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Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Episode 145: The current state of digital B2B with Scott Stedman of Imaginarium
00:54:13
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- [00:00]
A
This podcast is brought to you by Playwire. What if the real competitive advantage isn't choosing between human judgment and AI, but knowing when to use each? Playwire is launching a self service platform with rules based control and machine learning optimization. No more one size fits all monetization. At Marketecture Live, we'll reveal performance data including how one publisher saw 168% higher CPMs by choosing where to use human oversight versus automation. See the platform@playwire.com that's playwire.com 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 outcome. 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. Welcome to the Market podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm here with Eric, Eric Frangi. Eric, how you doing this morning?
- [01:28]
B
Doing well, doing well. Excited. How many days out are we from Architecture Live? Like four.
- [01:34]
A
Yeah, we're recording on Thursday and Market Extractor Live starts Monday morning. I've been so busy, you know, I tried to move from CEO to chairman and I thought that would reduce the amount of work I was doing and it's not. It's actually, there's a ridiculous amount of work going on. I'm busy all the time.
- [01:51]
B
Yeah, especially content, you know, remains, you know, your, your, your game and this is just all about content. So I, I totally get it. Um, yeah, it's, I mean, I can't wait. We've got like prep calls for the startup competition later on today. Like, I'm super excited. It's gonna be awesome.
- [02:07]
A
Yeah, the startup competition is gonna be like, I think a lot sharper than last time. We got. We're actually giving out trophies. That's pretty exciting. I haven't seen the trophy. I think I might have anti God on it. We'll see what the trophy has on it. Um, but yeah, we're, we're gonna, we're very busy bees. And as a reminder, you know, we are sold out, so we're fully sold out at this point. We aren't even making any exceptions. But a lot of the best content will come on this podcast stream. So I think next Friday we will have Terry Kawaja in conversation with Me. And then I think the schedule is that we'll be publishing some of the main stage sessions on Mondays over the coming month or so. So hopefully those will be, you know, interesting for the folks who didn't make it. And it's always good convers. And we have, like I said, we just have a stacked agenda. Also in the news section today, we're talking about Amazon's latest announcement. They put out a new product called RTP Fabric, and we have Steph Lehler from Amazon talking about it. So hot off the presses, ripped from the headlines. We'll have news to talk about at the event. So I'm excited about that. Anyway, our guest today is Scott Steadman. Scott is a real personality. He is the founder and CEO of a B2B ad agency called the Imaginarium. He's a former Havas and mdc. He's got a lot of perspective on all those stuff and he does not hold back. So it should be a fun conversation. Eric, do you know Scott?
- [03:31]
B
I do. So if you were to, like, say, oh, we're interviewing a B2B person or the head of a B2B agency, you might think that this person would be dry, not entertaining. You know, just like, focus on, you know, things like ABM and ARR. Scott could not be any further from that. He is a ball of energy. He's hilarious. He's a great speaker. He hosts seances. We're going to talk about this later on. Hopefully, like, this is going to be a great one. And B2B is just fascinating, I think, to all of us. So he's a. He's a leader in it. So it's going to be great.
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A
Yeah, it should be a great conversation. Hope you enjoy it. And we will see you on Monday in person. All right. Welcome, Scott Stedman. Scott, thank you so much for being on.
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C
I'm so glad to be here. Very honored and excited to join your. The hallowed halls of your past guests.
- [04:22]
A
Yes. I don't know if halls is a strange metaphor when it's all digital, you know, do we have halls? I don't know if we have halls, but we are happy to have you. So you're the CEO and founder of the Imaginarium B2B agency is what I'm characterizing it at. This is the B2B episode. We want to ask B2B, how do you sell to businesses? I know this is a topic that really resonates for you.
- [04:44]
C
It does. B2B is, you know, I might. I have my neck tattoo Blurred out right now, you know, for the. Because we're on video. But yeah, no, I, I bleed B2B right now. And I, I will say I am a recent convert. Convert to the, to the beat to the B2B universe. You know, when we launched the Imaginarium, I was not a practitioner for most of my life. What drew me to this area of the ecosystem is the amount of digital innovation that is taking place in this space. And that thesis has been validated. It's been a wildly exciting place to be. The.
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B
That.
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A
So wait, so you're. You were joking about the neck tattoo, but if you had to have a B2B neck tattoo, what would it say?
- [05:24]
C
Be to beast.
- [05:25]
A
Be to beast. All right, I was going to go with like ARR FTW in like Latin script.
- [05:30]
C
All right, fair enough. That's Val. I'll take that one. Luckily I don't have one, so I can still take better recommendations.
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A
After we record, we could all go to the. Go to the parlor. So you're also the host of what I hear is like the best dinner party in advertising. Is that true or false?
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C
Yeah. So we do.
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A
Because I haven't been invited, so I don't even know. Right.
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C
You know, now that I'm. Now that I'm in your hallowed halls, you know. Okay, the we. Yeah. So Saturnalia is an event that we. So I'm a, I am a co founder of his hotel in the Berkshires and the. Before this hotel launched called Tourists, we invited a bunch of poets up sure.
- [06:13]
A
As one does with a, with a.
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C
Poetry of the New Yorker and, and did this cool little three day thing with them. And then two weeks later we invited a bunch of great marketers up into. And it was really this test if the hotel could do events like the hotel was only half built, but it was just incredibly great. And we've continued having every fall a cohort of CMOs and marketing executives up. And in the spring we now do the same thing with B2B marketing leaders. And the, the, the interesting thing about this, you're not allowed to come twice. So it's a totally unique cohort. It's every time people come they have no idea what's going to happen. So it's like an Agatha Christie murder mystery every, every fall and spring.
- [06:55]
B
I think it's the coolest word, Saturnalia. So I pulled it up, I pulled it up because I actually didn't know what the background was. The ancient Roman festival of Saturn in December, which was a period of general merrymaking and Was the predecessor of Christmas also an occasion of wild revelry? So is this what Ari signing up for here? Wild revelry?
- [07:21]
A
It does not sound like my scene.
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C
You haven't been touched by Bacchus, so you know, who knows what will happen to Ari in the midst of a Saturnalia.
- [07:32]
A
Okay, so yeah, I get it. No, this is the normal game plan. After you start an agency, you build a hotel and invite the poets up. Step one.
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C
Discuss later the importance of being gestational distinctive in the B2B world is. Is certainly one of the great, one of the great opportunities for marketers and Soarium has its, its distinctive point of view while also doing.
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A
All right, let, let's. Let's start big picture with B2B advertising, marketing and digital. I think it sort of has a bad, a bad rep that in B2B you just create like thousands of pages of crappy content and wait for the SEO and then maybe buy some Google Ads. What, what is your state of play?
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C
As far as I forgot.
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A
LinkedIn. LinkedIn. LinkedIn's too expensive, right?
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C
Not the LinkedIn is crap, but like the, the. Like off the. Of the. Yeah, I. This is what attracted me to B2B quite candidly was that there were a few things that I found from my previous roles in sort of the more systemic holding company world. The, the. The most notable fact was that the holding companies didn't seem to be very effective at servicing B2B CMOs systemically. That doesn't mean it's not great work, there's not great etc. But they weren't. There weren't the obvious solution and therefore weren't being. There wasn't clear leaders in the space. Right. So I thought that was really interesting and it all has come to make sense over time. I think the re. I think that the. There has been a great revolution in B2B in the past five to seven years led by account based marketing. Right?
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A
Right. ABM.
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C
You know, ABM really. What what? And really these, these ABX and ABM platforms like six Sense, demand base, et cetera. What these things in Bombora in the intent data space pioneered was the ability to effectively build and identify your audiences. And without that digital was a theory. Right. It was like, I mean you can't, you couldn't really do use the superpowers of digital marketing until you could identify your audience in an efficient way. Otherwise it was just so wildly inefficient. It was better to buy a table at you know, some regional, you know, B2B. B2B event, which is what people did and many people still do by the. And so the advent of ABM and the unlock of digital marketing that that led to was kind of the revolution we signed up to be a participant in. And like everything, it has its eras. And I think we're in the midst of a new era, which is really exciting.
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A
But what's the new era like? What is the new era ABM or. Because ABM's been around for 10 years. Right.
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C
I would say the. The new era is, is, is a refinement of ABM in the sense that I think that it, it is a very data driven process. Right. It is very ad tech reliant. And there were these key platforms that kind of unlocked the capability and remain best in class and remained very valuable, but they effectively had these. There were these three jobs to be done. Audience identification. Ari, as you know, Ben, or you know very well through your respective backgrounds, distribution programmatically and using whatever, whatever digital channels are, are relevant but at an account level and then account based measurement and these things did those three jobs systemically as a platform. What is happening now is it's unbundling. We talk about this unbundle. We have this thing unbundled. Abm. The unbundling of ABM is a phenomenon that these platforms remain participants in. But there are also all kinds of other ways that a modern B2B CMO can accomplish those jobs in a way that is right for them right now.
- [11:18]
A
So on measurement, you and I are both advisors to Octane 11. And I told Dan that if I didn't, he told me that if I didn't mention him on this, on this program, I was out. So I want to maintain my shares in Octane 11. Okay, we've given him the plug. Great measurement.
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C
Dan is our beloved comrade in arms in B2B.
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A
So yeah, free plug. But anyway, let's get back to the conversation.
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C
I will just say quickly, I don't want to digress too much. Octane 11 is an incredibly good example of a tool that has a specific job to be done. Omnichannel, systemic account based measurement that can pull revenue into the dialogue. Right. They. That is something that historically was not able to be done as a specific job. Right. That is a great example of what I would call this next phase of the digital ABM revolution. You know, I think that's actually a great example of that.
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A
So yeah, so you're, you're unbundling plug plus, but you're unbundling. So like you're using LinkedIn or demand based to reach these people and then you have to measure it separately. What about top of the funnel? Like how do you does when you're talking about like CF your CEO being you know, a face of the company and some of this content management stuff, content development stuff, a lot of that is top of the funnel and not abm. How's that tie in?
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C
Well, we would still argue that it is that there is an, there should always be an account based system. So that even when you're doing what we would call like one to many, you are still measuring and considering it at the account level largely because you, it then unifies the dialogue with sales. Right? You're, you're playing off the same playbook, you're using the same currency. The currency is the account. That's the, that's not changing. You're not replacing Salesforce with like something that doesn't, you know, bring the anchor isn't anchored in the account. So we would still, I would still say that as sort of that top of funnel stuff. You should be, you should consider measure it of an account based system. It is not classical ABM like that one to one thing that we, we think of and there are incredibly exciting things happening there. I love that you teed it up because one of the notes I have to talk about here is account based ctv, which I think is one of the coolest ways. If I was like talking to my, my, my best friend or my brother who's a B2B CM, I'd say account based CTV. Account based Reddit, which is a very new innovation that is just being unlocked by Octane 11, the Imaginarium and a few other partners. Bombora is a participant in that. So I think those are two areas of real blue ocean.
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A
I think account based Reddit is the first time those three words have been put in the sequence on this podcast.
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B
Well, I mean there's a subreddit for everything, so I think in some subreddits it would be contextually relevant somewhere. Joe Zawadzki, my partner, is leaping for joy. He's been talking about this idea of account based CTV for a really long time. And the idea of some of these B2B companies that have perhaps six figure customer acquisition targets could be doing some very interesting things on CTV. How real is that right now, Scott?
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C
It's 100% real and Eric, and to me it is like ignored. And I think it's ignored for a couple of reasons. The cost of building a 30 second spot, which is a boogeyman it's not real like that is that can be done efficiently. I mean you know it costs money but it's not, it's not like you need to be building I'm spending a half million dollars and like building a 30 second TV ad the way GEICO would, you know And I'll give you a great example. We so I'm a big adhere adherent in always using the things we sell.
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A
Right.
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C
I've been in the whole co world no shade on the holding company. They don't do any marketing.
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A
Right.
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C
Evidenced by their naming. Right. We don't need to go any further than that to know that they. Whether they believe in marketing or not is unclear but they certainly don't as reflected in the way they what how they name themselves.
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A
What's the, what's the worst agency name that you've heard?
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C
There was one period where like VML and Y and R all of these were like. And it was just the acronym if I recall correctly rowing and growing by by incoherent. I was like do you remember at least make it look like a fake word.
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A
Do you remember March 1st from the dot com boom. That was great.
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C
Yeah. So I mean the. So I from day one at the imaginary I was like if we're going to advocate and we're a B2B company where if we're going to be advocating B2B market and if we're not using the channels then shame on us. So I we've done some account based CTV and I mean it's just, it's great. I get phone calls from friends because I throw occasionally a small you know mid sized companies where I know the CEO and it may not be a target but it's someone I want talking about us. And I will get phone calls like dude, I am seeing imaginarium ads like on like big television shows like are you buying like you know not the super bowl but like it's like are you buying like linear television? I'm like no, no, it's streaming tv. You're just on our target list and you can, I mean you can segment by your account list and by the buying committee. Right. I mean you have to make sure the audience is big enough and sure the CPMs are very expensive but they are minuscule aggregate budgets because you have such efficient targeting. So it's awesome.
- [16:42]
A
In my household I have a teenager and so my streaming ads are Tatari Brandeis University. Tatari Brandeis University. Never thought those two ads be competing. Just a quick technical question Scott do you, do you use like a standard kind of, you know, B2B advertising system to do CTV and Reddit or do you use like a specialist?
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C
That's a. So that's a great question. We have kind of, we have this system. It's, it's effectively like a managed service we call unbundled abm. Right.
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A
Okay.
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C
There's. We also have a little like a little blog about it. A website unbundled abm.com It's a fun whimsical thing. I just did a.
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A
This sounds whimsical.
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C
One was I just did a deep unbundled atm.
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A
I'm going to read that.
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C
Sorry. I just did a deep case study on the two ICPs, you know, so well, the ideal customer profile and the Insane Clown Posse and what we can learn as B2B marketers from, from that, you know, study the ICP. Well. So.
- [17:37]
A
All right.
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C
The gathering of the Juggalos is a case study. All right.
- [17:41]
A
It is. The Juggalos are in a list. They're moving down the funnel.
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C
So the, so we got unbundled Abium. So we, we have our unbundled ABM managed service which we, we're, we're kind of tech agnostic with kind of what I would call our standby. We use Bombora very heavily for audience identification and targeting. We're on the trade desk. We also use Stack Adapt but. And have used Beeswax beloved DSP of course everyone loves and the. But we are a trade desk shop and, and also. And then an octane 11 for measurement. Right. So that is kind of our. A standard amalgamation of Bombora plus Stack, IT App, Trade desk and Measurement in octane. And all of those would allow account based ctv.
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A
Right. And for the record, I think the Freewheel people like me to correct. It's not called Beeswax, it's called Freewheel DSP Solutions. So one of the raging debates on Twitter, which is really just between Joe Zappa and a couple other people is about whether the B2B CEO needs to be out there like a personality with a vision, et cetera. And what to do if they're not, what if they can't.
- [19:04]
C
People want to make money. I mean.
- [19:08]
A
All right, all right, walk me through it.
- [19:10]
C
It's this simple. It's this simple. It's a distinctive asset that is totally unique to your organization. I mean, marketing is all about creating mental availability. That is all marketing is. Right. Let's remember this. Marketing is only about creating mental availability. And for B2B within your buying committee and the people who influence your buying committee so that you are considered at the moment where your solution could be a fit for them. That is the. That is the whole game. And mental availability is, you know, is really, you know, Byron Sharp and Jenny Roman and these guys, you know, the marketing effectiveness people, you know, there's an equation for this thing. And distinctiveness is at the foundation of how we create that mental availability. Your CEO is a distinctive asset, much like, you know, you know, for a. Particularly for a V2B brand where differentiation can be quite challenging.
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A
What do you do if the CEO's not naturally good at it? You ghost, right? Do you find someone else on the team?
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C
I mean, I think that, listen, it's performance, right? It's finding in everyone. It's finding their comfort level with a little bit of performance, right? And I would say that every. There is a unique alchemy to every company. And if the B2B, if the C. If the CEO is not comfortable in that role and they have great strengths and superpowers and other roles, then they shouldn't tax themselves. It's an opportunity like a, like, you know, like a great, like a great name or a great logo could be an opportunity, or a great founding story could be a great opportunity. There's all that. That is kind of anytime you're doing work, in trying to build the narrative around the alchemy of why your business, your B2B business is distinctive and exciting and can be memorable. There's. There is a process of almost like, like deep diving into. Into the assets that are. That are real and authentic. I think it, I think it's probably better not to invest in the personality of a CEO who doesn't feel comfortable in that role. You know, I think it's on. I think it's all about trying to bring it back to the Insane Clown Posse here.
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A
Who's the lead singer of the Insane Clown Posse?
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C
I don't know.
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A
They need a bigger LinkedIn game. Things I learned at the meeting of the juggalos that affect B2B sales. So. Okay, let's go through some other channels. So have you seen anything on TikTok or Instagram Reels that's relevant here?
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C
You know, yeah, the. They. They're. They, they. They do have very vibrant communities. And that would be a great example of a place where a CEO could, or a business could build a community. I tend to recommend. I'd say we tend to play more in LinkedIn and then. And the experiential space is probably the areas that we see the most valuable community building and doing. Oh, sorry.
- [21:59]
A
What works on LinkedIn, like besides just like posting really long things about your childhood or whatever like what are the techniques that work?
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C
Great thought leadership. There's now there are. There are a number in the past six months of innovative ways to sort of through paid marketing and video. Yeah. And right. They have a whole new ctv. They have a. It's costly, it's expensive, but they have a great. They have a whole new CTV network. You can buy off platform CTV using LinkedIn data. And we've done it actually. We've done great. You do thought leadership videos with the CEO or the personality you think is going to exemplify sort of the narrative you're trying to tell. And you run it organically, you support, you boost that organic posts and then you complement that with video. Exactly right, Eric. And we would typically recommend testing some programmatic alongside LinkedIn's CTV. You know, LinkedIn's data is fantastic. It's also just very costly. So, you know, it's like where's the juice worth the squeeze?
- [22:58]
B
There is a burgeoning like creator space for B2B and I've seen, I've seen brand deals. So there's a. A gentleman on LinkedIn, his name is Vin Matano. I've. I've met him a couple of times. He start. He was a former salesperson, I actually think at Demandbase. He started getting brand offers because he's just like great magnetic personality. Would do a lot of LinkedIn videos and then started a B2B influencer agency. And from what I understand it's going quite well. Like, are you diving into. Into that a lot? You know, what you might do in consumer.
- [23:31]
C
There's like. And I would. Yes. And that also something that we're exploring and have not done a lot of IS affiliate. Is B2B affiliate networks, you know, which is very aligned with what you're talking about there.
- [23:42]
B
Yeah, makes sense.
- [23:44]
C
Yeah. I think it's a great space. It's not an area that we have done a lot of like distinctive like influencer type deals. But it. I will tell you it's funny, when we were launching the Imaginary three years ago, it was. And I was doing like work sessions with my co founder Tiso. It was one of the things that we considered like is a B2B influencer agency. Is that the Blue Ocean. And we ended up really starting laser focused on ABM and have grown and evolved from there. But I think it's a really good space. I'll tell you. Particularly when you tie it to an affiliate program, I think could be just incredibly powerful. It's funny that you mentioned because it's literally, we just had a. A little internal work session about that specific playbook recently. I always like it when you can find a paid angle around it because then you're getting scale. You're de risking a program because you can measure it. Oftentimes it's very hard to measure, like just an organic play all on its own. So I would probably think of a B2B influencer play to be married to an affiliate program so that you can be measuring the impact of that influence.
- [24:47]
A
I would be negligent if I didn't point out here that Marketecture offers quite a bit of influential promotion on LinkedIn through our advertising forum and other products. So if you want that, you call me.
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B
Would you take an influencer deal with an affiliate code for the right type of brand?
- [25:06]
A
We wouldn't price it on an affiliate basis. We wouldn't do a pure performance basis.
- [25:11]
B
But you as a creator, you as.
- [25:13]
A
A creator, me as a creator, I don't do advertising. So I personally chose not to. We sell ads on this podcast, but we as a company offer products, mostly the advertising forum, which are interview series which are partially sponsored, or interviews at Cannes and CES and things like that that will be sponsored. But I personally don't vouch for a.
- [25:33]
C
Product except for octane 11 and the imaginarium. I've just added the Imaginarium in there. Although Ari, I will point out, for legal reasons, has said nothing to sponsor the Imagenarium.
- [25:47]
A
All right, let's get back on track. So we're going around the horn on different tactics. I want to bring up podcasts because obviously podcast advertising clearly works and B2B is a big part of that. I'd love to hear your opinion about paid podcast advertising. And also a lot of companies are starting their own and putting on, you know, the word podcast is being stretched here. It's like a five minute interview on LinkedIn and things like that. So what are your thoughts on that?
- [26:11]
C
Listen, I. We are. I always think it is the best. I think in a situation like that where you can own the ip, it's great to try. It's great if there is a strategy where you can sort of build your own community from there. I guess what I would say most fundamentally is like there's two ways to look at it. One, is this an asset that's a part of our distinctive ecosystem? Right. And if so, then that's Something to lean into a nurture. And there's a real process of strategy and codification about how that fits into the way your customer and consumer engages with you. And it needs performance. If it just. If you could swap your brand, it's very simple equation. If you can swap your brand out with another brand and it feels pretty natural, you are advertising them as much as you are advertising you. So that is just a very, a very important thing to recognize. And like, you're a great example, the two of you, what you've built here, it is utterly distinct. The voice, the voice that you put out there around it, within it, it is a fundamentally distinctive space that is table stakes. If you're considering doing something like a podcast, right, For a brand, as far as having a podcast be a part of a marketing mix, it's a fantastic part. It, you know, it's got an incredibly important job, a hard job to be done around awareness and stuff. And I think it's a. One of the stronger ways that you can do that. I would. It is almost always going to be a part of a fairly comprehensive marketing mix, right? I don't think, I wouldn't, I wouldn't start with a podcast with buying ads in a podcast. If you have, if you're spending 10 or $15,000 a month, you know, I would, I would say that if you have the budget for a real omnichannel go to market, then it is a absolutely fantastic channel.
- [28:04]
A
So closing out the general conversation, you know, we have to ask about AI. What's the impact of AI on your customers approach? You know, obviously creating contents. Cost has gone down radically with AI, but you're producing, potentially producing stuff no one's going to read.
- [28:20]
C
So I think it makes content better. I mean, this is another great example. You know, it's like. So I recently did a thing. I recently did a talk in which Ari may have been at. Or I saw you made out. You may have left before my talk.
- [28:33]
A
Where I. I didn't see yours.
- [28:34]
C
I created like a seance, right? And I created these five LLMs of great writers I loved. And I asked them about the few. I was like, I'm so bad at prediction. I was like, so. And the best one was Borges. I don't know if you read Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer. And I asked him like, what's the future? And he had some of the greatest quotes in my little seance. And his. He had. The one that sticks to me all the time is that in the future the imagination will be about navigation, not creation. Right. And I think we have to think of that when creating content. If you're just trying to create content like you were before and prompting it the way you were before, you're going to, you're going to be in a sea of sameness. But if you are navigating the voice and all of that stuff and you can bring that to bear, you can create really distinctive, exciting content, much less, in a much less costly way than ever before. So I think the best content we've ever seen is going to come out. It will be right in front of us.
- [29:32]
A
Right. For those of you watching on YouTube, we had a special guest appearance by Eric's cat, who's never appeared on our podcast before. So I'm excited.
- [29:41]
C
I have that effect. I have that effect. Wild beasts are drawn to me.
- [29:47]
A
We didn't get an audio version of the cat, unfortunately. But I mean, I guess just to follow up on that question, but what about this problem of the flood of content like the the Internet is slop era? You know, if you.
- [30:01]
C
I don't think it matters. It was ever thus, Ari. I mean, honestly. Yeah, I mean, you know, like, you're kind of like, you know, have you ever, like, spent a lot of time, like going to the third page of Google and seeing like, what's coming up.
- [30:13]
A
And the first page isn't so great either.
- [30:15]
C
Thousandth page of Google. Like, I think that the, the Internet does a pretty good job very quickly of winnowing out the crap. And I think that that will continue and that like, you like SEO, like, you know, I think these things have a way of just without understanding necessarily the mechanics. I think that if you really invest in understanding the mechanics of things like how does, how to game SEO for gen AI, then there's, there's exciting blue ocean there. But I think if you don't and you're thoughtful about your content, you'll, you'll, you'll do just fine, you know.
- [30:49]
A
All right, before we go, Eric, does your cat have any questions for Scott?
- [30:53]
B
I have no idea what's going on here.
- [30:55]
A
Scott, do you even own a cat?
- [30:58]
B
I do. I do.
- [31:03]
A
What.
- [31:03]
B
What my cat learned about B2B marketing.
- [31:08]
A
Put it on LinkedIn right now. It's ready to happen. All right, well, let's take a quick break and we'll come back with the refresh News of the week.
- [31:21]
D
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- [32:08]
B
Hey everybody. And we are back with the refresh. Bunch of news this week. A lot on the AI front as always, some new product announcements, but I think we got to talk about Google Sandbox, Google privacy Sandbox which was I guess officially killed this week after being killed previously earlier in the year. I don't know Scott, if you want.
- [32:31]
C
To host a seance, you know, bring.
- [32:35]
A
Back some of our turtle dove. Yeah, Turtledove. Coming back from the ether.
- [32:42]
B
Anything to say about this?
- [32:44]
A
This is, this is a epic debacle. It is just, it is just the most disastrous process of politics and technology and hubris and everything. And I wrote about it in my book. I gave, I scathed it pretty hard about how arrogant this whole process was redesigning all of advertising from scratch, saying it's going to be launched in when it first came out. If you go back to the old announcements, they were like this will be in production within two years. And, and at the time they were really experimental proposals. Their proposals got rejected by everyone who reviewed them, including the W3C, the EU, the publishers who tried them. No one's going to miss this. And if anything we're just sort of regretful that we spent so much time on it.
- [33:33]
B
How many companies like devoted real. We talked about this a lot previously but like resources towards us. There's a couple of companies that went all in on Sandbox Y.
- [33:42]
A
It was, it was, it was a bet. Like if you were the CEO of an ad tech company, you could say I'm going to ignore it and then I might lose all my business next year or I could invest and maybe, you know, get a advantage. It was really tough, sort of prisoner's dilemma to figure out if it was the right move. And yeah, like I think Criteo spent quite a bit of resources. Ad form, ad role next roll. The current name of the company is changing. You know those are some RTB house. These people spent significant engineering resources and effectively it's for nothing.
- [34:15]
B
Yeah, yeah, there was that. Axios had some coverage and it's paywalled. We'll put it in the newsletter. They had this like radical looking chart about the growth of programmatic Direct and then the decline of Open Exchange over the course of the past decade. And maybe a little bit of, it's just like the opportunity has certainly moved elsewhere.
- [34:34]
A
The analyst Benedict Evans likes to say that it's an unfair comparison, but it's still apartment so in this chart, and we'll put it in the newsletter, what they basically, basically are showing is they're including everything programmatic, including all of Facebook in one in Programmatic Direct, and then of course Open Programmatic, which would only be, you know, the web based stuff declining as a percent quite rapidly. I don't think that's a really fair comparison. But we all know that the programmatic world is in sort of its end game.
- [35:03]
B
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. And what's next? What's next is AI. So we've got I think like three, one, three announcements to talk about this week. The first has to be OpenAI's browser atlas. Did you guys download it?
- [35:18]
C
I have not. I, I, I, we had a, we have a work session on it coming up internally and it worked.
- [35:25]
B
It works for B2B. Scott.
- [35:27]
C
I know, I know, I've heard, I've heard. Incredible. I'm really interested in this one specifically around search.
- [35:32]
A
Right.
- [35:33]
C
And when, and when, and when search becomes an advertising channel on AI. Right. This is my biggest question and the most exciting opportunity to be in front of, I think, around the implications around paid search.
- [35:48]
B
Yeah, agreed.
- [35:50]
C
And it does feel like this is a step closer to a natural starting point. I think there are already people starting to play in the space. But the, but as far as the big one, you know, as far as OpenAI, this feels like maybe the place they could conceivably start without it being, you know, discomforting for their core user experience.
- [36:11]
B
Yeah, for sure. And search is a $250 billion global market. A couple of things about this. Exactly. So I thought, I thought the, the downloading and the onboarding was a really good process. They made it super smooth to import, you know, your existing Chrome profiles, bookmarks, passwords, you know, credit cards, everything like that. So like super easy. There was a, a little bribe to, to making your default browser, which I quite appreciate. It was like you get some extra credits or something like that if you make it the default. But I think the big thing that I felt was when I wanted to do a search, it's a very similar search box as you might have with Chrome. You didn't get a result, you got a conversation and more questions around how can I make this better for you and get you closer to what you're looking for and I didn't, I got what I was looking for and I never navigated off. There was no opportunity for a blue link or a click. So I thought this idea of, hey, you know, the future is, is coming, but the future may actually be the browser. And a rearchitecting of browsing is pretty impactful. All right, what'd you think?
- [37:21]
A
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I didn't find it different from searching in ChatGPT in a tab in Chrome. That's a box. I don't think it's there yet, to be totally honest. I mean, the shorthand in Silicon Valley is that if you want to disrupt an incumbent, you have to be 10 times better. And I think that the chat based search answers engine is 10 times better than search and that's why people are switching and why Google's trying to catch up with Gemini. I don't think a AI based browser is even slightly, it may be slightly better than Chrome and there have been other browsers that are slightly better than Chrome. Brave is faster, DIA was out there for a while. There's a lot of options, but they're all a little better than Chrome and consumers aren't going to switch for a little better because there's brands safety, being with Chrome, you feel comfortable with it, et cetera. I think this is a good proof of concept and a stake in the ground. But we need to see a couple more cards drop before someone would actually change their behavior.
- [38:27]
B
Certainly one to watch. All right, number two, Reddit is suing Perplexity for data scraping to train its AI. So this article is worth reading because it's a little convoluted, but basically Reddit's suing Perplexity because Perplexity was buying data from data scraping firms. They're being referred to. So there's these companies that are popping up that basically do some shady work of scraping publisher sites and then packaging it up for sale to those who may or may not want to license it directly. Scott, I don't know if you've heard of the Papara rule of new innovation on the Internet. Part of the rule is publishers in some way get screwed. This is a case study of the Paparo first rule of Internet innovation. This is an interesting one.
- [39:25]
A
It's true, it's true.
- [39:27]
C
Funny. Well, I have a question. Yeah, no, please, I, you know, I, I know there's a cool company called Tollbit you guys may know, know a bit about. Right? It's, there's, it's, they, it's almost like they're putting a, they're, they're putting a toll on publishers. They're, they're working for the publishers, but effectively they put a, a toll. So when they pull your content, it's automatically compensating. I just wonder if there are any other in interesting things like that that are happening that would just preclude a scrape. You know, you could go in and scrape, but you're kind of getting taxed, you know. Sure.
- [40:01]
B
Cloudflare is the biggest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Cloudflare is basically giving publishers the ability to toggle any sort of, you know, scraping. Unless there's these startups that are getting around it on and off and you know, kind of create the mega paywall.
- [40:17]
A
Eric, have you heard about, have you looked into the IAB's AI paywall proposal, their auction prop?
- [40:25]
B
I have not yet, no. I read. You know, I think we covered it and we did, we did the broad strokes, but I didn't go deep in it.
- [40:30]
A
I sat down with a major publisher executive and he kind of walked me through his thoughts on it. I won't say who because it was off the record and I thought it was kind of interesting because it was. Apparently Microsoft's working on one also. And the idea is that in our mind we might think that the AI companies are just slurping up all this data, training their models and the publishers never see a sense of. But the reality is that these AI engines have to make real time callouts to a bunch of websites to get updated information on every request. So the old, like the model we had in our head a year ago where it's all pre baked isn't really the case anymore. And so it's like rag, they're basically filling in the rag in real time from a web scraper. And that's currently how a lot of these AI chats work. And so that naturally lends itself to a, an auction where publishers would set their price to be to have those requests happen in real time. So if you want to, if you want to know like, if your question is like who is Brad Pitt dating? You want the most recent information. The AI is then going to have a kind of a list of eligible pages to use for that answer and then at different prices and publishers will be paid in real time for giving the most updated information to the AI, which is really fascinating. And it just opened my eyes when someone explained it to me that way as a way they could get paid.
- [42:02]
C
You know, I'm surprised that none of them have bought any of these I mean there are famous brands that could differentiate, right. If, you know, if, if I was in, I mean the obvious ones are things like the New York Times, Forbes, but like a Forbes. Forbes didn't be that expensive to buy. And imagine if you're a business person, right, using a chat, you know, an engine. I don't know, I wonder if there's some, some age in which these things sort of start to roll into each other a little bit.
- [42:26]
A
Yeah, I mean, or Random House, you could buy a book publisher. But that was, that's more about the training data. Yeah, definitely. It's been speculated on. They have such big valuations.
- [42:36]
B
If we play this out though, you know, one of the things we've, we've been saying as we followed this trend is, you know, there seems to be an emerging opportunity and for publishers amidst all of the pressure around licensing and then if you play out what you just talked about, Ari, there's I think a real opportunity to be some sort of like constantly licensing your data for updated answers. So I think that's like super interesting.
- [43:05]
A
And strategically this is Google's worst nightmare because they've never had any marginal cost to their searches. And I used to think that the real problem for AI for Google was increased marginal cost because it's more compute to give a result. But there could actually be an actual cost of sale where they have to license data to produce good search results which they've never had to do before.
- [43:26]
B
Yeah, talk about margin pressure. Wow. Yeah, really interesting. Okay, one more on this one. I thought this was neat. This hit right before we, we started recording. So WPP launched, speaking of NIMS launched a self serve AI platform, you know, kind of across everything that they've been, they've been building for, for SMBs. So it sounds like it's for SMB clients of existing WPB brands that, you know, aren't necessarily kind of part of the Holdco engagement. But I think this is neat and a way to, you know, experiment with expanding the business, particularly at a time where they're under some pressure from competition.
- [44:06]
A
Yeah, I thought it was interesting when I saw the headline, I scratched my head, I was like they're offering, what are they doing here? Is it going to be self serve? They're going to take credit cards? That seems like a really odd business this for wpp. But then you read the article and there's a quote in there talking about it's a sort of account expansion as a really important part of this, which makes sense. There's lots of really small Brands owned by big companies that have no attention paid to them. I mean Scott, this is like right up the B2B alley where you have all kinds of stuff that have too small a budget to care about.
- [44:33]
C
Well and this is always why I've said the holding companies struggle with B2B right is because fundamentally they have these two huge centers of gravity. Scaled media production, big Persona driven creative and they're huge organizations. So those centers of gravity are what everything ends up over time, you know, being pulled into. And they don't really work for B2B for the, for the foundational B2B the sort of mid market sassy software type company. It's the exact opposite. Highly targeted ABM type media. Highly personalized content delivered at as efficient scale as possible with as you know, there is no unified despite everyone saying oh it's humans at the end of the day. Sure that's should be obvious but. Yeah but that really obfuscates the important insights that it's a buying committee and there isn't a lot of strategic unity among your different people you need to influence. You know there's not a lot that unifies $30,000 a year employee in the offshored with a. A CEO making $15,000,000 a year in a yacht in San Francisco. There's no strategic unity between them. There's no unifying pain point. So you have to create all this personalized content. This sounds like to your point a way in which they're using AI to sort of unlock that which is I think interesting and smart probably do existing.
- [45:53]
B
Buying platforms serve B2B as well as they serve B2C like because you mentioned you know part of your stack is you know TTB and stack it up right.
- [46:04]
C
Like stacking app does stack it Stack adapt is very leaned into B2B. It's a very. They're doing a great job there. Trade Desk is just a great platform and we have adapted we have built the tools to make to unlock a a B2B capability there. But. But not that that's not I as far as I can tell a space that the trade Desk has put a lot of effort into. You know the part a partnership of Bombora is the best is. Is the best thing they've done on that front and frankly does a good amount of the work the.
- [46:38]
A
Yeah so and there are technical challenges because a lot of B2B lists are frankly IP address based and like Google doesn't allow that for example and some, some of the major DSPs just don't allow lists defined by IP address. They allow it as like a graph. You can go cross graph on IP, but you can't just target an IP, which makes B2B difficult.
- [46:58]
C
And if you start inter. If you put Liveramp in between, it sort of messes up the measurement stuff. So there's. There are, there are all kinds of challenges to cob. Bubbling it together the way scaled B2C would.
- [47:09]
A
Right?
- [47:09]
C
Yeah, but that is, that is. But that, by the way, just to highlight that is what unbundled ABM is solving for. Right. It's taking these challenges, finding measurement tools and capabilities that allow you to, you.
- [47:20]
A
Know, to unlock that, just ask the Juggalos.
- [47:25]
C
The Juggalos. Juggalos.
- [47:28]
A
No, the Juggalos. The Juggalos.
- [47:34]
B
All right, let's prioritize here.
- [47:36]
C
We got a couple other things with a.
- [47:38]
B
No, not prioritize the conversation. Prioritize the news of the week. I want to talk about Amazon and this RTB fabric announcement. And I think Steph Laser is going to talk about this next week on Monday at marketexture Live. But they made the announcement just yesterday. So RTB fabric offers ad tech platforms.
- [48:00]
A
This is.
- [48:00]
B
I'm just reading from an article. More streamlined integrations with ecosystem and infrastructure partners. Allegedly lower latency compared to the public Internet and discounted costs to transfer data from aws. I assume you read this and probably talked to Steph about what she's presenting. So walk us through our TV fabric and like, what is it replacing, maybe and. Or what's the real use here?
- [48:24]
A
So to start, I don't have any information aside from the press release everybody else has. I'm excited to hear Steph. Steph's up first. After my keynote, Steph will be up with some guests to talk about this. So I'm excited to hear about it just as much as everybody else. I think at a minimum, this is sort of like a private network. So if you're running a DSP or an SSP on or DMP on Amazon, your bandwidth is a pretty big piece of your bill at the end of every month. And that doesn't. And previous to this announcement, it didn't matter if the ingress and outgres partners were both on Amazon, you still had to pay. There was no discount for being on Amazon. So I think this is at a minimum level. It's like a private networking environment between these companies that do business with each other. And that's really valuable on its own. Just like cheaper, faster. I'll take it. I mean, if I was a beeswax, still At Beeswax, I'd be all over this. And then it seems to hint that easier integration question seems to hint at maybe they've done some standardization around the pipes. And I don't think some people are saying, oh, this is a bid switch killer, which is Critio's connecting. It doesn't feel that way. I don't hear anything in the announcement about transactions, but it feels like a pretty useful investment on the infrastructure.
- [49:40]
B
Infra costs, speed, snappiness, efficiency.
- [49:44]
A
Yeah, I mean, they have so many. They have a critical mass of folks on their cloud. I mean, a lot of the big ones are not, especially the older companies all built their own data centers, but a lot of them are. And if you're on AWS and you're transacting with somebody else on aws, why not make it faster and cheaper?
- [50:03]
B
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So many of the new generation is on aws. AWS has a program called AWS Activate. We're a part of it at Apperium. Any company that we invest in, one of the first things that we can do besides write them a check is give them access to, like, tens of thousands of dollars of Amazon AWS credit. So they build this ecosystem. And, you know, with things like this, I think it locks in. It's very impressive.
- [50:30]
A
When I started Beeswax, one of the things I told Rahm, our cto, was I didn't want any fat guys with beards on the team. And by that, I wasn't saying that I was discriminating. I was saying I didn't want anyone in a data center overnight plugging in cords and figuring out how network topology. I wanted to outsource that entire problem to Amazon. So fat guys with beards, no offense, I know it is offensive, but I'm just gonna say, no offense, Please don't be offended.
- [50:58]
C
Man on the call with you, right?
- [51:00]
A
But you don't have a ponytail. What you need is a fleece vest that has a logo you've never heard of before for some networking company. Plus the beard, plus the ponytail. And to put it at the extra level, you also have to have, like, platinum status on all the airlines lines because you've been going to Singapore to plug in the machines. You know, that's the kind of person I did not want on the payroll.
- [51:26]
B
I'm just having flashbacks to, like, the dot com era. And that's exactly. Like, I don't.
- [51:31]
C
I don't think those.
- [51:32]
B
Those guys, because they were always, you know, guys with beards.
- [51:35]
A
Not a single woman has been in that profession. In is 100% male profession.
- [51:40]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [51:41]
B
And I just. I can picture those guys that I worked with throughout the early, early part of my career. You want. You want to hear one more?
- [51:48]
A
Warner Brothers. Yeah, let's go over Warner Brothers.
- [51:51]
B
Yeah. So Warner is exploring strategic alternatives and trying to potentially escape from Paramount's overtures in the company. They said they had unsolicited interest from multiple parties rumored to be Comcast and Netflix, but Netflix flatly denied it, which doesn't matter. It's part of an M and A process as a public company. Can't really say anything. What's your take on this guest?
- [52:18]
A
We talked with Rich last week about it. I think that was a really good conversation about how it's a lot of ip, but it's not a lot of distribution. So it feels like Comcast could be pretty interested or who knows, at Disney, you put DC and Marvel together, that'd be a crazy crossover. Right? There's also some reporting that Zaslav and his team had said that a split would be more tax efficient. So basically, splitting the studio from the streaming and ip, I think would be how the split would work. I don't understand these details. Details not really a tech story so much as a media story and continued media consolidation.
- [52:58]
C
I think it's back to DC and Marvel coming together.
- [53:00]
A
Wouldn't that be awesome?
- [53:02]
C
Are we not burying the lead here?
- [53:05]
A
You have Batman showing up in Marvel Universe. That'd be kind of awesome.
- [53:10]
C
Ant man and Batman. I mean, come on.
- [53:14]
B
That sounds amazing, actually. All right, that's a good place to leave it. Scott. This is awesome. Thank you so much.
- [53:20]
C
Hey, thank you, guys. This is fun every day, right? We're going to do this every day from here on in. This is too much fun.
- [53:25]
A
It is. No, we're going to do a live podcast from with the Poets. I'll take some peyote and talk about ad tech with the poets. Thanks a lot, Scott. This was awesome.
- [53:35]
C
Night with Ari. I mean, come on.
- [53:37]
A
Yeah. And Eric's cat. I hope you have a good day.
- [53:42]
B
Thank you for subscribing to marketecture.
- [53:44]
A
New interviews are added every week at Marketing 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@news.com.
- [54:19]
B
And.
- [54:19]
A
If you're feeling social. We operate a vibrant slack community that you can apply to join@adtechgod.com.