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AdTechGod Pod
Ep. 91 Protect the Publisher: Walt Dublin on Monetization, AI & Mission-Driven Media
00:25:01
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- [00:00]
AdTech God
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- [01:18]
AdTech God
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 are joined by the industry's finest. Today I'm joined by Walt Dublin, Vice President, Enterprise Publisher Development at Reptiv. Walt has been leading high level publisher partnerships since 2023. He also advises at Decide, sits on the Digital Marketing Advisory Board at USF's MAMA College of Business and and is an active member of hu, a platform supporting BIPOC leaders across media and tech. Walt, you came highly recommended from a mutual friend. So I'm really excited to have you here. Thank you for being on the podcast.
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Walt Dublin
I'm so glad to be here. Thank you.
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AdTech God
Well, we'll kind of take it back to to how you how you entered the space, how you started leading all your publisher development, sales and partnerships over at Raptive. How did you get into the space and what brought you to this point today?
- [02:19]
Walt Dublin
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I just kind of fell into ad tech. I don't want to say accidentally. I've always had a passion for technology but geez, I think it was about 14 years ago now. I got my start at a small mobile dictation startup called Copy Talk, which was my first exposure in tech sales and fell in love with it. Ended up becoming their their top salesperson within my first six months with the company which opened up a lot of opportunities for both prom had a lot of recruiters reaching out to me at the time. From there, joined a company called Gartner, which you may or may not be familiar with. They're a large IT consulting and research firm. Was there for a number of years. Led to my introduction to a CEO at a company called Clickbooth. John Limp, who I met with, had a phenomenal conversation with and he actually invited me to join a small startup at the time that didn't even have a name, a logo or a website. He just said, walt, I'm cooking up something really cool over here. I think it has legs and I'd love for you to be a part of the team. So, you know, after talking to my girlfriend at the time, made the decision to take a leap of faith and join this small tech startup which eventually became Rev Content. I was the 10th hire at Rev Content, second dedicated sales rep, had no experience, no idea what I was doing, but joined the company, which eventually grew to be one of the largest native advertising content recommendation companies in the space. From there grew to lead our publisher development efforts at Rev Content, which led to a number of other roles in native advertising across NGID and Decide Technologies, which bled into opportunities on the programmatic side as well. So, you know, led publisher development at Instacator, which is now the cool company, and opened the door for me to have a conversation with Tina Pouts and you know, just offered me an opportunity. I took advantage of it.
- [04:30]
AdTech God
What do you think? In from your perspective and where you sit, having worked with the publisher side of the space for so long, what has really changed from your perspective on how these publishers work and how they want to partner with with companies such as Raptive today?
- [04:47]
Walt Dublin
That's a great question. I think early on there was a lot more openness to testing. I mean, when I got started, we were still in kind of the wild west of ad tech, especially on the content recommendation side. You had like us, Content, Ad, ngid, Taboola, Outbrain. We were all trying to find our footing in the space and publishers were just really open to testing new innovative solutions without ton of due diligence. So it was kind of easy to get a foot in the door with somebody if you just had a good conversation, built a strong relationship. I mean, relationships are still very important, but I feel like publishers just given the amount of experience they have today versus back then, there's a lot more due diligence involved before they're willing to take the risk of taking on new partnerships than there were back then. So I would say that's probably the biggest change is just as with Anything. There's a lot more information out there, there's a lot more data. Publishers have access to a ton of resources that can help inform their decisions before they actually speak with you. So it's a lot harder now to get those tests up and running. But usually by the time you get to the point of actually running a test or launching a partnership, they have a really good idea and understanding of your value prop and they're very confident in their decision.
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AdTech God
So correct me if I'm wrong, but Raptive used to be called Cafe Media.
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Walt Dublin
Yes.
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AdTech God
Okay. And then is the core focus of the company on kind of like the, the mid tail, the mid level publishers and then you guys are helping them monetize and select the right partners and manage the site on their behalf.
- [06:27]
Walt Dublin
Yeah, so I would say, you know, just historically, you know, and Raptive has been around for a very long time. I mean we do offer a myriad of tools and solutions for that Knit Tail creator. So we got our footing in the food and recipe space. So a lot of people that are familiar with Raptive know us from monetizing a very large percentage of the food and recipe creators that exist on the Internet today. When I joined Raptive, we had been about a year into our Raptive for enterprise offering, which was a newer offering focused on helping larger publishers monetize and scale their businesses. So that's my focus today, is working with some of the largest media companies in the world, helping them better monetize through and just generally, you know, drive higher revenue across a number of different solutions from just the programmatic piece on display and video customer revenue streams. In the past week we've assisted with affiliates, e comm, newsletters, email collection, you name it. There's a lot of different ways that we're helping publishers today, Walt.
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AdTech God
The industry has changed a lot over the last few years. I just read an article this morning about the impact of AI and crawlers and how they impact publishers and that I think it was Cloudflare that wanted to.
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Walt Dublin
Yes.
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AdTech God
Recommend that, you know, you should block these AI crawlers from scraping your content unless there is a right way to. To monetize it. What's your just general perspective? And it doesn't have to be Raptive's perspective, but what's your general feeling about this and do you think publishers should block them? Should they not block them? What do you think is fair for these publishers that work so hard to push out so much content, to have it utilized in a format that they're not compensated for?
- [08:23]
Walt Dublin
Yeah, I think my POV there. And just to give you a little bit of background and context, initially when I went to college, I went to Ohio State. Go Buckeyes. I was a journalism major prior to switching to business. So, you know, I've always been very, very passionate about writing about journalists. I think one of the main reasons why I love working with publishers every day. I'm one of the people that's helping put food on the table for all of these content creators and journalists that spend so much time, some of them even risking their lives, to inform the general public on what's going on in the world. And I feel like they're being attacked on a lot of different fronts. You have, you know, the AI piece, you have, you know, polarized politics and all of these things that are impacting their ability to just make a living and protect their jobs. And it's important for us to protect them. So like you said, my personal POV is that anything that I can do to help protect journalists and protect their content so that they can continue producing more of it, I'm all for that. I think Raptis POV is our background is in publishing. Raptive actually got its start as a publisher many, many years ago. I think we have a really good understanding of the space and because of our scale, we realize that there's a responsibility that comes with advocating on behalf of not just the publishers that are in our ecosystem, which we work with about 6,000 publishers today, but just the ecosystem in its entirety. So we've done a lot. We've. We've taken a lot of steps over the years to advocate on behalf of publishers, both from protecting their content from being scraped by these large big tech companies, but also advocating for compensation in the event that their content is being scraped and repurposed on the web. We just want to make sure that they're getting their fair share. So, you know, with the Senate rejecting big tech's attempt to block AI regulation and the cloudflare news that just came out, I think what you're starting to see is that lawmakers are finally understanding what Raptive and just the industry has been telling them, which is that these AI companies just want to extract value from publisher content without fair compensation. And I think every publisher that we work with deserves that protection and compensation. So here at Raptive, we just, we just want to, you know, continue to advocate and be a. Be the type of partner who fights for the industry in its entirety, not just, you know, for individual publishers.
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AdTech God
I think you nailed everything on the head and there's no feedback from my end. I mean these, these guys work so hard, these women work so hard to come up with original content, writing articles, journalism across the board, whether it's industry focused or general news, and to see it being scraped and not compensated is, in my opinion, theft. If it was done in any other way where they were compensated, it makes sense. If it's summarized briefly for a sentence or two, that's perfectly fine. But the data is being collected and repurposed and there's really no reason to go to the website anymore because all that information is there. So I love the fact that you, you support your publishers and you provide them with the feedback and the voice to protect them from really the revenue stream, which is the content that they create. What are some things in the industry that from your perspective, are positive in terms of our growth and the trajectory we're heading in? We know AI, we understand measurement, but on the publisher side, what are some innovative things that you're hearing from them? What are user experience changes, device changes? What are things that you're hearing from your publishers that you think are really positive?
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Walt Dublin
Publishers have a lot, have more access to more information and data than ever before. So I think, you know, there's been this, this push to kind of push for more flexibility in the ways that they work with the various ad tech partners out there looking for more bespoke solutions or strategic partnerships that encompass not just one aspect of their revenue generation? I think that's one of the reasons why we've seen the growth that we have is through our enterprise solutions. We do work very closely with all the publishers to make sure that we're becoming a partner to the business. A couple of things that we've seen publishers are starting to just given the changes that have happened through AI and the reductions in traffic that they're seeing from changes that Google's made to their search algorithms is there's more of an emphasis being placed on user experience. Instead of just piling a bunch of ads on the page, like how can we find ways to generate the exact same amount of revenue or a similar amount of revenue with, with a much better user experience. You're seeing a change in how publishers are structuring their content. You're seeing them incorporating some of those popular formats that you typically see on, like social media from vertical video, looking for ways to bring that type of content onto their websites. I think it's, it's a really interesting time to be in the space because one, there's a lot of consolidation happening, but two, publishers are now being forced to innovate and do things that they haven't done before because they're being forced to. And I think it's exciting to be at the forefront of that. It's exciting to, you know, be able to work with so, so many different types of publishers that feed us a ton of information and insights on how we can continue to evolve and, and make our solutions better for them as well. So I'm just, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, I know there's a lot of challenges that we're facing right now as an industry, but I'm very optimistic that we have the talent and the people to figure out how to overcome them.
- [15:26]
AdTech God
So the, the podcast, when I first started this was really to meet people behind the industry. So whether it's ad tech or advertising, marketing, media, and I've been able to meet a lot of different people across the space. And one thing that stood out, your involvement with Hue. And it's a platform that supports bipoc people, which is black, indigenous and people of color. We don't have very much of that in our space. I'm a huge supporter of women. I think that's much easier for me to have a 50:50 type ratio for my podcast, but people of color is rare and I wanted to hear like, from your opinion, what it's like, what you think needs to change and maybe things that we can do and for the listeners to do to be able to just be a little bit more aware of the diversity that we need in this space to really make it better.
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Walt Dublin
I can tell you that, you know, when I first got into ad tech and I would show up at, you know, the, the major industry events, like, I noticed that most times there weren't very many people that looked like me at the events. That has improved over the years, which I'm very happy to see, but I still do think there's a lot of work that can be done to continue to improve that. And I think there's a very good business case for continuing to look for ways to just drive more diversity in the space. I think, you know, if, if you Think about it. Ad tech in general is, is fundamentally about solving problems. And I feel like diverse teams solve problems differently. I think having a lot of people from different backgrounds and different upbringings bring a lot of unique perspectives to the table and they just see opportunities that maybe, you know, very homogenous groups tend to miss. And I think that you, you can have a group of people from different backgrounds looking at the same data, right. And get insights that come across very differently depending on where they come from. So that, that's one thing that, you know, I've always advocated for, even, even before getting involved with Hue. I think Hugh is a great organization, it's a growing organization, but the focus of HU is just advocating for more diversity in all of tech. So, you know, they partner with the organizations from, you know, small startups on up to Fortune 100 companies. They have a recruitment arm that helps matchmake some of these organizations with great talents. They're also at a lot of the industry events and speaking engagements just trying to, you know, help educate people on some of the benefits of bringing more diversity into their organizations. But you know, here at Raptive, you know, we're also, we work with more diverse owned publishers or media companies and than any other organization in space. I mean, diversity is something that's been at the core of everything that we do. When you look across the organization, it's, it's one of the more diverse organizations that I've been involved in. You know, we, we actively want to continue to invest in, in these creators and publishers and help put more eyeballs on them.
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AdTech God
It really matters. Like we work in an industry. Let's forget ad tech. We work in an industry that's advertising. And the idea is that things need to be relevant to the people that are watching. And I sense the racial breakdown at some of the companies are not representative of maybe like the racial breakdown of the United States. Like if you think about percentage of people of color, various religions, various backgrounds, it is important to have those perspectives, especially in an industry like advertising where, you know, you want to resonate with the people that are watching your ads, you want to resonate with the people that you're trying to target. If everybody looks the same and you're trying to target people who may be interested in your product that do not look like you. It's very hard to understand the culture, the background, the views of things if everybody looks the same. So in my opinion, diversity is important more than just what is fair and what is right and what should be done. But I think for Advertising overall, in my view. Again, I think it's really important. Like, you want to target your customers and you want to understand how they feel about a product or your technology or your ad that you're running. I mean, you want people to understand that culture and understand their background, whether it's religious or color or ethnicity. It's important across the board. So there's so many different benefits to just looking at a diverse workplace.
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Walt Dublin
No, I totally agree with you. I mean, if you look at some of the most successful advertising campaigns over the past 20 years, I think they've come from teams that probably understand their audiences. And I do believe diversity's played a massive role in that because, you know, these ads that you see that are performing really well reflect the audiences authentically. I think there's. We've seen it in movies, we've seen it in television where, you know, maybe the producer or the writer on a. On a certain TV show didn't come from the background or, you know, have the upbringing of the story that they're writing about, and it just doesn't come across as authentic. I mean, it's hard to get engaged with some of those. But, you know, over the past few years, you see this increased focus on bringing more diverse writers and directors and producers into the fold, which has led to some very unique and authentic storytelling, which I'm super excited about. So, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think the perspectives are super important. And, you know, that that goes across all organizations, across all mediums. I think we do need to embrace diversity. I don't think it's like a problem that needs to be solved. I think it's just people understanding that there's more benefits just bringing in different points of view and people from different backgrounds than there are risks.
- [21:50]
AdTech God
I agree, Walt. If you weren't working in advertising, if you weren't working in ad tech, working with these publishers and your partners at Raptive, what's something you're really passionate about? What's something that you love that you would be doing if, you know, you didn't need an income?
- [22:06]
Walt Dublin
Let's just say that that's a fun question, because when I first got started in nantech, I spent a lot of time coaching. My background is I went to college on a football scholarship. Love football. Love coaching kids. So over the years, I've coached at just about every level from, you know, peewee on up to high school. But even beyond that, just going back to these teams into the classrooms to talk to the kids about opportunities and tech and, you know, thinking about their careers as, like, not this thing that they need to try to solve right away. Just. Just find something they're passionate about and dig into that. I do think being an educator is something that's always piqued my interest, just having an impact on, on young people's lives. I've done a lot of mentorship over the years with a few different organizations, most recently this program called Road to Hire at Red Ventures. And I volunteered as a, as a lifestyle mentor for them, helping them prepare for their job interviews, resume creation, budgeting, just all of those things. So I think, you know, it would probably be something in public service or education.
- [23:31]
AdTech God
I have good news for you. I. I work closely with University of Southern California, usc. I speak with one of the professors there quite often about the space. So maybe after this podcast I'll. I'll make an email introduction.
- [23:44]
Walt Dublin
He.
- [23:44]
AdTech God
He often has people in the ad tech space speak. Um, I think I had Tal from Cargo there. I brought in the CMO of Magnite and a few others to speak to students just about the industry, what you do, where things are heading. So I'd love to make an introduction after this podcast and maybe you guys can take it from there here in la. So you may have to travel, but if you happen to be in Los Angeles for a meeting, it could work out.
- [24:10]
Walt Dublin
I'd love that.
- [24:11]
AdTech God
Amazing. Well, thank you. Thank you again for being here, Walt. And thanks for being my guest. And thanks to Rakta for, for bringing you on.
- [24:18]
Walt Dublin
Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity.
- [24:20]
AdTech God
Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Ad Tech godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates. So follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.