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A
Bienvenido Miami. How's that for some Spanish? We're bringing heat to Miami this year at the possible event happening on April 27 to April 29. Architecture Media is back and we're back as official partners for possible we're bringing you more content, we're bringing you more curated gatherings, we're bringing you more hot takes. Join us at the Ad Tech God Golden Hour. Watch us on our video series called Preach on the beach and dine with us at our VIP dinner. Big thanks to our amazing sponsors. We're working closely with Fluency, verve, swivel, freewheel, AI digital life, 360 infolinks and 7. Thank you to our amazing sponsors for making it happen. We hope you enjoy our content. We hope you enjoy our gatherings. If you're interested in attending any of these or sponsoring our content while we're in Miami, please go to market possible 2026. Again, go to market 26. See you in Miami.
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B
This podcast is brought to you by audiohook, the leading independent audio dsp. Audio Hook has direct publisher integrations into all major podcast and streaming radio platforms, providing 40% more inventory than what could be accessed in omnichannel DSPs. What's more, audiobook has full transcripts on more than 90% of all podcast inventory, enabling advanced contextual targeting and brand suitability. Audio Hook is so confident that in addition to CPM buys, they offer the industry's only pay for performance option where brands can scale audio and podcasting with peace of mind, knowing they are only paying for outcomes. Visit audiohook.com to learn more. That's audiohook.com welcome to the AdTech Godpod,
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A
your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host at Tech God. Hey everyone, this is at Tech God. You are listening to a live recording from Architecture Live, the conference we just had in the beautiful New York City at a location called the Glass House. We received a bunch of positive feedback from our attendees, our guests and everybody especially loved the food. I don't have that for you today, but what I do have is an episode from the conference. This was recorded live. This one in particular is with Abella Brown West. She's the president at Cole McVoy Bob Lord, who is the president at Horizon Media and it's moderated by Mike Shields. He's the founder of Next in Media. Now we will be releasing a lot of these episodes across our various podcasts. This is not all going to be on Ad Tech God. It's not all going to be on marketecture. So if you are interested in listening to conversations with people like Luma Partners or People Inc. Bliss, Pubmatic or any other industry kind of technology platform, you can listen to the marketexture podcast. If you want to hear more from the brands directly, we have the Brand Forum podcast. We're going to be covering things like Olson, Coors, the WNBA, NFL and more. Also all recorded at Market and I myself on AdTech, Godpod. I'm going to be covering all the agency stuff. So I've got Omnicom Benches, Media Butler Till, Dentsu and more. So just tune in every week. My episodes will drop every Friday. My regular Tuesday podcasts are as is. This is just an extra bonus for you. Thank you again for listening and enjoy this session.
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C
Thanks Jeremy. What a, what a cheery title.
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A
What a, what a, what a.
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C
What a fun subject matter to jump into. If the meteorite is coming, which of you are Bruce or Bruce Willis in this situation, who's going to save us? It's an Armageddon joke. No one. No one's.
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D
I don't know. I think we're going to save ourselves.
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C
All right, let's start with how that's going to happen. So before we, let's get, I want to get into how agencies are responding and should respond. But what are you, what are you both hearing from clients? Because the, the, the extreme things you read right now, it's either we are all going on Universal Basic Income, it's over, or actually no one can figure out what to do with AI. Don't worry about it. What are you, what are you seeing, Bob, on your side?
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D
I would say, look, I think most of it is a mass confusion of what's happening right now and this collision of these short innovation cycles with the way that they know how to do marketing in the past. And I think the challenge is, and the imposit change right now is the consumers already moved on. The consumers are already in the discovery engines. We as marketers or the craft of marketing hasn't necessarily caught up to that yet. So it feels like we're in a really, really confusing world right now. And I think the winners, which we'll talk more and more about, are the people that just lean in really hard and capitalize on this great innovation that's happening and apply it to marketing in a different way.
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C
You want to jump in there, Abela
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E
Yeah, I was going to say brands, I think are excited. I think where the confusion lies is a lot of brands are not set up for the Agility, and a lot of agencies aren't either. And so I think that there is excitement, but the confusion comes in when you're actually looking at the operational side of things as to how can you actually lean into a system that isn't necessarily set up for this amount of innovation that's happening so rapidly.
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D
And I think, I think if we just jump on that up that operating idea, I think what we have to be responsible with is to set up operating systems for our brands. And what I mean by operating systems is it has to be led by a platform strategy, informed by a data strategy, and then created a managed service across the organization. We are still approaching the world in silos. So we have a media system, we have a creative system, we have a dsp, we have a this, we have a that, and everything's a point solution. And the magic right now where we need to get to very quickly is connecting those dots, quite honestly, eliminating some of those dots, and create an operating platform where the brand can have a great value exchange with their consumers. And it is incumbent on us as an industry to create those kind of infrastructures.
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C
All right, well, on that note, Abella, so like, depending on what you read, generative AI could theoretically replace a lot of what creative agencies do and. Or it's already doing that with media buying and planning and optimization. But the agencies are built for the way things used to be. And that's like a lot of procedure and structure that has to be redone. How do you do that quickly to keep up with the speed of technology and the needs? Or should you be racing?
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D
Like, protein is now at Starbucks and it's never tasted so good. You can add protein cold foam to your favorite drink or try one of our new protein lattes or matcha.
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A
Try it today at Starbucks.
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E
Yeah, I think so. On the creative side, that's where I think there is still a lot of opportunity from a humanity standpoint. The media side, there's been AI for a while. I don't know that any clients were talking about it, but pmax, there's been a lot of AI happening. Machine learning has been going on for at least a decade. So on the media side, I'm pretty sure that are on the creative side of things. The reason why clients are talking about agility and agencies are talking about agility is because now it's becoming a consumer facing potential liability. Right. And so when you're thinking about how as an agency you can become a little bit more agile on the creative side of things, there's a lot of tools that we can be using. And it's not about the, it's not about the lack of transparency. Right. You have to be a little bit more transparent than the media side has been. And it's because of the liabilities that come with that.
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D
Look, I think the liabilities of the industry right now is the fact that the ad agencies and the legacy business have basically invested in millions and millions of dollars in legacy tech and legacy debt. And why the hell aren't we moving fast enough? Is because they have to monetize a return on that legacy technology and that legacy debt. So what's not happening is marketers aren't getting modern tools in a consolidated way because there's a hold back with the inertia of the old system. So the winners in this are going to be the agencies and the clients that lean into the new technology and kind of leave the past away. And I mean that with all. I have never in my career seen innovation cycles so short. Meaning how do you capture these innovation cycles on behalf of your client? The only way you can do that or the only way I know how to do that. And look, IBM brought me to school around the open source world. The only way you can do that is you have an open ecosystem and you bring partners in and you innovate with those partners. An open ecosystem creates more innovation. So if you look back at legacy tools, even in some people sitting in this room, those legacy tools are holding you back from actually embracing the open ecosystem.
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E
I was going to say it's not, and we've talked about this a little bit, but it's not just the tools, it's the structures. Right. And so I think that is the piece that is holding people back from the agility you have in a brand type of environment. You might work with five, six, seven different agencies, depending on how you're actually thinking about the agency structure. And every agency might have a different point of view and a different way of doing things, leveraging AI. And so I think navigating that from the brand standpoint, navigating the MSAs that you have with those agencies might look very different. The amount of innovation that those agencies are pushing you into might look a little bit different. And I think that is where, going back to your earlier question, the brands are getting confused with how they actually should be thinking about it because they're also not set up to manage all of those different operational aspects on their side.
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C
It almost sounds like it would be, is it, would it be easier to start from scratch? Is this advantage in a newbie new agency that can be built for the needs of today.
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D
Oh, no. I mean, look, second, third mover advantage is a damn great advantage right now to have. So if you have no legacy tech, I have no legacy debt. I haven't invested. To leapfrog forward and partner with a Google and Amazon to create a platform for you is exactly what you need to do. Now, the great thing about a platform is it standardizes all the complexity. Meaning if I as a brand have nine agencies doing my creative, if I say I'm going to standardize on X platform, whether it's a smartly, a VidMob, whatever it may be, you basically then dictate the process. Without a platform, you have chaos out there. And that is what the opportunity is right now. So if you can find platforms that you can interconnect together, a media system, a creative system, a social system, a data system, if you can have that interconnectivity, you can then bring your entire organization together and external partners to innovate on. If you don't have the platform, we're going to have operational chaos. And I believe that the agencies and the brands that are able to put, I keep calling them operating platforms, those are the ones that are going to win over time, but the ones who are very promiscuous and sort of go with this platform and then go with this platform and then try to get the best of this and the best of that in the long run, you're going to get lost in the chaos. And quite honestly, you could write a check to Mark Zuckerberg. Right. That's the other option.
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C
That's the other theory.
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B
Right.
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C
Who needs agencies really in the future when they just do everything? The big platforms will take care of this.
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E
Yeah. So I'll say a little bit different than what Bob was saying. I don't know that we need to burn it all down. I do think that we need to actually have a harder conversation on what it is that AI will enable us to do. And so a lot of the conversations that are happening right now around AI are focused on AI taking everyone's jobs.
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C
Or I want to. I have to show my stockholders that I got rid of a bunch.
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E
Yeah, exactly. Or you found the efficiencies because of AI. And I think the real conversation that we actually need to be having is around upskilling the talent that we have that can actually come in and leverage AI to help us actually do more and do it better and do it quicker and help us actually lean into the humanity that AI will never be able to bring to the table. And you mentioned IBM, I think, great example. IBM was very hardcore AI, but they actually just came out like a month ago with a little bit of a mea culpa saying oh, we might have actually gone too far, we need to bring people back a couple. Claire and I think also just did that where they had AI doing all of their customer service and they came back and said actually you know what, there's that missing piece of humanity that we actually need to factor in. So I don't know that we need to burn it down. Yes, second mover advantage is, it's real right now. But I do think that there is a place for the smart agencies to come in and actually have the hard conversations around how can we be more efficient Instead of it being 10 people doing the job of a thousand people. It's those 10 people bringing that efficiency, bringing that additional manpower in to build the overall business. Which I think as we're thinking about that one of the biggest things that we didn't touch on but is very real in the agency landscape is that kind of goes against the pricing structure.
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C
The whole, the whole, the whole business
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E
was built around, it was built around FTEs. Right. And so if we're now saying that we can actually help build the business and do a little bit more and with the team that we have, if they're upskilled, if they're more senior and they lean into AI and know how to work quicker, more efficiently and more strategically, it becomes more about a value based option as opposed to an FTE model which those are the types of conversations that the agencies need to have and then bring those to clients and it makes it easier.
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D
Yeah, I fundamentally absolutely agree. I think that we go a step further. I think instead of thinking about AI tools to make the agency run faster, I think we think about AI tools and all these innovation technologies to drive our clients business groat. If we put that frame on the tool sets and the platforms that we bring forward of driving our clients growth, then that changes, Mike, the whole model
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C
internally, you were always doing that, right?
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D
Yeah, presumably. But look, pay me on how many cars you sell. Pay me on what your earnings per share is on an annual basis. Pay me based on the results that you're driving. We've never gotten to that point and I think that's where performance based, performance based. Because if we get to that point right then all of our incentives are all lined up. But right now my incentive is to put 150 more people on the engagement because I get paid more.
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C
Are our clients there? That all sounds. Why wouldn't I want to take the risk away and make you guys perform? But they're used to paying you a certain way. How hard is that to get them to change?
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D
No, it's really hard. And I think in the next year I think we're. But look, I finally believe the technology's there. And let's call a spade a spade, right? The technology has never really been there in a place where if you have a media system, it was disconnected from everything else. Now you have a media system that can plug into an ad tech stack, that ad tech stack can plug into an ERP system. That ERP system runs your financial system. So for once, now I actually have the CMO being the friend of the cfo. So I can track the media dollar all the way down to how many cars I sold or how many beds I've sold. When I can get to that point, which I don't think is very far away, Mike, you then start to say, look, you know, instead of paying me 100% on commission or 100% on retainer, let's bring it down to 25% on retainer and 75% based on the performance. And that's where we need to go. And that'll get everyone's incentives. But to keep thinking about AI as taking more jobs away from the agency and how I make the agency run faster, I'm still in that FT model, I'm still driving my cost down. I got to think about AI as a way of running my clients business and making them more successful. And then the frame starts to change.
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C
Avela, what about, you know, people envision once, once the. Once agencies, whatever form they take, they figure out how to use AI best, that it will sort of the machines will be better at knocking out 5,000 different versions of Creative and optimizing the media plan better than any person could. But you talked about the liability and maybe keeping that stuff at arm's length, like why? How should we think about how that might unfold?
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E
Yeah. So it's funny, we've been saying internally that every CMO technically has a junior art director or junior copywriter in their pocket right now. Right. The missing link though is the actual, as I said before, the humanity aspect. As we're thinking about the agency model and making sure that we're continuing to bring value, it is bringing value that we know that AI is never going to be able to necessarily bring. They're not going to be able to really understand taste level, they're not going to be able to understand a brand brief and how you're supposed to position yourself to the CEO of a company. Like, you can do a really good job of trying to train it and model after that. But there is a certain aspect that will always require a human to intervene in order to make sure. So as we're thinking about the elevation of the craft and of how people should be actually working with AI, it is really the upskilling aspect and not being afraid to say to the team, like, there are tools that can be useful in helping us move quicker, but they're not going to necessarily replace the actual human aspect of how we do things on the media side of things. Yeah, there is a lot of. There's a lot of pressure because there have been tools that have been available for many years that we never had to have conversations with clients about because there was a lack of liability interest. But now that all of these AI addendums are coming in and MSA tell
- [19:25]
C
people what that means.
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E
An AI addendum. Yeah. So when you have. We have been getting a lot of outreach from the legal teams of our clients because they are curious about how we're using AI. And so all of our master service agreements, all of our contracts, we are now having to amend. To be fair, Max, no one, no one cared about that. But now that there is the creative side coming into the picture and there's the potential liability of a brand being sued if they use an AI generated piece of creative that they did not know was owned by someone else. That is a very real liability. And so because of that, the legal teams, we are having a lot of conversations with them. And it's not just about creative anymore. We're having those legal conversations about the use of AI, period. And so now we're having to have those conversations on. Well, by the way, we've actually on the media side been using AI in these ways with these partners for many years. And that opens up that conversation. So it's starting to become more interesting because, yes, a CMO has a, an art director in their pocket, but when they're starting to push their agencies to start to think about how to find AI in an interesting, innovative, efficient way, the lawyers pop up and say, oh, wait, your agencies are using AI for creative. Let's get an understanding of how they're using it for everything. And so that piece becomes interesting as you're talking to them on the defense of where the humanity aspect still comes in. We might be using AI but we're not actually using AI for finished product. There's still. You have to be able to defend how your people, through upskilling are leveraging it and continuing to use their skills to make it something that is unique for that client and something that is defensible if a client takes the risk. From a liability perspective.
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D
Yeah. Look, I think this world of AI transparency is a really big thing. When we've actually put out the use of AI principles and what it means to use AI, your responsibility in using AI as an employee at Horizon, that is you can't say the dog ate my homework. Whatever comes out of the AI tool is your responsibility. It is not because the machine actually told you what to do. Right. And we just need to train people around what that is. But I think the legal thing, we will get through, like I think we are, will get through. That's just a temporary road bump now for it all. And I would say to you, because I do agree, the creative brand, the Marlboro man, like the great insight ideas, right, those will never be captured by AI. But once you have that idea, how I root, how I scale it, how I assemble it, how I do product localize, how I score it, how I integrate it into media, that is just a natural place for machines to do stuff, right? And given the amount of platforms that we have, when you look at these technologies, they're great technologies. You're the one controlling the wheels. It's not automatically doing it all itself. So it's informed by data. And as long as the data and the key factors are there, you can put AI in a safe box for yourself as a brand. If it goes outside of those outliers, you have technology to show you it went out of those out outliers. So I'm kind of bullish. And I think it's a matter of us figuring out in this damn industry how to use the best in innovation tools so that our, our marketers can actually grow their business really quick.
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C
Does this have the unintended, maybe unintended side effect of bringing creative and media closer together again and 100%.
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D
100%. I think it's a fantastic thing. I mean, look, come on, Lou, you, you were convinced years ago that breaking media apart from creative was the best thing happening. That was 25 years ago because you
- [23:30]
E
just do a thumbs down.
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D
It was all about bring my price down, bring my price down, separate media from creative. Right? Well, we did that for many, many years, but now we finally have technology and media that can coexist together. And we know when we bring media and creative together or at least 15 or 20% lift on your return on ad spend. So yes, we're going to be back
- [23:52]
E
together and I would say just bringing it all the way back, that is what will actually help brands get more comfortable, I think when they truly have a one stop shop that can help them from an AI perspective get everything done. Right now they're working with a lot of different partners and this is actually the great unifier in a lot of ways.
- [24:13]
C
All right, so we still have jobs. Awesome.
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E
We all still have jobs.
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C
We could do another hour on this, but we got to stop right there. Thank you both for a trif discussion.
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D
Thank you.
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A
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, ET cetera. The PG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.