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Episode 173: Tony Marlow Talks Innovation in Sports Advertising and Eric Gets into Microdramas
00:51:01
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- [00:01]
A
This podcast is brought to you by the Build, a new podcast from the guys behind Sincera, Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few important ad tech problems in our industry. And that's exactly what the show is about. Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solved their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the process. Listen to the Build with Michael Sullivan wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is brought to you by CloudX, the agentic platform for mobile advertising. Connect to the CloudX command line interface or MCP server and have Claude or Gemini pull reports, run experiments, and automatically drive better outcomes for you. CloudX add infrastructure for the intelligence era. Head to CloudX AI start to get started. That's CloudX AI start. Welcome to the Market tech podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm here with Eric Fronte. Eric, how you been?
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B
I'm doing well. I missed last week. I called Connect him. He was great. He did a great job, great stand in. But I'm happy to be back. I don't like traveling.
- [01:25]
A
Happy to have you back. How do you like the new format? I have a new fancy format for our, for our prep notes. Do you like with the little grid of the guest names and stuff like that?
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B
It's helpful. Yeah. You've.
- [01:35]
C
You've upped your game.
- [01:37]
B
The only two people in the world that know what we're talking about anyway, we went from, I mean, just a vomit on a page with notes that, you know, I try to like, you know, organize every single week to a nice clean layout, which my brain appreciates. So thank you.
- [01:54]
A
Yeah, no problem. I got the AI working basically. I figured if I entered the data into my vibe coded CRM, I can auto subscribe all of our guests, all of our newsletters, they can never get off of them. And we'll have a little. It's our way of building architecture one guest at a time. So we have an important clarification from last week. So some of you may have noticed and I was getting a little worked up about. We're talking about teeds, the company and its earnings.
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B
I remember this part. Yeah.
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A
And I got a little worked up because the thing about TEES is like they're, they're an okay company, they're doing okay. I don't have anything bad to say about teeds, but they have a lot of debt and as a public company, it's a real concern because they have interest payments are very high. And in the heathen moment, I made a statement that the D in EBITDA stood for debt, which obviously it doesn't. The I in debit stands for interest, which is what I actually meant. And, you know, you try talking on a podcast for an hour a week and not making stupid mistakes. That's what I basically say. So, you know what I think is interesting here? First of all, apologies for being wrong. Sorry if anyone got all confused and made some unfortunate stock picks based on my bad advice, which we'll come to later. But also, the. But also, it's like every. So on Twitter, I posted like a little mea culpa. And every woman I know who listens to this podcast was like, oh, yeah, I noticed that. It is a shame you made the mistake. Super nice. And every man was like in my DMs, like, you idiot, do you know what D even stands for? Right? And it's just like, you know, come on, man.
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B
I do think it's funny that the one week I'm not here, like my arcane financial knowledge could have been put to use. Like this happens.
- [03:44]
A
Yeah, finance is definitely not my strength. All right, so today we have. Tony Marlow is a friend of the pod. He is the new CMO of Genius Sports, which is a super interesting company in the sports space that's been increasingly making moves into advertising. And he's been on the show previously at his job at LG Ads. Should be an interesting conversation. Eric, what's your opinion as an investor of the sports space? It often has a reputation as being hard to invest in.
- [04:14]
B
Sports is hard to invest in. We have had fantastic results investing in media and technology that empowers sports. So we were an early investor in a company called Front Office Sports, which is a media company about the business of sports. Not unlike market that was acquired. It was a great return for us. We're an investor in a business called Transmit Live. Very relevant, I think, to the conversation we're going to have now, you know, around like live streaming monetization, one of our best investments ever. So if, if there's like technology companies that are trying to help, like reimagine monetization of sports, I'm all about it and we've done really well.
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A
Transmit Live, they do like, remind me what they do. They do a second screen monetization of live.
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B
They'll do picture in picture. They will detect a high engagement moment and have like a very kind of like relevant ad insertion happen. Like, you know, interesting monetization, like very native to live sports.
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A
Got it. I think we all know the stats, which is the overwhelming amount of linear viewing right now is. Is sports. Sports is one of the only forms of entertainment that consistently skews younger and has scale. You know, there's other things that skew younger but are fragmented. So it's. It's pretty exciting. Part of the media landscape. Absolutely. All right, let's get going with Tony Marlon. All right, welcome Tony Marlow, the CMO of Genius Sports, a man who we've brought on, I think, because you have a voice for radio, as they say. So, Tony, welcome to the market.
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C
Extra pod, I think a face for radio too, but thank you, Ari. Thank you, Eric. Great to be here.
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A
Yeah, I was trying to turn it into a compliment rather than the backhanded insult. Right.
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B
Everybody gets an insult on market.
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A
So we had you on our vendor interview, I think at Cannes last year was a can or that I interviewed you while you were at lg.
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C
We connected to can. That's right. Yes.
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A
That was. That was a good conversation. So what made you. So you switched jobs? I mean, people switch jobs all the time. What. What was exciting about Genius?
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C
Yeah, I mean, and for. For any. Any of your listeners that don't know Genius Sports, Genius Sports is essentially a real time sports data company. So. And actually it's. And I'm in my first few weeks on the job, so you're going to have to forgive me. I am still firmly learning the business and it's a complicated business. It's kind of interesting. So the history of the company, it originally started by providing that real time sports data to the sportsbooks. So essentially the faster and more accurate the data about a game, the better they can do their job at setting the line, making sure the odds are appropriately set, et cetera. So historically it was about ultra low latency, ultra accurate data going to the sports books. And by the way, we have the rights to the NFL data, English Premier League, lots of the NCAA stuff like we're talking about, no joke, AI fueled very accurate data for some of the biggest sporting events on earth. There's a business around players, leagues and teams improving performance, doing things like that. The English Premier League uses our tech or this semi automated offside technology. There's a broadcaster business. But the biggest opportunity, at least in my mind, in the newest portion of the business, is using this data for advertising. So that is to say, Genius has a deep fan graph. They have a huge abundance of what we have, a huge abundance of data about the game and then some technology just to be able to Say, okay, the right fan in the right moment with the right message on every screen, everywhere. And so when you say, hey, wait, why did I come here? I think sports is really the last bastion of mass live scale. And now technology is coming into it to really empower that appropriate connection between marketer and person.
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A
So do you have like little scribes at every courtside session, like making little notes about, you know, who blocked whom and stuff like that? I know you also have chips in people's like, you know, helmets and stuff like that. How are you collecting all this data?
- [08:18]
C
You know, like I think there was a point in time where it was, it was manual. Like I know you're sort of semi jokey, but there was a point in time where a lot of this data would be manually collected. But take the NFL for example. Every NFL game will have an array of 28 cameras and sensors around the field and it will create an infinite number of angles. So genius sports is able to create what's called a digital twin literally in real time, certainly within milliseconds of things occurring. Almost like a Madden style view of a football game. And the view can be manipulated. So you could be looking at a touchdown from the perspective of a touchdown scorer, or you could look at it through the eyes of the person who missed that tackle. And it's this incredible amount of data. And so there's this concept called auto eventing, meaning all of the different events that occur during a game. You don't really need a person manually scribing anything anymore. It's all AI fueled and it's all of these cameras and sensors with edge of the cloud computing, processing it in real time and then transmitting it on with ultra low latency. It's actually incredible. I know this is a podcast format, but to see it in action is incredible. It's mind blowing.
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A
And you've had that pre AI. I mean the company's been doing this for many, many years and you were even doing it with like kind of machine learning slash old school AI, right?
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C
Yeah. The company is 25ish years old and it has gone through many, many iterations of how to do things. And I think that that's, that's one like our, our CEO founder Mark Locke. I think one of the most impressive things about him and his vision is he's always on the cutting edge. And so I think for, for the company ethos, it's just very important to always be leaning into what's next. So it means yes, once that once upon a time things were done in one way, but now they're being done in a completely different way.
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A
So I kind of want to talk about the sports side of things like for an hour. But I guess we shouldn't, we should talk about the ad side of things. Right?
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C
We could do that.
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A
Do you make some players like swallow pills so we can get their internal body temperature and stuff like that?
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C
With the array that I mentioned, you don't even need to. It is funny and obviously originally I'm from Australia and a big, big sport in Australia and much of Europe is rugby with a lot of these rugby players to this day they still wear these chips in the back of their shirts. You don't even need to do that anymore. You don't need these chips tracking, tracking players in the way that we did even like three, four years ago. Literally the sensor array captures everything that's going on, whether it's a basketball court, soccer field or on a football field.
- [10:41]
A
But yeah, it's fascinating. But let's talk about ad. So I think one of the interesting ad sides of this is that, you know, some, some of the ad formats from genius, but also in general in certain sports can't be interruptive. I think the most clear example is in soccer or football as it's called. Rest of the world, where there are very few breaks and the ads just show up on top of the pitch. Is that a, is that the future or is that a niche?
- [11:10]
C
You know, I've kind of got a foot in each camp on this, so I think it is very league dependent. So for example, right now with Liga mx, which by the way is the most, the most watched soccer league in the United States, so Liga MX there, would they permit to happen on an augmented basis, like literally over the top of the game is kind of much more forward leaning than many of the other sports. So for example, you could arrive at a scenario where a goal is kicked and scored and in real time the technology detects that that's what's going on and it could overlay on the screen. Here's the miles per hour of the kick. Here's here's who kicked it, here's who missed it, and it's brought to you by your favorite brand. And that literally happens with Liga MX right now. Now, you know, if you start to look at some of the other leagues, I'm not sure they're going to be as forward leaning as quickly as that, but I think that will, that will become part of some sports and I think the other thing is just being in and around those moments Literally, as I said, we have fan identity graph, we have moments. So scoring moments, intercept moments, maybe even spicy moments like red card or think of fist flying. In a hockey game, you can package up moments so that maybe you're an advertiser that's sponsoring or circling a particular game that not only you always on pre game with the anticipation during the game, with all the moments that are going down and then post game with the analysis, but that at every point during that whole journey, every ad you deliver is hyper personalized for that fan for the moment they just saw with a customized creative. So you might be. Well, I forget, Ari, we were talking about this the other day. What's your football team?
- [12:53]
A
You have to bring it up. New York jets, which they have a lot of stoppages in gameplay. A lot of stoppages in gameplay, mate.
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C
And as an Australian, I would. I arrived here 15, 16 years ago and arbitrarily chose my teams. Arguably the worst choice I've ever made, choosing the Jets.
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A
But yeah. Eric, are you jets or Giants?
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B
I'm Giants, but loose Giants. I've lost interest over the years.
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A
It's not. The game isn't violent enough for you. You need people to actually grapple each other, right?
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B
Yep, that's my game.
- [13:24]
C
Hard to maintain. But. But like. So say you're a Jets fan, that intercept that goes your way means one thing to you, but for the opponent for whom it went against means a very different thing. So understanding the fan and then understanding the fan relative to the moment and then altering the creative based off that knowledge is really critical. And then I would also say like for example, this is a World cup year. The other element is being on every screen everywhere. So yes, you know, overlay, that's one part of it. Yes, the typical commercial breaks also a part of it. But I think the reality is your modern sports viewer is companion screening. Like you, you are using that mobile in your hand as a part of the experience. Whether it's fantasy, whether it's trash talking your buddies betting, or whether it's engaging with brands and shopping and doing things like that, but it is a part of the experience. So with the World cup you might be one of these live viewing sites or at a match directly, every person's watching the same screen or the same action, but everyone has a second screen in their hand that's highly personalized for them. So making sure you're delivering the ads to the people, that's personalized and in the way that they're expecting it as well. So I think that's an often sort of missed out piece when talking about it is the ability to put those ads everywhere and personalize it for the person seeing it. I think that that's really the golden ticket here.
- [14:41]
A
So let's talk from the buyer's perspective. So you know, a buyer, I think a billboard ad is kind of interesting. So you know, typically a buyer buys a billboard in an actual stadium and they have this sort of calculation about how much they think that billboard will be viewable by in person versus on tv. And it's kind of a little bit of voodoo arts there to figure out how to price a billboard in a stadium. And now you're, you're coming in here and saying, oh wow, we're going to swap that billboard out and the people on TV are going to see a different billboard. Right. Or one that doesn't exist in reality. It doesn't that give like heartburn to the media buyer and the agency who might be trying to figure out what that's worth?
- [15:23]
C
Yeah. Luckily it's not so much the former, so it's not so much in an AI way switching out the physical billboards, but it is augmenting over the top. So not so much replacing. But it is, we do possess the ability to augment the action on the field. And it could even be things like a replay moment brought to you in a, in a highly personalized way by your favorite brand. And it could be, as we mentioned with Liga mx, those goal moments where, where there are key stats that are brought on. So not so much replacing the physicality of the on field advertising, but the technology exists to supplement it in the way, in the way you describe over the top and we call that augmentation.
- [16:04]
A
Yeah. And how do they value something like that? How do they value a, say a image ad that's showing during a live event at an angle with, you know, unclear amount of time being viewed as opposed. I mean, because we've gone through this in the video game world where video games banners, everyone would debate endlessly like when it was viewable, what angle of viewability required an impression and things like that. I can't imagine they're counting it that way. So what's the state of the art on measuring this stuff?
- [16:37]
C
It's interesting you sort of mentioned video games. If I pull on that thread first and then actually answer your question. But it reminds me, do you remember there was a company called Massive. I think they got swallowed up by a bigger company. There was a point in time, May, oh, it was Microsoft, maybe like 15 years ago they came out with this research study and this is gaming, so it's a little bit different to live sports and I'll talk about the differences. But they found, they found in these gaming environments that if you didn't have advertising that replicated the real life experience. So for example, with Formula one you would expect to see advertising everywhere. If the Formula one version of the video game didn't have that, it just didn't seem realistic. And they actually found that adding advertising into those certainly simulated sports experiences, it was additive. It made people enjoy the video game more than if it didn't have the advertising. I remember that from so long ago as just okay, this becomes about like replicating the experience and providing the experience that's expected. So fast forward to now. I think it's really about okay. Sports and marketing go hand in hand if you're a marketer. It's the last bastion of mass scale sports spending live viewing with, you know, certainly the super bowl gets, gets north of 100 million, sometimes approaching 200 million viewers in the U.S. this doesn't exist anywhere else. There was a, there was a piece of research that came out by Sportico maybe two years ago. I think they do it every year. But I saw it two years ago and it was something like 90 or 91 of the top 100 rated broadcasts TV ratings of the year were football, either professional football or college football. And so linear has somewhat become the sports channel, if not the football channel. And I think ads over the top of that in new and creative ways is really about marketers trying to reach like these mass amounts of eyeballs that are in the Zeitgeist experiencing the same thing at the same time. These moments are so emotionally powerful for a marketer to potentially to be part of something that's going to live on in the zeitgeist, I think is immensely powerful is how I see.
- [18:46]
A
Seems also like it's a little counterintuitive because this ad model of an overlay or a, you know, in real time kind of dynamic ad, it actually is kind of a mass approach. It's not personalized or customized per user. You're, you're doing it at the broadcast level. Is, is that a correct assumption?
- [19:03]
C
Yeah, for something like an overlay. But don't forget the majority of the inventory we sell is, is on the companion screen. And so it is this highly personalized version of the ad that is available to, to be personalized to someone with the glass in their hand. Although we also do sell ads, whether in regular commercial breaks and also augmentation. But the augmentation really is just to put a fine point on it, it is very league dependent. Some leagues permit it, some leagues do not. And I think, you know, I won't go through the ones that don't. But I think, you know, some of the more prominent leagues, you could just have a, have a difficult time imagining them doing that. But others are a little more adventurous.
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A
Yeah, mma. Are you showing any ads on MMA Octagons?
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C
It's interesting. I don't think we're super heavily involved in the combat sports, but I think that there's a really growing and enthusiastic audience behind it. I think that it's something that's very interesting and worth looking at. Obviously. Again, please forgive me. I've been at this point at the company a few weeks, but to me it seems like an interesting opportunity. I think there's a volume of matchups, I think there's a huge audience that likes it and there's a reason to watch live. There's something really fascinating about that. So maybe watch this space, but I find that prospect fascinating.
- [20:22]
A
I know you've only been there for a month, but is a lot of younger people especially think getting a job in sports is the pinnacle of their career? That is the sexy place to end up. Is it true? False. Is sports just like any other business?
- [20:37]
C
Well, I think the business of sports is hitting. And in fact, going back to your very first question, it's a big part of why I made the jump here. I think the business of sports is hitting this almost 2.0 era where it's starting to professionalize beyond what we expected. I think technology is enabling that for young people who are considering this path. I think sports is here for the long term. I'm at a conference here today. I think a lot of people are discussing AI and the role of AI displacing how we traditionally view jobs versus jobs in the future. I think live human sports is something and the entertainment and the spectacle of that is something that's here to stay. I think AI and technology are just tailwinds to enhancing the overall experience, but it is pretty cool. And it is cool to be a part of something that everyone gets. It is cool to be a part of something that captures so much attention and it's just frankly a bit fun. I mean, it doesn't mean that we're not working. We're working extremely hard to deliver amazing experiences to everyone. But it is fun to be a part of a space like this for sure, sure.
- [21:39]
A
And if you want A job in sports. Just send your resume to Tony. You hire. Are you hiring?
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C
You know, I've. I've been analyzing what we need as a marketing group so that there maybe might be some key hires in the near future. Yeah.
- [21:52]
A
All right, well, Tony, thanks for coming to us from a conference. We know you've been pretty busy. We're going to take a break and we'll come back with the news of the week.
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C
Right on. Thank you.
- [22:04]
D
This is at Tech 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. Com, 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 Texture Pod, 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.
- [22:54]
B
All right, we are back, everybody, with the refresh, AKA the news of the week. So we're going to mix it up a little bit. Today we've got earnings, we've got AI, We've got all the usual stuff. But today we're going to talk about pharma.
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A
Pharma. Love pharma.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Verticalization is super interesting. Obviously sports, you know, another. Another vertical that's got unique solutions. You could build a big business this week, Branch Lab, which is a company that my fund has an investment in, I think. Ari, you're an advisor to Branch Lab, am I right?
- [23:23]
A
Yeah, I have some equity in Branch Lab.
- [23:26]
C
Yeah.
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B
Yeah. So they raised a big series A branch Lab. For those who are not familiar, I think number one, go back to the episode we did with the founder Josh Walsh last year. It was one of our best. It was really, really good in terms of information. Very simple. It's a AI based platform to build audiences for pharma commercialization and then ultimately activate it. $26 million Series A led by McKeeson Ventures and Sanofi Ventures. What's interesting about this, the headline number is big. We're going to talk about the headline number for a second, Ari, after this. But then also McKeeson and Sanofi represent both manufacturing and distribution. So it's like very interesting strategics on both sides backing the same company at a Series A. So super interesting.
- [24:17]
A
Yeah. The pharma, Interesting pharma advertising business fascinates me because obviously privacy is of the top concern with hipaa, et cetera. So the goal is to be able to reach people who may have a given condition without knowing who they are and without knowing they actually have that condition. And Branch Lab has got a very interesting machine learning, AI driven approach. They spoke at Mark Dexter Live, both Josh did and Lance Armstrong, who's an investor in Branch Lab, spoke at Marcus Dash Live. And I've known them for a while, they're very smart, they're growing very quickly. And the pharma business has a lot of margin, so they're willing to spend on advertising when it works. And it's not that easy to do. The question I've always had is if you had the data, could you just log into the trade desk and do this? And the answer is not very well. And I'm not picking on the trade. I'm saying any mainstream dsp, you really have to tweak it for this kind of anonymized data with a weird feedback loop of whether it worked or not.
- [25:20]
B
Yeah, well said. You put the question out. Is this the, certainly the biggest ad tech series we've seen in some time? Was it the biggest one ever? And so it was one of the largest that we've seen in the recent era. You know, most of the big ones have been in the 2025 range. But you think that there was a $40 million Series A. Yeah.
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A
So the feedback on Twitter. I appreciate the Twitter peeps. Is that the biggest A people can think of is Fluency, which I had just had. I just had on the podcast is 40. No, that's not why.
- [25:56]
B
So Fluency is a near 10 year old company.
- [25:59]
A
Okay.
- [26:00]
B
Raised $40 million from a growth equity firm last year and called it a Series A.
- [26:05]
A
Okay, fair.
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B
You can call it a Series A because it was the first institutional round. But that's not a Series A. Come on, guys.
- [26:11]
A
Okay, okay. I'm willing to go with you for now. Let's, let's. So we have a tie. So verified tie.
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B
Break the tie first.
- [26:19]
A
No, no, no. I meant a tie in the dollar amount firsthand. Firsthand from our friends Michael Rubenstein. He. They did 26 as well. And that's definitely an A. And that was like about a year ago. And then in my Twitter account there was one other. I'd never heard of another, like CTV for small business company, but I can't seem to find it. It was such. It was a company I'd literally never heard of before I was 22. Vibe was 22 and a half. So Arthur came into my, into my DMs and told me or into my mentors that it was 22 and a half. So good for them. But firsthand appears to be the tie here.
- [26:59]
B
Okay, so Tony, don't break the tie.
- [27:01]
C
Anyway, I would add into this, maybe not on your tie, but I agree with what you were saying about the pharma advertising space. I've been a big fan of Deep Intent for a while. I agree you can't just be a mainstream dsp. But you look at the pharmaceutical category and I don't have equity in any of these companies. So it's like for me it's neither way. But you look at the era of the blockbuster drug, it seems to be coming to an end. There seemed to be. We're entering an era of like highly personalized medicine. And I think with the advent of AI and AI within medicine, it's going to become more and more personalized. Being able to deliver a highly precise message in a HIPAA compliant way. Like that's a, that's a specialist job. So like it doesn't surprise me to see the money. Money going in that direction at all.
- [27:47]
A
Yeah. And I have a, I have a sort of a random question. I don't have the answer to it, which is how much are. Are the retail media networks under CVS and Albertsons and, and Walmart using the pharma data to retarget pharma potential consumers? Because you can use the data if you don't transfer it to anyone. HIPAA doesn't prevent that. The issue for independent DSPs is that they don't have firsthand data. They have to get the data from somebody. It's just kind of an interesting question. If anyone knows, please hit me up on DMs and I'll, I'll report it back.
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B
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. But if I, you know, kind of play Marketing Messaging Association. I don't associate Walgreens and CVS with like pushing the pharma story so much as companies like Deep Intent and Branch Lab.
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A
Yeah. I mean, but if you like looked at. Sorry. By market share, who's the top pharma in the United States? I think number one is Walmart and Walgreen is probably number two. Right. Cvs somewhere around number two also. So you would think that. And Amazon entering the market pretty aggressively.
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B
Yeah. Pharmacy versus pharma companies is the. I Think Riggle here. Speaking of Deep Intent. So more pharma news. Ian Coley, who is the former CMO at TTD seven years there, is now the CMO of Deep Intent. So more big moves with pharma. Vertical ad tech companies love to see it.
- [29:10]
A
Yeah. And Deep Intent took a pretty big private equity round like about six months ago. I think they're the leading independent in this space. I don't know the exact details of their size and things, but my friend Mark Mike Mundley, who is the head of CS for Beeswax, is now the head of CS over there. So it's a really good company. I'm pretty big, pretty fond of them.
- [29:31]
B
Yeah, yeah. And if I recall correctly, like, I think it was like valued at close to a billion, which makes total sense. I think the scale of Deep Intent we had Chris on, we were both fairly surprised. And you just start to do the numbers. It makes a lot of sense. These categories, these are like multi billion dollar outcomes.
- [29:49]
A
Yeah.
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B
Because you know, just pharma and deepa 10 had a.
- [29:55]
A
Had a big outcome that got turned down by the doj. So they, they had an M and A get scuttled by the government. It was like they're being acquired by some pharma middleman or something. Yeah, yeah. Right. So now they're independent and I think it'll probably work out for the best for their shareholders.
- [30:11]
B
Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's talk about earnings. So couple weeks ago, we had basically all of the walled gardens report like at once. They made everything really difficult for us. Right. So we had like Meta growing at 33%, Amazon 24%, Google 16% for their advertising businesses. And over the course of the past week or two, you covered a couple last week, we'll cover a couple this week. We had a lot of the independent ad tech companies. So I don't know how much we want to go into like the specifics here, but I think there's two things and we can talk about a couple of the companies, we can pull it out. So it's number one, independent ad tech is not growing as fast as the walled gardens. TTD 12% growth, PubMatic 13%. You know, like slower growth rates is number one. But if you are focused on CTV or if you have a CTV business that tends to be growing at a far more accelerated rate closer to what the walled gardens are so mountain. We haven't talked about in some time, 25% growth. Viant, who's, you know, most of their business now, I think, you know, well over 50% is, is CTV. They were close to 20% growth. So you're seeing like CTV really driving the market for independent ad tech. And some of these legacy display companies, they're just, you know, they're, they're falling behind.
- [31:34]
A
Yeah, I think that's accurate. There's, there's a bunch of public companies we don't really cover here very well like, like the Perions and Nexons of the world. But the trend is pretty clear, as you stated. I totally agree with it. A couple of little notes I'd like to bring up. Mountain probably is going to have a lot of tailwinds this year because of political. They do a lot of political. And it's a big election year. So that's something to consider if you think about year over year. And the second thing is with Pubmatic and Rubicon or I'm sorry, I can't believe I still call it Rubicon. Magnite. Magnite. I was wearing my Magnite sweatshirt to the gym earlier today. I should remember their name. Excellent sweatshirt, by the way. Thank you to Adam Sirocco. So there's a call option there on the Google settlement. And the stock analysts understand that, that if the Google settlement works out in a certain way, it could be a windfall for those two companies as well as the private ones like index and OpenX, because the Google Ads demand could shift over. Could be 50, 100, 200 million in media dollars a year just coming out of nowhere. So that's something to consider from a stock picking perspective.
- [32:42]
B
But this is not financial advice. Ari is not a certified financial advisor. Don't listen to.
- [32:48]
A
You can feel free to trade on my advice. Go for it.
- [32:50]
B
Don't, please don't.
- [32:56]
C
I, I might weigh in on the CTV thing. I, I think it's also interesting. We've seen, we've seen Netflix stock price kind of in the doldrums for a little while now. But you talk about mountain and obviously my previous world, I spent a lot of time in the CTV space. I think in the back half of 2026, you're going to see a lot of these regional and local dollars piling into ctv. Excuse me. And I think the mountains of the world will be the beneficiaries of it. And I think your Netflix of the world, they're still going to the same pools of dollars. There's not net new revenue streams coming in for them. So it'll be really interesting to see if Netflix can kind of operationalize some of the things they've said in their turnaround plan. But it's really not surprising to me to see, okay, these companies that are tapping into the region on local dollars are sort of starting to see that the net new revenue streams come through and it's coming through in their valuation.
- [33:46]
A
I had an interesting conversation on Twitter about a related subject which is like, you know, Spotify reported some numbers that said that I think something like 30% of their revenue was coming from Programmatic. And the question was, is that a good thing or a bad thing? You know, it's a good thing because revenue is good. It's a bad thing because like Meta doesn't get a get 0% for programmatic. Like if you were so powerful a media company that you could sell out, you would need Programmatic at all. And Netflix is right in the middle because they do have the kind of inventory that's easy to sell on Programmatic, but they would certainly prefer to sell it direct. And that's just something to watch where that ends up one way or another.
- [34:24]
B
Yeah, no, it's really interesting to Tony's point about where the growth in CTV comes from.
- [34:30]
D
Two things.
- [34:30]
B
So first in the mountain earnings, there was this eye popping stat. 97% of mountain customers never ran a TV ad before. Like they're going for this long tail of regional and SMBs. Empirically speaking, there's a handful of categories that are just like super hot in your early stage investing market. Like, you know, we just see a ton of deal flow. I want to say that we've looked at probably eight or so, like streamer AI, copycats or the next streamer AI over the course of the past few weeks. There's so many companies who's had what is the same thesis. But man, the question I ask around customer acquisition for the plumber, the dentist, it's a challenging one. Nobody's able to really address it.
- [35:17]
A
And that's why they've been raising so much money. These companies that are in that space and they're also competing with very well funded companies that are mountains, public and universal ads from NBC and you know, Vibe is raised, I don't know what lot over the total lifetime. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't be excited about going after SMBs if I was. A new startup though. Seems like a tough, tough slog.
- [35:42]
B
Yeah,
- [35:44]
C
I would weigh in with what Eric. Sorry guys, weigh in with what Eric said. Like, I think Magnite's acquisition of Stream was genius because it fills that gap where the corner barber shop or maybe even a more regional advertiser the biggest barrier to them buying these TV ads was the TV production was building the ad itself and making it not very low quality. I mean, local ads are typically like farcically terrible and it's almost what gets them over the line. This is a technology that enables you to build world class ads and then deploy it programmatically. I think that that's why the market is opening up in the way it is. Eric, I think you're 100% right on that point.
- [36:23]
A
Yeah.
- [36:24]
B
Thank you. It's wild. I remember seeing Streamr when Mafi was really at the bleeding edge of ad creation and experimenting with the new models and I was like, man, this is really, really impressive. Now every company is doing the same thing where give us a URL and we're going to create in 30 seconds a high quality call to action TV ad for you. So it's incredible just the pace of adoption of AI and how these companies are using. Okay, do we want to touch on ttd? Samantha Jacobson exiting, you know, relevant. She was the cso, Jeff's, you know, purported right hand for a long time, stays on the board. But going to OpenAI.
- [37:04]
A
Yeah, I don't have that much to say on that. She was a, she was one of our best podcast guests when she came on, giving us a lot of detail about what they did at trade desk. I think I will make an OpenAI point though, which is I was speaking to, I won't say who, a media buying company. And they were saying they're buying OpenAI aggressively. They're using the UI, they're mixing CPM, CPC. It's going like gangbusters up and to the right very, very quickly.
- [37:34]
B
How could it not be just the opportunity?
- [37:37]
A
How could it not be at this
- [37:40]
B
moment with so few advertisers, relatively speaking, versus the millions on Meta and Google? I mean, you know, any good media buyer should be having just like a field day right now.
- [37:53]
A
Yeah. And since they moved from their pilot, which was CPM based, to their, you know, their actual system, it's basically low risk because you're buying on performance, more or less. You get the clicks, you see if they convert and you change their bid. So it's a game plan we all knew was coming and they're executing very well, apparently.
- [38:11]
B
That's great to hear. All right, let's talk about upfronts. There's so much in the upfronts. The coverage is always so good. Maybe we'll pull a couple of themes out of this. So I think the themes, to me, it seems every Company is like bringing forth this outcomes message, which is really great to see, really interesting to see at the upfronts which are traditionally around reach and celebrities and locking up inventory up front. Nbcu maybe the most surprising, like they're talking about this performance insights hub that is, you know, being launched in Q4 and talking about how like Instacart got 5x ROAS on, you know, the, the initial plans and, you know, talking about performance as much as anything. So it's like sign of the times. I think it's pretty neat.
- [39:00]
A
Yeah. I think NBCU Comcast has always been pushing pretty hard for a traditional company onto this data stuff and, you know, they've had a lot of really good talent in the company and they still do that, knows tech. They own Freewheel to the extent that that is like kind of in a, you know, secret R and D lab within the company. So it's great to see this stuff.
- [39:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. Equally Amazon, there was a piece in Ad Exchanger on this one what they're bringing out in terms of like customized CTV ads, like dynamic based on not just the advertiser, but like, you know, the different SKUs that is appropriate for a user based on their shopping. Like, that's really, really cool.
- [39:41]
A
What do you think, Tony? Do you think they're going to put overlays on their, on their football games?
- [39:45]
C
I don't know. But did you know a while ago Amazon patented the idea of preemptive shipping? Did you hear about this?
- [39:53]
A
What's preemptive shipping is what it sounds like.
- [39:56]
C
We can anticipate what you're going to buy before you buy it and we will just ship it to you and if you don't want it, send it back now. Patenting it and then operationalizing it are very different things. But like that tells you where their heads are. It's pretty, it's pretty cool there.
- [40:10]
A
Yeah. They're going to have robots show up at your door with like an array of products and you're going to have to, you know, turn them away, I guess. But you know, I mentioned on the POD a couple of months ago that I was just really impressed by what the ads I was seeing on Amazon. All had like a clickable call to action on them. Like a lot of them did. Not just occasionally, but more than 50%, I would say had that. And that was very impressive to me because that's like one of those things people always talk about user remote control, but they actually had it in production and you see a little bit From Google on YouTube TV not as much from others. So it's great that given all their data and their ad tech stack and their product skus and you know, let's just push the envelope on this stuff. I think it's great.
- [40:56]
B
Yeah, they're the one that I think can really do that interactive stuff. Just because everybody's an Amazon customer.
- [41:04]
A
Right.
- [41:04]
B
And maybe some, some of the best are just add this to your cart. Yeah, it's just like, man, if you
- [41:11]
A
squint the Pinterest TV Scientific get you there at some point. I mean, they don't have the supply. Right. They don't, they don't have anyone watching Pinterest TV or anything like that. But they've got two elements. They've got the, they've got the E commerce intent, They've got three elements. E commerce intent, the product catalogs already loaded in and, and now the TV Scientific, it's getting there.
- [41:35]
B
Pinterest is my company to watch in 2026, 2027. Just like they're already out there selling TV scientific and I'm so impressed with what they're doing.
- [41:44]
A
Well, it's not on the agenda, but like, how about that GameStop offer to buy ebay, which was a little bit of a joke, right? So GameStop put in an unsolicited offer to buy ebay. They didn't really have the cash to do it. But I think the reason I'm bringing it up is I think there's this theme of there are a lot of these kind of big successful digital companies that are not in the top three or four we talk about all the time. Pinterest is definitely in that category and maybe they're undervalued pretty significantly. Again, don't listen to my advice on stocks, but like, that's a great point.
- [42:20]
B
You know, I've been, I've been traveling over the course of the past week or two, so I'm like not consuming as much X as I the website or the app as I normally do, which is probably good for my mental health. But man, some of these clips of Ryan Cohen are just so funny. So Ryan Cohen is the CEO of GameStop. He's the one that's making this offer for ebay. And you know, he's talking about how, you know, ebay, there's been no innovation basically since the beginning. It looks like it did the beginning. I can run it out of my bedroom. Like
- [42:55]
A
it's easy. It's so easy to give ebay a hard time because it is pretty unexciting. His idea was Pretty good. Which was, you know, basically use the gamestop stores as a sort of an ebay hub and check the authenticity, the authenticity of things before they get shipped. There's some, you know, that's kind of interesting. I like, I like that a little bit.
- [43:15]
B
I think it's a great thesis. Final thing on the upfronts, I thought this was neat. So there's a nine way alliance. I know these alliances tend not to work, they have a bad history. But OpenAP has nine companies, A&E, AMC, Fox, Hallmark, NBCU, Paramount, Scripps, Televisa, Univision and WBD working together like basically a standardized capi to connect TV exposure to business outcomes. Again, I think just sign of the times, it's really good that this is happening with tv. God bless. Nine companies trying to figure out the economics on this one. We should check back on it.
- [43:52]
A
Sounds great. I mean I think capi's the future, right? Or it's the present. Basically shipping all of your server side conversion data instead of using pixels and then figuring out what worked. And it's a little hard to set up, it's a little time consuming. So it makes sense for all the TV folks to band together and say just do this one integration and we'll give you the data you want.
- [44:14]
B
Agreed. All right, some quick hits. Conde Nast says to expect no more search traffic on a TBPN interview. What's your thoughts on this one?
- [44:23]
A
Yeah, so the, I forget who was executive at Conde Nast said that they're instructing their business units to just assume search traffic goes to zero, referral traffic goes to zero because it's declining and it's not coming back. I think it's, you know, get ahead of it. Why not? Well, it's a, it's at least a good mental exercise to say like what would happen if our website got zero traffic from sources that we don't own? And I think people are heading there pretty fast.
- [44:51]
B
It's a good mindset.
- [44:52]
A
It's good mindset. Yeah. Consider your get your search and AI traffic as a bonus while it lasts, but is certainly not going to last.
- [45:02]
B
I agree. All right, so microdramas. This is weird, but I want to talk about this. A week ago or so I was on the west coast. I was having dinner with a handful of people. A couple of were technology executives from China and one of them was telling me about how micro dramas are just like taking over in China. And there's a couple of companies, one of which is called real short, that is a billion dollar business if people paying $20 I think a week or something like that to subscribe. Basically like subscribe for content and micro dramas are everywhere.
- [45:43]
C
So.
- [45:44]
B
Have you ever seen a micro drama, Tony?
- [45:46]
A
I've.
- [45:47]
C
I have never seen one, no.
- [45:49]
B
Have you ever?
- [45:50]
A
I. I've seen clips on Instagram and TikTok that then that are the teaser clips and they're always like overly sexual Chinese. Chinese soap operas. Basically.
- [46:02]
B
Yes. It is like taking over. It's like 60 seconds long. It's like a soap opera.
- [46:10]
A
It's a Soap Opera.
- [46:11]
B
It's 60 seconds with a cliffhanger every single time. And you're just like oh my God, let me watch the next one. Peacock two unscripted Bravo micro dramas they announced this week company called True Short which is from Jeffrey Katzenberg. So founder of Quibi coming back with Quibi.
- [46:30]
A
He had the right idea. Wrong timing. Yeah, yeah.
- [46:33]
B
Basically raising 12 million to like build out these AI native vertical dramas and there's companies that are just killing it. The estimate in spend is that the US apparently the US micro drama market is already at $819 million. Market. It will be a $3.8 billion market by 2030. Including TikTok who launched their own thing called Pine Drama. Pay attention to space. Just 60 second soap operas with cliffhangers.
- [47:04]
A
Yeah. So the town did a great episode about this like a month ago. I'm a big listener to the town podcast and they went through some of the production aspects of this. So picture a movie. So a two hour movie chopped up into however many like you know, 50, 90 seconds and do the math on two hours divided by 90 seconds.
- [47:22]
C
Seconds.
- [47:24]
A
So 190 seconds slots and they film the whole thing in a pretty short amount of time. So it is scripted, they have a script, they have producers and they film maybe that whole movie in a week. It's all non union actors. That's a pretty important aspect here because they're basically putting in 10 hour days and filming constantly and not getting the wages you'd expect. And, and then like you said, it's every, every 90 seconds ends in a cliffhanger. And then they take like the most interesting, you know, 5 or 10% of it, put it on the socials and then to see the rest they hook people into the story and then to see the rest you have to click out and get a special app and pay. Right. That's, that's basically the model super interesting per week.
- [48:10]
C
Wow. Well I just checked guys market microdrama.com is available.
- [48:15]
A
So yeah, I'm gonna Have Antec God. He'll just like every, every week we'll figure out if he's like, he'll be wondering, you know, why. Why is. Why is this super attractive secretary asking me to. Asking me what she did wrong? Oh wow, I better, I better put her in punishment. Like that's basically the content of almost all of these.
- [48:36]
B
Basically, yeah. Final thing just again, bit of sign of the times but I think it's good directionally is TikTok launched their M C P so third party AI agents, your Claude, your OpenAI can run end to end TikTok campaigns. It really seems like things are moving from the UI to the agent.
- [48:57]
A
Yeah, TikTok meta Google to some extent. I don't know if Google's fully there yet. They announced some AI stuff but I'm not a user so I wouldn't know day to day. But absolutely. These UIs are so complicated too. The AD UIs.
- [49:12]
B
Right, yeah. Claude is taking over the world, Tony.
- [49:16]
A
When can we use an MCP to figure out like people's internal body temperature on the field? And
- [49:23]
C
you can buy that moment. But yeah, like it is interesting though. I think we're entering an era where agents will market to agents and it was a discussion at this conference I'm at earlier today where we will hit a point in time where sure, I might have airline preferences, for example, like maybe I'm a United guy, but I'm not a United guy. If that costs $6,000 more than Delta, where a point where I just say to my voice assistant, okay, I'm going to San Francisco, book it and I literally don't make a decision. It's like at that point if you're United or Delta or JetBlue, you need to be exercising a lot of your marketing expenditure focusing on the agents that are making the decision more than the human. That is not. And I think it starts to become pretty tricky for the marketers out there.
- [50:07]
A
Absolutely. All right, I think that's a good place to end it. So this was a great discussion. Tony Marlow, CMO of Genius Sports, thank you so much for joining us.
- [50:16]
C
Ari, Eric, thank you for having me.
- [50:18]
B
We'll see you next week, everybody.
- [50:19]
A
We'll see you next week.
- [50:21]
B
Thank you for subscribing to marketecture.
- [50:23]
A
New interviews are added every week at
- [50:25]
B
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