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- [00:00]
Ad Tech Go
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- [00:51]
Taylor Simons
Race the Rudders. Race the sails. Race the sails.
- [00:55]
Ad Tech Go
Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
- [00:58]
Taylor Simons
Roger, wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the.
- [01:08]
Ad Tech Go
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- [01:13]
Taylor Simons
On your next campaign.
- [01:15]
Ad Tech Go
Get started today at LinkedIn.com results, terms and conditions apply. Welcome to the window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, Ad Tech Go. Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, where we speak with the entrepreneurs in AdTech. Today we're joined by Taylor Simons, founder and principal consultant at TCHT and advisor to Audigent and others. Prior to this, he worked at Media Math for nearly nine years. He has an incredible history in the space, having seen the boom and challenges at his time at Media Math. I'm looking forward to getting to know Taylor today. Taylor, welcome to the EdTech Godpod.
- [02:00]
Taylor Simons
Thank you very much. And I do just want to say thank you for what you're doing. I know a lot of people comment on the positivity you create in a space, which is certainly true, but I did want to call out, I think fondly back to especially the early days. It almost felt reminiscent of going to the office on a Monday after an episode of Game of Thrones where everyone's talking about it. Who is that tech God? Do you see this? I think here lives in the West Coast. Do you know who he is? And it. It's been awesome to watch. It's just, just fun.
- [02:29]
Ad Tech Go
It's been fun. It's been. It's been fun to be a part of it. I. I don't know how it got to this point, but to be honest, Taylor, like, I love it. It's fun. Like, I still enjoy it. I think we're. I'm busier than I was before. It was just more of a hobby But I, I really enjoy it. I also get to meet awesome people like you and others, which is great because I don't know if I would have met you prior to this. Who knows? Or maybe we've met.
- [02:50]
Taylor Simons
Maybe.
- [02:50]
Ad Tech Go
Maybe Taylor, you know, looking at your time at mediamath, looking at, you know, starting up. Tcht. I would love to hear about how you got into the space and then we can kind of move towards the journey and how your perspective differs sitting as a, as a consultant across a multitude of clients. So I'd love to hear how, how you got into ad tech from the beginning.
- [03:12]
Taylor Simons
Absolutely. I've noticed that a lot of the guests on your podcast, or I think you've even mentioned the vast majority just kind of show up in ad tech. They didn't plan to be in ad tech. It just kind of happened. I actually have a very different story. I very intentionally got into ad tech. I don't know if I'm your first guest or not, but to give you a very quick context, before MediaMath, I was always at tech startups. My career started actually at Universal Music Group. I got to work with great artists like Damian Marley and Amy Winehouse and prints. But I really realized I did not want to be working at a major record label. Did not see opportunity for young people. You really have to commit a lot of your life there before you make, you know, any real money. So I then went to a startup called TuneCore. I was employee number nine. We rose to become the largest digital distribution company in the world. And it was really disruptive. It allowed artists to upload their music and the distribution company didn't take a percentage of, of the money they make, which is really cool. And then I moved on to a company called Order Groove, where I was employee number nine. So building a company again from the ground up, we were basically Amazon subscribe and save for anyone who wasn't Amazon. And both companies had a great exit. Enjoyed both very much. But I had felt the startup grind and I was really trying to figure out what to do next. My wife worked at WebMD at the time, she actually still does. And a lot of our friends worked in ad tech somewhere at Tapad or Turn or all these different places. And they were all making a lot more money than I was in the base salary and they were having a ton of fun and it was kind of contagious and I wanted to be around it. So I ended up actually, believe it or not, cold applying to media math for a director, you know, position and, and landed it. But it was very intentional and I have Kada Laughlin, CEO of Super awesome to thank for pushing me over the line to accept the MediaMath offer because I wasn't going to until we talked.
- [05:18]
Ad Tech Go
When you applied, how big was mediamath at the time?
- [05:21]
Taylor Simons
Mediamath was huge. I mean, I think we had well over 600 employees at the time I joined in 2014. It had this feeling and vibe that it was kind of at the time going to be the next Twitter, the next Google. We had three offices in Manhattan that we were bursting at the seams of. We hadn't yet moved down to 4 world trade, which was certainly not the right move as we all know. But yeah, it was big and growing.
- [05:46]
Ad Tech Go
When you look back at the time at Media Math in particular, you were talking about busting out of the seams offices everywhere. How was it for you when things kind of took a turn? What was that experience like? And I guess what did you learn from it?
- [06:01]
Taylor Simons
Yeah, I mean it was, it was embarrassing, it was heartbreaking. You know, I had spent nine years of my life there and I had a very large team. You know, I oversaw the majority of our client facing teams globally. It was excruciating. And we can, we can go into more details, what I've learned from it. I mean, a lot of what I've learned is just my experience post, you know, the media math bankruptcy and what's important how I spend my time and you know, just that you really can turn a failure into great success. I've had the best two years of my career since the media math bankruptcy. I like to tell people that it wasn't the exit that I was working towards, but it was actually a much better exit for me than it, than it ever could have been otherwise. So yeah, you know, if things aren't always as they seem and, and you really can turn a failure into a.
- [06:54]
Ad Tech Go
Great success, I mean, first and foremost, like, I don't think it was your fault. So if there's any guilt around that, like, I don't think that's anything that was in your control and like it just happens. Like I think it was a funding issue, it didn't go through as planned and it is what it is. I mean you've obviously turned this into, to a successful consultancy, you know, working with Autogen and you mentioned a few others prior to our call, but I'll let you talk about them. But like what, what are you seeing now in the space? Like now that the DSP is gone and you've become, you know, Independent working with a multitude of clients. Like what are some trends you're seeing and what are you seeing the direction of the industry overall?
- [07:31]
Taylor Simons
So I. I do have to say some of what I've observed, it's a total mindset change, right. I have previous to the last two years, I've always been a W2 employee and as the vast majority of you know, us are and you have a certain view of the world, right? Like media math certainly shaped a lot of how I view, you know, the industry. The right way to do things, wrong way to do things. What I thought we were great at, what I thought our competitors were good at. And you know, being able to look at many different platforms, be inside a lot of different platforms, one is very validating it. You know, we were doing a lot of amazing cool things that a lot of DSPs still are not even necessarily contemplating. Nevertheless, you're executing on it was. What I've noticed is a lot of the things that I took for granted at mediamath are still areas of improvement, which gives me a lot of green space to work with my clients. It also shows some areas where we can make what we have today work a lot better in terms of where the industry is going. I do think SPO is still in its early days. Whether you look at that from a quality perspective or you just look at that as changing share of voice from an extreme long tail of both domains and SSPs where we can support good publishers and good SSPs by consolidating through spoiler. I also think DSPs and SSPs still kind of suck at working together. That's a big focus of mine now that I'm out as a free agent working with different constituents in the space and I also think we are on the cusp of next gen brand safety and fraud prevention.
- [09:07]
Ad Tech Go
So I love all of those. We talked prior, we were chatting for what, 15, 20 minutes prior. You had asked me a question which is do you think there are more SSPs or DSPs in the market? And I answered for sure, dsps, the ssps have all been acquired and I was wrong. Can you explain that to the people listening? Like how are there still so many SSPs? Maybe I was wrong and I'm just had no idea but I was under the assumption that there was hundreds and hundreds like 300 dsps that are all integrated through, you know, either direct or through Bitswitch and other solutions in market. But you actually corrected me and said there was a ton of SSPs. So I'd love to hear about that. And how you're working with clients as it, as it relates to SSPs and why that benefits them.
- [09:49]
Taylor Simons
Yes, absolutely. So the quick context is I was catching up with ex coworker and good friend Ari Buchalter at DMS a couple of weeks ago and we got into this argument of whether there are more DSPs, which was Ari's view, or if there are more SSPs, which is my view. We both tried a bunch of different chat, GPT and other AI solutions we got from the same prompt, the same AI agent, completely different, you know, answers. We argued about it over text for a couple of days and I finally pulled in Chris Keane, who I think the vast majority of the industry views as the source of truth. And he immediately wrote back, SSPs, of course, by a huge magnitude. There are over 200 SSPs still coming through the bitstream and you could not get anywhere close to that number for DSPs. The only way you could even get past 100 is if you were considering people who are curators or people who are built on top of Trade Desk's APIs who are not DSPs. To be a DSP, you need a bidder.
- [10:55]
Ad Tech Go
I'm still shocked. I don't even know what to say. I really was under the assumption there was more DSPs than SSPs. Is it because some are not clearly labeled as SSPs, or is it just because there's just this huge long tail of SSPs?
- [11:09]
Taylor Simons
There is a massive, massive long tail of SSPs. And this is one of the things that I'm really trying to work at eliminating with my clients. Not because I want any company to go out of business. I went through that myself. It's a horrible experience, but it's just not good for the ecosystem. We talk a lot about a lot of problems in our space, and I think one of the foundational ones is the fact that we have misaligned incentives between the buy side and the sell side. But because of that, SSPs are gaming DSP bidders to try and get as many bids from them at the highest price possible. So they lean into volume bias. Right. The more bid opportunities that you send out to the bidders, the bigger scale they think you have. The bigger they think you are, the more likely you are to get the bid. So how does a publisher do that? They don't work with, you know, one or six, which I think you mentioned, you know, you thought was already an egregious number from many years ago. It's something like 30 plus is the average. Now, SSPs that a publisher Works with. And you're talking about premium publishers, not mfa. These are premium publishers which need to lean into this game of duplicating their bids, bloating the bid stream to earn dollars from the buy side.
- [12:28]
Ad Tech Go
So they, they, they duplicate these bids, which increases the bid volume, which means they fill. I mean, what's the negative of doing that for the publisher? Or is it just more of a negative for the DSPs when it comes to QPSs and overwhelming the system? What can the publisher do better to not have 30, 35 SSPs plugged in, to only have a handful and then utilize those partners better?
- [12:51]
Taylor Simons
I don't think that there really is much the publishers can do. I think that just like how, you know, we as an industry really got rid of mfa, we did that through changing our buying behaviors. Right. And so I, I see this as really a requirement of agencies, brands and DSPs. If this is a buy side problem, we need to show SSPs and publishers that we care about this before they change. Because if you're a publisher and you, you know, go down and you stop duplicating your bids, you go down to a few SSPs, you will lose revenue.
- [13:24]
Ad Tech Go
And do you think that this has a big role to play with the focus around spo, the focus around curation and just like cleaning up that supply path all the way through? Is that kind of like the first and second step? What else can people do to improve the overall ecosystem and transparency that we have?
- [13:43]
Taylor Simons
Absolutely. So there's a lot there. But I want to start with taking a quick step back. One of my clients is Ballertil, and they are an independent agency. You've had Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer. Yeah, as a part of your show. Previously, I've worked with Butler Till, for coming on 11 years. We launched their first programmatic campaign on Media math the first week I started. So I have an extremely long history with the entire business, the entire leadership. I've been working with Kimberly Jones, their CEO for those 11 years. The reason I'm bringing them up and giving them this context is post mediamath, you know, bankruptcy. They were, they were a huge client and partner of Mediaths. And my relationship with them sustained that. And I am clearly still working with them. One of the primary things that we're working on is consolidating their spend across the supply. So when I first started working with Butler Tilt, you know, they're across, you know, three new DSPs, they were clocking in well over 100 SSPs through those three DSPs that they were buying on, you know, we are sub 12 now. That's a massive, massive change. So I do think it has a lot to do with, you know, spo. It has a lot to do with vetting your SSP partners, creating agreements with your SSP partners, papering them, setting your expectations of the inventory that you want and leaning into curation. You know, whether that is, you know, through a third party curator like an Audigent, which they're certainly in the mix, you know, or yourself as a brand or an agency, you need to start to traffic, shape the inventory for yourself. Because of, you know, where we got started in this conversation. You know, you have all of these different publishers and all these different SSPs playing games like bid duplication and bloating. It's very hard for a DSP to navigate that just for themselves. And to your point, you know, managing qps, constraints, really the tools that you have now to make an impact is to set up deals which inherently allows you to traffic, shape that inventory.
- [15:49]
Ad Tech Go
So one thing that we were talking, that you've been engaged with me for years now, one thing that I've always hated was the Open Exchange. I've really never been a supporter of Open Exchange. Do you think that the SPO and the curation play will eliminate the dependency on Open Exchange? And I guess what does that mean for the long tail inventory that's available and the unsold that's not available in market?
- [16:15]
Taylor Simons
I'm right there with you. I'm not really a big fan of the Open Exchange. I don't really think that you need it anymore. Even if you're trying to find a very niche audience. Applying the data on a supply side and curating deals to find those scarce audiences and hard to find audiences is an amazing example of how curation can really help. It's a standard use case that I say over and over, you know, hard to reach audiences are best done by supply side, you know, audience targeting and deal based buys. So I really don't see an argument left for Open Exchange when you can, you know, do one to many deals and have much more control over that again that that traffic that's making its way through to you via the deal.
- [17:01]
Ad Tech Go
And I feel like from a publisher's perspective, if your inventory is premium, having it packaged, either you package up your inventory, have SSP package up your inventory to make it available to their market sellers, right? More directly to your DSPs. But on the other side it's. I would just think that you want to know where every impression is firing and if You've ever pulled an open exchange report and taken a look at the long tail, like it is ugly, like what you see there is not normal. And it's almost impossible to track and log every impression. That happens when you have 50,000 domains running. There's just like no system can really handle that, that you serve two impressions on a site way downstream. And so even for brand safety, it's so important for a buyer to be able to know where every impression fires.
- [17:45]
Taylor Simons
And, you know, even, even taking your example of the long tail publishers, which is absolutely true. And again, I look at that as consolidating the spend to the publishers who deserve it, you know, most. Right? You don't need to be running on that many domains. The same is true for the SSPs. Right now I am working with DSP clients and I often show them an analysis that they are surprised by where I'm like, okay, look, you have 40 DSPs who are receiving 2% or less share of voice from you. You're not getting any value out of that individual 2% share of voice. Your clients aren't getting value out of that and neither is the ssp. So why don't we just cut it off?
- [18:27]
Ad Tech Go
The fear of the unknown, I think, I think sometimes they just keep it because they're like, well, let me keep it just in case things get better.
- [18:32]
Taylor Simons
Yeah, or there, you know, and there's valid reasons, you know, clients, SSPs have demand teams now. They are out brokering deals directly with buyers. The DSP wants to make sure that they can have, you know, that inventory available for said client if they say they want to run that way. And I think you can do that. You just need to, you know, throttle extremely and consolidate your spend to a core set of trusted, vetted SSPs and paths. And you can have those available if people want them, but you really shouldn't just be letting organic spend float to them at this point.
- [19:04]
Ad Tech Go
Taylor, you mentioned incentives, misalignment of incentives in the space. What do you think that is? If you could explain and then also like, how can that be improved and how. What's the impact on misaligned incentives in the space and what does that mean for advertisers and the ecosystem?
- [19:23]
Taylor Simons
What I come back to is there's an inherent dissonance between DSPs and SSPs, which I think has had a really poor impact on our overall space. We can go into a few examples. I remember when I started in this space, people explained it as a very good, healthy dynamic. You want the SSPs to be taken care of the publishers and you want the DSPs to be taken care of the advertisers and the agencies. But really everybody wins if we actually hit or exceed the marketing campaign's goals. Right? And the supply side is completely blind to what the campaign KPI is if they're performing, if they're not performing. I remember when I first started in the industry, this, this really resonated with me. I was meeting with Triad Retail Media, if you remember them, you know, they monetized all of Walmart, you know, Sam's Club and others. ODIN operated inventory and their audience extension that early days of retail media networks. I was speaking with their leadership team and this woman said, you know, it really drives me crazy about Programmatic where we can get massive spikes of spend and we don't know why. Advertisers can just stop spending on us completely and we don't know why. And you know, if we just shared information between the DSP and the SSP and even the pubs, we could all be optimizing towards the same thing. So I think it creates a lot of mistrust and just that fundamental misaligned incentive creates all sorts of shenanigans in the market that we could solve pretty quickly if we just put the marketer KPIs in the middle.
- [20:59]
Ad Tech Go
The view of what's happening is so limited. I think no matter what supply side platform you use and you start to dig down into who the DSP is, okay, who the advertiser is, okay, what is the brand that's running, where is the creative? Like you can dig down pretty, pretty deep but you still have no idea. Like, you still have no idea. Like, does this Toyota Corolla campaign end on the 5th? Are they trying to get people to go to their dealership? Are they trying to get people to just go look at their new model? What are they really trying to hit here? All you can see is the spend trend and then you optimize on the spend trend. And some days you wake up and you're like, why do we drop this much? Oh, it looks like the Toyota campaign ended okay, maybe something else will replace it. Because that was really nice to have that running for 30 days. And there was like, it's totally blind.
- [21:44]
Taylor Simons
Yes. And imagine, you know, the tech is there. We actually built this at mediamath. We built it with Pubmatic. We built this in partnership with Butler Till. Even for very advanced pharma campaigns which have lagging indicators like audience quality and script lift, I'm a huge champion of it. I would love for DSPs to share performance signals with SSPs and pubs where they are integrated directly so that they can shape the inventory based on what they know is working for a specific advertiser and a specific campaign. Not just, hey, did I get, you know, a bid from the dsp, yes or no? And how high was that bid? That's a very rudimentary way to do things and I'd love for the industry to work towards doing that because I know that also that it works and I know performance, you know, increases. Right? This is also a lot of what, you know, Audigent does, right? They, they ingest performance data from the DSPs from their clients and they optimize the deals based on that. That's the way that it should work. It shouldn't be just, did I get the DSP to bid or not?
- [22:50]
Ad Tech Go
From your perspective in the space, like as a consultant, as working with dsp, an agency, with, with Audigen, as an advisor, you get a really unique view. What is something from your viewpoint that maybe people would disagree on?
- [23:05]
Taylor Simons
Well, I think a lot, a lot of people disagree with what I just said, right? And it's a lot of interesting, you know, change management that I also do with a lot of my clients because a lot of people on the buy side think, you know, my bidder can just handle it. My bidder can just figure out what inventory it wants and what it doesn't. And they know the users that they want to target and there's again, a lot of mistrust. They think that if I share Data with the SSPs, they're going to use that against me. And some of it is a fair skepticism, right? Like the lines between, you know, DSPs and SSPs are getting blurred. But part of this, you know, you could say is because I'm an optimist and I start from a place of trust, there might be an element to that. But you know, if you're integrated with a hundred plus SSPs and you're not sharing any data with them and you're not commercializing terms of them and you're not saying what you want from them and what you don't want from them, to me, then you're in the worst place possible. Why not actually engage with some partners in a strategic way, create ways of working commercial terms to set those rules and then be able to do some cool, innovative stuff like bidirectional data sharing and optimization. But so people definitely don't agree with what I just said.
- [24:15]
Ad Tech Go
I find it kind of shocking, but I also get it. People get stuck in their old ways.
- [24:20]
Taylor Simons
Absolutely. We are clearly at an inflection point. There's one thing that I think back to a lot. There's this slide that, you know, Chris Kane presents at every Jounce summit and it shows just this flat, flat or very little growth of the open Internet. The only real growth that's happened in the open Internet is, you know, X coming into the open Internet and Pinterest coming into the open Internet. But when I look at, you know, what's happening with AI agents, I actually very strongly believe that we can make this a new channel and or a new format for programmatic Open Internet. And we haven't had a new channel or a new format since ctv. Right. And we saw what growth that brought. I was speaking with a few different C level executives at DMS a couple of weeks ago on this very topic. I want to be at the forefront and I want my clients to be at the forefront of enabling, let's say text ads and new search ads within these AI agents. That's changing dramatically and I think it's a very real thing and we can make it happen on the existing programmatic rails.
- [25:27]
Ad Tech Go
So I'm not sure how I feel about AI and this is more of a general question about AI in this space. Do you think that it's going to replace even the type of work and research that you do in the market? I know that AI is being utilized for everything from campaign setup and targeting for reporting. I personally think that it'll optimize someone like you like it'll just be able to assist you with doing things faster. But what's Your view on AI's role in job creation or even job elimination?
- [26:02]
Taylor Simons
I won't pretend to have a crystal ball by any means. I definitely do think, and I think in some industries I think of a lot of outsourced jobs that you get with Fiverr and I think a lot of those will be eliminated, I think. But within our space I see a lot of opportunity. Like I just said, I firmly believe that we will creating a new programmatic channel and inventory and ad type with AI agent inventory sooner than maybe any of us think.
- [26:35]
Ad Tech Go
Taylor, thank you for being here. I wish you the best of luck and thank you for all your support for the years.
- [26:41]
Taylor Simons
Yes, thank you so much. This was awesome and I hope to speak again soon.
- [26:45]
Ad Tech Go
Definitely we will.
- [26:46]
Taylor Simons
Bye.
- [26:47]
Ad Tech Go
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 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 adtech innovation.