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Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Episode 150: Thanksgiving Mailbag. Listeners ask questions, Eric and Ari give answers
00:40:51
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A
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B
All right, welcome to the Market podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I am here with Eric Franchi and we're having our little Thanksgiving feast a bit early. Happy Thanksgiving.
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A
Eric.
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C
Did you bring the cranberry sauce or did you forget it like you did last year?
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B
You know, I'm really upset because years ago I, I, my wife bought like a 12 pack of cranberry sauce and I was like, you know, in my usual OCD way, I was like one can a year that's gonna last me to like 2037 or whatever. And, and it's in my country house where I'm not at. So we're gonna, we had to buy another can, a new can and extend, extend the timeline of exhaustion of our cranberry stash.
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C
Unbelievable. All right, so I'm excited about this. This is going to be fun. We got a bunch of interesting questions, many from Anonymous, some from our friends of the Pod. Before we get into it, talk about what's the latest on the Google trial?
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B
Yeah, sure. So we're on Friday of last week were the closing arguments in the remedy phase of the Google trial. So effectively the end of that trial. Although the judge said some stuff about maybe having more hearings, it was a little confusing what she said. Admin and I wrote it up on Friday in the Newsletter Mark, the Monopoly Report newsletter, if you're not subscribed. And the. It was interesting. They both put out their cases. What I tried to kind of get a feel for like the body language of the various participants and how they were kind of positioning things. And I, I left with the conclusion that the addict spin out is not going to happen. That's my opinion. The judge started out by saying something very strongly worded about time is of the essence, this industry is changing. She didn't say that, but she was obviously influenced by the fact that the open web display market is in decline as being attacked by AI and she knows all this stuff. And, and she really pointedly asked the Department of Justice, like, how long is it going to take if you do the spin out? And she said specifically, we know Google's going to appeal and we're not gonna be able to do a spin out during appeal, so how long is that gonna take? And the Google, the, the, sorry, the DOJ people didn't really have a good answer for that. They said a year and a half after the final judgment. So if there's a two or three year appeal process, that's four and a half years from now that you'd get the Google spit out. Meanwhile, The Google counsel, Ms. Karen Dunn, who's been the council the whole time, she said, you know, we have put out remedies that could be implemented immediately. We would within a year. And the other side's agreed to our remedies. They just want extra stuff we don't want to do. And I was pretty convinced by the argument. I mean, I think that obviously a lot of people don't agree. A lot of people say, and I actually say that Google can't really be trusted to own the whole thing. But from a practicality perspective, I think that the spin out is feeling like a bridge too far for the judge. And the judge is certainly taking conservative bent as a lesson of the Google search remedy, which where the judge really decided not to do anything. So that's my opinion as of today. We probably won't hear anything till like February. Ish.
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C
Got it. Okay. You were kind of thinking this last time, right?
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B
I was 5050. So after the, after the first half of the trial, wrote a newsletter saying I was a 5050 toss up on it. But now I'm, and there's, I could probably talk about this for an hour. No one wants to hear. But like, you know, I think there's a, in a sense, I think an ADEX only spin out where GAM Stays with Google is almost the worst case scenario because it loses a ton of value by being spun out because it loses all the integrations and GAM loses all of its value by not being tied to the exchange. So Google has no reason to support it anymore. And a GAM spin out is contemplated as taking even another three or four years after an ADX spit out. So overall, I just feel like the remedies have kind of hit a bit of a dead end here.
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C
Got it. That makes sense. Okay, one more to come. Um, let's get into these questions. Uh, all right, here. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get through as many as possible. Um, Ari and I are gonna alternate on asking, I guess, the questions to each other or. Or putting the question out there. Um, maybe I'll go first.
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B
Yeah, why don't you go first? Sure. Are you. Wait, are you first to ask? Ask or answer? You're gonna ask me a question first? I'm first to ask, so I'm going first. Really?
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C
Yes. Whatever. We're both gonna talk about it. Okay. From Anonymous, I have recently been tapped. And by the way, this is a person asking for straight up, like, consulting adv. Like, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't say, you know. No, no, no, no consulting. So here's, here's one business challenge from Anonymous. I've recently been tapped by a data company transaction sku, addressable cross retailer that has historically served institutional investors who make bets on the market to head up a marketing division. Think Circana Cardlytics. What do you think the best strategy or advice for a completely new entrant into this space would be? How would you approach this challenge? Why don't you go first?
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B
Yeah, this is an interesting one. So I've written about this a little bit about how curation has upended the business models on data, where if this was five years ago, the answer would have been start your own ad network, because that's the way to capture the most value. And the data only business, you could participate in it, but it's somewhat commoditized. It's hard to differentiate your data to other data. But with the invention of curation, there's a new option which is you could bundle your data with other people's media and make money on that, which still is a. Has the motions of an ad network. You still have to be selling to people. So how you address this? Do you do data only, curation only, or an ad network is your key question. And I think it has a lot to do with your company, the company you work for, and its tolerance for investment because they're kind of different levels of SG and a different levels of tech in each of those. If they've hired you as sort of like a one man band to just create revenue out of thin air, then probably data licensing is your only choice, right? If you're trying to build like a 9, 10 figure recurring revenue business, then probably somewhere in the curation or media side is more valuable. What do you think, Eric?
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C
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean my short answer would be, you know, I would absolutely start an ad network. But this person, actually their question said they've been tapped to head up a marketing division. So this is a little bit about how to position this new data source. So, so to me kind of attacking it from, you know, the marketing challenge, I would say, hey look, you know, focus on the use case, not not the data. Right? Like if this is SKU level anything, you know, this is potentially some pretty powerful data, right? So what does this data do for a marketer? Right? How does it connect to sales lift measurement, you know, like market share, like translate the data set into like actual product use cases. And I think that's how you would translate this into something that you can like bring to market, make it, make it actionable. Whether you're arming a sales team in an ad network way, whether you're arming curators, like, like you need to translate this data into what does it mean for me from a, from a marketer perspective and then you know, from a GTM perspective, like look, if this is all about empowering curators, go and strike deals with you know, three, five big curators, get some great case studies and then let them tell the story. You know, it's pretty formulaic from there.
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B
Yeah, sounds easy. All right, let's go to the next question. So this question actually just came to me as a real question, not for the mailbag, but I anonymized it to put it here because I thought it was interesting. If you saw my inbox, like my Apple iMessage inbox, it's like, it's quite interesting. It's all random people coming over the transom asking me hard ad tech questions, asking for advice. Yeah, asking, Yeah, I get all the time, like what about this company? Should I work there? Should I? How does this work? What's the deal with this protocol? That's what, that's what my inbox looks like.
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C
Do you know what my inbox looks like?
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B
What?
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C
People asking for money yeah. Or jobs.
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B
Yeah. Money or jobs. Yeah. Okay, that's fine. You have those things.
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C
I know, I know. I try to be as helpful as.
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B
Possible and it's quite overwhelming. And I have free advice which is worth what you pay for it. Okay, there's a question for you. There's all these ad CP agents, buyer agents, seller agents, all of which seem loosely like LLM wrappers on a foundational model like Claude with some API integrations and clever prompts. So what mode, if any, do these companies expect to have? Isn't the cost of replicating their product close to zero and they're all going to integrate with a handful of decisioning systems? How do any of them expect to have meaningful network of effects?
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C
I took off my glasses for those.
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B
That's a good question, right?
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C
Yeah, I had to take off my glasses. I'm gonna steal an anecdote from somebody who you don't like, Ari.
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B
Okay.
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C
And that's. That's Chamath Palihapitiya.
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B
Oh, yeah, he's annoying.
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C
Who was, who was asked this in a. In a different way? But it goes to this whole question around, you know, what is a rapper? And then what is an application of AI? The bet in advertising and many other industries is that the application is going to be where, if you are not an LLM, enormous value will be created. And the anecdote that he pointed to, and I'm going to butcher this and Internet correct the hell out of me, was with the advent of refrigeration, refrigerator companies were not the biggest winners. Coca Cola was the biggest winner because they were able to make a product that would universally, you know, be fit into any type of refrigerator, whether it's in the home, whether it's in the store, a hotel, so on and so forth, and leverage the distribution of refrigeration to build one of the greatest businesses of all time. If you back it up, that was an application of refrigeration, right? A cold drink that tastes great, that is ubiquitously available.
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B
That's a classic chamath, sort of like anecdote with no history behind it. I'm sure.
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C
And by the way, this could be completely wrong.
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B
I'm sure it's wrong. I get the point.
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C
All right. Okay. So let's now apply this to advertising and advertising tech. If you have a workflow that is locked in, so to speak, by an enormous number of customers, if you have data, first party data that is, you know, actually creating value across that workflow, you're going to build an enormous business in the AI. Age, full stop. So our bet is that there are applications that are going to sit on top of the LLMs that are going to create tons of value and create enormous businesses. What do you think?
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B
Yeah, I gave a different version of the same answer, which was more or less that the AI is an enabler. You're not going to create an ad CP company any more than you create like an OpenRTV company. You're going to create a company based on data or algorithms or something proprietary. And ADCP now is a rail on which you can move faster and integrate better.
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C
Yeah, which is why Scope three didn't pivot to adcp. Scope three was one of the companies that is leading at the ADCP initiative.
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B
Yeah, right. They can't do what they want to do without adcp. But adcp, I think the questioner is right to say it is a leveler. And if your entire business model, you know, maybe not today, but like a year or two for now is like we integrate ADCP into your ad server better than other people. It's a commodity. You're not adding any value.
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C
Correct, Correct. Okay, I think the next one you gotta take.
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B
Yeah, I'll ask you. So I recently did a interview with Doug Laurentano, who, many of you know, where he has conversations with people over pizza and then interviews them about their pizza. And, and he asked me for my favorite type of slice. And I said plain, plain cheese slice. And I'm getting a lot of shit about this. Like some people really got worked up. Like plain slice. Come on man, that's like such an answer from Ohio or something like that. And I'm like, you know, I grew up like in the, in Manhattan. I lived in Brooklyn. Manhattan. Brooklyn. Manhattan is. I've had a lot of diversity in my life, so I stand behind. Plain New York slice that's slightly orange, slightly greasy is pretty much the top tier. It's the S tier of slices. It's fine to put pepperoni on it, feel free. But like that doesn't take away from the orange slice. And there's a corollary question which I'll address to you. I answered my own questions I've asked. You have a two part question. What is your favorite slice type? And secondly, what is the best pizza in Staten Island?
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C
Okay, my favorite slice type is the same as you. It's a classic thin New York slice. I will, I will defer to, or I'll default rather to putting pepperoni on it. I love that. And where, you know, maybe my, my bridge and tunnel is going to Start to be alive. Me, what I would like to do is sit at the counter, have access to the, the, the small round shaker containers. Shaking containers of oregano, red pepper and Parmesan. God knows how old these things are. And if they've ever been refrigerated, the.
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B
Parmesan is hazardous like that. The Parmesan, man, that does not get refreshed often enough for a cheese product.
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C
I will just freaking just like load it up. And there's no better lunch or late night snack for me.
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B
How do you feel about people who put salt on their pizza slice in the pizzeria? Because there's always, salt's always there. It's an option.
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C
Unnecessary, Unnecessary. But, but oregano, red pepper and Parmesan absolutely augments pizza. Now, I'm from Staten island, we know, home of what some people think is some of the best pizza in New York, which is the best pizza. You know, my thinking on this has evolved over time because I grew up on Staten Island. I haven't lived there for a couple of decades, but I visit and it's always good. But there's great pizza everywhere in 2025, every borough and increasingly outside of New York. Like, there's just great pizza. So my, I, I, I think that I'm less kind of snooty about it. That said, if you want to go to Staten Island.
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B
Yeah.
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C
There's three places that are legendary that have been there since I was a kid. They are. And somebody on, on LinkedIn said this, and they were right. On Lee's Tavern, Joe and Pat's and Danito's. If you were to put a gun to my head and said, you have to name one that is the best pizza on Staten island and potentially the best pizza you've ever had. It's denito's.
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B
All right, well. And if you go to Staten island, having a gun put your head is a very likely outcome. So we're glad we covered that experience.
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C
Anyway. All right, back to ad tech. Terry Khawaja asked us to do a commercial for him. He said, I'd love to hear what folks think of this. And then he linked to a presentation from Luma Partners that is about 300 slides long. It's his AI presentation. It's literally 300 slides. Like, I don't know, I'm clicking through, trying to get the name of the presentation. Like slide one.
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B
Okay.
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C
The FutureScape AI and advertising prepare for tectonic disruption. I've seen this presentation. I've read the presentation. Presumably you have.
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B
I have seen it.
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C
As well. What do you think of the presentation?
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B
Yeah, so yeah, he gave it at his Future Scape event last week or the week before that. I went to and I think we're queued up to have him at Mark Decker Live 3 in March to give this presentation to those people who haven't seen it. It's very high energy, it's very interesting. Lots of great thoughts. Let's just hone down on the one thing that I think he wants to get across, which is that he thinks that the pace of AI innovation is very fast and that incumbents need to acquire their way into this. And he's an M and a banker, so of course he wants that. If people believe him, that makes him a lot of money. That's why he did this presentation. And not in any way disparaging that. That's just obviously the game plan. So that's an interesting question. So far we've had Magnite acquired Streamer. Streamer. I always forget the name of the company. And it was sort of an acquirer I think. And there are a lot of these smallish AI ad tech companies that, you know, for a nice small chunk of change would probably be happy to be acquired. So I think that makes some sense. I think that we're seeing a little bit of a disparity in valuations where you have sort of high profile west coast VC funded companies with stratospheric unacquirable valuations. And in ad tech it's been pretty modest. We haven't seen any giant series Bs or anything like that that might pump up the pricing. So if you can get these companies at at seed round valuations and get some talent and some momentum, maybe that helps a lot and more than pays for itself. So that's generally my take on Terry's positioning here. What's your point of view?
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C
Yeah, I would, I would agree there's been more M and A though, but to your point, it's been just like relatively small in size. Like we were an investor in Memorable, which Reddit acquired. It was a good acquisition. It wasn't, you know, a monster acquisition. Harry and acquired Green Bids, which I think it was. That one was public. I think it was like 60 million, but it was like a 10ish 11inch revenue multiple. So he makes the point that the revenue multiples, even though these were smaller deals, are higher than the norm. Look, I've been spending a lot of time with corp dev teams. They're all trying to make the build by partner decision when it comes to AI when it comes to agentic AI. And at some point these companies are going to start to get more successful and then the numbers are going to creep up. I think the bigger piece or maybe the macro piece on Terry's presentation is how impactful Luma and he thinks AI is going to be to all of marketing. And I think that alone is worth flipping through this thing. So go to Luma Partners. Look at the presentation. It's really, really good. At the very least, it'll make you think.
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B
Sounds good. All right, new one for you. Keith Weisberg, friend of the bot, says this is like a slam dunk question. Do you think OpenAI will get into advertising? Why or why not?
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C
Yes, I think OpenAI will get into advertising. Why do I think so? Again, some of the best thinking on this has come from somebody not named me, Marc Andreessen. There's a clip that kind of went viral a couple of times, actually. He was on tbpm and he. It's short. It's like two minutes. He makes the violent case for advertising. It's fantastic. One of the things that he said is, you know, effectively you can't build a service that connects to a billion users and then 3 billion users without advertising. The costs are just too high. And particularly when it comes to OpenAI, with the cost of computer, it's just too high to be fully reliant on subscriptions. And furthermore, if you are fully reliant on subscriptions, you are kind of cutting off a large percentage of the world that can't afford a subscription. So it's not only the way to pay for it, but it's the right thing to do. So kind of philosophical conversation, number one. Number two, it's just so clear that this is going to be, if they do it right, a fantastic advertising business. Between the data, the user intent, all of the things that the apps that they're coming out with, it just seems to be lining up. I think you. I think they will get into advertising for certain. The question is, how big of an advertising business is it going to be in one year, is in five years, in 10 years? That's the real, in my mind, the real question here, and I know there's a kind of part B coming in a second with another question, but that's my take. What about you?
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B
Yeah, I think you nailed it. There is no example of a global, very large consumer product that doesn't have advertising as part of it. In the tech world, you have at one scale, you have Meta, which is virtually 100% advertising. They don't have a substantial subscription business. And then on the other end, maybe you have Netflix is probably the largest dominant subscription and they're obviously investing pretty heavily in advertising because they couldn't reach all the consumers, especially in certain countries. And then the middle ground, you have quite a few mixed models, YouTube being one of them as a good example where subscriptions are increasingly important. Will OpenAI be able to create money in advertising? Well, absolutely, assuming consumers continue to use it. So their market share is kind of the more important factor in my opinion, than the monetization. If they have market share, they will be able to monetize. If you go back in history, AdWords monetized really quickly as soon as they launched it. And it was just obvious to all the media buyers that it was a better way to reach customers that I think OpenAI is a similar situation. If anyone from OpenAI listens to this, we would love to have anyone from OpenAI at Marketexture Live 3 in March. You name, name the time, name the conversation, name the interviewer and you're on stage. So call me.
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A
By now you've probably heard about market. We put on two sold out events, jam packed with the most insightful advertising content around. Speakers included Eric Seoufer, James Barro from Universal Ads, Mark Grether from PayPal, Olivia Corey from Houzz, and of course me and the architecture crew. Well, this spring we're coming back bigger and better with a two day that's shaping up to be a must attend event March 10th and 11th in New York. We're putting on the new tentpole event in collaboration with Adweek and TV Red and you absolutely need to be there. Early bird tickets are 25% off and qualified brands and agencies can be comped. Go to marketlive.com right now. That's marketlive.com to get the early bird discount.
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C
All right, so I like this next question as a follow on to that. So this is from Kevin Weatherman. Shout out to Kevin. Yo, Kevin, five years from now, how the typical MMM of a Fortune 500 brand spending, say 100 million a year will break out? Basically he's asking like what is the allocation? And he asked very specifically, number one, what percentage is going to chat GPT or are there LLMs? And then number two, what percentage is going to walled gardens versus open? So let's look at the three. Right, so Kevin thinks answer to number one is yes. It's just a matter of how much five years from now to mind you. Okay, what percentage goes to chat and other LLMs. What percentage goes to walled gardens? What percentage goes to open?
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B
Well, I don't really know what the percentages are right now off the top of my head, but like right now it's basically search, walled gardens open and then legacy. Right. And for the sake of this conversation, let's say search is a third, walled garden's a third and then the last third is a mixture of legacy and open. Well, such a stuff, I don't know. Legacy is probably bigger than that, but let's just say that for now. So I'm not sure the percentage has changed that much. I think the biggest shift is first from search to LLM. I don't think that increases that much though as a percentage because if it were, you have to assume that consumers would be doing more bottom of the funnel discovery in order for that number to grow. And I don't think consumers are going to buy anymore because the amount consumers buy is based around GDP and about percentage penetration of the Internet, both of which are probably not going to grow that much. So I would say you move from search to LLM, which is a huge opportunity but doesn't change the mmm, the mix. And I think on walled walled gardens you might see a lot of shifting of share between players. But think of walled gardens as entertainment at this point. It's like what people are spending their time on and there's some evidence it's already peaked. There was a FT article that got a lot of press that I've put in my presentations that the amount of time being spent on social is starting to decline because consumers are getting burnt out and people. It's obviously bad for you and you have regulations and kids regulations. So maybe that grows a bit over where it is now, taking away from legacy and open. But I don't think it radically changes. I think you might see a lot of shifting between the players and new players. Even with OpenAI Sora might be a player, who knows? And then obviously legacy and open aren't growing. But you know, you had the emergence of AppLovin which suddenly made the whole in app market much more appealing. I do think there's some opportunities like that. So my answer is like nothing changes, but everything changes.
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C
Yeah, I think that's well said. Unfortunately I feel the same and I might come at it from a slightly different perspective, but basically that. So to add some color to the search versus LLM question, so search is a $250 billion market. Yeah, globally.
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B
Right.
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C
Largely owned by Google. The real question is how big of a business is Chat GPT going to be in five years. Like that's. And it's the most important like biggest dollar question there is out there. Because if they make a meaningful dent in the search business, I mean, OpenAI justifies it's about its valuation.
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B
Absolutely.
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C
So it's like really that, that is, you know, one of the most interesting questions of, of our time. And then to your point, I think you're right, I think you see share shifts on the walled gardens, right? Like if you could consider CTV to be a walled or hedged garden. Right. Do you see growth there? Does that growth come at the expense of some of the social stuff? Do you see to your point, Sora, you know, take some share from TikTok. I think that that, that makes a lot of sense. And then the real question to me is there's a lot of people trying to make open measurable and accountable and drive outcomes. Does that make open grow? Does that make open, to your point, a share shift to, you know, a smaller curated set of, you know, performant and participating media companies? I don't know. But hey, if we end up a third, a third, a third, it's pretty healthy ecosystem. It's pretty balanced and a lot of opportunity. Yeah.
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B
I think the worst case scenario for Open is if all the sports rights go away. If basically the big tech companies use their muscle to sort of steal the NFL and the NBA, not steal, but buy it. And that's a really gut punch to open, you know, especially the more traditional broadcaster type media companies and they wouldn't be able to recover from that. So that's kind of the wild card there, to use a sports metaphor. The other point I'll make, I want to go back to it because it's an interesting question. You know, Mark Zuckerberg said a couple months ago that he thinks AI is going to be such a big impact on advertising that it's going to increase the GDP of the world. And that's like a PhD level conversation for someone who's an expert. But it doesn't actually seem to hold water that making advertising better would increase the amount of stuff people buy. It decreases the kind of the search cost of buying things, which is an efficiency. But making your, your buying behavior more efficient shouldn't have a big impact on the amount you buy. Which is pretty interesting conversation because then you also have a share shift. Like if AI was so good that it gave you the products you wanted to, you might use search less because you didn't have to find the products as much. But it gets Pretty complicated and probably you could whiteboard it for a while before you come up with an answer. But I think fundamentally he's wrong and I think most people who've who've analyzed that statement think he's wrong. Also that advertising as a percent of GDP is pretty stable and if anything, efficiency might make it smaller.
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C
Yeah, that makes sense. But gosh, what a great quote to put in your PowerPoint presentation if you're an AI company.
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B
It is. You got to grab those quotes when they come.
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C
Exactly. All right, who's up, you or me?
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B
I guess I'll ask you this question. This is a good one for you. I don't know who asked this question. We just have it here. What are the safest jobs in ad tech? If AI is going to eliminate account managers, BDRs and make engineering, product management and data analysts 10 to 100 times more productive, what jobs are going to still be safe?
- [31:01]
C
Well, I don't know if AI is going to eliminate account managers and BDRs versus similarly making them 10 to 100x more productive. Like that's some of the areas we're already seeing productivity gains. And actually at a rare reply on X to ad tech God, he went on a rant this weekend saying, talking all sorts of smack and you know, saying that like adopts is going to, is going to blow up. And I told him adopts is actually getting 100x more productive because of everything that we're seeing. Total aside, what are the safest jobs in ad tech? What are the safest jobs in any business? The closer you are to revenue generation, and that doesn't necessarily mean only sales. It means sales and all things around revenue. In an age of automation and an age of efficiency in any age, those are the roles that, you know, don't get eliminated. Right. So, you know, that's the short, glib answer. What do you think?
- [32:03]
B
Yeah, getting close to revenue always helps. It's harder to eliminate a job close to revenue. I think the answer is obviously podcaster because certainly there's been like near 100% annual increases in employment in adtech podcaster segment. You know, we weren't the first, but wow, we set off something like, because everyone, their brother has an ad tech podcast nowadays. I know you have three, right? You're like literally on three. So like you're taking away jobs from people who like to be ad tech podcasters. Instead you're multi homing.
- [32:36]
C
I'm growing the pie. All right, here's one for you. I think these all actually came from Kevin.
- [32:45]
B
Kevin Kevin helped us out.
- [32:46]
C
Yeah, yeah. Shout out to Kevin. What is the difference, Ari, between an AI native company and AI posers? If I'm interviewing, how can I tell the difference? It's a good question.
- [32:56]
B
That is a good question. I think it has a lot to do with vision in that when someone doesn't really grok AI and isn't really spending the time understanding it, the vision is very narrow and unspecific. And you'll hear people say things like, oh, yeah, we've implemented AI, or it's like it's on the roadmap. You know, those sort of things have kind of put it in a box like it's a feature. And. And those aren't really good answers because reality, it's so comprehensive and so important a change in technology that you should have some humility around what you're doing. So a good answer is something like, you know, our first step is that we're reimagining our workflow and then after that we're going to be thinking about automating our interactions with our partners or redoing our entire machine learning infrastructure to take advantage of the latest transformer models. Those would be answers that may or may not be true, but at least the person who's saying them has enough of a understanding of the impact on their business that they are saying the right things and thinking the right things. I have been in meetings, I'll say. Anonymous DSP executive says, well, we got all of our data into Snowflake, so now we're ready to really address AI. That's not a good answer, man. That's a good answer in 2022. That's just not a good answer. Or the most common answer I'm hearing from ad tech kind of companies is it's very UI centric, like, oh, we built a wizard. We have a little helper for our customers, lets them save time. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not really very future thinking response.
- [34:45]
C
Agreed. Nothing to add. That was really good. Okay, another anonymous question. Let me ask you, Ari, how have things changed for you since you have become a media personality and author?
- [35:00]
B
Well, Eric, thank you for asking this question.
- [35:04]
C
It was a non. It wasn't me.
- [35:06]
B
Very little. I really, I had selfies.
- [35:14]
C
I've seen you take selfies.
- [35:15]
B
I appreciate when people say they've read the book or they've bought the book. That makes me feel good about things. I have been stopped on the street in Manhattan once, which is. And luckily it happened with my wife, so I didn't have to convince her it happened. She saw it. She saw it. But otherwise nothing's really changed. I mean, basically, somehow, here's the history of my life. In short, I worked at Google, I worked at DoubleClick in Google and I tweeted a lot. That was really the thing. And then Business Insider wrote an article that called the hundred best Twitter accounts in media and advertising. And I was like number 18 or something like that. And that just blew me up in a way that you would be surprised. I went from a thousand followers to 20,000 followers and then subsequent to that, I started listening to my own bullshit and writing articles and otherwise being a media personality. And it just all led to this day. So it's a self, self created Persona that, you know, hopefully some people enjoy. And the book's good, so you should, if you don't have the book or you should buy it. So that's, that's how my life has changed. How about you? You, you went from, you know, kind of obscurity to media personality in the past couple of years. Not just on this pod, but multiple pods, speaking engagements, you know, the key to all jobs in ad tech. How's your life changed?
- [36:37]
C
Yeah, it's been, it's been a great benefit. It's benefited my, my work and my, and my job greatly. Right. So, like as a vc, which is the job, brand matters and access matters and you know, the best companies wanting to, you know, work with you matter.
- [36:56]
B
Right.
- [36:56]
C
So, you know, I think there's definitely an effect there where, you know, just things like deal flow and, you know, kind of people wanting to benefit from the association, so to speak. I think we've, we've certainly benefited from, from that perspective. The one thing that I can't get used to, and I'm actually interested in your answer on this, is the asymmetric nature of the relationship with the listener.
- [37:21]
B
Yeah.
- [37:22]
C
Which means, you know, there's a lot of people out there and we're so lucky for this. Like, you know, like there's so many people listen to the POD every Friday. They listen to the POD every Friday and they develop a relationship with us. Like, they kind of know our insider jokes and our banter and Staten island and all that stuff. Right. And, but we don't have that relationship with them. So when we run into them at marketecture or possible or can, there is like, yo, yo, Ari, what's up? Yo, Eric, what's up? And I'm just like, hi, I, I, it's, it's, it's, it's it. It throw. It's a little like, kind of throws me off a little bit.
- [37:57]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [37:58]
C
But it's also something that's like, so cool. But it's a hard one to wrap your head around. Very micro celebrity, micro influencer type of type of thing. But. But it happens a lot.
- [38:09]
B
Yeah. Unlike you. I love all of our listeners, so I don't have that problem.
- [38:15]
C
I appreciate it. It just throws me off.
- [38:17]
B
No, no, I. I've. I think I'm well known for having a terrible memory for people. So people at this point, they come up to me and they're like, hey, I, you know, you don't remember me, but I'm actually your, you know, your brother in law or whatever. But no. Yeah, I have a problem with people's names. Like, I will talk to someone for a while and have kind of no idea who they are, and then I'll remember. Like, that's why we're talking. Yeah. And it is asymmetrical. But I do my best. This is where I need the facial recognition glasses for.
- [38:46]
C
Oh, geez.
- [38:47]
B
Oh, man, you gotta.
- [38:48]
C
How great would that be?
- [38:49]
B
That would be so great. But everyone. The tech companies are too scared to build it. All right, let's finish with a Thanksgiving question. Favorite side dish?
- [38:57]
C
Favorite side dish. You know, I didn't have it growing up, but I feel like the arc of this side dish has really grown to become a staple. Thanksgiving, modern day Mac and cheese.
- [39:13]
B
Mac and cheese is very controversial. It's sort of identified a little bit more with the African American community for Thanksgiving, I think. Yeah, I think so. But I don't know. I never would have Mac and cheese at my Thanksgiving dinner. But that's kind of. You're right. It's changed in its popularity over time.
- [39:29]
C
We've been doing it for years now. I can't tell you, like, when we started doing it. It's just become a thing.
- [39:33]
B
Yeah. All right, I'm interested. We'll get some reader feedback on where. What's the cultural history? Because. Cultural history of Mac and cheese at Thanksgiving. Is it regional? Is it ethnic? I'd love to hear from people on that subject. I mean, I could Google it. I'm a real stuffing fan. I love stuffing. You only eat it once a year, right? How often you have stuffing.
- [39:52]
C
True.
- [39:53]
B
It's so bad for you. It's so bad for you. It's just like. It's just like bread soaked in fat, basically.
- [39:58]
C
Yeah. What a great point. That's right. You don't have it any other time.
- [40:03]
B
You really don't. Right. I think it's, it's just. Yeah. And you can put anything in it. Really. Like, really any ingredient that's savory could be thrown in there, and it's delicious. Well, on that, I hope everybody has a great Thanksgiving, enjoys themselves. Put this on the, on the stereo after you're done with your meal, before football starts, and listen to your podcast with your family and loved ones.
- [40:27]
C
All right, everybody, enjoy your Thanksgiving. We'll see you next week.
- [40:30]
B
See you next week.
- [40:32]
C
Thank you for subscribing to marketecture.
- [40:34]
B
New interviews are added every week at.
- [40:36]
C
Marketecture TV and your favorite podcasting app.
- [40:48]
B
Thank you for listening to the marketecture 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 architecture TV. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant slack community that you can apply to join@adtech God.com.