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Episode 128: Everything that happened at Cannes with Ari and Eric
00:33:05
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- [00:01]
Ari Poparo
This podcast is brought to you by Adelaide Media verification and measurement are undergoing major disruption. Legacy players are pivoting to performance. Advertising AI is reshaping brand safety and attention is replacing viewability. Adelaide is leading the shift with au, a new way to assess media quality that scores placements based on their potential to drive attention and outcomes. Before your ads run, think of it like a credit score for media. Finally, a clear view of quality. Before you buy, take the guesswork out of your investment strategy and try Adelaide AU on your next campaign. This episode of Architecture is brought to you by Start IO, an industry leading mobile SSP. If you build ad campaigns, Start IO is offering architecture listeners curated evergreen deals with no audience fees. Visit www.start.IO nofees to activate today. That's www.start.IO no fees. Welcome to the Market Extra podcast. This is Ari Poparo. I'm joined today by Eric Franchi. We have a special episode today and we don't have a guest. We're going to talk through the news that came out of Cannes a post Cannes wrap up and just generally there's a lot going on so we'll be back with a great guest next week. Eric, so I didn't see you at Cannes.
- [01:26]
Eric Franchi
Yes, I did not go to can and I managed through the follow I think quite well. I had a bunch of stuff on home front that I need to stick around with. Stick around for rather. But I kept myself busy. There was a viral startup that launched while you all were at Cannes called Cluly. Have you looked into Cluli?
- [01:46]
Ari Poparo
He cheated everything. These assholes cheated everything. Big surprise. A16Z funded them. The most amoral company in Silicon Valley will fund anything.
- [02:00]
Eric Franchi
So that was interesting. Occupied some mind share but there was a lot of news coming out of camp so let's talk about it. How many times have you been to Canada? When did you start going?
- [02:10]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, so not as much as many as you'd think. Probably only four or five. And I took off for a couple for Covid. So I think I started going to Beeswax small delegation just like me and a sales dude. Plus you know Katie who is my head of Europe who I saw shout out to Katie and it was always very productive. I had a terrible can a couple years back where I had a root canal go bad midway through my flight to Cannes and I thought I could, yeah, it was bad. I could like I thought I could power through and just like see the dentist when I got back and it kept getting worse and worse and all I could eat was ice Cream. And I was like, I got to get back and I had to. Emergency flight back to New York. Wow.
- [02:49]
Eric Franchi
Okay. Well, thankfully that didn't happen again.
- [02:52]
Ari Poparo
I know. I just love telling that story because, you know, it's dramatic.
- [02:57]
Eric Franchi
Yeah. Yeah, that is dramatic. I started going over 10 years ago right when Ken started to be taken over by tech and there was, you know, ad tech row of the. Of the yachts and everything like that. And I've seen over the, you know, the decade, everything shift and now, you know, the walled gardens and the, the large, you know, hedge gardens, what, whatever, I think dominate the space. What was the difference from your perspective? And this could be around anything this year versus last year versus maybe when you first started going.
- [03:28]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, I think that the ad tech people have definitely taken over every piece of signage on the crusade. Most of the yachts, most of the booths are ad tech adjacent. At least you do have folks who are just selling ads like Spotify beach and consultants and things like that. But it's pretty firmly a mixed conference where you have the folks who pay for the tickets and get the awards are largely agents people and then the folks who are spending the money are largely ad tech people. That's a nice coexistence. I guess someone has to buy the drinks.
- [04:03]
Eric Franchi
Who from ad tech was very visible. Who do you think won in terms of mindshare, creative marketing? Just, you know, who's on your mind? Post can for ad tech.
- [04:14]
Ari Poparo
I think it's interesting that Google increasingly just talks about YouTube. It was really YouTube beach, not Google Beach, Neil Mohan and creators and all of that. That was the highlight of the. It comes from Google's bank account. But they're really pushing YouTube.
- [04:31]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, we'll get to that in a sec. Okay, that's an interesting observation. What else?
- [04:34]
Ari Poparo
Spotify had a big presence. I think Stagwell had a sports speech that was very popular. I didn't go there, but it seemed like that was a big deal. You had competing consultancies with MediaLink and three CV2 beaches next to each other. Also, I think you saw a lot of the CTV people. I had a chance to pop by the LG suite, but they weren't the only ones. Netflix had a suite. Pretty much everyone in the CTV world was there in some form, although not as big. You didn't see other than Freewheel, Comcast, you didn't see a major expenditure from the TV people. They were more tactical, more bringing five or six people and, you know, getting their message across and taking meetings from.
- [05:16]
Eric Franchi
The cheap seats here across the world. One of the things that I thought was interesting, and I want to know if they've resonated as much in person versus online was the Viant out of home ad or the vine outdoor ad. So they had an ad and did you see it?
- [05:30]
Ari Poparo
No, I don't think I saw it.
- [05:31]
Eric Franchi
Get out of here. So, and Adam, maybe this is a location thing and this is just the power of social media. They had an outdoor ad that seemingly was like, right, you know, positioned by the Palais, that had an image of a typewriter with the question still trading on a desk. And then, you know, the other side of it was Vine AI future of digital advertising. So a nod to their, I think, you know, positioning that they view, you know, DSPs as being autonomous in the future and certainly like a shot across a ballot. Ttd.
- [06:03]
Ari Poparo
Yeah. So. So as a marketer, I always want to know how the budgets and how these activations take place. So I asked some questions and what I found out was, first of all, the dollar amounts you have to pay to get a spot in one of the hotels is just astounding. Right? It's astounding. I talked to someone, I talked to someone who basically had like a couple of couches and a little hallway in a major hotel, and they said it was $500,000. And what's interesting, and I didn't know this, is that when you do that, you also get bundled into the package. Signage on the main road. And you have to. They're combined, like, you can't. And it's the opposite. You can't do signage on the main road. You can't just like, find some random cafe and say, we're going to put up our sign here. It's all controlled by the lion's people. So the signage and the space go together for a really big dollar amount. And also, even if you have like a hotel room up on the third floor of one of these hotels and want to throw a banner out your window, you have to get it approved officially by the city council. So there's some French bureaucrat who's. Who's saying none to the ad tech people who. And they get a little too obnoxious with their signage. The other thing, the other thing I noticed is like, and this is kind of funny from my perspective, running bees, not beeswax. What's the name of my company market? You know, our small. You know, we're a small company, so. So it's like it's basically, we've reproduced medieval feudalism because Cannes Lyon is the King. They own everything. They are the Roy of the French Riviera. And then they sell a parcel to a nobleman like Adweek, who's a partner of ours. So Adweek spends a lot of money and they have the Adweek house and that's great for them. And then they have to have a level down in the feudalism. So they give Vayant a little. Half of their space is all branded Vayant. And Vayant has meeting rooms in the Adweek house, which is from the hotel, which is from Lion. And then ad tech God needs a space. So we partner with Adweek to have a party in the vian space in Adweek in Lions. And then we sell sponsorships to our party. So that's how the money flows.
- [08:08]
Eric Franchi
It's like a series of subleases almost.
- [08:10]
Ari Poparo
It's a series. It's like, yeah, it's basically I'm the sharecropper and I'm waking up in the morning and hoeing my land and trying to eke out some barley. Wow.
- [08:21]
Eric Franchi
I do remember the few years we went big at Undertone. This is a decade ago going through all that. That's how things go there. But it was nowhere near 500 grand. So it has kept pace or outpaced inflation.
- [08:35]
Ari Poparo
That's like the entry level for a yacht is like. Because it may be like 300 for the yacht and another couple hundred for food and Bev.
- [08:43]
Eric Franchi
All right, let's talk about big themes. So we had three here. We'll go through them. So first is AI. Second, I think sports creators kind of put them together. And the third was rmns Commerce Media, maybe non Publisher media. Let's talk about AI first. So a year ago, speaking of Vayant, we saw the first big AI launch which was Viant AI and then there wasn't a lot. And then all of a sudden over the course of the past quarter or so, everybody's got an AI story. So was AI just the dominant theme in conversation and content?
- [09:19]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, absolutely it was the dominant theme. The common joke was next year we're just going to send our agents here instead of wasting the plane trip. The info in me likes that. Yeah, exactly. There. It certainly is a top thought for everyone, but mixture of fear and opportunity. Everyone is talking about it, everyone's excited about it. I will say from my experience talking to the ad tech vendor community, which is kind of like my bread and butter, I'm not very impressed. I don't see that many. I don't see that many products have shipped. I Don't see people using in production. And I put this on Twitter. Everyone loves to talk about, you know, Brian o' Kelly in Scope three and how he's like hyping so much. He's crazily hyping his stuff. But you know what, he's in production and a lot of people are not. So let's see some shipping, let's see some features that people actually use.
- [10:10]
Eric Franchi
That's interesting. So interesting. Joe Zawadsky came back and you know, he had. His perspective was. And maybe this was just everybody thinking more about opportunity rather than production is like there's a sense of real optimism because of what AI represents in terms of a resetting. Right. You know, it's been a decade of Google and meta basically eating everything, right? And then, you know, the open web has whatever its share and ad tech has, has its share. But, you know, it's a little bit of like, optimism that the future is, is up for grabs, which maybe tracks to what you're saying, which is it's excitement. But yo, you got ship.
- [10:43]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, I do think it is up for grabs a little bit. That we've been in a fairly static competitive situation in most of the sectors that matter. And for a while we all thought cookie deprecation was going to be the reset, that we would have a new generation of tech that would be privacy, safe pets and stuff. And that turned out to not be as big a revolution as anyone thought. And now we have a new opportunity to rethink the way we offer our clients products and could really change who competes with whom. I have some ideas I'm trying to work through for my newsletter about this, about Does AI make curation more valuable? Is kind of a thinking I've been kind of working through, but I guess I'll stand by my point. Like, who shipped? Can you log in? Name your favorite dsp? Can you log in and have a radically different experience because of AI than you did a year ago?
- [11:39]
Eric Franchi
It's a good question. I'm not hands on tboard, so I. I can't come up with anything.
- [11:44]
Ari Poparo
The answer is no. The answer is no.
- [11:46]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, all right, fine. That said, we're seeing things, right? So TTD had their 10 days of announcements or 10 announcements they thought had some pretty interesting announcements that were around AI, right? So they're building out their gen AI Creative Marketplace. They've got companies like Rembrandt, a portfolio company that are, you know, just trying to reimagine creative with AI. They've got, you know, some interesting sort of like kind of data things happening. So people are pushing forward. But yeah, there hasn't been yet the wholesale change that I think I'm waiting for.
- [12:21]
Ari Poparo
This is a little bit off topic. I put it in the notes, but it's a little off topic. But did you see the gorilla dentist ad?
- [12:27]
Eric Franchi
Yeah.
- [12:27]
Ari Poparo
You know Veo, the, the video platform from Google is astoundingly good, right? It's, it's just, it's the first time that you can, that can fool the average person into thinking they're real. And so there's this meme, it creates these really funny videos with this gorilla who does a lot of drugs. It's very, very funny. It's like kind of taking over TikTok and Reels, this gorilla thing. But it's not copyrighted character. You just tell Veo to have a drug addled gorilla. So a dentist created a commercial of this gorilla getting really high, jumping out of a plane and breaking his teeth and then going to the dentist and getting implants. And it's a real dentist and a real ad and it's a million dollar ad easily. You know, if you were to ask an agency and it's, you know, probably the best local dentist ad in the history of the Internet. It is really cool. It is hysterically funny, like really laugh out loud funny. It just makes me wonder, and I've been skeptical on this pod from the start about AI creative companies is that like I feel like the underlying tech is so powerful that you may not need vendors like there may. We may be skipping this step in this whole process. And AI is more like the invention of the PC than it is the invention of the spreadsheet.
- [13:42]
Eric Franchi
Fascinating. Stephen Liss from Open Ads had this post and he had a good image in his post as well. It might have been with Veo or something like that of a yacht, like sinking. But his view is that as AI kind of blends media and creative future creative roles need to be technical. Like you need to be able to make VO3 do that and then conversely technical roles, you need to be able to meet creative in the middle. So it's an interesting resetting and it's a skill set that to your point, like needs to be created.
- [14:20]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, I think that's a good point. And also creatives have always been somewhat technical. If you've ever tried to jump into PowerPoint, not PowerPoint, Photoshop and make it work for you. I mean there's a pretty high skill level in the creative professions and always has been, this is different. And I Think that the tools remain somewhat immature. So be very interesting to see how they do that.
- [14:42]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, exciting. Okay, so I. Not enough shipping. The potential is ridiculous.
- [14:49]
Ari Poparo
Yeah. I wrote about it in my newsletter this week that I'm surprisingly impressed by the amount of shipping going on among agencies. We don't know as non users how impactful what their shipping is, but they're shipping. So you have MIQ's major sigma announcement we covered two weeks ago and they were on a panel that I moderated. Also IPG has a new product out with Snowflake. Yeah, they have an A.I. sort of. I don't even know what it is like a media planning kind of thing. But they shipped it into the Snowflake cloud so that brands can use it without moving their data. Which is a really interesting idea of like can you bring the agency's intelligence to the cloud instead of the client's data to the agency? And then PMG has a. Has an AI instance called Ali. PMG is the. Is like this very tech enabled. They don't even want to be called an agency, but they are tech enabled. Agency that bought Camelot, they released this thing called the ALI Marketplace which is again it's agency workflow around media buying and planning. But now that they are allowing third party vendors to kind of instantly insert themselves into the client's workflow and data, this is just a step more interesting than historically what we've seen from agencies, which is effectively white labeling technology from other people.
- [16:13]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, love to see it. Have you gotten a demo of Alief?
- [16:16]
Ari Poparo
I haven't. I would love to get that.
- [16:18]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, I did and we'll put the link to the announcement. There's some screenshots that shows it. It is, it's quite impressive.
- [16:24]
Ari Poparo
Right. What is, what is the core functionality? Is it media planning primarily or execution?
- [16:30]
Eric Franchi
It's both. It's end to end. Think of, you know, I think they launched it with something like 30 vendors, 25 leading partners including Amazon, Attain, Disney, Experian, NBC Universal, Samsung Ads, inside campaign workflows. So it's like end to end if you think about those names. They're everything from planning to media to execution to optimization.
- [16:49]
Ari Poparo
Yeah. So it makes a lot of sense if you're going to use AI to automate things. You have to. Part of that is pushing the tool into the client's hands. Because if you're just automating internally your agency and still shipping spreadsheets and PowerPoints to the client, there's going to be a limit to how much benefit there's going to be. This episode of Architecture is brought to you by Start IO, an industry leading mobile SSP. If you build ad campaigns, Start IO is offering architecture listeners curated evergreen deals with no audience fees. Visit www.startionofees to activate today. That's www.start.IO no fees.
- [17:30]
Eric Franchi
Okay, cool. Let's move on to number two, sports and creators. Again from the cheap seats. So much of the content that you know was discussed was at Stagwell Sport beach, which seemingly was like the place to be. You had Serena Williams, the Kelsey Brothers, like all sorts of celebrities there and a lot of the conversations were around sports and sports sponsorship and sports monetization. There's actually some ad tech announcements that were about sports. So two of TTD's announcements were about how they were doing integrations to allow for buying during live sports. So really feels like this is becoming elevated and more of a part of, you know, the space than it's been and where there's probably some areas for innovation around ad tech. What did you. Was there a lot of discussion there or is just that was not part of the ad tech rumor all.
- [18:20]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, there was a lot of presence of creators. I think Forbes announced or is a fortune. I think Forbes announced their like creator top 100 listing. They had a big party. The YouTube presence was heavily focused on creators.
- [18:34]
Eric Franchi
So this is sports and creators.
- [18:36]
Ari Poparo
Sports and creators.
- [18:37]
Eric Franchi
You're kind of putting this all together.
- [18:38]
Ari Poparo
Put together. Yeah. The angle for sports specifically obviously is like so much of TV viewership is sports and that has been moving to digital and to Programmatic, but those are kind of different steps. Moving to digital first but still serving ads in kind of the traditional way and then moving to programmatic where there are a lot of complexities that I know the IB and other folks have been trying to kind of get their arms around to help help make it programmatic enabled without having the same ad show 70 times in a row and stuff like that. It was kind of difficult technically, but definitely creators were top top of the list of important things. I was, I was standing online for the Spotify party and I was on the press line which was exciting. If anyone wants to treat me as press and give me free stuff. My I did not go to journalism school, so I don't know what the ethical rules are. I'll just take it. So anyway, so I was standing online to go to see Cardi B at Spotify and the guy in front of me was a younger fellow who, you know, just doing his thing, checking his phone and some girls across the way were like, hey man, who's playing? And he's like cardi B. And then the girls after he said cardi B, they freaked out and started yelling and being like, oh my God, do you know who he is? You know who he is? And I have no idea. There's some random dude. And the other girl's like, no, who is he? And he just says like, look me up, baby. And then, and then the woman, the first girl says he's the guy with the spatula. And I'm like, I'm like, this is ridiculous. Like so like, I mean he looks like a cool dude and everything, young, good looking guy, but like he's the dude of the spatula. And they had that made their can that they ran into the dude with the spatula and they didn't know I was the ad tech influencer. There was no one screaming for me. Or there might have been actually Steve Kettleman might have been, but no one, no one of note.
- [20:28]
Eric Franchi
This is ridiculous. I did a quick search for the guy with the spatula there.
- [20:33]
Ari Poparo
I wasn't able to locate either. I was able to locate him either. Yeah.
- [20:37]
Eric Franchi
So Lou Pascal has actually a really good wrap up in Ad Exchanger. We should link to it. He pointed out just the impact of creators, right? So the Social and Influencer Lions award is now called the Social and Creator lion. And you know, the, the, the predictions around growth are wild. So a creator economy will become a $500 billion business on CAGR of 25% by 2030. This seems to be. So obviously this is why YouTube is all in because they're just like running away with this space. But also it's an area that I've been trying to dive into because it's like this is the future of media and some of the problems that we've seen in terms of fragmentation and measurement and workflow with the previous open web, it seems to be the same in the creator space. So I do wonder if we start to see more of a light on tech tools for creators and the creative space just because of the market size and the obvious problems.
- [21:38]
Ari Poparo
On the other hand, the creators express themselves largely within walled gardens. So between YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, those are the three major sources of creator income, which makes it very difficult for everybody involved because those are closed platforms. They're not going to let a lot of tech involved into the gardens. I also have a little bit of a contrarian take, which is the creator economy is very vulnerable to AI. You know, I mentioned earlier these guerrilla Videos. If you spend any time on TikTok, it's getting overwhelmed by high quality AI generated content very quickly. Like, not. You know, it's. It's probably a very underreported story. How much AI is going on TikTok right now? It's not slop, it's like, quality. And I just wonder how much of what creators currently do is going to be AI'd.
- [22:25]
Eric Franchi
I will take the other side of that.
- [22:27]
Ari Poparo
Okay.
- [22:28]
Eric Franchi
Because I think for the reason you just said, there's an unlimited amount of AI slop, which is going to get better, which is going to get highly personalized, which is going to be trained for your taste versus my taste, authenticity and real people. And the complete other side of that becomes that much more valuable. What this means in terms of market opportunity and money and all that stuff, I'm not sure. But I do think the other side of that remains, like a real opportunity.
- [22:57]
Ari Poparo
All right, I'm going to make a tortured analogy, if I may. Tell me if this makes any sense. In my life, we've gone from rock bands with five or six friends creating music to one of the trends is there are no bands in the top 100 songs ever anymore. Every single artist is a single. So that's the creator economy. And then you look at the EDM world, which I'm not a big fan of, but people love EDM. And the DJs are anonymous, they're wearing headgear, no one knows who they are, and they can be replaced at any time. They're characters. I think that's my tortured analogy.
- [23:33]
Eric Franchi
Okay, all right. So you are like, ready Player one Matrix. We're just plugged in and machines are feeding us.
- [23:40]
Ari Poparo
Look, it's going to happen to OnlyFans. That's why they're trying to sell, like, OnlyFans, you know, sexual content. You know, of course not. Sexual content is going to be replaced by AI in our lifetimes.
- [23:51]
Eric Franchi
Geez. Okay, let's come back to Commerce Media.
- [23:55]
Ari Poparo
Let's do it.
- [23:56]
Eric Franchi
So who do you recall just, you know, making big investments, you know, just like a location perspective from a marketing perspective.
- [24:04]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, that's always the vibe. How much did they spend on their yacht and things like that? You know, I think PayPal's making a big, big move. We had Dr. Mark on the podcast. They're just constantly doing stuff, having events, trying to get people involved, raise their profile.
- [24:20]
Eric Franchi
Shoppable ads that he hinted they came out. They look good.
- [24:24]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, I haven't seen them. Okay, I'll check it out.
- [24:28]
Eric Franchi
We'll Put the link in the docket. We could put it on the newsletter. They look good.
- [24:32]
Ari Poparo
The biggest news which we'll cover in a second is Amazon Roku. That was the one news report that broke through the clutter. But I don't know if I saw that much commerce. Everyone was there, everyone was talking, but I don't think anyone had an enormous physical presence.
- [24:48]
Eric Franchi
That said, the announcements around commerce media, I agree, were some of the most interesting. I had another one that maybe was a little bit less impactful and big as Amazon Roku, but we should talk about both. So Amazon Roku, why is this interesting and matter?
- [25:03]
Ari Poparo
So Amazon and Roku, they kicked off the week with their announcement and they positioned. It was a little hard to parse it out, but they positioned it as the largest reach Video CTV network. What it is specifically, you know Roku is an active seller of ads, right? They sell their ads themselves. They sell, they facilitate the ad sales on the apps on the Roku device. Roku is the most popular CTV platform. So that's, that's, that's the baseline. And Roku has a, has multiple buying platforms because they acquire Datazoo and they have a self service platform and they also allow people to buy through the trade desk. Okay, that's the baseline. So what they announced more or less is just that the Amazon DSP can buy on the Roku devices with a unified id, which makes the Amazon DSP arguably the strongest player in CTV because they can access all of Amazon's walled garden stuff on the Fire TV and all the other Amazon stuff, plus all the Roku inventory with the same ID. And I think they gave 68% as their estimate of the audience they could reach. And there's some caveats here. So the Trade Desk and Roku have a partnership that does involve UID too. So the trade Desk also has ID resolution on Roku devices. And there was some question. I talked to Dave Clark, the former CEO of Freewheel about this and he thinks that the real interesting thing is that Amazon's getting insight into the ID within apps on Roku devices. So if you're like CBS and you have the CBS app on Roku devices, it's sort of up to you whether you use UID 2 or not. And Roku has always had ID resolution within the CBS app and now they're giving that to Amazon as well. Overall, I would just say it's a real big coup for the Amazon dsp.
- [26:44]
Eric Franchi
We had Jay Askanazi on shortly after he took the job at Roku and he talked about their plan to go from basically being closed to open to doing big partnerships. So this is like the ultimate manifestation of that. YouTube is still number one from a reach perspective, from a time spent perspective. But they don't have Amazon shopping data. So this is a very interesting big competitor to that.
- [27:09]
Ari Poparo
Yeah. And if the DV360, historically the number one advantage has been YouTube access, still has that exclusively, but the Amazon DSP has Amazon access and Roku access. So this is a real heavyweight fight going on here.
- [27:24]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, for sure. The other one I thought was interesting and again not as big clearly was Comcast. So Comcast partners with they had now split with a couple of companies. But within this announcement the lead was they parted with MasterCard to link TV exposure to purchase behavior around this whole Universal ad stone that the James Burrow and the guys are doing. I think that's super interesting because you know, it's like they're going the SMB mid market route and you need to show proof of ROI to keep those advertisers spending like we've talked about a bunch of times with these types of companies is a really smart deal.
- [28:02]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, we talked about this specifically with Mountain when they went public then Mountain claimed some sort of special sauce around attribution, but really it's just IP address. They're saying here's the IP address of the TV and here's the IP address of the website. Someone bought something. And when you're going after these small advertisers, especially local, they may not have a website that people go to. People may go to doordash to buy something. And so the MasterCard link to be able to say we know that someone went to your restaurant or at least and then you can project it out to the population of non MasterCard users. It's really powerful for a local regional advertising offering.
- [28:39]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, well done. So it's so interesting we're talking about commerce media, but we've actually been talking about CTV the whole time. These are coming together really nicely.
- [28:49]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, they do seem to overlap a lot.
- [28:51]
Eric Franchi
Hey, before we break, half of the reason why people go to Cannes is to run into people have those conversations, whether it's in between meetings or well into the evening. Anything interesting in terms of a vibe, a rumor, like something that you left kind of thinking about that you might want to articulate here for the listener.
- [29:13]
Ari Poparo
I think some of the topics that we talk about or that are top of mind about. Is Applovin for real? Is Mountain for real? How much fraud is there in the world? I Heard a lot of that stuff off the record.
- [29:25]
Eric Franchi
People, you're just setting the agenda that that's all you're doing.
- [29:28]
Ari Poparo
People are people.
- [29:29]
Eric Franchi
Full circle.
- [29:31]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, people read my newsletter and then they come to me and tell me that I was right or that they knew it all along. So definitely. But definitely there are folk, there are haters out there and they may be justified haters, but there are definitely haters out there. So people like buttonhole me and tell me about that. The other thing is people just coming up to me and telling me about their random agentic startup. Then I'm like, yeah dude, sure, send me a deck. Which is probably happens to you, Eric. You luckily weren't there. So you don't have people constantly, you know, trying to pitch you on giving the money. Right?
- [30:05]
Eric Franchi
Yeah, the team was there. So I have a full inbox. Either. Either way any, you know, sense of whether M and A might pick up in the second half.
- [30:15]
Ari Poparo
I didn't really get a sense for that. That wasn't top of mind for me. I predict it will. I think this AI thing can potentially shuffle the deck in ways that if you are a company that's flat footed on it, that doesn't really have an offering and competitors start showing stuff, you might very quickly want to reorganize your offering. Buy things, sell things, move things around.
- [30:39]
Eric Franchi
That makes a ton of sense. All right, awesome. Well that's can 25, the wrap. I'll see you at can 26, buddy.
- [30:46]
Ari Poparo
Yeah, we'll see. You might be sending me to can 26 this year. We'll do the opposite.
- [30:54]
Eric Franchi
The man on the ground.
- [30:56]
Ari Poparo
All right, so that's a wrap. If some housekeeping, other things. So this week's Market Extra vendor interview which came out on Monday was really interesting. It was with Acast, which is a podcast ad network. They have kind of this sort of similar to the influencer thing where a lot of advertisers want to find hosts and get host read ads. So they created a marketplace where you can propose, copy and do all that. So it's pretty interesting interview I think also if you're. Yeah, it's a cool company. If you're catching up on this podcast, I'd recommend listening to the four podcasts we launched last week, all of which were short 10, 15 minute interviews with interesting people from CAN. And that was pretty interesting, especially I think the Oleg Kornfeld one where he tells us the pros and cons of building AI in an agency and what sort of challenges that went through. And other than that we'll be back next week with some interesting guests.
- [31:51]
Eric Franchi
All right. Until then, we'll see you next week, everybody.
- [31:54]
Ari Poparo
Yep. Thanks for listening.
- [31:56]
Eric Franchi
Thank you for subscribing to marketecture.
- [31:58]
Ari Poparo
New interviews are added every week at marketecture TV and your favorite podcasting app. Thank you for listening to the Market podcast. New episodes come out every Friday, and an insightful vendor interview is published each Monday. You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to join@adtechgod.com.