's all better. Let's work on it. And so you just went through these phases and then, you know, app next is, I don't know, we're like second or third seat holder. So over the years, you know, I've been building companies either sitting on other platforms or correlating multiple platforms, trying to work with the CTOs or the core founders on a product level to build solutions that are, you know, making advertising work or making supply work. And so I've been on the demand side and supply side and sort of sitting in the middle of the operation pieces, both product and technology for a long time. And that kind of, you know, led me through the desire to eventually just give up on using other platforms. Because there's a continuous trend.
- [13:22]
Ad Tech God
Well, there's a lot of dependency when you're built on other tech. I mean, exactly. They could decide to change their API tomorrow and your business is dead. They could decide that they want to build it in house and all of a sudden, you know, your business is gone.
- [13:34]
Bob Regular
And it happened over and over and over again, right? And you, you buy, you know, going with the theme, right? You buy into the religion, you get invested in it. You really work with the, with the teams to build technology that really works for you. And then something happens. Maybe it's an acquisition. In Right Media's case, there was an acquisition Yahoo bought it, made lots of modifications. It just was not as robust as it needed to be anymore. Of course, App Nexus, we know the story there. We got on Live Rail, we know the store. Facebook bought it, shut it down in four months, gave everybody 30 days notice. You know, ultimately you're beholden, as you said, right, to these other tools. And I was so involved, and my now wife was so involved. She was my head of operations for many years, which, you know, you should always marry your head of operations. That's my biggest recommendation. And one, she was brilliant from a product operation standpoint. I really love product and business and the technology side. And we work really, really closely together each of these platform cases, to build them and make them work in a way that allowed us to build a business. And then the world would be pulled out from under you and then you would be left sort of trying to figure out what's the next step. So when the time came in 2018, you know, I had left my last company, had taken about a year off. I had sort of sworn off ad tech. I really needed a break. I didn't think I was going to come back into it. And, you know, I really missed it. I think there's something almost like a disorder, right? You miss the chaos, you miss the puzzle solving. So I was looking for a company that fit, you know, the basis of what I wanted to do next. And that's when I found Infolinx and acquired Infolinx.
- [15:15]
Ad Tech God
To do that, taking it back to, you know, so much experience working at companies that were, you know, built on other companies, what do you feel was. Was really the pivotal point in that process where you decided, look, I want to build out a company called Infolinx and we'll get into what exactly Infolinx does. But what made you decide that? Was it just the dependency on other platforms and feeling like it was time to build something on independent of other platforms, or was it just, you know, time to pivot and try something new? What really made that click in. In your mind to move forward with it?
- [15:47]
Bob Regular
So I think it's a couple of things. A lot that comes from experience and maturity and, and sort of this adventure of working with these platforms that have a lot of hope in the beginning and then they have reality in the end. And what you discover through those experiences is eventually what actually was necessary to achieve success. What is it? Right? You need to really learn. And one of the things that happens on other platforms is they grow to scale and they need to further scale. There's a massive Deterioration in quality. And there's a massive deterioration by everything becoming commoditized, right? The fact that everything becomes standardized for everyone on one platform, the only thing you're assured of is it becomes commoditized and less effective. And you have no edge, right? You have no advantage. You're using the same rules, the same standards, the same capabilities as everybody else. How do you find your edge? And I finally learned that I can't create that edge or advantage by being essentially vanilla like everyone else. I really need my own platform that allows me to take the ideas that I have, the advantages that I sort of perceive as important, and customize it into my own tools so that I can achieve the advantage that I'm trying to not only get, but benefit the customers with. Because ultimately, whatever customers you deal with, whether they're publishers or advertisers or both, they're looking for some benefit that's above and beyond what they can get from all the generic stuff that's out there. And as you know, there's lots of generic stuff in our ad tech space. So there's the platforms that kept disappearing, maybe through acquisition or commodification. And then later it became about, well, you know, every time I help, right, Media be better through product innovation, or app nexus be better through product innovation, or then it was library, it'll be better. All I'm doing is giving others my ideas that I can't get an advantage from anymore because they end up being distributed everywhere.
- [17:49]
Ad Tech God
Moving into Infolinx, you guys do kind of a variety of things from what display native ads to publisher monetization to in text ads. Can you give me a little bit of background what Infolinx does and why you decided to create this and what problem you were looking to solve for in the market.
- [18:09]
Bob Regular
So the first thing that I sort of been observing in the space forever and been a proponent of it is disintermediation has just been going on forever. And you mentioned very early in the pod about the idea that these sort of repetitive cycles that you see over a long period of time, and one of those repetitive cycles is massive fragmentation and then there's consolidation, right? And then the consolidation comes together and it blows apart into more fragmentation and then there's more consolidation. And so I felt for quite a long time that we're into consolidation mode. There's just been way too many networks, way too many SSPs, way too many intermediaries. And this is an old. At this point, it's almost cliche, right? But there just has been and there's not enough value creation. There's just a lot of intermediaries, let's say. And so in witnessing that, I sort of watched this discussion before it became an actual rule. This discussion, early discussion about ads text as a reaction to meeting, essentially a form of compliance for consolidation and this rule. I sort of looked at this as being sort of a heinous, crazy idea of, of workload, right, or being able to distribute this thing. But aside from the methodology, I, I looked at it and thought to myself, this is an outcry to the need for consolidation, right, Simplification, and that the most valuable asset here in this concept is are you actually direct? What are you direct to? And so I believe that the next movement for the next cult was about five plus years was going to be are you direct to the publisher? Do you have distinct supply? Are you creating distinct value that's really bringing, you know, a true outcome to the advertiser. And I think that movement turned out to be true. And so when I went looking for a platform to acquire, I found Infolinx and I fell in love with it because it was its own platform that had created its own arguments that were code on page or script to page, JavaScript to page, and thereby creating its own ad units, thereby create its own auction and was able to control behavior that allowed for the highest performance. And then on the demand side, it was direct to demand. And so I liked this incredible directness, right? And what I discovered as I was doing sort of the acquisition analysis of different companies and I didn't quite realize how bad it was, but there was a ton of, of let's, let's call them networks out there that were just networks to networks, networks to aggregators, but didn't actually have any directness to publishers.
- [20:42]
Ad Tech God
I didn't realize that a lot of middlemen, I mean, it was, there was.
- [20:45]
Bob Regular
Just a lot of middlemen. I didn't realize how extensive it was. But there is a lot of folks with a lot of brand names that you knew that were just really buying other aggregators from other aggregators. And so what I fell in love with with Infolinx was it was direct to publisher only. And even though I'll probably be shunned in the industry for saying something like this, but I was also in love with the fact that it didn't do header bidding. I really didn't want to go to the publisher through header bidding because I see header bidding as sort of another universal commodification. It's perfectly fine and it's a Great standard. And it's a good thing that it exists because it's purple. That it exists was an important one. But I also didn't want to go to the publisher the same way everyone else went to the publisher. I wanted to create my own ad units. I want to be able to control my own auction and I want to do it in a way for the sole purpose, not just to be direct, so that I could create and look at the KPIs that created the highest value that I merged over the years on different platforms. And so that was the focus. If we could create our own ad unit experiences, then we could drive the KPIs from those ad unit experiences way up and we could get a disproportionate level of the demand because the outcome was just so much better than all the other outcomes. That was the focus and that was the mission and that's what we've been doing now for the better part of six years.
- [22:09]
Ad Tech God
You touched upon intermediation, disintermediation and going direct to advertisers. We talked about the middlemen. This also brings up another really hot topic that maybe you didn't mention, but you implied, which is the importance of transparency and knowing where the ads run. So we talked about the, can we say it, the arbitrage business, the ad network arbitrage business where it's just I buy at five, sell to you at seven, you sell seven, you buy at seven, you sell at nine, and whoever has the better demand kind of wins. And you don't necessarily know where in detail you're buying. And that that business model has to some degree over the last 10 years diminished quite a bit. But now the transparency business is different, right? Like now it's we want URL level reporting, we want to understand the context of the sites, we want more and more transparency, which I think is the right move across the board. How are you feeling? Advertisers in particular like that you are direct on page ad units in comparison to some sort of header bidding solution.
- [23:12]
Bob Regular
So we have also embraced the narrative that we're a form of curation for one reason, because we are been doing that for a long time. But another reason is it's a language that a lot of advertisers also understand and it's been received really well. The difference for us is that the way we postured is that being direct to publisher and being transparent and giving URL level detail and basically you can't get more transparent direct than we are with the publisher. The distinction that I'VE been focused on. And this goes back to my previous business, which was essentially a DSP, certainly nowhere near wildly successful, some other DSPs. But there was something that I learned in that experience of buying know, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars over the years in media was the 8020 rule is completely in effect in media as well, which is 80% of the performance tends to come from 20% of the placements. And those 20% of the placements drive the value, a lot of the value. And so we focused very heavily on not only the high value placement location, but we focused on behaviors in the placement that allowed us to drive the performance even higher. So we make sure that the ad unit's behavior itself and there's, you know, a couple dozen of those types of things really drive an outcome. For example, you know, there's a reality that if a user doesn't see an ad, if it's not viewable, high percentage of time, very unlikely you're going to drive any outcome. So pushing towards viewability is very, very important. And so one of the things we made as a condition is we just should Never be below 80% viewability. Find behaviors in the ad placements that ensure that you're never below a certain level of viewability. Because that's just a table stakes thing you should do to create sort of quality and outcome. Be transparent about the URLs, be transparent about the directness s chain. To me, all that is table stakes at this point. And the business of arbitrage, you know, I think has been tremendously diminished from what I see out in the market. It is very, very, very difficult to make that business work. And I think that's the right thing. Right? That is the right thing and that's fine. In all markets there are all kinds of distributors and distribution points and that's not an unusual thing. But we had way too many in ad tech for a long time and I think that has diminished a lot. And now we have just a moderate amount of providers. One irritation for me is the ads Txt concept is an incredible compliance model, except that since we're direct to a publisher and we're creating that placement direct to the publisher. If we sell ever to an ssp, for example, if a plumatic buys from us or has access to us, then we're considered a reseller according to the spec in the node. And the downside is I think there's been a huge amount of, let's say, conversation or advocacy in hopes of removing the arbitrage, in hopes of removing all the intermediaries, that a reseller is always a bad thing. And I think one of the things we've continually tried to explain to both advertisers and agencies is for sure there are a lot of bad resellers that have no value and they're just sitting there in the node and just passing through requests and they're not adding any value at all. In our case, we are defined as a reseller, but we're adding a lot of value because we're direct and creating that unique proprietary placement. So that's been a little bit of an uphill challenge.
- [26:49]
Ad Tech God
They define it as if I recall this, right? So they define it as direct, meaning you are directly the publisher, you're the owned and operated publisher and you have control of the ad unit reseller because you are technology provider to a publisher. You're not the owner of the site, but you are technically the technology provider of the ad unit. And so they label you as a reseller, which, as you mentioned, is, I wouldn't say a slap on the wrist, but it's not going to be as prioritized as a direct ads tax file. You're kind of looked at as a maybe like a Tier two, right, because you're not direct. But then you have a lot of explanation through the process to your advertisers, like, yes, it's a reseller, but we're the technology provider that powers this ad unit. That's a lot of explanation for something that's direct on site and in the.
- [27:33]
Bob Regular
World, when no one has the patience to listen, it can be a challenge. Nobody has any patience. And, you know, Chris at Jounce has done an amazing job of classification and he's, you know, he's taken the time to classify us as a premium proprietary placement, which is a. Certainly a great status to have. What we find now is that we go upstream, talk to the advertisers, talk to the agencies, talk to the traders, and we have to explain to them that we are direct to the publisher, creating this unique placement, creating this unique auction experience, creating this unique performance, and we're selling direct to them. That's a lot to explain. And so that's been, you know, basically overcoming the ongoing challenge of where are you in the food chain? Right? Where are you in the transparency? It's been really, really well received and that's the positive side of it. But I think that the advocacy and hoping to eliminate all the intermediation has led to just, if you're a reseller in general, we're just going to cut you off with a machete. And so without a doubt, that's a big part of the movement. But I also think like all pendulums, right? Pendulums swing hard one way sometimes and then a lot of folks, because again, we've been a buyer for many, many years in the past. You start to learn really quickly that, you know, you take that machete and you cut off a large part. But really what you should be doing is using a scalpel and being very careful to look at all the different perks you're buying from and what is really driving outcomes for you. And I think when we see folks using the scalpel, we're always, you know, performing in the, in the top 10 percentile because we're not about scale, right? That's the ultimate reality. You also learning the buy side is that when there's massive scale, when you're talking about hundreds of billions of requests or trillions of requests, you are really dealing in sort of the Walmart vast volume approach, not necessarily the outcomes approach. We're just basically a boutique, right? We're a boutique of volume that performs at a high level. That's one of my annoyances is the whole reseller versus direct notion.
- [29:32]
Ad Tech God
I recall that being a topic, not, not for you, but just in general, that that topic has come up multiple times, that it's mislabeled when in reality it was correctly labeled because per the specs, technically you are a reseller per the spec. But if the explanation is complicated sitting where you're from. When we go into the kind of the final question of the pod, where do you think things are heading over the next 12 to 18 months? What do you think is going to be hot? You've mentioned curation, transparency, distant remediation. What do you think is going to be hot over the next 12 months as we see these, the political climate, economic climate, everything changing.
- [30:09]
Bob Regular
So we definitely hit on all the greatest hits, right? The disintermediation and what have you. I think the future is fascinating because there is as much change as I've ever seen in the space. You have, of course, now I'm going to say some obvious things now, but you have the rise of ctv, of course, is not only just the rise from an ad tech perspective and the benefit of moving what has historically been a display OLV type of business into the watch TVs on large screens business. I really think that the consumer is also adjusting behavior in new and interesting ways. That is a real foundational shift, right? And I remember all the shifts. I remember the shift from desktop to the shift to laptop and to the shift to mobile device. And now we see the shift to of course ctv and then within the mobile device and within the web browser you have this shift of AI where we're changing search behavior. And so how is the open web going to interact with the change of how people are gathering information? That can still remains to be seen, but I think there's going to be a tremendous, there is already a tremendous amount of disruption. You know, can informational sites that historically have required time on them to do research and learn, whether that be news or information or entertainment or whatever it is, can they still be as wild and successful if Google AI or ChatGPT is providing you quick summary in an AI box? And so they will have to evolve, that could continue to hold on to their loyal audiences. And so there is an evolution I'm witnessing going on there that is very familiar to me of when there was the movement from the desktop to the mobile device. And you may remember this, but websites that were on desktop screens, large screens, really struggled for several years to how they captivate people on these tiny screens. For the most part that's all been forgotten as a topic, but that was several years in the making of how so many well known publishers could not make the transition and hold their audiences when they went from a desktop screen to a mobile screen. And there was a whole disruption from that. And then of course when an app became super popular, there's been a whole migration to apps from web sometimes and there's been a whole disruption as a result of that. And then there's like a lot of really interesting conversation about how is AI going to inform our ability to do creative and content optimization and campaign optimization. And I think, you know, while that's a really amazing conversation, going to be very interesting stuff, it's somewhat, very obvious, right, how AI is going to transform, making the workflow better, making creatives better, you know, making insights better. There's no doubt AI is going to certainly influence all around in terms of, you know, how I see for us for infolink side, you know, I think, you know, our world will continue to expand to mobile app. Our world will continue to expand with the web. I think as the web goes through these gyrations, we'll be there for publishers. You know, we have great relationships with publishers. We're coming to them with typically long term deals, coming to them with, you know, long term relationships. And so you have as many publisher relationships as we do. You build a community with the publisher base and you sort of get to know their struggles and get to know what's going on in their world. And as you probably know, publishers have gone through a lot, you know, in the last 10 years, right. It's been an incredibly tumultuous period for publishers to make monetization work. And so, you know, we've been there for publishers backing them up with monetization and working directly for a long time. But I can tell you the publisher is having a really, really rough time right now. And we're very empathetic to that. And I don't think it's obvious, right, what's, what's going to come of the classic web publishing world. It probably is going to go through a lot more disruption before it gets easier.
- [34:10]
Ad Tech God
Bob, thank you. Thank you for being here today and thank you for being my guest. I really, really appreciate your time.
- [34:16]
Bob Regular
I loved it. I needed to go to church more often, so thank you for having me.
- [34:19]
Ad Tech God
Thank you, Bob. I appreciate it. Take care. 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.