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Episode 96: Chris Paquette from DeepIntent explains programmatic for healthcare
00:40:21
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- [00:01]
Ari
This podcast is brought to you by sao, a leading CTV advertising platform purpose built to help brands effectively reach, engage, and validate streaming audiences. For over a decade, SAO's platform has combined deep industry expertise with innovative technology to meet the needs of an evolving media landscape ready to unlock the power of CTV advertising. Learn more at SAO WS podcast. That's SAO WSpodcast. Welcome to the Market Sector podcast. We have an exciting episode today. We're going deep on healthcare. We have Chris Paquette, the CEO of Deep Intent, which is a specialized DSP that focuses on pharma and healthcare. I'm very interested in hearing about this. We had a great Monopoly Report podcast this week with Megan Gray, where we went into a lot of depth on whether TikTok will be banned. And the law says it will, but the candidates for president don't want to talk about it and no one really wants to talk about it. So it's going to hit us one way or another in January and Megan takes us through all the mechanisms, the court cases, et cetera. I'd highly recommend checking out the Monopoly Report podcast and subscribing to that. Next week I will be at the IAB Tech Lab in London. So if you're in London listening to say hi next Thursday and I might be around for a pint or two. You know how it works in London. All right, Chris, thank you so much for being here.
- [01:31]
Chris Paquette
Ari, thanks. Thanks for having me. And Eric, good to see you. How are you doing, Chris? Am I. Am I your first guest who's not@about.com?
- [01:38]
Ari
The first in a couple of weeks. Yeah, it's an ongoing joke we're recording on Halloween. Either of you guys have exciting Halloween plans? Chris, a year down in Miami. Do you do Halloween in Miami or is it too warm?
- [01:50]
Chris Paquette
We do. I have a two and a half year old and we started this thing where we started watching classic movies. We bought a projector and we threw on wizard of Oz and now she's a going to be the Tin Man. So I'm pretty excited for that.
- [02:02]
Ari
That's a. That's a good one for a homegrown costume. Just like take some, take some stuff out of the recycling bin and suddenly you have a costume. 40.
- [02:09]
Chris Paquette
40 gallon drum or something. Yeah.
- [02:13]
Ari
All right.
- [02:14]
Eric
Jerry Kawasa outed my. My Halloween costume. He posted a picture of me as John Wick on, on the Internet this week.
- [02:22]
Ari
Oh, is that. Is that it? How do you do, John Wick? You just put on a coat.
- [02:25]
Eric
Yeah.
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Ari
All right, that sounds good. Sounds low. That's a lower costume. I'm going to go as Zach Alphinacus, which means I'm just going to walk out of the house and it'll be.
- [02:34]
Eric
Fine with a satchel.
- [02:39]
Ari
Chris, why is healthcare and pharma different from everything else?
- [02:44]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, no, it's a really great and important question. So maybe just to back up a minute, Healthcare right around the same time, but I think advertising had this like digital renaissance and programmatic, there actually was a pretty big renaissance that happened in the healthcare space. So just a quick backtrack to what was it, 2009, 2008? Obama, believe it or not, I mean he instituted or had this part of the high tech act. And at that time, if you can believe it, less than like 10% of healthcare providers actually use electronic health records, right?
- [03:19]
Eric
So part of the health, the high.
- [03:20]
Chris Paquette
Tech act actually pushed healthcare providers and hospitals to actually start digitizing their healthcare records. And you probably have noticed over the last decade or two more of your digital health data is now able to be accessible through all these applications. Epic has a big application, there's all these different companies. So there's been this huge digitization within the healthcare industry. And with that there's a lot of opportunities to build applications. Right. Once that data becomes online, you can do things like machine learning, pattern recognition, right. And be able to build applications that are, that are truly data driven. So, you know, while we in the programmatic advertising world had this huge rtb, right, Programmatic advertising, data driven, kind of Cambrian explosion of different technologies in the healthcare side, it was very much going through the same type of renaissance. And you know, where we kind of came into the picture was in 2015, we recognize that to do healthcare marketing correctly, right. Do it with precision. Obviously it's unlike all the other many, I should say many other categories in healthcare. There's certain nuances about healthcare that, whether it's market complexity and regulations and specialized systems and processes that just really require you to have a specialist platform to do it at the peak that you can get for performance.
- [04:34]
Ari
What sort of data is available? Because you have hipaa, you have even the NAI self regulatory guidance has sensitive categories. So what sort of data is available for healthcare marketers?
- [04:46]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, so you know, obviously all the data, most patient level data, all patient level data is covered under hipaa, right? So using that data is, you know, it's federally regulated and there's a lot that goes into making sure you're compliant with federal law. And then now you see a lot of state law that's that's coming into the picture as well. But that said, there are, you know, things like data points like medical claims data, which you know, very similar to maybe the ad tech industry has a lot of middle like basically aggregators, like think of them back as like the parallels are actually kind of crazy. Like ad networks are kind of like these like clearinghouses, like it's kind of the analog and they aggregate all these claims data which think of them as maybe like RTB requests. Right. And they're aggregating these things and then what they're doing is they're deidentifying it and then basically selling those off. Right. As inside as actually raw record level data. So yeah, you have this kind of like parallel world that in many ways feels like the ad tech world back in like the earlier days. And so it's pretty exciting.
- [05:45]
Ari
I think a lot of people just hear HIPAA and they freak out and just say like I don't want to touch that. Is HIPAA a blanket restriction from using any data? Like is it just an absolute no. Or is there or does HIPAA just require more processes?
- [05:58]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, it requires more processes to do it.
- [06:00]
Ari
Right.
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Chris Paquette
And actually a feature of hipaa, basically what you're trying to do is you're trying to protect from re identification, right? There's a lot of insight and important insight within that health data that's used for both medical research and improving healthcare delivery. And also for use cases like marketing, there is actually a part of it called expert determination where you actually have an outside statistician come in and certify that what you're doing is as a very low risk. That's a statutory requirement for re identification. It's pretty much near impossible to re identify any one individual using their health data that you're working with.
- [06:35]
Ari
The second question I had is you made a distinction between the healthcare provider and the claims. They're both under the same HIPAA restrictions. It's just that the claims provider has more scale. Is that a way to think about it? Yeah, healthcare.
- [06:47]
Chris Paquette
I mean and you guys have been to the doctor presumptively. So you guys know how it works, right? You go to the doctor and then the doctor sends a request to the insurance or the payer. That data point, right, that basically that payment request is in the form of a claim and that goes to the payer. There's aggregators that kind of simplify that connectivity and these like center points. I mean there's many different parties in the healthcare data ecosystem. But yeah, these aggregators exist to kind of collate all that data and then process those claims.
- [07:16]
Ari
So if it's de identified, what, what is it useful for? Is it by zip code or something like that?
- [07:21]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, you can look at it by zip code. There's also new technologies that, that provide these like pseudonymous IDs as well. So there's like these tokenization companies that will take PII and convert them to a pseudonymous ID that then can be linked to other pseudonymous IDs. And that's where obviously a lot of, when you talk about re identification, that's where a lot of risk comes in. And that's where you have to make sure you have this certification. It's pretty rigorous. I mean there's every use case that we have goes through like a multifactor analysis that basically certifies that you can't re identify any of those individuals. When you link all these data points.
- [07:57]
Ari
Together from the marketer's perspective or the agency's perspective, what are they looking to target?
- [08:03]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, that's a great question. So most of our use cases that we see are large pharma companies that have treatments and trials. So whether it's clinical trial or some sort of drug or product that helps patients and healthcare in particular is pretty unique in that, especially in the RX pharmacy business, you're not marketing to just a patient or a consumer. You're marketing actually the two audiences you're marketing to the provider as well as the patient. Right. Because you ultimately need the provider to write the script and they need the patient to be aware of it and actually go fill the script. It requires that nuance. It creates more complexity. We find that when we're able to reach both of them with a concurrent and similar message, we actually do see performance goes up. That's why this idea of having a verticalized or healthcare specific DSP and probably make the claim for any other type of technology, it's kind of like a right to exist compared to maybe everything else. All the other categories that can kind of all do the same thing. Consumer based ROI analysis, etc.
- [09:06]
Ari
Well, how do you know if it works? How does attribution work when the call to action is literally ask your doctor.
- [09:13]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, no, and at the end of the day, I mean pharma is marketing products, right? And they do have product level information like how many RXs are being written by a specific doctor. So they can see like what each doctor is or provider is actually writing and increases in those, in those, the prescribing behaviors of those physicians. Right.
- [09:34]
Ari
But they don't Know who was exposed to the ad.
- [09:37]
Chris Paquette
Yeah. So in very much the same way that you can create linkages, right. For targeting use cases again through the same like certification process, you can actually get your result back. All this data into. Think of this kind of like a data clean room except with a little bit more privacy nuance that's specially designed for hipaa. So yeah, we, what goes into that clean room has to be super locked down, unlike what you can do. And so we push impression level data in there and we can, we can score and evaluate the increases and actually whether or not these patients or your households actually end up going on to a script or not, if GEO is.
- [10:11]
Eric
The, is the common denominator here between, you know, both targeting of a consumer and you know, where the prescriptions are coming from, you probably can map it back using, using geo.
- [10:22]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, geo. GEO certainly is one dimension. You can do it. But yeah, you can also do it at a household level as well. And again, we can't, we can't tell you what household actually went on. That's the whole point of this pretty rigorous certification process that happens. But yeah, and just, just for background and this may help as well, like I actually came from the healthcare space itself, right. So like I worked at Memorial Sim Kettering for a pretty long time, I should say two years long time, probably my career. And then before that I was doing a lot of healthcare research and you know, I, the first thing I noticed was yeah, all this data is like super fragmented. And so like I developed a pretty good understanding of how to work with this data. Obviously doing it in a way that would allow us to build applications on top of it that delivered value for the healthcare side. So the way I look at deep insanity is you can think of it like, like the work we do makes us feel good and then ultimately the people who work here like feel good about doing all the work that we do too. So it's nice, it's a little bit different. We have one foot in healthcare and one foot in ad tech. So it's a little bit of an interesting use case.
- [11:25]
Ari
And if you don't feel good about your day to day existence, please tell your doctor. So Chris, implicitly in this conversation we've been talking effectively about Programmatic because you run a dsp, if you step back and tell us from a pharma point of view what are the most effective channels or what's going on between. Obviously we see a ton of farm ads on tv, but also how is social play in. Is, is social as effective? Or the restrictions. How does Programmatic differ from say direct buys on medical sites?
- [11:58]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, all really good, really good points. I mean, so first off, I would be remiss not to mention that there is this big shift from you know, obviously linear television to ctv. I mean it's happening across everything. But with pharmacy, what's nice, you know, pharma has probably been a laggard and is traditionally view as a laggard when it comes to most technical adoption. We haven't necessarily seen that with ctv. They've been pretty forthright or just like really leaned in on the CCTV opportunity. It's one, I mean it's the fastest growing category on our, on our platform that we see and that's, you know, it's nice to see that adoption and pharma is not four to five years behind the curve on that. So CCTV definitely is one. And then, you know, obviously we don't touch too much on the social side, but from what we can see, anecdotally we do know social performs well for especially clinical trial recruitment. That's like a big one. And I tend to think that that is a good channel for those types of, those types of engagements. But yeah, we see audio is now emerging, digital out of home. It does track and probably index with kind of what you see in the more general marketplace.
- [13:02]
Ari
Right, that's interesting. What's interesting going on in the market is there, is there innovation going on on the creat side AI other things like that?
- [13:11]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, I mean so we're pretty, we're pretty heads down on the distribution side. I think the interesting thing is one of the trends that we see is this idea that actually to a point you just made a lot of direct endemic buying, what we call endemic or the healthcare publisher buying that happened. We are starting to see that shift more and more to programmatic activation. So we're seeing this kind of melding of these like direct buys and Programmatic happening within our platform. We just announced a big strategic partnership with Everyday Health, Ziff Davis. So we're now their preferred DSP and it's a really strong partnership with them that's just building in recent months. So it's almost like we see these walls coming down where Programmatic used to be this like kind of again, knowing that healthcare may be a couple of years behind, Programmatic is kind of this like remnant inventory thought of as like hey, everything else but my premium stuff. We're actually starting to see like deals, like PG deals, private marketplaces being set up for even the more premium. I'M using air quotes, premium inventory that would have been sold directly. Right. So we are seeing those walls come down and that mixing happening.
- [14:19]
Ari
Do you have to compete on a day to day basis with the trade desk and mainstream DSPs?
- [14:24]
Chris Paquette
Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean we, look, I think there's, what we categorize is like generalist DSPs where you have these very few scale platforms that are, you know, healthcare is 10% of their business. And typically when you're a healthcare marketer, you're working with a team there and then for us, I mean it's 100% of our business and you know, we tend to think healthcare platforms are, given all the complexities I mentioned, tend to outperform. Right. And we do see that they have special nuanced. Right. Capabilities that just go deeper with the clients and I think that that typically is valued. And again, both, you know, there's reasons and why you use one or the other, of course. But yeah, I mean, I think what's fun for us is that we've really started to kind of step up in terms of our competitive set just in the last year or two and we're really now competing, I'd say with Those larger scaled DSPs in a very, very meaningful way.
- [15:22]
Ari
So we have a running joke on the pod that if a CEO moves to Miami, they're going to have an exit. So Miami. And you almost had an exit. I think the first time you crossed my path was on this pod. We reported that your company, Deep Intent had been acquired by a company called iqvia. Icva. I don't know how to pronounce it. And then the deal got called off by the government. Tell us what you could tell us about that experience. What happened? Who's icva? Why were they requiring you? Why did the government get involved?
- [15:54]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, so I keep you just to give the background on how I. Because I know them when I first got started either. But they're a huge, they're a huge company in the space. When we first got started at Deep Intent, we focused on a very small subset of the healthcare category for marketing, basically programmatic advertising for healthcare providers. And we had a really strong partnership with a company that ultimately ended up getting acquired by Cubia a couple years after we started building that relationship with them. And then iqvia, that's how they got to know us. So we got to know them. And then it just felt like a very, a very, you know, this is back in 20, 20, 21.
- [16:31]
Ari
What does IQVIA do?
- [16:33]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, so they're, they're big in like the clinical trials and they do a lot of data aggregation as well. So I mean they're, they're major like pretty, pretty large company. They have a lot of different businesses but they, you know, they've been taking an interest in the digital advertising space. They saw it as a, you know, I think they still see it as a important part of their business from what I gather. But again I'm not saying anything non public but yeah, that was, that was 2022 and then towards the end of the year we got, you know, get through a heart scout process, we end up getting a second request and all the fun things that go along with that. And kind of throughout that process we, we got, I got some firsthand experience in the antitrust process. So it's funny, I was actually talking with Andrew Casale like a couple weeks ago and I know he was one of the Google witnesses. So yeah, we were, we were lamenting over that experience. Very similar experience.
- [17:26]
Ari
But yeah, so they chose, they chose to get involved. What was the rationale of the government for breaking, for stopping the deal?
- [17:32]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, I mean look, they, they, you know, important to say like, you know, and I wrote, I wrote a letter, it's on our website, just kind of giving the context how we viewed it. I still very much take issue with, with kind of the facts and basis for which the FTC took on the matter. And I think ultimately at the end of the day they were using, ultimately comes down to market definition. They were using a definition of the market that was sub selected for healthcare providers and programmatic advertising in these specific channels. One would say, I've heard this in other forums. That was a gerrymandered market definition. Right. And it was a nascent market. Meanwhile down the road you have the DOJ suing Google which I actually do compete with as a DSP down the road. So as for me being a monopoly. So yeah, I mean so like the, you know they, they successfully convinced the court that you know, this should be paused. And then unlike the doj, the FTC has their own administrative courts and it just, at that point it was almost two years, you know, I, Cubia and us made the mutual decision to walk away because at that point, you know, we, we wanted to focus on business.
- [18:40]
Ari
So you had moved to Miami, bought a Lambo and now you're stuck there trying to get your Lambo returned and running a dsp.
- [18:48]
Chris Paquette
No Lambo. Can't say I got a Lambo out of it. But no, it's been good. Look, I think Miami's got a really cool scene down here. I'm back in New York every other week basically, so there's a lot to love in both cities.
- [19:02]
Ari
This is a great conversation. I feel like this really bookended our conversation from about two weeks ago where we had DSPolitical on because political and pharma have actually a lot of similarities when it comes to programmatic and specialized vendors and all kinds of specialized data. So I think it's really informative for our audience. So, Chris, thanks so much for giving us those insights. We're going to take a quick break. We have a big news week. We have earnings reports, we have ias in play. We have a lot of other things to go on. So we'll be back in a moment. This podcast is brought to you by Adroll. Adroll is a name a lot of advertisers are probably familiar with. A leader in high performance Digital Advertising for 15 years. AdRoll is a brand you can trust to deliver strong ROI across display, native and paid social campaigns in one platform. Get in touch with an account expert or create a self service account@adroll.com arri today. That's adroll.com Ari today.
- [20:01]
Eric
And welcome to News of the Week. So we have earnings, we had iis in play, we have a new head of ads for Netflix. A couple other things we can get to them. All right, let's talk about earnings. We had a bunch of companies report this week, Reddit, Snap, Alphabet, Meta and Critio. Not going to get too much into the specifics. I think we just want to kind of call out a couple of things that seem to be consistent across the board. Number one, relatively solid earnings from every company. Looks like political spend was particularly strong in Q3. Reddit, for example was up 56% year over year revenue wise. Snap up 15%, Alphabet 15%, Meta up 19%. So you know, relatively strong revenue growth. And there were multiple mentions of strong political spend which obviously ends next week here in the us. The other thing to call out is AI is like everywhere in all of these earning reports. Snap talking about how they're using AI targeting Reddit. Obviously they have the licensing deal. It's everywhere when you do a Google search and I'll talk about Alphabet and Meta and particularly want to get your guys take on this. So like number one, these guys are spending a lot. Capex for Alphabet was 13 billion in Q3 and the majority goes to AI Meta. Capex was 9 billion and their stock is actually getting hammered after having an incredible run this year because they said they're going to spend an additional billion that they didn't forecast largely for capex. So these big companies are spending a ton on AI, but it's also starting to produce some like benefits. So a couple other interesting points. Sidebar. YouTube is now a $50 billion business is using AI to optimize shorts. The head of business for Alphabet said 70 billion shorts are being watched daily. It's crazy if you think about it.
- [21:59]
Ari
Crazy number.
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Chris Paquette
Yeah, yeah.
- [22:02]
Eric
And we've previously said, you know, meta with AI. They're using Gen AI capabilities to build creative. So they have a million customers using Gen AI for creative. 15 million creators were produced in the last month alone and now they're running tests to actually determine when the best time in a user session to show an ad is. So rather than just like trying to stuff as many ads into a user session and try to figure out exactly what's like the highest value moment to produce, you know, obviously a high paying ad. So like really I think like the actual innovation is happening here but it's coming at significant cost from a CapEx perspective. When you guys hear all this stuff and go through it, what's your reaction?
- [22:42]
Ari
I'm going to do my lightning round because I have a lot of comments, a lot of things. Quick lightning round. First, Alphabet never bet against their stock. You may not like them, you may not like their products, never bet against their stock. Second, Alphabet Waymo is so exciting. I want self driving cars and Waymo is doing incredible. I know it's a part of Alphabet, not Google. I'm more bullish on Waymo than any other part of Google. Next AI AI really works for these end to end systems like having Meta. Being able to generate creative is so much more powerful than a standalone startup being able to create creatives because they have the closed loop of results. They have the customers already, they don't need to charge them anything. I'm really skeptical about a lot of the standalone ad tech AI plays because integrated systems are better. And last Snap was my call for the. I think it was my call at the beginning of the year for the most interesting public company. It's taking a while and they've had unforced errors. But I'm really bullish on Snap because they have a subscription business. People love the product and their advertising business is starting to turn around and.
- [23:48]
Eric
The stock finally popped. It finally popped for you.
- [23:52]
Ari
It's still, I'm still by 50% at least.
- [23:56]
Eric
Got it. Chris, what do you got?
- [23:58]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, no, it's nice to see the value accretion, I mean Nvidia obviously was the major run up just in the value and it's nice to see now hopefully from what we're seeing is that some of the value is being captured at the application layer. Right. I think the integrated comment you made just about integrating of data and having the measurement capabilities and then just look data is going to win, it's going to trump. All right, so I think these are the companies that have all the data. So yeah, I think they're in just really good position. I'm just. Has Meta announced a nuclear deal yet?
- [24:30]
Ari
Take over turnover?
- [24:36]
Eric
That's so funny. Critique also reported yesterday they're actually lower than the rest in terms of revenue year over year, 9%. They'd mentioned something that a large customer has kind of pulled back, but their retail media business is up solid 23% year over year. So makes sense. We'll have the other companies reporting later this week and beginning of next. Okay, move on. Big news ias. So Bloomberg reported that IAS is exploring a potential sell after receiving takeover interest with Jeffrey's advising. Stock was up on the news, popped 17% on Friday and the market value at the time, which is still the same market value today, is about 1.9 billion. For context on this business, this stock is down 20% year to date while the overall market is up 20% year to date. The closest comp Double verify is down 50% year to date. Meanwhile TTD is up almost 60% year to date. Applovin I think that was my stock pick of almost 300% over 300% year to date. So it's interesting to see the pressure that this category has, but then also on the other side, some interest in doing something. Interestingly enough, this is also the second Vista Company video amp being the other one that we talked about a couple of weeks ago that got some interest. What do you think what happens with iis? I mean this whole sector seems to be so ripe for A innovation and B like a fresh approach.
- [26:13]
Ari
I don't have any comment about iis, but there's definitely a lot of movement around ad tech companies, both private and public right now that are not the leaders folks either. Private companies sort of capitulating on valuation. I mean we saw Live Intent exit for probably a number that was a lot lower than they originally thought and a lot of private deals going on. And maybe this is just a reflection that the growth is hitting a wall. There's only so many places to grow, so consolidation and financial shenanigans are Kind of the, the way you rate alpha.
- [26:45]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, feels like, feels like 2025 is going to be an interesting year regardless. Seems like there's a lot of pent up. Pent up activity here from the last couple of years. So. Yeah, just. It's a good, just generally. Yeah, not. Not commenting specifically on any companies. But yeah, I think next year will be an interesting year, especially in the first half.
- [27:02]
Eric
Yeah, I think that there needs to be just there needs to be standalone independent measurement companies and if IaaS and DV are part of that set, that's great. But it just seems to be a category that must exist, must innovate, must have big companies that are independent and not creating their own homework.
- [27:24]
Ari
It's strange. Measurement's been such a bad area for the stocks. Obviously. Comscore has been a disastrous stock. Kantar is privately owned and for sale. Nielsen seen better days. Video amp for sale. DoubleVerify is arguably most successful stock in the, in the space. Even though they're having a bad year.
- [27:46]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, I wonder if, you know, these, these companies jumped on the AI too late. Like the whole, you know, changing the emergence. Like, I tend to think maybe IES and DB maybe got a little bit of a late start on the AI trends and maybe that put them slightly behind. I mean, obviously we have attention. Metrics is like another category roughly the same like subcategory within the measurements space as well. So, you know, I don't know. I, I just don't know if they. Maybe they reacted a little too late. Maybe some of these trends that. And that maybe maybe put them behind a little bit.
- [28:17]
Eric
All right, well, we'll keep an eye on it and we'll keep going here. So there is a new head of ads for Netflix. That didn't take too long. Nicole Padis, who was formerly of Ampersand, is now the head of ads for Netflix. So Nicole's got a strong, like, advanced TV background, did a bunch of awesome stuff at Group M, was a key person at Zaxis, came up through 24 7. So she's part of that whole group of the Brian Lesser diaspora that's moved on to do some awesome things. All right, what you got on this one?
- [28:48]
Ari
I live in the Union Square area and so my favorite local bar that I might have a beer at after a long day of work in architecture is called Old Town. And I bet everyone who's listening to this podcast has had a meeting at Old Town at some point. So I went in there last week and I try to just like sit at the Bar and do a crossword puzzle. But no, I see ad tech people every time I go in there. And so Nicole sitting there with John Whitacombe, who is the head of products at Netflix and Products and who I used to work with at Freewheel, and they're like, gary, Harry, come here, sit down for a drink. And I was like, okay, fine. And they put on this whole act for me where Nicole's like. Because Nicole had resigned from Ampersand a couple weeks ago, so we knew she was on the market. And Nicole's like, I don't know, what job should I take? I don't know what's out there. And I'm like. And I say to her, oh well, there's a big job at Netflix available. Haha, Funny, funny because you're meeting with John and she's like, oh, that's so funny. I don't think that would be for me. And then this comes out and you know, come on, people like, you know, not only are you at my local bar, but also you're gaslighting me. And you know, it's not appreciated.
- [29:57]
Eric
Yeah, you can't out hustle the hustler Papara.
- [30:02]
Ari
I could have broke the story last week, but I didn't want to interrupt your privacy. Going to Old Town. Old Town is a sacred place. So congratulations, Nicole.
- [30:11]
Eric
Yeah, congratulations to Nicole. And the speculation on this one, which we covered after Peter left, was what direction does Netflix go in with this hire and how does that signal the future of their business? Where they're going to go internally? Were they going to go with another media leader with a strong Rolodex or another kind of leader that comes from the combination of demand side and programmatic tv? So they went with the third. So I think it's going to be interesting and maybe that signals that direction. What do you think?
- [30:45]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, no, I hope it does. I mean, I think for many reasons that inventory should belong and be more accessible. Right. And enabling more diversity and types of demands. I think that would just be a really good thing for everybody.
- [30:59]
Eric
All right, what you got?
- [31:00]
Ari
Also continuing my non serious conversation. So I wanted to give Nicole a hard time on LinkedIn about it. I forgot her last name. You go into this, I'm not great with names. So I searched for Nicole Ampersand and there's actually a woman named Nicole Ampersand out there. This is Steiny. I couldn't even find her. That is kind of an awesome last name.
- [31:22]
Eric
You have no comment on the implications for Netflix, the most important company in ctv?
- [31:27]
Ari
No, I'M still upset about this whole situation.
- [31:31]
Eric
We demand, we demand Nicole comes on the pod for some sort of retribution here. Yes, Nicole.
- [31:40]
Chris Paquette
Nicole Ampersand.
- [31:42]
Ari
If Nicole Ampersand is listening, you're welcome on the show. She's like a developer for Nike. She's on the Nike website team or something either.
- [31:51]
Eric
Nicole reset. All right. Also speaking of ctv, a company, that startup that Ari's involved with called Vibe, they had a cool launch this week. So we actually talked to Arthur, the CEO on Open Market. We'll post it early next week. But they produced a, I don't know, like an Apple like keyNote video. It's 10 minutes long. Each of the execs did a presentation about like product updates and the future of the business that a customer testimonial. Basically, this is a business, if you're not familiar with it, they help SMBs and performance marketers get on CTV with, you know, as little as a $50 credit card payment and, you know, some assets that they can use AI to produce and then, and then deploy. It's really cool. And you know, I just like, increasingly I'm a fan of a lot of these ad tech companies, you know, not, not to buy it, obviously, mixing it up from a marketing and product launch perspective. This is a, this is one that I think is, you know, on par with what the, what the Viant guys did and just want to give them a, give them a shout out. It's all over if you haven't seen it. But if you haven't seen it, we'll link to it in the newsletter. It was well done.
- [33:04]
Ari
They do a real good job with marketing. They sponsor many of the market, extra podcasts. So I appreciate that. I think this goes towards my thesis, not speaking for the company here because I'm on the board, but what I said earlier, which is integrated AI, they're selling to these small businesses who in many cases don't have TV commercials on hand. They may have YouTube ads or things like that, but they don't have really good content. And so AI is a perfect use case because they're a closed system from creative through bidding, through attribution. And hopefully that flywheel will make sense.
- [33:36]
Chris Paquette
I think it's a great area. I mean, like, that seems to be prohibitive even for, like, I see it in the healthcare space. I mean, when we're trying to use, I mean, so for healthcare providers, a small audience. So oftentimes the ROI of building a video asset in the healthcare provider campaign is just not there or it's perceived not to Be there. So maybe there's an element of what Vive is doing that could help lower the barrier to entry on the, on the CP side is that, you know, video assets, definitely videos under index and health care providers, just because the smaller audience of the ROI is not quite there, they end up running consumer and patient focused creative for healthcare providers.
- [34:12]
Eric
Yeah, I mean, sounds like a great area for. For deep intent to. To do some investing.
- [34:16]
Chris Paquette
Could help out. Yeah, maybe. Ari, you can get me connected.
- [34:21]
Ari
Yeah. I mean, geez, could you imagine trying to convince like the pharma regulatory people that AI generated creative would be okay? Yeah, that's a long road to ho.
- [34:33]
Chris Paquette
It's a long road. Yeah. Yeah. Could be interesting on that.
- [34:37]
Eric
Yeah. Well, one more on Vibe, because so much of ad tech is focused on selling to the enterprise or selling to the agency or selling to other ad tech. Vine, because of the focus on SMB, is as like an interesting set of challenges that you just don't get when you're selling to enterprises. I actually talked to Arthur about this. You got to listen to some of the stories he had with some individuals trying to game the system and buy TV ads to promote illegal activity or saying mean things. Sounds like they've got a good creative approval process in place, but there's just a whole other set of challenges that come with, you know, kind of serving SMBs, both from a service standpoint and just from like a practicality standpoint. So a couple of humorous anecdotes. Listen to, listen to open market. You'll, you'll, you'll get some laughs. Here's, here's actually one that I saw this week. Publicist let go of. I think it sounds about 100 employees over egregious RTO violations. So this has been a thing that a lot of the bigger companies have been pounding the table on. So Amazon went full RTO a couple of weeks ago, and globalsys apparently had a number of employees that were not at all sticking to the three days a week in office guideline and let them all go.
- [35:55]
Ari
What does egregious mean? Were they badging in or having their dog badge in or something?
- [36:00]
Eric
You're in a mood today. They didn't specify what egregious meant, so I interpreted that as either trying to pull some funny stuff like badging in and out or just not showing up and not giving any good excuse for it.
- [36:14]
Ari
Wasn't there that Facebook story like a week ago about employees that were using. What was the story? They were buying groceries or something?
- [36:20]
Eric
Yeah, there's A per diem for food. And they fired an employee that made, I think the number. I don't know why this stuff sounds in my mind some employee making $400,000 a year was spending the per diem meant for food. When you're kind of working late at Walgreens for like beauty products or something like that.
- [36:41]
Chris Paquette
Okay, so.
- [36:42]
Eric
Yeah. And doing it like on an ongoing basis.
- [36:45]
Ari
What was that movie quote like? If you're not stealing a little, you're probably stealing a lot. Is that like from. I can't remember what movie is from. If any listeners can chime in on that. Not that that's an endorsement for stealing a little, but appropriate quote at this very moment.
- [37:01]
Eric
How many employees do you have, Chris?
- [37:04]
Chris Paquette
Just close to 350.
- [37:06]
Eric
And then what's your in office? Remote hybrid setup, if at all.
- [37:11]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, so we're what we call a remote first kind of policy. So we have a limited size office. We actually just moved earlier this year to Bryant Park. And you know, we don't have a RTO mandate. But you know, I would say we are interested in kind of keeping people closer together. So like we have a good, a good swath of us are in the New York tri state area. We get together every so often. So we have this policy where I basically have the department leads come up with their own policies like kind of self organize themselves and every department's going to have their own kind of best practices and kind of optimize their own. So we kind of distribute the decision making to the departments themselves to come up with the best policy. But yeah, look, at the end of the day, we just want people to get together, do the work that they do, the work that they need to get done. And I don't necessarily care where it gets done as long as it's getting done. Right. And I think as long as they're part of a team and we have a good culture. So that's kind of been our approach, the whole thing. I also understand there's no real right answer and something that we're all trying to figure out still. And yeah, maybe, maybe some of these companies are taking a different perspective on it, but it's definitely still a tough issue, I think in some ways when you want to build a culture. But you know, obviously if employees want to have one flexibility, I think it's good. I think it's good to offer that. So yeah, we're trying to, we're trying to balance all the different dimensions here.
- [38:31]
Eric
Yeah. Has this changed for you and the company over the course of the past couple of years.
- [38:36]
Chris Paquette
No, it really hasn't. I mean, we've seen just a natural inclination, I think, within a set of our employees that want to get together and be together, which is nice. Right? And so we give those folks at home. I do think it's important to have a physical identity in terms of office space. So, yeah, we just got a new space. It's beautiful. I love it. And whether you come in once a quarter, once a year, several times a month, several times a week, I think it's good to have a place to call home.
- [39:04]
Eric
Yeah, makes sense.
- [39:05]
Ari
Totally wonderful. So, Eric, thank you for news of the week. And thanks, Chris Paquette, CEO of Deep Intent, for teaching us about the pharma industry and the programmatic overlap. It's a great conversation.
- [39:19]
Chris Paquette
Yeah, Ari, thank you. And Eric as well, thank you so.
- [39:22]
Eric
Much, Ari, Good luck in Europe next week, and we'll see you when you get back.
- [39:27]
Ari
Yeah. And also, we have actually a big announcement on the podcast next week, so stay tuned.
- [39:33]
Eric
Thank you for subscribing to Markitecture. New interviews are added every week at Markitecture TV in your favorite podcasting app.
- [39:48]
Ari
Thank you for listening to the Markitecture podcast. New episodes come out every Friday and an insightful vendor interview is published each Monday. You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at Markitecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to join@adtechgod.com.