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Episode 169: Joe Ligé on Culture and How it Works in Advertising
00:51:47
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- [00:00]
A
This is adtech God, and I command you to listen to this house ad. So if you're listening to this show, just know that you've really stumbled upon a giant network of content across advertising, marketing, media, publishing, and of course, the people that work in this great advertising industry. So go to market, check out all of our brands. We have multitude of shows from the Brand Forum, the Advertising Forum, the Monopoly Report, the Ad Tech God Pod, the Market, and more. We are bringing more podcasts to our network. We are consistently and constantly bringing on new shows. So check it out. Market or search for any of those brands in the app that you use to listen to this podcast. Enjoy the show and see you all soon.
- [00:59]
B
All right. Welcome to the Market Sector podcast. This is Arian Paparo. I'm here with Eric Franchi. How you doing, Eric?
- [01:04]
C
Doing well. I survived the no ari interview of 2026.
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B
Yeah. So we're switching around a little bit today, so we have a great guest, Joe Ligier, who is the founder and CEO of Culture Hive Media Group. He gave a great conversation at Mark Dexter Live. And I said, well, let's have him on. And then we scheduled a recording and we got. I got my co and I got my notes, and Eric got his stuff, and then my computer crashed in the most spectacular way I've ever seen. There was smoke coming out. We had to reset the breakers in my house. It was a real issue. So, Eric, how'd the interview go?
- [01:49]
C
As you were about to hear, it went great. Joe is fantastic. Joe could have done it on his own, quite frankly, but it was a great conversation. So for those unfamiliar, he is building an ad tech company around the notion of starting with culture first rather than starting with identity, rather than starting with audience. Make that the basis of how brands start to think about engaging, engaging various groups. So it was fascinating. He's got some really good anecdotes and stories, most notably around, like, the founding story for his biz. So I enjoyed it a lot. And I even snuck in a little joke that you might have that you might have said towards the end.
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B
A little sardonic.
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C
I think I did you justice.
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B
Yeah, a little sardonic humor. I appreciate that. Well, I'll listen to it. This will be like the first version of our podcast I listened to in a while because I haven't heard it. I hope you enjoy the conversation with Joe. And then we've got our news, which includes this allegedly Facebook being bigger than Google, and then the Vian T Vision acquisition, where I have a lot of things to Say so. Hope you enjoy the interview and we'll be back in a bit.
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C
All right, I am here with Joe Leger from Culture Hive Media. Joe, how you doing?
- [03:03]
D
I'm doing good. How you doing today, man?
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C
Good, good. We'll take it from the top. What is Culture Hive Media?
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D
Yeah, absolutely, from the top. So Culture Hive Media is a full stack ad tech and media company that's built around literally one idea, that culture drives performance. So we help brands stop targeting people by demographics and start connecting with them through things that actually matter, like identity, behavior, and community. We've literally built an ecosystem that combines cultural intelligence, AI and programmatic execution. So a way for you to actually activate on culture. So instead of guessing what resonates with people or might. What, you know, might resonate with people, we actually model it, we activate against it, and then we optimize in real time. So at a high level, we're at the intersection of culture, conversation, and conversion. Everything we do is about making advertising relevant to people and at scale.
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C
Got it. We'll get into culture in a second. Why did you start this business and how long have you been at it?
- [04:09]
D
Yeah, actually, the idea for the business started many moons ago. I'll say about six years ago. When I saw it was actually due to me seeing an ad that I felt like was very culturally insensitive.
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B
So that.
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D
That took me on a.
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C
Is that the one that you presented when I saw you? At times it is.
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D
That is the ad that started me down this path. And I asked myself, you know, in this day and age, with all the technology you have, how does a bad ad like an ad that's so offensive to a large number of people, where it has to be pulled down, how does it make it to mainstream? And that led me down this path to start doing research around why that happened. And being an ad tech, I'm like, there has to be a way that we can solve for this at scale. But what I understood was in doing my research is that all people don't have similar cultural background or that experience. So they don't necessarily see the things that other groups of individuals might see from a different cultural background. That ad alone, and I'll describe it, it was a black child wearing a green hooded sweatshirt. It was an H and M ad. And the. The child on the sweatshirt, it's a coolest monkey in the jungle now. I looked at it in cringe. You know, it was one of those moments. But as I did my research, I actually found out, yes, Liam, who was the. The model he and his parents are of African descent, but they're from Sweden. So in Sweden, there was never a connotation around. Black people look like being compared to monkeys. And that was a US Historical slavery thing here. So you go to Africa, you call a child a monkey. It's not a bad thing, right? Because there's nothing wrong with that there. So the child's parents did not stop that from happening, and to this day think that it's not racist and it's not stereotyped because of their cultural background. So once again, I said, how can we solve for this? Right? And that's what brought me back to, okay, we got to figure out this culture thing. We need to make sure we have a common definition of what it is. And then if we do that, then we can build around it. Right. And I can figure out a way to, you know, just like we do with brand safety and ad tech today, we should be able to do that with understanding what culture actually is.
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C
Walk us through the difference between culture and ethnicity, and I think the story you just told is probably a good kickoff to that conversation.
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D
Yeah, absolutely. Culture is not a demographic. You see, demographics are static. Demographics don't change. Culture is dynamic, is behavioral. One of the biggest mistakes marketing makes is that they treat culture like a checkbox. Ethnicity is who you are. Culture is how you live. You know, you talk about myself, I grew up with my mom and my grandfather. My grandfather is my father figure in my life and blind my entire life, so he couldn't see. So growing up with someone in your house, that was blood, that is blind. But he wasn't blind in his entire life. He ran over a landmine in World War II. That left him blind. Another podcast. I'll tell you that full story. One of the greatest man I've ever encountered in my life, but he taught me how to see without seeing. So something that people don't realize and think about. And I made this comparison. We see through our eyes. So we look at other people and we see what they look like, but we don't know what we look like until we see a reflection, right? Until there is a mirror or somebody tells you what you look like. So internally, you look like what you think you look like. You fit where you think you fit, right? But when other people see you, they judge you based on what they see. Advertising advertises to what they see. You are black, you are white, you are this age, you are this demographic is what they see, but it's not how you feel. It's not who you Are just because I'm black doesn't mean I have to be part of the black culture. I might be more lean towards Hispanic culture than the black culture, than a white culture. I give another great example about this is one of the best shows I think that's out that I recently watched and binged with my 6 year old daughter is Stranger Things. I think that is a pure lesson in culture. Right. And how people don't fit in boxes and how you can see that these people come together. And if you're advertising and marketing to them, you have to meet them where they are, not not what you think they are, about what demographic you can put them in or place them in.
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C
Got it. Okay. How can brands even start to think this way? How could they identify, I guess, for want of a better term, like their cultural cornerstones, Right.
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D
So ritual brands need to stop and start thinking about the. Stop thinking about the who and start thinking about the what do they do, why do they do and why does it matter to them? So I would say demographics are the who, culture is the what, where, when and by. And we've been focused so much on the who.
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C
Right.
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D
Who are, who is this person and how can I duplicate that person so that I can, you know, extend my audience and my reach with that person? Right. But it's based on, once again, demographics. So brands, they, they need to start thinking. The cornerstones for culture are rituals, communities and moments. Rituals. When you think about rituals, think of it like culturally, like a sneaker drop, right? That's a ritual. Your skincare routine is a ritual. Gaming sessions are a ritual. Communities are where those rituals live. And moments are the places where that audience is the most engaged. But when they're the most engaged, they're also the most open to influence. So the cornerstones, if brands start looking at those cornerstones, then they can start understanding it more. So what we did was we created a system that measures culture. It's called CRS Cultural Relevancy Score. And we go out and we measure the actual cultural relevance towards a particular cultural segment. Therefore, once we can measure it, we can then build infrastructure around it. If you can build infrastructure around it, then you can finally, you know, activate against it and you know, optimize towards it and get better results than you were previously.
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C
Got it. Unpack how you do that?
- [10:47]
D
Absolutely. So we go, it depends on what the input is. So if it's so at the very base and how I went at this, I said, okay, for me to get to this rubric, this scoring system, I need A large database of things to look at. So I started with domains. There are a lot of domains out there from my experience and working with publishers and running pub dev teams. And I'm going to start there and I'm going to look at all domains and I'm going to see, okay, what is this cultural relevance? Well, in order to do that, I need to identify segments. So we came up with 175 different cultural segments that represent the largest cultural groups in the United States. Different segments than you would find in a DSP or an SSP or a dmp. Off the shelf. So not your typical segments. And these are once again based on context. So these are not anything to do with identity. Right? So we go and we look and say, okay, I'll take an example, say home improvement enthusiast, which is one of our segments. So home improvement enthusiast is a culture. So what defines that culture? What is the language of that culture? What, what motivates that culture? You know, not. And then you look back and say, okay, now we define a culture. Oh, this is a group of individuals that fit in that culture. But if we look at the culture as itself, we can say, okay, now does this domain, what is its relevancy to that culture? Defined by what that culture is? And we have a scale of 1 to 100. So if you take that domain and you say, okay, espn, what is its relevancy to the home improvement enthusiast culture? Let's say it's a 67. Higher cultural relevancy. You know, better alignment, lower culture relevancy. Actually what we found out was, can actually be offensive to a culture because we want to find out that this is the highest culture that it may be relevant to, but the score is really, really low. So yes, it's targeted at this group. Arts identified as being targeted at this group, but it's not relevant to that group. So therefore it's bad. So when you look. So we took all of the creative, so the other thing we did, so that's how we did domains, right? And then we established a cultural, the cultural framework. Then we say, okay, now I can take a creative and I can say, okay, what are the, all the aspects of this creative. What cultural segment does this, this creative align with? And then based on a score on relevancy, I can determine if it's going to be received by that community, by that culture and how well it would be received. Right? So then we, and then we run iterations and tests. And the way that I train our AI system on that is I took all of the Advertisement that has been pulled off the shelf since 1920. So any ad that was considered controversial threw it through our system and made our system understand and what to look for. So we are now one of the only systems that I'm aware of, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, that can identify racism, stereotypes, tokenism in a creative at scale. And not only that, we can determine that in any input, whether it's a domain, a bundle id, CTV channel, we identify based on its cultural relevance. So hopefully that makes sense. I can dive in more as needed.
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C
Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. It strikes me that this is a much different path than how most certainly programmatic buying is done today, which is largely based on audience, it's largely based on identity. This is taking a completely different, different tact to it. So how do you have this conversation with a brand about moving from thinking about, you know, the who to the culture, if that makes sense?
- [14:33]
D
Yeah, absolutely. The thing about it is brands and agencies have always wanted to target on culture. There was never a measurement system or a true definition, a way for them to do it. So when I come back and say, hey, I can identify if your advertisement is going to resonate with this particular cultural segment, group of individuals, call it an audience, call it whatever you want. They are like, oh holy, you know, how can we activate against it? They have. There's never been a way until now to activate programmatically against culture. So we created these cultural segments, audiences, if you will, and put them into DSPs. SSPs. We're active all on all the major SSPs right now. Audiences on the shelf. So we are there because that's my background and that's what I know. So we've created a way to actually measure against culture and then activate against it and then optimize in real time. So we can move domains or bundles out of a particular segment as needed, depending on how it performs.
- [15:38]
C
How do you manage the risk of. I don't know what the what, what is the opposite of relevancy. Right. So like your, your system is going for highest possible relevancy in terms of both audience and creative. As I understand it, I don't know what the bottom end of that scale is. Maybe we call it fringe, maybe we call it like, you know, offensive. How, how do you manage that? Because like you're managing towards something different. You're, you're managing certainly towards performance and KPIs and outcomes, but you're probably managing towards like risk to a degree.
- [16:14]
D
Yeah, absolutely. I would call it the biggest brand Safety, you know, non score thing that we've ever had in ad tech. And you know, you mentioned the word cringe, right? That's when a brand, you see it a mile away is when a brand tries too hard. We used to call it when I was growing up, you know, I'm a date myself, or we used to call it fronting. So like when a brand fronts like they should be part of that culture or they should be there, they're using language in a, in a wrong way. It's like, you know, I would compare it to like a dad moment, you know, now that I'm a father, a dad moment. Like dad comes in, he thinks he's cool and you know, I'm talking to my daughter using my slang and she's like, dad, stop.
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C
You know, she says, I have no idea what you're talking about, Joe.
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D
So it's understanding, you know, and having it. It's the difference between proximity and authenticity, right? Like it's the difference in how close you are and being close without it, but not being that close. You have to earn the trust. I'll give you an example of a good, a good and a bad, right? I'll give you some examples, right? A really good one. And I say a brand that has done this really well and I'm calling out brands, so hopefully we, you know, But Mountain Dew, I'll give you an example. Mountain Dew is synonymous with gainers, right? They did a fantastic job with inundating themselves in the culture of gaming. They understood that gamers play late, they play long. You can't drink alcohol and game for 10 hours, it just doesn't work. And water, yes, you go to the bathroom a lot, but you needed that energy. And drinking coffee isn't a gamer thing, right? But soda was. And Mountain Dew with the highest caffeine count of any soda. And it's lime green fuel, you know, it's like drinking radiator fluid. Like you feel like you're drinking something powerful, right? When you think about gamers, you're like, great. So that, that they took all that in and it became synonymous with gamers. It got inundated into gaming releases and it was into the actual games itself. They got it right, right? They met the gamers where they were, right? It was. And that was a good example. A bad example, I'll say is why is. Okay, I'll break it down like this. Michael Jordan sold the most shoes, you know, with his name on it ever in the history of basketball. But he also was, if not the one of the top two greatest basketball players ever. So people wanted to be part of that culture. They wanted to feel like Mike, be
- [18:49]
C
like Mike, be like Mike.
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D
Then you have the number one three point shooter that has ever walked on the face of this earth. More people have an opportunity to shoot a three point and make it than they do to try to dump. Right. So people love this three point shooter.
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B
But.
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D
And he had a shoe too. But unfortunately that shoe was the worst selling shoe ever to come out.
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C
Why?
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D
Because a certain company did not understand the culture and it was about the looks, not the performance. You see, I may not be able to shoot a three point from half court, but if I look good while I'm in a three point trying to shoot it, that's more of what the culture is about than actually making a shot. So they got that wrong, right. And it was a cringe mode. It was like, oh, I wouldn't worth it. So that's the moment that they missed. It's understanding the culture and not just selling a product. And I think that's, that's the, you know, as an example of a good and bad.
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C
Makes perfect sense. This is a primarily ad tech audience, so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you how you make all this stuff work with the tech.
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D
Yeah, absolutely. So at the foundation tech tech is what has allowed this to happen. I couldn't make this six years ago when that with Liam came out. It wasn't until like ad tech, one thing they get really, really good is data, right? Really good at data and figuring out how to move data around. So the missing piece was understanding a new piece of data and how that fits into our current ecosystem. So we used AI, like I said before, to take this massive amounts of data and these massive amounts of input. So in the back end, I'm open up the kimono a little bit more. So on the back end, what feeds into our LLM are massive different graphs. So we pull in data into graphs. We have some proprietary data sources, we have publisher data sources, we have publicly available data sources. And we create graphs with all of these different data sources that feed into our algorithm that determines cultural relevance in that scoring system. So that is what feeds into our CRS and our creation of what that score is. The score then transfers into what is allowed in and out of that cultural segment based on a score. So we then take domains and bundles and things of that nature and then put them into these particular segments. Those segments are then placed in a DSP through SSPs. We do a lot of curation as well. And so then they're placed there so you activate against them. Here's the, here's the killer part. Because we're doing contextual segments. You can then, if you want, apply your first party data and find people within those segments. We don't, you know, it's up to you, but you can always layer your first party on top of our segments. We're telling you where you can still go find your who and pick your people out. But we're giving you the best place to start. Where a lot of people aren't identifying and understanding that, hey, if you have a, you know, if you're, if you're fishing, you might want to start in a pond in the middle of a boat and not during the middle of the day when it's too hot and the fish are lower. Right. We're giving you where and saying, hey, start earlier. Sure. When they're feeding. So we're letting you know, hey, this is the best place. You got the best opportunity to catch a fish versus, you know, you trying to figure out where in this pond to go. We're telling you, hey, this is, this is the hole. This is the fishing home. Never use that. Hopefully a lamp.
- [22:17]
C
Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. That, that's very helpful. Helpful. So it's like, it's not binary. Right. It's not a different way of thinking about programmatic. If this is the way it's going to be provisioned. Right. You know, focus on the where and, and, and not the who. It's. Start with the where if you want the cultural relevancy and then.
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B
Sure.
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C
Layer on the who and experiment and figure out what ultimately drives, drives performance with, you know, perhaps some trade off in terms of reach. That's how I'm sort of, Am I thinking about it correctly that way?
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D
Absolutely. And the other thing that I'll add is we help expand. So a lot of you get into targeting. You start contracting on what you think that audience is. You know, you layer in. It gets smaller and smaller and smaller and. Well, we allow brands and advertisers to find the fringes of people on the outside. I'll give you another example. I love analogy. So I live in L. A, I'm in Southern California. Every Tuesday I go to a Mexican grocery store called Vallarta. I go there to get my authentic Mexican tortillas. I get my carne asada, my salsa, because I want to feel like I'm eating authentic Mexican food. Right. So I'm part of that Hispanic culture. I'm part of that Mexican culture now. If I'm a tortilla distributor, they, you know, are looking at me. How do they get to me? Right? I don't speak Spanish. I'm not Hispanic. Now, their primary market knows tortillas, so they're going to eat the same tortillas they've been eating forever, right? Whatever their grandmother made, are they making a homemade ones? But they have their brand, and you're not changing it. It's like changing my toothpaste. I'm not going to change what I've had since I was a kid. It's just what I'm used to. But someone like me, I just want authentic, right? I don't care about the brand. I don't have a, you know, responsibility to one brand or another or, you know, I won't feel bad about switching brands. So I'm technically the one that they need to reach. But if they go, and you're a marketer and you say, okay, you want the Hispanic crowd, Spanish language, you know, the first thing. So guess what? I'm. I'm not part of that, but I'm the consumer that you want. That's hard to reach. I give them those sprinters on the other side of what that culture actually means. And I'm not into. Explain the relevancy score. I'm not a 98 for cultural relevancy. For the Hispanic segment, I may be like a 67. Right. So this is the expansion. You know, if it's a 98, that's language. If it's a 67 is I'm going to the store and shopping there once a week. You know, how do you reach me? So hopefully that. That's another way that you. You might understand how we do this.
- [24:46]
C
Yeah, I'll invoke. If Ari was here, he'd probably ask you if. So you're saying that there's a Taco Tuesday segment available in the platform?
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D
There's a taco segment, there's a taco lover segment. I mean, you can literally create. And that's what we do. We have our base, and then we can create segments based on cultures as needed. Based on. We define what it is, we find out what it is, we study it, and then we create the culture, and then we see how close something is relative to that particular culture.
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C
I get it. Joe, this is super cool. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. I learned a bunch. And we wish you best of luck with what you're working on.
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D
Thank you. Appreciate, Eric. You guys Have a good one.
- [25:33]
B
Everybody, this is Ari. Here's a quick heads up. If you're going to be at can this year, I'll be there as well with the team and we're going to do a handful of of one on one podcast recordings throughout the week. It's pretty straightforward. You pick the topic, we sit down, have a conversation and publish. So if you've got something you want to talk about this year, like a launch or your perspective, whatever it is, it's a good way to get out there. We're only doing a limited number of these, so if you're interested, go to our Ken lion events page at market. That's@marketecturemedia.com. look forward to seeing you there.
- [26:08]
C
All right, we are back, everybody, with the refresh. We have something for everyone this week. We have Meta allegedly overtaking Google for ad revenue. We have some further changes in progress at OpenAI, some M& A, some measurement anger and maybe a couple more things if we have time. Let's take it from the top, Ari. So Emarketer released a report claiming that Meta will pass Google for ad revenue. But you pointed out that the methodology is a little weird. And they have subtracting tech from Google, which ends up being, you know, like a net number.
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D
Walk us through this.
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B
Yeah. So if you're thinking strategically, you want to know which company sells more ads, which one has a bigger impact on the ad business, which, in which case you look at gross, grows. How much are they selling? And Google's still well ahead of Meta. Meta's growing faster may catch up to them in the next couple of years. But eMarketer made this big splashy headline. Meta's bigger than Google, but they took out tax. So Google, as we know, pays Apple $24 billion a year. It came out in the trial. And their network business has a lot of tac. And they also syndicate their search to companies like AOL and Yahoo, and that's taco. So they took all that out. And so on a net revenue basis, and we all know Facebook has very little tack because it's almost all owned and operated, that Facebook's net may exceed Google's later this year. It's interesting from a Wall street financial perspective, but it really isn't that the headline is deceiving from our perspective as kind of industry watchers.
- [27:47]
C
Yeah, for sure. Still, Meta is wild in terms of what's going on there. So the growth rate for a company at this scale, they pointed it out in the piece, is accelerating. It's going from 22% last year to 24% this year. And again, I don't know if the growth rate is apples to apples for Google, but Google's growing at approximately half that. So it's like, I mean they're just firing on all cylinders with these AI improvements in terms of just driving more engagement and driving higher rates and set it, forget it. It's like, it's really, really amazing.
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B
Yeah, Mike Shields had a pretty interesting funny newsletter this morning. In his next in Media newsletter where I'm going to just paraphrase, he basically said, well, you know, Meta doesn't have a TV strategy. Meta is going to get killed by Apple Meta. Only old people use Facebook and all they do is check the memes. Meta doesn't have its own AI platform. It's dead in the water. No AI. And yet the results are striking. They're absolutely becoming dominant in this space, in the advertising space. And just by constant, the good kind of churn, they're just like grind is probably a better word. Constant grind. Making the AI better every single day, getting better results for advertisers every single day. It's amazing.
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C
Zuck is just a ruthless pivoter. I saw somebody say something like that on X, I think. And does Meta need tv? If the audiences that they want to reach are not on tv, they're on reels, which sidebar is at a run rate that's larger than linear tv, by the way.
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B
Yeah, I think that they're missing the boat on tv. If you think about time spent, there's still a use case even for young generations to sit on the couch and to chill with long form content and you know, maybe you bet against that in the long term but you know, the Amazons and Google's of the world have a pretty strong position there and Meta is just nowhere. So I think that they're missing the boat a little bit in that area.
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C
Yeah. Striking the how much Amazon needs to grow to catch up to Meta and Google. So Meta is forecasted per marketer to be at 243 billion billion business this year for advertising. Amazon's ad business, 82 billion. So it's like a third of the size, you know, still growing, you know, faster than anybody. But there's a, there's a real delta there.
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B
It's, it'd be interesting to see an analysis of those numbers against time spent because Meta has enormous time spent, right, because of Instagram and all of its products, whereas Amazon probably is pretty small, of extremely small time. Outside of prime video, outside of Prime Video. Right. So they're overachieving by leveraging the data, but underachieving in terms of capturing the consumer's time and attention. And Google's probably somewhere in the middle. You know, the usage is enormous, the percentage market share is enormous, but people go in and out of Google search very quickly. So that'd be kind of a pretty interesting analysis.
- [31:03]
C
Yeah. The wildcard over the course of the next couple years, which can be baked into these numbers is AI search. Because you have Gemini, you have the one we talked about last week. The name escapes me. For meta, you have some of the tools that Amazon has, notably with Rufus. What happens there? Do we see some sort of share shift that accelerates things?
- [31:24]
B
All right, I'm going to ask you a tough question. So let's say GENIE came out and said, eric, you're allowed to own one media property moving forward and you get to buy one like with play money from one of the big, big companies. And by media property I mean you could buy Google Search or you could buy YouTube or you could buy Facebook, Blue, Instagram, TikTok, etc. But a single media property, not a company. What's. And assume a fair price. What's the, what's the most exciting asset you could buy?
- [32:03]
C
Can I buy OpenAI? Yeah, I'm buying OpenAI specifically for ChatGPT ads.
- [32:10]
B
Okay, good answer, interesting answer.
- [32:12]
C
What's your answer?
- [32:13]
B
I'm not doing, I'm not buying OpenAI. I'm buying YouTube. Probably unrelenting growth, visual multi screen subscriptions, free ads. Yeah, I, I think YouTube. YouTube is the real challenger to Facebook. Really? Or Meta.
- [32:31]
C
Yeah, my original answer was going to be Instagram. My original answer was gonna be Instagram on the basis of, you know, the engagement, how much, you know, there is to do. Just people love the AI formats. Like there's still much more, you know, so much more ahead. But man, OpenAI with ChatGPT, it's just a greenfield and we'll talk about it in a second. Like there, I just firmly believe that everybody is counting them out and that, you know, looks like a clown car from the outside, but from the inside they're just building.
- [33:00]
B
All right, listeners, I want to hear from you. Come on, come on the comments or come on X and tell us which, which property you would buy and why.
- [33:08]
C
I'm going to get roasted probably. Anyway, let's talk about OpenAI. So the information had a scoop, I guess a little scooplet that they're telling advertisers that CPC and then outcomes based pricing is coming soon. To ChatGPT and Digiday had a good piece. We won't talk about here too much, but we'll link to it that the ads manager again seems a little bit basic, but a lot is happening behind the scenes and there's like daily improvements and iterations. So I continue to believe that this thing is going to be real.
- [33:43]
B
Yeah, I mean it would be shocking if they weren't rolling out CPC pricing because a lot of the intent is very search like and click like. The trick with CPC that Google learned early on is that you have to have a quality score because the most clicks is not the most conversions. So it'd be interesting to see how they're going to be dealing with that. It's probably just cut and paste from Google's Playbook would be my guess.
- [34:05]
C
Yeah, yeah, why not? And then, you know, with respect to the ads manager and Garrick Suford said this, well, to achieve their goal, they are going to need not just brands but SMBs. Having an ads manager and then having the ability to frankly market to all the 14, 15 million SMBs out there in the US is going to be, I think, really interesting for them. So, you know, the, the bet here is that they can accelerate and have the, not just one of the largest but the fastest growing ads businesses if they do this thing right. And there's a lot of risk, obviously and things not going right.
- [34:39]
B
Yeah. The biggest risk I think is the consumer market share of ChatGPT versus alternatives. We've seen there's quite a bit of data, especially from like the bank ramp, that on the business side there's a pretty rapid move away from, from ChatGPT towards Claude. Consumer is probably a little more mixed because consumers aren't using the hardcore coding features. But if you lose market share, you end up like Bing. Right. It doesn't matter how well you monetize, how good your ad manager is, et cetera.
- [35:10]
C
Yeah, yeah. Do you think that there's a chance that OpenAI loses consumers? I mean, they're so far ahead.
- [35:18]
B
Yeah, they're ahead in market share, not necessarily in capabilities. I mean, you saw they rolled back sora, which was a consumer play. So I think that the advanced users are moving away and it's not really clear how the market moves. Do ordinary consumers who are frankly not using AI to its capabilities already, do they care if it's basically just like a slightly better search, you know, and the brand name is really important? You know, ChatGPT is synonymous at this point with, with AI for many people.
- [35:47]
C
Yeah, yeah, very Much. One of the things that's fascinating is, you know, I get the sense that people are like outsourcing so many decisions to AI. Right. And that has, I think huge implications on brands and then implications on this AEO Geo category which we've been talking about for some time. There was another Monster fundraise Bluefish AI, one of the leaders in enterprise, raised a $43 million Series B. These are just numbers that we've really not seen in a long time with anything related to advertising and marketing. So I'm a believer in the category that there needs to be the ability to influence some of the ways that you show up in terms of LLM visibility.
- [36:36]
B
Yeah. Last time there was a big funding raise. What was the name of the leader that got the giant fundraise? Like the 70 million something with a C. Profound. Profound. Okay. It's not a C. Sorry, my bad. Yeah. I think last time we had this dialogue we said, well, we're not really sure that influencing the AI results is the final product. It's more like these CMOs and marketing orgs really need a buddy to come in and help them with everything about AI and, and there's a role there. And whether the current product is it. Exactly. Or if this turns into like HubSpot, which started as landing pages and turned into CRM, you know, is it, is it that kind of thing? So if you're a leader in the space and you're signing blue chip, you know, VP level decision makers at brands, you got to figure there's something there even if the exact product is changing.
- [37:26]
C
Yes, agree completely. Okay. Did this one, did you have this one on your bingo card for 2026? Ari Viant acquiring t Vision Insights.
- [37:39]
B
I think vyant going in the dollar store and like just picking up, you know, failing ad tech companies was on my bingo card because it's happened multiple times over the past 12 months. So you never know what they're going to come out in the shopping bag.
- [37:52]
C
Let me break down T Vision Insights for the listener because it's, it may not be the most well known company. So think of it as almost like moat for TV. So T Vision had or has a panel of 5,000 households in the US and with these households they've got a little device that you know, effectively is watching everything that's going on in the room. So it can measure how many people are watching TV and whether they're engaged with the ads or the content. Do they leave the room? Do they like turn their heads, everything like that. It's like super, super cool bet and a bet on attention. So I think this puts Viant in a pretty interesting position. Right. So they've got the, you know, the acquisition they made with Iris tv. So they have the Iris ID to allow them to, you know, kind of like classify TV inventory. They now have T vision to allow them to measure literally everything linear CTV walled garden. So I think they have like a really interesting TV offering right now.
- [38:53]
B
Yeah, I have to agree there. You know, Vian having the core offering being a dsp, and what, what have I said? What have other people said over and over again? There's only two ways to compete in the DSP market, which is unique inventory and unique data. And so Iris is a way of getting unique data and T vision's a way of getting unique data. And so they're very astute buys. Right? And the dollar store analogy aside, they are buying these things on the very cheap, but still they're very astute. For just a quick plug that the Add to God podcast, our kind of sister podcast, had the Vanderhooks on just yesterday. So if you want the, you know, straight from the horse's mouth about what they did here, I would tune over to that on your Spotify or Apple podcast. Okay, I, I need to go on a little bit of a rant, which is like between these two deals and Infilion picking up Catalina, right? It's all in the unique data category. What is the trade desk doing? Like they could have bought all three of these companies for pocket change. And the trade desk is out there getting, getting hit in the market over and over again about, you know, lack of differentiation, losing, potentially competing with Amazon, and with the money that's going into their cafeteria food, they could have bought three companies that would have given them unique, interesting data. And they're. All their competitions have unique data, including the Yahoo DSP Vyant. You know, everyone's nipping at their heels with uni data and they're not investing in this area. And I think it's crazy.
- [40:30]
C
I don't know, it's an interesting question. You know, like their data play seemingly is centered around what was Sincera and they don't talk about it all that much, but just the SP 500 plus, like, you know, really being focused on like quality and open web. But I think that's a really good point. I don't know.
- [40:50]
B
They're investing in data hygiene, not in data uniqueness. Right? Yeah. Like they're trying to say we have the best pipes for data. Basically. Basically More or less like, you know, Identity with Identity alliance and prioritizing different data and then Sincera with the cleanest contextual signals were really like ad quality signals. But none of that's unique, none of that is non reproducible by other DSPs. And it appears that acquiring unique data X Walmart and retail media is sort of its only play there. They're just totally missing the boat here.
- [41:26]
C
Are there more? Let's say you were the head of Corp Dev for ttd. Are there other companies, other interesting data assets that come to mind that might be, you know, kind of interesting?
- [41:38]
B
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean in the app space, maybe, you know, the App Annie, someone like that, you know, one of these companies that's got deep data on all the apps out there in ctv. I don't know if there's a really good CTV play left or TV play left. I mean, video amp is probably an asset that would be available for sale, similar to T Vision, but also includes a media business that's less desirable. You go a little crazy and buy comscore for like $50 million is the current market cap. Right. It's interesting. You know, the thing about T Vision also is it's a measurement company and there's just general like taboo against a media company owning a measurement company, you know, grading your own homework and stuff like that. But it's not clear that Viant's going to continue offering this as a measurement offering. They may just be using the, the panel as a data play.
- [42:32]
C
Right, Exactly. It could be for optimization and then. Oh, by the way, every single walled garden measures their own homework. So there's actually like real precedents for it.
- [42:41]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Right.
- [42:44]
C
Attain. Maybe that one. Yeah. Familiar with the tein? Yeah, yeah, that could be Data play. Yeah. I don't know. Okay, let's just talk about measurement for one more minute. So there was this article in the Journal where NBCU had a rare kind of like public criticism of Nielsen that they're significantly underestimating linear audiences and having, you know, by virtue of that having a real impact on tv, like budgets. It's a long article, it's like pretty detailed. But there's two things that I pulled out of this one. Did you read it, by the way?
- [43:25]
B
I skimmed it. I sort of like, I looked at the headline, NBC accuses Nielsen of underestimating TV audience and I said, is it 1995? Again, like what? Like I've seen, I've seen this headline before. There used to be a person whose job at NBC was just doing this, it was like a full time job to just abuse Nielsen. He worked for me too. He's a really good guy.
- [43:47]
C
Two things I pulled out of this. So first was, I mean, maybe it's been a while since I've, I've, I've seen this, but some of Nielsen's largest customers pay them $100 million a year.
- [44:01]
B
Yeah, that sounds low to me. That sounds low.
- [44:03]
C
$100 million a year
- [44:08]
B
at a tight. Nielsen took 9% of the television business as a measurement fee and they'd always defend it. They would say, well, it wouldn't be a 250 billion dollar business if we didn't take our 9%. Right. Or whatever it was. But that was, that was the benchmark 9%. So, and, and the reality is they, their customers are very concentrated. There's only like 10 customers that matter at Nielsen and some of them pay, you know, billions.
- [44:34]
C
Yeah. So if they're under reporting even by, you know, a little bit, this stuff really matters. Rich Greenfield, who we've had on the pod a couple times, had a, had a great, great quote here, kind of just, you know, adding some perspective about how much this might actually matter. I'll read it. There's no doubt that the underlying data is incorrect on an absolute basis. I'm not sure it has helped their valuations, but it doesn't take Nielsen to tell you that viewers are shifting their viewers. So like at the end of the day, with the rise of streaming, with the rise of YouTube, with the rise of reels, like, that's the real competitor that these linear TV sellers are dealing with right now.
- [45:10]
B
That's the truth. And just a programming note, so next week we have Jonathan Carson on and he's a longtime measurement guy. I worked with him at Nielsen and now he has his own measurement company called Antenna. So we're going to go into both these issues, the T Visual and the Nielsen next week.
- [45:26]
C
Oh, awesome. Good FTC thing. So FTC actually reached a settlement with the Holdcos about this whole Media Matters alleged political boycott. You've been all over this one, I think.
- [45:42]
B
Yeah. So let's go trip down memory lane. Right. Basically, towards, towards the end of the Biden administration, I guess the Media Matters and other groups were trying, were asking or telling advertisers not to advertise so much on X primarily, but also on other things like Breitbart and other, you know, right wing leaning media companies. And then, you know, I believe Elon and Musk, Elon, Musk and X sued them and then The FTC got involved as soon as the administration turned over and it became this whole like, hey, you're your censoring right wing voices thing. And like the first take was oh, this is fascism. But then the second take was, oh, wow, there are actually some pretty bad emails in this whole thing where the, There were some emails that sounded like there was a lot of bias going on within media matters. And then if I recall, there was another organization that actually went out of business that was like a division of the, of the forays that, you know, just shut, shut its doors because of this. So we're now at the end point of this whole long saga and there's a settlement which allows everyone to kind of go back to their, their respective sides and pretend it didn't happen.
- [46:57]
C
Yeah, yeah. Admitted no wrongdoing, you know, the, the, the whole code. But breached a settlement.
- [47:05]
B
This is a, this is a working the refs issue. Like if you, if you want to prevent these sort of like content based boycotts or content based influence of advertisers, you sue, you get the government involved. And now the next time this comes up, no one wants to do it. No one wants to, you know, no agency, Holdco or independent tech company wants to take a side on this stuff. So you've successfully brushed back the ability of the media to sort of choose content based on ideological basis.
- [47:40]
C
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. One more. Let's talk about audio. By the way, this week, total sidebar, we had the CEO of Consumable on the podcast I do with Joe Zappa. Open Market and Consumable is a big audio ad tech business. So I've been just like kind of digging into audio a little bit. I posted about it on LinkedIn and man that people came out wanted to talk about audio. There's a lot of audio advertising enthusiasts that are just waiting to talk about this. What's my point? Dollar General is expanding their RMN offering not by adding more screens, but by adding more sound. So they are offering some in store audio ads which is kind of cool. Yeah, like you know, reaching people at the, you know, kind of like shopping an intent purchase when they might not be be like looking at their phone, they might not be looking at a screen when they're looking at items, but obviously their ears are open are pretty cool unless their ears are not open. So one of the pieces that covered this news found that a YouGov poll last year said that 17% of adults are usually or always wearing headphones in public spaces. And among 18 to 29 year olds, that number jumps to 37%. So you've got, you still have the majority of the audience you can reach with in store audio. But in this age of ubiquitous AirPods, it might not be that simple.
- [49:10]
B
Yeah, I love the idea of audio as being an RMN channel. I mean we've all probably heard ads occasionally in retail locations. This is, you know, Muzak back in the day was a pretty big successful business and part of that was, you know, occasional ads. It makes sense that this would work as long as it's not too annoying. You can't, you know, ad load matters.
- [49:29]
C
Yeah, yeah. And there's definitely a measurement story to tell here. Like over time being able to, you know, kind of tie audio ads to in store purchases seems like a very Catalina type of, type of play.
- [49:41]
B
I like it.
- [49:42]
C
It's cool. It's innovative. I'm digging into audio.
- [49:45]
B
I love audio. Audio works. This just doesn't really translate very well to Programmatic, which is kind of this constant. I wrote about this in my newsletter, I think two weeks ago about. Is audio a programmatic media business or is it an influencer business? And I think for the most part it's an influencer business. You want, you want your host, your podcast host, like me to talk about your product. You don't necessarily want to just shove a 30 second commercial into the podcast.
- [50:09]
C
Yes. And not to get too off track, the thing that was interesting from this conversation I had with this, with this consumable CEO Mark, he's going into mobile apps, so casual gaming apps. And when there is no like video ad to be served, they fire an audio ad because people have their headphones on. Right. Like audio is always on or they can detect when audio is on. So interesting sort of kind of hacker happening in the audio space.
- [50:37]
B
Yeah. There was another startup that was doing that too, I can't remember the name of it. An Israeli company that was doing audio game audio.
- [50:43]
C
There's a couple of companies that are on the edges of this thing. Anyway, not to go down the audio rabbit hole, but good job Dollar General. We, we like it. I think with that we've got the news.
- [50:56]
B
Yeah, it was great conversation. So I appreciate you doing, you taking the hit, doing the, the Joe interview from Hive Media. And thanks, thank you all for listening.
- [51:08]
C
We'll see you next week, everybody. Thank you for subscribing to Market. New interviews are added every week at marketecture tv.
- [51:16]
B
And your favorite podcasting out.