90% of Media Buying Workflows Are Still Manual—Here’s What’s Broken | Lacie Thompson

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Always Be Testing – Episode: 90% of Media Buying Workflows Are Still Manual—Here’s What’s Broken (with Lacie Thompson)
Airdate: March 24, 2026
Host: Tye DeGrange
Guest: Lacie Thompson (Founder, MediaPact; former agency leader at LT Partners & New Engine)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Tye DeGrange welcomes Lacie Thompson to discuss the persistent manual challenges in media buying, why nearly 90% of media buying workflows are still not automated, and how her new venture, MediaPact, is aiming to streamline and modernize this space. The conversation dives deep into agency life, automation in affiliate and partner marketing, leveraging AI for efficiency, entrepreneurial lessons, and best practices for building modern B2B SaaS tools that solve real industry pain points.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Lacie’s Professional Journey and Origin of MediaPact

• Creating for Real Needs:
  • Lacie’s trajectory from the brand side (e.g., Blue Nile, Expedia) to running her own agency (LT Partners, eventually acquired by New Engine).
  • Motivation to launch MediaPact stemmed from experiencing the pain and inefficiency of manual media buying processes both in-house and at the agency level.
  • Inspiration from founders like Mark Vadon, who built companies to solve their own pain points.
• The "Manual Media Buying Problem":
  • The paid media buying process is still extremely time-consuming and disjointed, especially when it comes to flat-fee buys outside of programmatic DSPs.
  • “In the programmatic space, you have DSPs and SSPs and you have standardized formats of everything. But when you're buying flat fee direct paid media... it's just all over the board.” – Lacie [04:11]
  • Manual gathering and reconciling of disparate media kits, rate cards, and negotiation documents create inefficiency for agencies and brands.

How MediaPact Aims to Fix What’s Broken

• AI-Powered Standardization:
  • MediaPact uses an AI scanner to read and standardize media kits & rate cards, essentially automating what was previously a manual and tedious task.
  • “With the advent of AI, it has been so much easier to create even more efficiency... I created an AI scanner for all the media kits and rate cards. And so it just can read everything and build that standardized format.” – Lacie [04:56]
• Balancing Efficiency and Human Relationships:
  • Emphasis on not replacing the relationship-building and negotiation that are valuable in partner marketing, but instead reclaiming time by automating repetitive workflows.
  • "There’s still great aspects of our roles where you’ve got that relationship, you’re having those conversations, you’re negotiating... but for this, I do think there’s a gap in the space. I do think there’s a need to bring more AI technology and programmatic aspects of media buying to affiliate..." – Tye [05:53]

Agency Lessons and Leadership Reflections

• Values vs. Spreadsheets:
  • Decisions guided more by values and long-term vision than just data. For example, bold moves like offering four months of paid parental leave at a small agency, driven by a belief in doing what’s right—even at operational pain.
  • “Normally, you can’t do that at that size... but I was like, eff it. I don’t care. It’s going to happen and I’m going to figure it out... in hindsight, I would totally do it again because it’s just values aligned to what I believe in.” – Lacie [07:41]
• Women in Entrepreneurship:
  • Insightful discussion around the hesitancy some women feel in launching businesses before they have “100% confidence,” referencing advice from other female founders.
  • “...women just don’t start their own businesses until they have 100% confidence. It’s just men and women are biologically different, and women have a tendency to not want to take that risk earlier on... I would encourage people to take the leap before they feel like it’s right because sometimes that right moment just never arrives.” – Lacie [10:15]

Entrepreneurial Timing, AI, and Building in 2026

• Taking the Leap—Again:
  • After exiting her New Engine role, Lacie deliberately took a pause to reset, travel, and reassess her next move. The leap into MediaPact came organically after playing with AI dev platforms.
  • “I honestly didn’t think I was going to do this... then I did it really randomly and I was like, wow, this—I was just so mind blown I was like I can’t not do this.” – Lacie [15:42]
• AI as an Entrepreneurial Multiplier:
  • Both host and guest discuss how AI is democratizing the ability to build (“building has become mockeritized”), but warn that real value comes from building moats, meaningful differentiation, and understanding distribution, not just launching single-purpose tools.
  • “If there are other entrepreneurs out there watching or thinking about what to build, I don't think it's going to be as successful to just build a tool that does something. You have to have something else that’s a part of the moat and the business model.” – Lacie [18:36]
  • “At the end of the day, when you run into a big problem that’s hurting your business, you want to be able to talk to a human to say, ‘hey, how do we resolve this?’” – Tye [19:22]

B2B SaaS Product Focus and Customer Discovery

• Staying Focused When “You Can Build Anything”:
  • Lacie relies on trusted advisors and robust customer feedback before prioritizing features on the roadmap.
  • “If what you're trying to solve for is not aligned to that differentiation in that moat, don't waste your time building it unless it's really easy to build.” – Lacie [21:50]
• Seller-Side is the Bottleneck for Platform Adoption:
  • The biggest challenge for adoption isn’t buyers, but getting sellers (those with media inventory) to participate—due to reluctance to manage inventory across multiple tools.
  • Seller conversations and feedback fundamentally shaped MediaPact’s feature set (e.g., visibility, negotiation workflows, data sharing).

Market & Industry Implications

• MediaPact = Not Just for Affiliate Marketers:
  • Most sellers’ revenue is only partly affiliate-driven—wider opportunity exists across broader media and brand buying circles.
  • “It’s not an affiliate tool. It’s a media buying tool to create efficiency for flat fee media buys...” – Lacie [28:18]
  • Manual flat fee buying remains a massive (and under-automated) problem, even for teams otherwise using DSPs for CPM buys.
  • “If you have these tools within affiliate network platforms, you’re never going to access those types of buyers that are outside of the affiliate platform.” – Lacie [28:02]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Automating Manual Tasks:

  • “I created an AI scanner for all the media kits and rate cards. And so it just can read everything and build that standardized format. So it just alleviates like so much more work that people have to do.” – Lacie [04:56]

• Agency Values vs. Operations:

  • “Very early on I was like, I want to give everyone four months of paid parental leave... in hindsight, I would totally do it again because it’s just values aligned to what I believe in.” – Lacie [07:41]

• Entrepreneurial Risk for Women:

  • “Women just don’t start their own businesses until they have 100% confidence... I would encourage people to take the leap before they feel like it’s right because sometimes that right moment just never arrives.” – Lacie [10:15]

• On AI’s Role in Entrepreneurship Today:

  • “I think there's a lot of fear around AI right now. Rightfully so. I have it too. But I just think it's such a cool time to be an entrepreneur. Like, the things that you can do with your ideas and your vision—it's like nothing I've ever seen before.” – Lacie [16:50]

• Customer Discovery Changes Everything:

  • “...some of those conversations have meaningfully changed the direction with which I build the platform. Some of the functionality around visibility in the platform, whether you can negotiate, whether you show pricing—all of these things, I probably wouldn’t have come up with on my own.” – Lacie [24:40]

• On Building with AI:

  • “If what you’re trying to solve for is not aligned to your differentiation and that moat, don’t waste your time building it unless it’s really easy to build.” – Lacie [21:50]

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Key Segments & Timestamps

• Introduction & Context – 00:07–01:54
• How Lacie’s Experience Informed MediaPact – 02:21–05:43
• Manual vs. Automated Media Buying – 05:43–06:43
• Leadership, Agency Building, and Values – 06:43–09:11
• Women in Entrepreneurship – Taking the Leap – 09:47–11:34
• Starting Out and Pivotal Moments in Early Business – 12:12–13:39
• Transition from New Engine to MediaPact: Why Now? – 14:23–17:12
• The Role of AI in Modern Entrepreneurship – 17:12–18:32
• What Makes a Modern B2B SaaS Tool Stand Out – 18:33–19:13
• Bias Toward Customer-Centric Product Roadmaps – 20:11–23:07
• Customer Discovery with Sellers and Cold Start Problem – 24:00–26:33
• Positioning MediaPact in the Broader Marketplace – 27:03–29:47
• Wrap-up & Closing Thoughts – 29:47–End

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Final Takeaways

• Manual processes in media buying remain widespread and inefficient, especially for flat-fee/direct buys.
• Building solutions that solve real problems—grounded in customer discovery, not just technology—are key to SaaS success.
• AI is rapidly lowering the barrier to building products, but differentiation and defensibility still matter (community, moats, real human support).
• The affiliate world is only part of the total opportunity for media buying automation; holistic solutions can serve the wider digital marketing ecosystem.
• Entrepreneurship rewards a blend of principle-driven choices and the courage to act before full confidence sets in.

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Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty degrange, and I'm really excited to talk to Lacy Thompson today. Lacy, how are you?

[A]

I'm great. Thanks for having me. How are you doing?

[B]

Happy. Great to see you as always. Always enjoy our conversations. Happy Friday. Just, just sharing. It's. It's. Summers come early in Austin, Texas, but we'll, we're. We'll handle it. Okay.

[A]

I. I think I should refrain from flipping you off right now since it's pouring out in Seattle.

[B]

That's all right. You're always welcome. And you, you guys have a good thing going up there, too.

[A]

Yeah. In the summer.

[B]

Yeah. I'm gonna plan my trip for August to come visit you.

[A]

Exactly. Exactly.

[B]

Those of you don't know, you should. Lacy is an amazing leader, agency leader, affiliate marketer, partner marketer, digital marketer. And she's got something exciting she's launching now, which is fantastic. I'm just so happy to talk to you about it and talk to you about your experience. It's going to be a great one.

[A]

I'm super excited and a little scared, so.

[B]

Nothing to be scared about. Nothing to be scared about. So Lacy is launching MediaPact, which is an amazing tool to reach brands and allow brands to place media programmatically in a really interesting way. So I'm excited her to talk about that. She has been instrumental in agency growth, something that's near and dear to our hearts, and was able to scale LT Partners to get acquired by New Engine, which is one of the most amazing acquisitions in the last few years. She's worked with brands like Blue Nile and Expedia. So you're, you're talking to somebody great today, very highly respected in the industry, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. So anything else you want to add?

[A]

No, you've said too much.

[B]

Well, let's jump into it. So you've been able to build things on the brand side. You've had the agency experience. I'm excited to hear a bit more about MediaPact. What your vision of. For it is, what. What you're thinking about and sort of what was the. What were some of the key problems that you saw in market where you're like, this doesn't exist now. I need to build this.

[A]

Yeah, Well, I think like the, the evolution of my career. It's funny actually, kind of follows like a similar path of a story that I heard when I was back in house at Blue Nile and I heard the story of like Mark Vadon and why he created Blue Nile. And then he went on to create Zulily as well. And it was very much like this organic story about things that had happened in his life and him wanting to create a solution for the problems that he had. And so for me I was at Expedia running the affiliate program there. I had hired an agency and when I fast forward three years after that, started LT Partners, I really just wanted to create the type of agency that I would have wanted to hire when I was in house. So I wanted a lot of transparency. I wanted to create a solution that wasn't just like pushing, advocating for the things that weren't in the best interest of the brand. Like all these things, all these like issues that I had seen brand side. I wanted to create an agency solution that would solve for that. So then when I had my agency, I think one of the most important things for agencies is to always be considering how they're spending their time. Because the time that your team puts in is your cost of goods. It's different than like Hill Co. Or something like that. Your people are your resources and the more time they spend on things that are not focused on driving results for the clients, the less time they have to spend driving results for the clients. So one of the things that was just like so monotonous and time consuming and painful was the process of buying flat fee paid media. And I did it when I was at Expedia. There's a huge part of our industry that still sort of acts like business development, building real relationships in person with people, having real conversations, real negotiations, which I think is very powerful. But I also saw a need to create efficiency and have systems around it. And so in the programmatic space you have DSPs and SSPs and you have standardized formats of everything. But when you're buying flat fee direct paid media, Vox will have a totally different media kit and placement spreadsheet or rate card than PMC or they it just is all over the board. And so with the, with the advent of AI, it has been so much easier to create even more efficiency in that whole process. And that's what was really fun about building MediaPact is sort of like had this idea back in my agency days, but now that I have the time to actually like put it into practice, we I created an AI scanner for all the media kits and rate cards. And so it just can read everything and build that standardized format. So it just alleviates like so much more work that people have to do. So really I mean, it's all about creating efficiency and making the process seamless and not disparate and all over the place and time consuming.

[B]

Yeah, I love that. And it's, it's. There's still such great aspects of our roles of affiliate and partner marketing where you've got that relationship, you're having those conversations, you're negotiating. But for, for this, I'm excited because I do think there is a, there's a gap in the space. I do think there's a need to bring a little bit more of that AI technology and programmatic aspects of media buying to affiliate, where it's in some ways stuck in 1985. So I think there's something, I think there's something there and I'm excited about it for you. Absolutely. Yeah. We need all the good tooling we can get. Obviously, the run of being able to build something from nothing is amazing and exciting and to be able to scale it to the level you did with LT was just phenomenal. Looking back, was there something that, hey, on paper looked like a phenomenal decision, but in hindsight, as you've had some time to look at it, you're like, probably wouldn't have done that again. Is there anything that comes to mind?

[A]

It's, it's just so hard because I think that with every decision I make with other people, even sometimes together, decisions that we make together, like you have the day. It's just like with marketing, you have the data and then you have your like, context and expertise. And every decision is sort of about, like bringing that together. So I, I never really just look at a spreadsheet, even though I am a highly analytical and data driven person, because you can kind of make data tell whatever story you want if you try hard enough. And so I think, I think that in retrospect, some of the things that I did were actually like, not because of the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet told me something else and I did it anyway because I was just really, like passionate about it. Like, for example, very early on I was like, I want to give everyone four months of paid parental leave. I had like six employees, seven employees. And normally, like, you can't do that at that size. It's really difficult. And I was like, eff it. I don't, I don't care. It's going to happen and I'm going to figure it out. And we were fully remote, so we started building out the spreadsheet to be like, how would we do this? And we're like, yeah, it's possible. And I think, like, in hindsight, I would totally do it again because it's just values aligned to what I believe in. And I wish I could do more than that, to be totally honest, but it in practice was incredibly difficult to implement. And hiring remote employees in all these different states, like, operationalizing that is such a massive pain in the ass. Like, you really don't get it until you've had to do it. And it just makes you, like, not want to hire people in certain states or things like that. But at the end of the day, it's just part of doing business. And you just sort of have to accept that there's going to be some things that are not ideal. And it's a trade off because you, you have to figure out, like, what your priorities are. So, I mean, I just don't have a lot of, like, things where I looked at something in a spreadsheet and I said, oh, that makes a lot of sense. And then it didn't. Because I just think it's always important to combine it with, like, your values and what's important, you. And then you can't.

[B]

I love that and forgive everyone out there. If there's knowing looks, laughter, or crying, it's because I've lived through similar things that Lacy has, as she knows all too well. So well said, well said. Just to maybe humor me, was there stuff where your kind of position changed a little over time? Or maybe you look back and you're like, not, not, not to, like, dwell on it? Was there something where you're like, okay, that's an interesting evolution. I'm looking at it differently now. Even if, like, beyond lt, if it was just something that you've maybe changed position on a little, might be a trickier one.

[A]

I mean, what I would say is I do. And sometimes I do wish I would have started a company earlier in my career. But then I'm always like, would I have done it the same? Because I learned so much from all of these different experiences that I could apply to what I did. But the first day, I think it was the first official day that I was in business, I had a call with another female founder, and she had spent like 14 years at Coca Cola and done these, like, leadership training sessions. And she said that one of the key things that she retained from some of those sessions is that women just don't start their own businesses until they have 100% confidence. It's just men and women are biologically different, and women have a tendency to not want to take that risk earlier on. And I think that I very much was that way. And I don't know that I had a hundred. I don't know that I still have a hundred percent confidence in anything, but I definitely, like, I spent three years at another agency helping to scale that and I felt like after doing that I was like, well, I could do this on my own, you know, but could I have done it on my own before? Possibly. I probably would have made more mistakes. I don't know. Who knows? It's. It's hard to look back and. Yeah, but I, I think like I have shared that story before and I share it again just because if there are other women that are contemplating like going into business or anything of that nature, like, I just, I would encourage people to take the leap before they feel like it's right because sometimes that right moment just never arrives.

[B]

Yeah, that's a really, that's a really interesting point and I think I couldn't agree more with you on all of it. Think. I think I started relatively late in my entrepreneurial journey and I had exposure to what it meant to be an entrepreneur. But I was in house company guy for quite a while myself and I think, think there is an interesting case to be made. Even if it is to just try it at some point or maybe try it a little bit earlier. I think that's a really interesting appreciated conversation and I think it's good to get probably worth doing. And also think about the times when it's like, how close was I to

[A]

not doing it right?

[B]

I don't know if you ever thought of that either.

[A]

But yeah, I. Six months into starting, I mean, I just consulted in the beginning and I didn't know for sure that I was going to create this agency. And six months into starting I was like, okay, well I can't do this all by myself anymore because I just got so busy. And then I was. I hired a coach to sort of like help, help me work through, like, what am I going to do? Am I going to go or not? And then even after I decided I'm going to go, I hired my first employee and then one of my clients wanted to bring me on in house to be their cmo. And I was like, I could do both. Why not? So I was flying to LA every other week, going in office, and I basically had like a job and my agency. And then it all really came to a sudden halt for like HR reasons. Not on my behalf, thankfully, but all of a sudden like that opportunity just kind of stopped and it was actually like such a good sign for me. I took it as like a sign of like that's not actually what I was meant to do. I sort of was thinking I'll explore this, maybe that will be the path. Like maybe I'll just go that way instead of this way.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But it was made very clear to me in a very like cosmic way.

[B]

Some sometimes those are nice. Yeah. That's so cool. I mean I think it's amazing that you are got the drive and the gumption to go at it again with a new venture. I mean that's something that I think not a lot of people would do after the successes that you've had. I'd love to hear a little bit about the timing around Media Pact and transitioning from the new engine opportunity and just it's like I think it's pretty impressive to drive to build again from nothing and I think it's pretty amazing. But I'd love to hear kind of that but also like why now? Sort of for, for Media Pact.

[A]

Yeah, I mean I, I transitioned out of my full time role at New Engine in June and my, my career has always just had these like levels of intensity and then like a small lull of some sort. When I was at Expedia I went part time for like four months and just kind of reset a little bit and refocused and thought about bigger picture and like where I wanted things to go in my future and I, I think that it is important for people to have some sort of like pause at a certain point of the, the pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. You have to like take a breath and like reset your nervous system and become a little bored for a little bit which I'm not very good at by the way. Like I like that is difficult for me to take but I love to travel. I, I spent some time traveling after my transition out it was the summer so I got to spend more time with my kids and my family and I have done some like artsy things like just played around with a lot of different ideas. But then I was encouraged to start checking out some of these AI dev platforms and I had actually come up with a media packed idea back when I had LT Partners and I had an investor pitch deck that I had built and I put it into Lovable and I started prompting it and I was like build this thing. And automatically from the very first prompt I think I said I want it to have an AI scanner so that sellers of media can just upload their stuff and it just creates everything for them. And I mean within an hour I was just mind blown and I, it wasn't really like I had this intention of like or this plan or this timeline or the like even thought that I was going to do this. Like I, I honestly didn't think I was going to do this. And then, and then I did it really randomly and I was like, wow, this, I mean I was just so mind blown I was like I can't not do this because it's just incredible what is possible today. And I'm so honestly, I think there's a lot of fear around AI right now. Rightfully so. I have it too. But I just think it's such a cool time to be an entrepreneur. Like the things that you can do with your ideas and your vision, it's, it's like nothing I've ever seen before. And I just, I excited about it. I couldn't like hold back and not, not try it, you know.

[B]

Love that. Yeah, it's, it's mind blowing for, for, for my perspective and so many people are seeing it and it's, it's so fascinating. I. There was a recent one of many content pieces and posts about it. It's almost overwhelming to keep track of, but one I liked in particular recently was basically like you can, you can basically have it do a lot of the things that you're just, it's, it can compliment you and you can enable you to do things that you're more, more able to focus on. I'm. I'm not phrasing it particularly well, but it was a very simplistic one or two liner where it's not necessarily something to be as afraid as are of it. If you can, if you can enable you to do good things, if it can enable you to do what you want to do. And I think that's the exciting part of it for, for you and for all of us. And I, I love the entrepreneurial opportunity. I think you've probably seen a bunch of things sharing that this may unlock a lot of entrepreneurial opportunity for a lot of different people, perhaps more than it has than previously.

[A]

Yeah. And on that note, I would just say like the, I think the dynamics of technology are. They've changed, they're changing, they'll continue to change, they always will.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I think right now like if there are other entrepreneurs out there like watching this or thinking about what to build, like I don't think it's going to be as successful to just build a tool that does something like you have to have Something else that's a part of the moat and the business model. Otherwise anybody else can build it. And maybe not today because we've all seen that chart of like all the squares and the colored dots and who's using AI and blah blah, blah, blah. The one little corner thing where people are building with it. But that will, that will change very quickly. So.

[B]

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. It just, in elaborating with you like having this is a horrible statement, but like having someone's nectaring has come up a lot around like SaaS. Like at the end of the day when you run into a big problem that's of hurting your business, you want to be able to talk to a human to say, hey, how do we resolve this? Or not to mention the challenge of distribution, which we all know is what we do to an extent is not there for a tool that was just launched yesterday, even though it might have the same features of your tool. So it's fascinating to hear and see people make sense of it all. I'm sure you're making sense of it rather quickly building this.

[A]

There's a lot of people that have a lot of opinions about it and we don't all have the same opinions. You know what I mean?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And we'll see. I mean it's always fun to like share hypotheses and hear other people's hypotheses of what's, what's to come and, and we'll see. I mean no one knows for sure.

[B]

Exactly, Exactly. Sort of related is you think about all the things you can build and all the opportunities that media pact could be and you've got your product roadmap and you're building, you've got some, some good brains thinking on it. Like how do you keep focused when you can build anything? How do you think about product roadmap in that world where building becomes so, so much easier?

[A]

Yeah, I do, I have three advisors for my company and I, I, I just, this is something that I did with LT Partners as well. And I think that hearing from other people who are successful, well networked, know their is more important than me just saying like this is what I think. And so a lot of times when I think about what to focus on, I lean on other people and I, I just like to get feedback and get a lot of input before I make a decision. And I have an, like an AI tool guru who's one of our advisors and I, I was talking about like what's, we have this problem that we need to solve. It's a, it's around like how our stripe payouts work and like understanding the flow of all of that and all this stuff. And he's like, well you need to decide like what, what is the most important thing for your target customer? What what is your moat? What is your thing that they want? What's your differentiation? And if what you're trying to solve for is not aligned to that differentiation in that moat, don't waste your time building it unless it's really easy to build. So one example is I kind of got to this point where I was tracking everything that I wanted to build into the platform in a Google sheet for a long time and I was like I probably need to have like some sort of project management solution, a Kanban board of sorts. We previously used Asana for example. There's lots of other ones out there in the space. And I was thinking like should I use this one or that one or does Google have a thing or what? And then I just thought well it'd be a lot easier if it was just like in my admin portal so I can go in and prompt to build the same thing and I don't have to go license it. And it took like 30 minutes to build it out. So like it's a, it's a trade off between like is this core to your solution and what the differentiation is to the end user and. Or is it fast to build it yourself? If, if those two things are no, then go buy it somewhere else. Go license it somewhere else. Use a third party tool. That's kind of like my thought process around it.

[B]

Yeah. Even, even for now that, now that building has become mockeritized, for lack of a better term, it's a, it's a bit of a trade off in our own way in a different way. So it resonates with me and I think that logic is. That's very sound, talked a little bit about, important to the customer. Right. The one that's actually utilizing the tool and Media Pack. When you think about the media buyer, I'd love to hear your perspective on like kind of what is it? What does that flow potentially look like with, with Media Pack? What's the, what is the intention in terms of how you can kind of alleviate some of those pains and some of the like jobs to be done and things that they, they will be doing and being able to do with with MediaPack. I'd love to hear a little bit more about who are the types of people would really resonate with who the types of folks could use it, benefit from it.

[A]

Yeah, that question really makes me think to the fact that I got a really, really good book recommendation from my friend Rob over at Levanta when I first told him about Media Pact. And that book is called the Cold Start Problem. And it's all about like building network effects. Have you read it?

[B]

It's a good one.

[A]

Yeah. So for Media Pact, like kind of using some of the terminology from the Cold Start program, the selling side is actually the hard side of the platform. Right? Like, the reason why some of these other solutions that have existed out there in the, in the past haven't succeeded is because they don't get the seller adoption. And I also don't have background on the seller side in my own career. And so while I can to some degree sort of theorize about what their business looks like, I needed to get in there and do like customer discovery conversations with them to really make sure that what I was building was something that would be adopted by them. So since November, I've been having those conversations with sellers of media and I've recorded them all. I've built a spreadsheet and tracked everybody's feedback to really validate that what I wanted to build was the right thing to build. But some of those conversations have like meaningfully changed the direction with which I build the platform. And so some of like the functionality around, like visibility in the platform and whether you can negotiate and like whether you show pricing all the time, like all of these things are things that like, I probably wouldn't have come up with on my own. And again, like just crowdsourcing the needs, I think is a really important piece. And then I've been onboarding sellers first. We just started like mid last week, so it hasn't been that long. We're very early days. But we have 14 sellers on the platform right now. There's 180 placements that are now on board. And so I want to make sure that when the buyers come, there's stuff there, like things for them to see, ways to interact. They're going to be excited to like, engage and then also like for everybody to be inviting all of the other people that they know in the industry. Because if I'm a buyer, I probably know a lot of sellers. If I'm a seller, I probably know a lot of buyers. And that's, I think, organically how the community will come to grow.

[B]

I love that we talked about this a little bit, but the, the affiliate world is kind of has its own methodologies and idiosyncrasies of media buying, which we, we talked about and know all too well. And then you've got kind of the programmatic world and world that buys things a little bit more, a little bit more programmatically. What, what's your thought on where it sits and how you're thinking about it in that realm? Is it, is it predominant predominantly in the affiliate space or how would you maybe describe it for people?

[A]

I had a theory kind of going into this whole thing. As I mentioned, there are other tools out there kind of similar to MediaPact. This isn't like some new invention, right? On some of the affiliate platforms these tools exist. I won't name names. There's like three of them that I think still exist today. My theory as to why it hasn't really scaled is because these sellers that are the hard side of the platform, they don't want to have to manage their inventory on five different platforms. It actually makes more work for them than just doing it the old school way and like manually reaching out to people and doing it through email and sending iOS and all that stuff. So that was my initial theory and as I had these conversations with sellers that was validated. But what actually came up again, like through these conversations was these are, they're not just selling to affiliate marketers. In fact, most of the people that I talked to, most of the sellers said that maybe half of their sales come from affiliate marketers. Some of them said 40%, like less than half. So I think the market opportunity outside of affiliate is so much greater or at least half of what the affiliate industry can represent. And so if you have these tools within affiliate network platforms, you're never going to access those types of buyers that are outside of the affiliate platform. So those are like my two really big reasons why I think it hasn't worked in the past. And I think there's other aspects of the platform that I could kind of go into a little bit around these series. But it's not an affiliate tool. It's a media buying tool to create efficiency for flat fee media buys. So like if you're a media planner and a media buyer who is typically buying Programmatic Media, I've interviewed some of those folks as well and they'll say like, yeah, we'll definitely do like CPM buys on the trade desk or whatever other platforms, but oftentimes they'll throw in like this flat fee portion of it that still is handled very manually that doesn't have a system with which to execute it. And so now I do see Media Pact in the future being able to be leveraged by people who are selling programmatic by people who are selling to brand marketers or PR agencies. I it's definitely not, I don't want to put it in a an affiliate corner, but I, I know for fact, because it's the industry I've been in forever, that that's a definite pain point in affiliate marketing.

[B]

It's really well said. It's been absolute pleasure, as always. Thanks for coming on and sharing some amazing learnings, and I'm excited to continue to collaborate with you on MediaPact. And it's coming a lot more coming soon. Have a good weekend. Bye.