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Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Episode 154: Marketecture Wrapped: Predictions, Year-in-Review, and Shout-Outs from Eric and Ari
00:46:28
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- [00:01]
A
This podcast is brought to you by audiohook, the leading independent audio dsp. Audiohook has direct publisher integrations into all major podcast and streaming radio platforms, providing 40% more inventory than what could be accessed in omnichannel DSPs. What's more, audiobook has full transcripts on more than 90% of all podcast inventory, enabling advanced contextual targeting and brand suitability. Audio Hook is so confident that in addition to CPM buys, they offer the industry's only pay for performance option where brands can scale audio and podcasting with peace of mind mind knowing they are only paying for outcomes. Visit audiohook.com to learn more. That's audiohook.com. All right, it's that time of year. It's marketecture wrapped. Are you excited? Eric?
- [00:57]
B
I am so excited. I can't wait to see what the year was and what the year will date.
- [01:03]
A
Did I wonder, did Spotify trademark wrapped? Because they, I think they gave up with it. Now everyone's using it.
- [01:08]
B
Yeah, what a good innovation either way. And yeah, I, I love it. I, I hope every, every service that I use that has my like consumption data comes up with it because it's always hilarious.
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A
There was LinkedIn wrapped. I didn't even look. I, I just saw it go by and I was like whatever man. I'm not reading that.
- [01:28]
B
LinkedIn Wrapped could have been so much better. They, they definitely took the ultra bland route with the data they used.
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A
Well, so we're here it is a bit before the holidays and we're going to do an episode where last year we called it the Year End the predictions episode, the awards episode. We've got a lot of things but we're basically going to see what we covered this year, what was interesting, some predictions for next year and a bunch of other things like that. We'll hold ourselves accountable for what we said last year. I had to listen to the episode this morning and it's pretty cringy but do what we could do do before we get into it. So this is the last episode of the year. We'll be back the week of CES with some interviews from there. Also worth noting again, I'll point out that what we talked about last week, which is we have a new product in architecture, it's called MAD DB and it is, I'm addicted to it. I'm using it like all the time as my news reader because I'm a news junkie so I always want to get alerted about things that are happening. It's like a newsreader for thousands of articles from all different publications about advertising that's personalized with AI. And if you have used it and want to give me suggestions or recommendations, just hit me on DM or email and I will literally change the site for you. Pretty fast feedback loop on that stuff. So before we get into the industry, let's talk about market because we had a really big year this year. So according to Spotify Wrapped, so Spotify Wrapped has a creator view so you could see as a podcaster what they say about you. Our audience was up 200% year over year on Spotify, which is great. All the numbers were up, which was great. Interestingly, they had our top episode as totally different from what my other stats. So I'm going to use my official stats on my ad server and my content management system, not Spotify Wrapped Up. You've probably seen this. I was a little surprised. Our top episode was really early in the year. It was like, it was like January 15th and it was Paige Billings from Magnite talking about the future of ctv. I was surprised. Maybe they just promoted it. The Magnite people did some social and things like that because I don't it was a great conversation. Paige and I, there were some insights there, but it wasn't a blockbuster news episode or anything like that. Number two, more predictably was the Brian o' Kelly interview I did live on stage at the first Architecture Live where it was effectively the conversation about the Scope 3 pivot from you may think Scope 3 has always been a Gentek AI company, but for those readers with longer memory, they used to have something to do with climate. And that was the conversation where he had just done the pivot and we had a pretty good conversation about that in the future of AI. So those were the top two episodes by listenership and then Market. The company had a pretty big year. So we did our first two conferences market live at 1 and 2. They were both sold out successes and we have a giant conference coming up March 10th and 11th. You should get the Early Bird tickets for they stop being Early Bird right around ces. We did two acquisitions so Serial Marketer and Adland. Adland TV is the largest repository of super bowl commercials online and we are going to be be covering the super bowl pretty heavily coming in January. And then lastly personally I stepped back from being the CEO of marketexture. So now Jeremy Bloom is the CEO of marketexture. He's doing a great job and we're excited about the future of the company and I am just a random Unemployed podcaster, which is how I like to be. Right.
- [05:16]
B
What a year for architecture. Maybe. One question before we get into the episode. I was surprised to see the audience growth because my impression was like, this is an insider podcast on ad tech.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And it's a. It's a sort of known universe of the ad tech listenership. And I figured they were all architecture listeners, so I was surprised to see the growth. Maybe it's because more ad tech people are listening to podcasts. Maybe we're starting to expand outside of the core audience. You probably don't have those types of insights, but I think that's pretty interesting. I was surprised. I was like, everybody listens to this thing already.
- [05:50]
A
Yeah. You know, I was surprised also. Look, the stats are really hard in podcasting because when you get downloads, which don't really mean that much, and then Spotify gives you audience Data and then YouTube gives you views, and it just doesn't all add up. Yeah, my. My instinct is that we have a solid, loyal fandom that is, you know, probably the largest in ad tech. It's not radically growing, but it's also not shrinking. So that's my take on it.
- [06:18]
B
Yeah. Yeah, it probably to. There's probably something to. More people are listening to podcasts this year than last year. It's, you know, the space is just growing.
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A
I think YouTube's also a big part of this in that, you know, we just added video maybe four or five months ago, and I don't know if we were even on YouTube before about a year ago. So anecdotally, YouTube is a huge place for people to listen to podcasts. So we're participating in that. And, you know, we're. We're happy that you're listening. That's all I can say.
- [06:50]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Let's get into it. Why don't we start with how we did last year? Because we always end these pods with predictions, and we'll do that again this year, and then we'll get into, you know, the year that was. So I'll run through the predictions one by one. I gotta say, we did pretty good.
- [07:08]
A
Did we?
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B
Like, there was. There was, like, no real whiffs. There was, like, I would say, like, a maybe or two. But on. On balance, we did pretty good. So the first two that I would say were very good calls were as follows. Number one, we see the rise in strategic M and A, which we saw a little bit of last year. Last year ended the year with Experian acquiring Autogen. There were a few other deals this Year was like, I went and like built the list. It was wild. I'll run through it very, very quickly. T Mobile acquiring Vistar, T Mobile acquiring Bliss, Omnicom acquiring IPG, Paramount, Skydance, DoorDash, Symbiosis, Pinterest, TV scientific publicist Load of Me and influential TTD, Sincera, WPP, Infosup, DV, RockerBox. And that's probably not even all inclusive. Like there's a bunch of little deals and stuff like that. Like this was the year of strategic M and A and very clearly this is around capabilities, this is around channels, this is around you know, like technology which is, you know, pretty awesome to see.
- [08:16]
A
Yeah, yeah, we always like to see that M and A is a natural conclusion of many venture funded startups.
- [08:23]
B
Sure.
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A
I'd push back a little bit in that, you know, if you just think about tech, venture funded tech in advertising, you know, that's like about half of the list of companies you mentioned. And most of those deals outside of TV Scientific, most of those deals were pretty small. Like Autogen and TV Scientific were probably the two biggest ad tech deals of the year. Right?
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B
Yeah. Oh, they both happen to be a perium deals.
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A
Look at you.
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B
Vistar and Bliss.
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A
Yeah, Vistar and Bliss was, was, it wasn't that big and about that big. Right. Okay. These are all, these are all like in the 100 to 300 million dollar range, which is great. If you're an entrepreneur and you're getting that money, that's great. But if you, you know, let's, let's go down in our history lesson here. We're in 2025 so like 2021, 2022, those years you had multiple high nine figure deals, you know, and financings and things like, you know, Madhive raised at like 700 million and stuff like that.
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B
Yeah, sure.
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A
Triple lift, Got triple lift, 1.3 billion.
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B
Yeah. Valuations that we, we may never see relative to how things normalize. But I still think the, the, the sheer number means we got this one right.
- [09:36]
A
It's strategic, it's much better than 2024 or 2023. I think 2026 is going to be, you know, big acceleration from there.
- [09:45]
B
I agree, I agree. I don't even think we're going to predict that one because it seems quite obvious. We also said that we would see the continued momentum and proliferation in ad tech of AI. You specifically said we'd see more actual use cases and adoption and with a focus on things like planning. And I think that was largely the case. A lot of companies rolled out AI tools. There's I think a lot of experimentation happening. We didn't anticipate what we'll talk about later which is things like ad CP and the industry like really galvanizing and pushing itself forward. But I definitely give us, give us an A on you know, just like thinking this would be the year of AI pushing everything forward. Yeah.
- [10:27]
A
And again I think next year will be even more dramatic. This year it was fits and starts. SCP was a big deal, but it's only an experimental mode still. The, the big guys Meta and Google full steam ahead on AI but, but many ad tech companies are, are just adding little chat boxes boxes to their ui, not doing substantial stuff. So a lot more to see here.
- [10:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. There we have I think a collection of okay calls. So you said TikTok would get banned. TikTok didn't get banned, but we saw a deal consummate and there is a conclusion which is I think maybe a halfway which is, you know, it will be, you know, controlled by a, by US entity. So I give us an okay on that one.
- [11:16]
A
I don't know, I'm naive here. Like I thought there's a law that's signed by the president that it would be enforced, but I guess I was, I was wrong.
- [11:24]
B
That's okay. Number two, you said Google would spin out ad tech assets. Ad tech assets. Again, I think we are okay here because they were, you know, declared a monopolist. This is still in the courts. There's a chance that it will happen, just not at the timeline.
- [11:43]
A
We thought that's. You're a, you're an easy grader. Okay, sure. I thought it would actually be be announced an actual spin out by now and I don't think that's. Well, certainly we have a week left in the year. It appears not to be happening. And we'll get to our predictions for next year about what's going to happen to Google. I'll. I'll opine on that in a bit.
- [12:03]
B
Yeah, sure. And then, you know, probably, you know, an obvious one we talked about, you know, live, live streaming would continue to grow, which you know, absolutely is happening. And I think there's real upside in 26 and the one that's maybe borderline was, you know, we both agreed we would see the rise of AI first agencies and maybe a retooled agency type that's much smaller and adapted AI tools. I don't think we, I've seen a couple of them out there. I don't think we've seen the rise of them. But we have seen the rise of independent agencies and frankly, holdcos being pretty innovation forward on AI.
- [12:40]
A
Yep. AI hit the agencies and they use it well this year, which was, I think a great story for both independents and the hold codes. Is that how much they're leaning into this? I'm still waiting to hear the story of this. This two person company became. Became agency of record for some big, big company. We haven't seen that yet.
- [13:02]
B
That would be so cool, I think. And that's a. That's a when, not a. Not an F. Maybe it's not two, but something like that. Then there were a couple of fun ones. So we ended the episode last year predicting the number of architecture employees. Now, you might have had your M and a plan in mind. So I was at a disadvantage. You predicted 11, I predicted six.
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A
Yeah, I think.
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B
What's the number?
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A
It depends. Am I an employee? I don't know. We use the word employee pretty, pretty loosely at architecture. I think we're five. Five or six.
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B
Okay.
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A
All right. The.
- [13:33]
B
She does it again.
- [13:33]
A
I should know, but you're pretty darn close. Let's say, let's give a call. We have Jeremy as a CEO. We have ad tech God as our anonymous cm. We have Hannah as our new head of sales. We have Dave Berkowitz, who's our head of community. We have Sam, who's a consultant and works on a lot of communities. And we have Amelia, who's our operation. So that's six. There you go. You hit it and call out. And if I forgot any employees, I apologize.
- [14:00]
B
Got it. Shout out to Eric. And then finally I listened to the episode again. This was pretty hilarious. At the very end when we were riffing on ctv, you said, you know, maybe we'll see a big Silicon Valley company come in and buy the likes of. And you, you were like Silicon Valley, I. E. Netflix buying somebody like tv, Scientific or a Vibe. And what just happened?
- [14:25]
A
Yeah, just happened. I get. I get some points on that.
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B
That was hot. Maybe get some points on the deal.
- [14:31]
A
I did not get points on the deal, unlike you. All right, cool.
- [14:35]
B
Let's. Let's talk about the year that was. Where do you want to start, man?
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A
Why don't we do biggest news of the year?
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B
Biggest news of the year. Okay, how you want to do this? You want to go first? You want me to go first?
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A
You go. Go for it.
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B
Yeah. So biggest news of the year. And we've got the benefit of seeing each other's picks, which I just loaded into into the docket this morning, we had the same, which was the Q1 earnings from TTD, which precipitated a challenging year for TTD News of the year because this was the number one independent company in ad tech for some time. And then the simultaneous rise of Amazon dsp, undoubtedly the biggest news of the year. We talked about it seemingly every week.
- [15:20]
A
Yeah. For those deep in the ad tech world, this is. This is like the, you know, the prom queen and king having breaking up or something like that. Metaphor alert. But yeah. So the trade desk had a really bad year in terms of its perception and, and its stock momentum. Well, the fundamentals are pretty strong. So not a bad company, not a company that's falling apart. But perception wise, they missed a quarter of earnings for like, the first time since they've been a public company. Almost simultaneously, they lose the exclusivity with Walmart, who is among their biggest partners. They have seemingly a number of spats with other companies in the industry. We'll talk about pre bid at some. They have some layoffs, exits of some key people. A lot of key people leave some of the old guard, like Jed Dederick, who's a CRO, and the cto, whose name escapes me at the moment, and it just felt like a parade of news. And meanwhile, you have Amazon dsp, several of whom executives have been on the show, just unrelenting progress, releasing new features, new products willing to price lower, going at them head to head. Doesn't help that you also have Yahoo DSP publicly reported to be competing on price. So this whole sector, the DSP sector, is very competitive. The competitive nature increased. And the company that was sitting there with a giant stock capitalization was the. Was the perception victim. I'm once again very strong company. Not saying the reality is there, but the perception has been strong.
- [17:10]
B
Absolutely. And stick around to the end, because I think we both have some thoughts about TTD in 2026. Okay, let's. Let's move on. Let's talk about people, let's talk about CEOs. Sure.
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A
So let's do best private company CEO.
- [17:25]
B
I chose Jason Fairchild of TV Scientific. Jason has executed flawlessly over the course of five years. He, you know, was early into this idea of performance. CTV recruited a team, built a company, built a brand, and is ending the year with a acquisition by a $20 billion Silicon Valley leader called Pinterest. And it was a successful acquisition at that.
- [17:52]
A
Definitely landed the plane, but I'm gonna go with his arch rival, Arthur Cuero from Vibe. So Arthur had the Best ad tech ad in history, which we talked about last week. Undoubtedly you should watch it if you didn't watch it last week. Took his company from, from 0 to probably about the same size as TV Scientific in less time is on a fast track. You know, he posted a, a snarky little meme online when TV Scientific News came out saying that they're on divergent path with him towards the Nasdaq vibe, heading towards the Nasdaq. And I think when we talk about on your other pod with Joe Zappa, when you talk about how CEOs need to have a voice, a position, etc. He is a masterclass. He's putting on a masterclass here about how to communicate with the market. Both customers, partners, investors, etc. I think they've raised a bunch of money. So Arthur, I think gets my vote for private company CEO of the year.
- [18:55]
B
Yeah, I think we both made really good arguments on that one. And nobody wins.
- [18:59]
A
And meanwhile the mountain CEO is sitting around like I got Ryan Reynolds. What's the deal? Why are you talking about me?
- [19:07]
B
Amazing. Well, speaking of mountain public companies, let's talk about public company CEOs. Why don't you go first? What is your pick for best public company CEO?
- [19:16]
A
Yeah, so I was originally going to say Adam from Applovin because obviously the market cap supports that and he's done a great job. Let's not give him our time. But I think a call out is necessary for Sundar Pichai of Google who just a year ago we were all, not just me, everyone online was saying time for him to step down. Not a wartime CEO, you know, peacetime CEO. We need someone to shake things up around there and now. Google is the undisputed leader in the AI race. Undisputed. You know, they are hitting on all cylinders. Gemini is the one of the leading platforms, fundamental models for AI on every metric. On every metric.
- [19:59]
B
Every metric.
- [20:00]
A
The, their search business has not been cannibalized, which is a miracle. If they could pull that off. Their, their business makes over $1 billion a day, like a straight billion a day in revenue, which is just, I think they crossed that number about a year ago, but still is just a nutty, nutty number. The, you know, all the privacy and regulatory stuff is, is a distraction but they're dealing with it. And he's got, you know, YouTube under his belt, which is the most important company in media. Neil Mohan, we mentioned last week was named Time magazine CEO of the year. So he has the Time magazine CEO of the year reporting to him. So God bless Leonard has had just an amazing year.
- [20:48]
B
Yes, this is hard to argue with, but I don't want to agree with you on everything, but this one is a hard one to argue with, but I'll argue with it in a second. Just put another name forward. Google's turnaround on AI has been incredible. And the thing about Sundar also is having. I don't know if it's the humility or the collaborative approach to letting Sergey come back and do his thing, because I've, like, talked to a bunch of people and like, read, you know, a lot of stuff on this, and basically Sergey came out of retirement and said, I'm coming to the office. I'm working again. You are all going to work again. I expect 60 hours a week. And drove some cultural change, which Sundar then really ran with and made. Was it DeepMind, the center of everything and drove a lot of technology change. So it was an amazing turnaround. Just to mix it up, I'll give it to Adam Farogi again. This. This company is. It's. It's defying the laws of gravity. We were talking about the stock last year. I think it was up. I forget how much it was up. 3x, 7x, something like that. It's up another 2x. He's got short sellers like creating all of these reports. He is. His head is down. He is executing relentlessly. I spoke to one of the largest performance marketers last week, and I'm. I don't think I'm saying anything, you know, that's. That's confidential. He is in the trenches designing, like, the ad product for performance marketers that are like kind of X X mobile apps. So total founder mode. At the end of the day, the scorecard for public CEOs is a stock price. He drove the highest stock price increase as a class. So I'll give it to Adam. Please come on the pod, dude. Every year. Yeah, like, talking good. Please come on the pot.
- [22:40]
A
Yeah, Adam's gotta come on the pod. I mean, I can't imagine him continuing to be successful without coming on the pot.
- [22:48]
C
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- [23:12]
A
So, all right, let's do. Let's do the hottest trends, the current trends, not predictions. So I'll get us Started here. I think that as we're leaving 2025, and there was news over the past couple of weeks, including the Warner Brothers acquisition news. The. The biggest news here is that Yahoo. I'm sorry, not Yahoo. I can't believe I just said Yahoo. YouTube and Netflix are effectively creating a duopoly in streaming, where they're so much bigger than number three, number four, meaning Disney, and bigger than Disney. Disney is the biggest media company in the world, but they're so much bigger that they're starting to grab rights and they're starting to flex their muscles in ways that are going to be harder and harder for other people to compete. Compete with. Netflix grabbed a whole bunch of podcasts, exclusive video podcasts, and then YouTube turned around and did exclusive rights to the Oscars, which was one of the tentpole TV events. And Netflix, obviously, buying Warner Brothers, if that goes through, gives them just so much catalog, so much momentum, and they're not gonna be the only ones. Obviously, you know, Amazon's got a big position here, and Disney has a big position, but it's starting to consolidate. And that's a really important story as it relates to advertising, because YouTube runs Wall Garden, as we all know, and Netflix, you know, is early. All right. It's really unclear where Netflix ends up in this whole advertising world. So I think that's a pretty important trend.
- [24:55]
B
I agree. And the real question is, do we see the rise of four or five, six, I don't know how many walled gardens in CTV in the same way that we saw them in the web with the implications of that, or just do we see something more balanced, where there's just the need for more ecosystem participation on both the supply and demand side? I don't know.
- [25:20]
A
Yeah. If CTV is the most important sector of advertising and it consolidates, then downstream, all the vendors that are SSPs, DSPs, data providers, et cetera, they don't disappear, but they lose a lot of their clout, and potentially they lose a lot of their ability to produce margins.
- [25:40]
B
Yeah, yeah, agreed. I mean, and you see things like Pinterest. All of a sudden, Pinterest can become an interesting mini walled garden in CTV with the acquisition of TV Scientific. And they probably have made their bet in CTV so super interesting. I mean, to me, the hottest trend. Trend is obviously AI. It's obviously agentic AI across the board in every way. But as it relates to our industry, I mean, what a year. We got the rise of a new category, right? AEO, GEO, of multiple companies who raise anywhere from 10 to 20 to $40 million. We got a new open standard ad CP. We had the launch of a new organization, agenticadvertising.org we got a new Lumascape.
- [26:28]
A
Wow.
- [26:29]
B
That is filled with new companies. If you take a step back, I mean, this was the year that really advanced agentic AI, not only as a. On the whole. Right. But as it relates to advertising. So I think for certain it's the hottest trend.
- [26:45]
A
Yeah, it's almost such a big trend. I didn't even discuss it.
- [26:50]
B
Right. But if you take a step back and we just talk about like some of these highlights this year. Yeah, it's like, wow, you know.
- [26:56]
A
Yeah, you definitely have have a point here. AI is so interesting and I wrote about in my newsletter that came out this morning as we're recording this on, on Monday. You know, is it, is it like, is it like the Ad Exchange something that changes advertising in every way or is it like Excel, something that changes advertising but doesn't produce any companies? Like, you couldn't have a modern advertising business without Microsoft Excel. Right, but there's no Excel for advertising startups.
- [27:26]
B
Right, Right. I absolutely believe that it creates companies. It doesn't just create Excel, but we shall see.
- [27:35]
A
That's why you're an investor. Yes, sir. All right, let's do hot companies. So this is right in your wheelhouse. I'm going to guess this is going to be a portfolio company of yours. So hottest early stage startup.
- [27:48]
B
This was tough. This is always tough because I don't want to get anybody upset. I also kind of see a lot of company operation about who's growing and who's not.
- [28:01]
A
Yeah. You have good info.
- [28:03]
B
Yeah, yeah. So my nomination is Swivel.
- [28:06]
A
Okay.
- [28:07]
B
Swivel, which was formerly called Pilot Desk. CEO is Joe Hirsch and a lot of the former team from Spring Surface. Swivel launched only a year and a half ago. Like literally, I kind of spun out of Magnite and then started what was Pilot Desk a year and a half ago. You had some early conversations that you were part of when we were just like talking to Joe about the business. And they moved incredibly fast in, you know, getting customers, kind of being one of these first AI for ops companies. And then when SCP happened, Joe went all in and is now like on the bleeding edge of executing agentic buzz. And I think they have an opportunity to build a really big business. They raised their Series A this year. There's a lot of seed rounds. There weren't many Series A's. So to raise a Series A, that's an Accomplishment as well. And I think the buzz on this, on this company is only going to be building. So that was my pick for, for Startup of the Year.
- [29:08]
A
All right. Yeah, not a. I, I endorse that pick. I love Joe and it's an interesting space for me. I have more than one. Right. So.
- [29:20]
B
Oh, I didn't know I could get two.
- [29:22]
A
All right. Branch Labs, who we've had on this podcast, I really like the way they're using neural nets to use to do targeting of pharma conditions and things like that in a totally privacy safe way. I think that's a really interesting way to do things as largely the future. And they've had a huge, A very, very fast acceleration in growth from when they started to having significant major pharma customers already. And second, like I said, I'm using two is MadConnect, where I'm also an investor. You're an investor in MadConnect, right?
- [29:56]
B
I'm an investor in both of the companies.
- [29:58]
A
Both Those companies, yeah. MadConnect, who won the startup competition at last Market Extra Live, People's Choice. Yeah. They effectively do interconnection of data between ad tech companies. It's like this sort of snowflake in the cloud for ad tech. Very technical, very infrastructure, but it's a important sort of cloud service and they have great momentum as well. There are a lot of startups out there, so it's hard to pick. What about Later Stage? What's the hottest Later Stage?
- [30:29]
B
I gave it to Vibe.
- [30:30]
A
Yeah, I gave it to Vibe.
- [30:32]
B
Maybe you summed it up very well in terms of all the things that the company has accomplished this year. And I think they've done also a great job of raising their profile and truly up to the, to the word hottest. So. So I gave it to Vibe.
- [30:47]
A
I'm giving it a Vibe too, so that's not very controversial. We're watching you, Vibe. Let's. Let's see the IPO. Let's see the S1.
- [30:56]
B
I am not an investor in Vibe. I'm not an investor.
- [31:00]
A
All right, let's look forward and say, you know, best market episode I had to go through. I had to go back in Spotify and remind myself about the episodes. What do you think the best one of the year was?
- [31:10]
B
I. I couldn't believe that you didn't pick this one. My. Mine was. Was Terry Kawaja and you live on stage at ML Live too.
- [31:21]
A
I have PTSD from that. Like, I was like the. It was just too much. I couldn't take It.
- [31:28]
B
He was on fire. That was the most entertaining. And it also interspersed with good. With good learnings, good perspective, good. You know, kind of like view on the. On the future. I thought it was really good.
- [31:40]
A
I like the Kristoff from Analytics episod, which was earlier in the year. He's getting sued by various folks, I think doubleverify suing him. And we had him on and it was just a really interesting conversation because I spent a little more time in the questioning on things like what is his motivation? How does he do his job? What does he like and dislike about the job? And I got a lot of great feedback on that one that people really enjoyed it and felt like they learned something. So that was earlier in the year. I'd recommend going back and listening to it. And we hope Kristoff does not get sued into oblivion. What about something you've learned on the pod?
- [32:18]
B
Yes. So I went through and looked at a bunch of episodes and I came away with remembering how much both of us learned from Adam Epstein from Gigi on how to build a vertical AI agent.
- [32:34]
A
Yeah.
- [32:36]
B
Literally walk. Go. Go to that episode listeners and just go start to finish. Adam's. Adam's part is only 20, 25 minutes. He goes through and defines everything. Like, we hear these terms all the time. And if you're not an operator, you might not necessarily kind of get a deep understanding of it, but everything from fine tuning vs reinforcement learning vs rag vs system props, it was like, so good. And I know we both felt like we learned a bunch coming out of that one.
- [33:04]
A
Yeah. You know, he. He talked about how his system, gg it is an AI for helping you optimize Amazon advertising. And he talked about how he has folks, you know, take individual labels from the reporting in Amazon and define them in long form and then puts that into the rag. It's so interesting. You know, I had a different answer, but I'm just going to agree with you. That was the best. That was an amazing episode for learning.
- [33:28]
B
Yeah, it was really good.
- [33:30]
A
All right, let's get to predictions. So the hard part, let's tell us what's going to happen next year. So we both a bunch of bullets in the dock. Why don't we just alternate? So you go first, you do one, I'll do one.
- [33:41]
B
Okay. We both. We both said this, but I think I have maybe a little bit more of a. Of a. Of a view on what it means. So we both said that TTD is going to do its first major acquisition. This is a. This is a prediction by both of us. I think also TTD takes back the narrative and exit 2026 as a hot company, as a leader with the, the wind at their sails, so to speak. Like we've seen this too many times where they build you up, they tear you down and then, you know, you can, you can rise from the ashes. I think you know where we may be at like peak negativity on ttd. I think this time next year it's completely different. Okay.
- [34:28]
A
Peak negativity, I'm not sure we'll see. I think the acquisition side though makes a ton of sense. If you see slowing growth, you have to do something about it. They had an M and a guy who left earlier this year and they just replaced him. So presumably if you're hiring someone into a, into a corporate level role and paying them a lot, they should do something. Right. And you would want to see them do something. And I think if they were to acquire another company, it would be something that gave them some degree of unique data or unique supply. You know, a little bit of walled garden ish. Maybe the Yahoo DSP who has access to Yahoo data. Maybe someone like Liveramp. You know, I could see a lot of options but I definitely think I'm putting my money on that one.
- [35:19]
B
Agreed. Okay, you go.
- [35:21]
A
All right. Adcp. So predicting ADCP is sort of fish in the barrel. So I'll be a little more precise about what I'm predicting here, which is, I think it'll become the talk of all the SSPs. Anyone on the supply side, publisher side, is going to be really rolling out lots of ad cp. Oh, we did our first campaign. We're offering this to all of our publishers. We do it in ctv. You're going to see all those announcements on the sell side. And we already saw the first one from Pubmatic last week with Butler till. So we'll see a lot more of that. And the DSPs are going to either be a mixture of silent or hostile. And I think this is aligned with their interest. They don't get to charge as much. It's not as much value add. We'll see. Like, you know, the trade desk put out a think piece about why ADCP is not the solution to all of our problems. And generally they're not going to be investing nearly as much here as the sell side.
- [36:18]
B
I'll buy that. I'll continue on the AI front. So I agree with you on adcp. I'll go a little step further. I think a few things happen with AI. So if this year was the year of the new category Geo aeo. I think apropos the recent episode with MSG which everyone should listen to, I think content marketplaces become the big thing next year and bunch of startups emerge, get funding, you know, like we start to see real, real, real experimentation with that. I think number two next year the LLMs launch ad products. I think OpenAI does it next year, perhaps the others. Number three, and this is probably in line with your view on ad cp, agentic buying does start to take off and people might be underestimating how much that could reshape the market as it relates to SSPs versus DSPs. And I think conversely on the other side we start to see real cracks in the display market that may manifest itself in like quarterly earnings that may manifest itself in some rocky times for legacy companies but it seems to be only a matter of time and we see it in 2026.
- [37:32]
A
Yeah, I can't really disagree with any of those things. I think the content marketplaces are going to be very experimental in 2026. We won't see major volume there and ad products for, for the, for, for OpenAI at least is a, is a no brainer. And yeah, the cracks in the display market, you know, I don't want to predict any specific companies but there could be some real pain there for majority display companies. All right, my turn. Well, you knew it was coming. I'm going to talk about the DOJ case. So I think, I think Google's going to win. I think the ruling is going to come out in February or March and it's going to be predominantly behavioral remedies, maybe a tougher set of behavioral than what Google ideally would want, but it's not going to require an attic spin out. And I think Google's going to ship a pre bid adapter which is a big deal for publishers and who care about this sort of stuff. If you don't know what I'm talking about then I'm sorry but I think they will. So they're going to ship a prediminant pre bid adapter and there's going to be generally like publishers are going to come along, they'll be like ah, this is pretty okay, I don't really need to switch ad servers right now. It's fine. So that's mostly what's going to happen in the Google side of things. There's the civil cases which could be very contentious but ultimately those are just solved with a very large check. So I don't think it's strategically interesting.
- [39:00]
B
I Mean, you're the expert. I can't argue at all. It makes sense. I think that 2026, this is, I mean this is so obvious. It is a massive year for ctv. You have all of the wars that you're talking about with the Walled gardens, you have the World cup, you have the Olympics, you have haramounts ambitions around expansion. I think there's real upside for market participants in ctv. But you've said something a couple of times this year that I first disagreed with and now I agree with and I think that next year is going to be the year of it that we start to see some of the massive companies get into performance ctv.
- [39:44]
A
Yep.
- [39:44]
B
You floated Meta and Google, which I agree with. I think you have to add Applovin. They already have the assets, they already have the business, they have world. Yeah, yeah, they have the assets. But my senses that is a real vector of growth for all of these companies and they get into the performance CTV space in a big way.
- [40:07]
A
Yeah. Of all the big tech giants, Google is in CTV through YouTube. So I'm not sure that changes that much. I don't think they'll do an acquisition or do anything crazy there. And Amazon's in it through Fire TV and the Amazon DSP. But Meta and TikTok are just not, they're not in your living room. I mean there's an app, you can watch TikTok on your TV, but that's not really it. And Meta just announced Instagram on your tv. But really this is not the same thing as going in at scale. And I think, I think in particular Meta is going to make a big move into ctv, either organic or through acquisitions.
- [40:50]
B
Yeah, on the Google point, yes, YouTube is CTV for Google, but they have these incredible capabilities, particularly around pmax and relationships with media companies and publishers. If they wanted to get serious and expand it as a channel, which again, why not? I think there's an opportunity to have real upside there, but it remains to be seen.
- [41:14]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And we have two companies that are both at scale, that are acquirable, which are Mountain and Vive. Neither is cheap, but if you want to blow a couple billion dollars to get into the market, go for it.
- [41:26]
B
When you are worth a trillion, three trillion. Like a billion or a couple billion is, is, is. It's not even a, you know, a bet.
- [41:35]
A
Meta, Mountain. Meta. Mountain. Meta. Buying Mountain would just be like a no brainer. Right. All right, my turn. So speaking of Meta, I don't have a specific prediction here, like a measurable one, but I think the in app space is going to become really exciting for a lot of people. I think Applovin success is turned into sort of a bit of a grudge war between Meta and applovin. We've heard from public reporting that Google is really upset with the growth of Applovin. They feel like they had their opportunity stolen from them. Meta. We heard from Jim Payne on the show just two weeks ago that they were really involved in his startup because they really want transparency in the in app market. You can read between the lines there. The Meta versus Applovin fight is going to go brawl in the streets and as a result I think a lot of other, a lot of companies that are in the in app space will suddenly become interesting again. MMPS Unity, you know, some, some other, you know, some of the companies owned. I think Apollo owns a bunch of assets there. So I'm going to see a big heat up in App that makes perfect sense.
- [42:49]
B
Jim Payne is going to win again.
- [42:51]
A
He will always win. Yep.
- [42:53]
B
Hopefully that means more, more legends to come. Final one by me. We said this in the beginning, you know, that we, we think, you know, 2026 is going to be a real year of M and A. On the, on the strategic side, I do think that PE is, is looming and you know, interested in, you know, everything from roll ups to, you know, taking companies private a la iis to other PE like strategies. I do think after a year of maybe less activity that starts to become a factor again in 2026.
- [43:29]
A
Yeah, I think it'll be a little bit different in that it might be a little bit more bargain hunting like the bending spoons model. There's just, there's a lot of companies that are just not in a position to IPO or to have a giant exit and still are healthy businesses. So we'll, we'll see that roll up the, roll up the thing. The negative on that, and I've definitely been hearing this from PE contacts of mine is that if it's too display oriented, they're going to wait and see. The, there's too much worry that the display portion of a, of ad tech businesses may be falling. Knives.
- [44:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. Declining businesses tend to keep declining.
- [44:08]
A
All right. My last prediction is that, you know, we're coming up with an election year. It's going to be a big year for advertising. I think this is going to be generally seen as the TikTok election, that you'll have more and more candidates getting their, their message out on TikTok and that swaying young voters. This is probably especially true for the Dems, who have sort of a young versus old dynamic going on in their party, and we'll see if there are candidates who can attribute their win through getting the message out on TikTok.
- [44:46]
B
Makes sense to me. No objection.
- [44:48]
A
All right, any final words, Eric, before I wrap it up?
- [44:51]
B
This has been fun, man. MarketExter has been just a pleasure to number one, be a participant and number two, just observe what you've what you've created. So so so thank you for allowing me to be a small part of it. And thank you to the listeners.
- [45:05]
A
You're a big part of it, Eric. Thanks for hosting this with me, co hosting it. I couldn't do it without you. And I want to thank our AV producer Mike Felhaber, our Admin coordinator Jane Pangin, and all of our guests, listeners and fans. And we look forward to another year of the Market Extra podcast. Everyone have a great holiday with your families and come back to CES and say hi in the lobby when I'm wandering around not remembering your name.
- [45:30]
B
See you in 26 everybody.
- [45:32]
A
See ya.
- [45:33]
B
Thank you for subscribing to Marketecture.
- [45:36]
A
New interviews are added every week at Marketecture TV and your favorite podcasting app. Thank you for listening to the marketecture podcast. New episodes come out every Friday and an insightful vendor interview is published each each Monday, you can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to join@adtech God.com.