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Fluency’s Mike Lane on Automating Digital Ad Ops, AI Scale, and Execution Infrastructure
00:17:23
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- [00:11]
A
Welcome to Market Tech, where you can get smart fast with in depth interviews of technology executives. I'm Ari Papara. I'm joined today by Mike Lane, who is the founder and CEO of Fluency. Mike, thanks for being here.
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B
Thanks for having me.
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A
So what is Fluency?
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B
Fluency, we are operational infrastructure that focuses on large scale enterprise digital advertising execution.
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A
Okay, In a nutshell, infrastructure for execution. Okay, I think we're done here.
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B
Exactly.
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A
You claim to your marketing tagline is digital advertising operating system. I don't know what that means. What does that mean?
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B
Right, so think about like the advertising ecosystem. We focus really on advertising execution and we build an operating system that is really focused on, you know, you've got your media plans, budget to get all these things. The hard part after that is actually going and creating all the accounts, setting up campaigns, building the creative, managing them. Right. And doing all the actual work. So we take everything in terms of like advertising execution and we automate that entire thing back to like all the reporting and then pushing back into your systems like whatever you need after that. We do all that heavy lifting, but which has been historically like the hard manual part of everything. And there's a lot of point solutions out there that address little things. We cover the entire spectrum and roll that up into one operating system where people can do all the advertising execution.
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A
All right, so based on that explanation, it sounds like sort of adopts on steroids. Why don't you take us through like, you know, different customer types and what they use you for. I don't know if it's easier to start on the buy side or the sell side.
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B
Yeah, A typical customer, they'll range anywhere from, you know, agencies and brands. Right. Typical brand icp. Right. Ideal client profile. On a brand side, they typically have, you know, anywhere north of $100 million in revenue and have an in house marketing team. Right. They are looking for tools specifically for their teams to do more. And a lot of times, right, um, we all know budgets are constrained at brands these days, right? And those brands are looking to do more like activate their data, use their inventory, use stuff from their data warehouse or new creative tools. They want to merge all that together and do more. They want to launch TikTok, right. They have no more heads, right. In their departments. That is more work. They need to figure out how to do that and automate. And we provide that to brands all the way up to, yeah, Fortune 50 companies. Right. And then on the agency side, right, typically agencies, they'll have at least 300,000amonth. Is Kind of like the floor where it kind of makes sense where they start feeling that pain. Points of like managing that type of portfolio all the way up to Hold Coast. It's kind of who we sell to.
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A
Right? And what's an example of like where, where you get value from this? You mentioned TikTok. How would, how would your, how would fluency help with like enabling TikTok and starting on that?
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B
Yeah. So if you are maybe a franchise or multi location, either agency or brand, right? You're on Google, you're probably on Meta, right? You're doing some of the basic stuff, maybe you're doing a little bit of display stuff, retargeting. And now the higher ups want to be advertising and it's been decided like we're gonna, we're gonna launch campaigns on TikTok to reach younger audience, right? If that's the case, you get dropped on that. If you're an ad ops there, right? You just get a whole bunch and be like, okay, I'm multi location, I got 800 locations right now I need to go set up 800 accounts on TikTok suddenly, right? And be like, okay, that's going to take me based on the five and a half hours to get everything set up per account that's going to take us based on our current schedule, 3.8 years to do. Right. It's not feasible for that to happen. Right. So what ends up happening is we have a low no code system where you can build that logic and say I already have the information about all those accounts, I need to go set that up. In TikTok we integrate with all the APIs, right. And then we automatically set up all those and you can be launched tomorrow. Helps you build the creative pull, link all that data together, get the strategies together and you can build infinite logic. You can say I only want to advertise on sunny days in that market. Right? You can because you're just grabbing data from the world and you're like mapping it all together. But you can also do things like really creative things, right? There's folks that are in like multifamily that say like I only want to advertise when you know, my occupancy rate falls below a certain thing or an automotive, right? It may be like I only want to advertise my service business when my service base 60 days out is below a certain threshold or my inventory, right? I want to stop advertising inventory of any sort of when my inventory count goes below 5 or 10 automatically. Like you're just creating all this smart automation that you would normally want to do, but you just build it once and then you can apply it to over and over and over, and the machine just does it. And there's no humans in there to, like, make the mistakes that often happen. Right. Budgets forget to get turned off, or I forgot to turn off the Thanksgiving promotion, and it's now April, like, Right. All that money wasted on those ads that are still running. Like, that stuff should not be happening these days.
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A
So it's more than just adopts, you know, you have a layer of intelligence. Here is this like, Claude, where I just like type in, you know, stop showing my Thanksgiving ad. And it all works.
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B
Right now there's. And this is like one of the big things out there, right? With AI. Now everyone's talking about how well AI could just do that and be like, well, that's a sledgehammer, right? And you just need like a little. A little hammer, right? There's, there's like scope and size. So we like that type of automation. And monitoring already happens. You don't need AI to do that. You can just look for expired messaging in ads automatically and have agents that do that work without using AI, without using that expense and those credits. Right, Right. But the AI layer, that is exactly what we're doing and building that next level of intelligence to say, like, hey, there's 16 expired ads running right now. Do you want me to go turn them off? Before you would go say, yeah, I won't. Click, click, click, turn them off. Right. It would make it really easy, really simple. It saved like 90% of the time. And now the agents will be asking the question, do you want to just turn it off? And you say, yes. And it go. Turns them all off. It starts doing the actual work. Right. That's where we are now.
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A
You just. You released a product recently called Muse AI. So what? Tell us about that.
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B
Yeah. Muse essentially is our version of an AI agent, right. We just labeled it and call it Muse. Everyone's got a cool name for their AI, right? Ours, you know, for a long time we've already had the chatbot, right. Give me information about my data that gets better and better all the time, where I can ask questions of any sort and say, like, how much did I spend yesterday? What are my campaigns or accounts that are in trouble? You can ask it any question. It'll give you the response it does that work for you? It's smart and intelligent already. But then we're just building upon that to be like, provide me reporting. Provide me Daily summaries build me reporting for my clients, right? So right now like one of the heavy lifts is you can do all the advertising you want if you're an agency, right. And be really good at that. But at the end of the day you need to tell them how well you're doing or poorly you're doing, right? Talking back to your clients. Like we help with even some of that stuff and we use AI to build automatic reporting for them all the way to the point like you can actually build a one minute video with voiceovers describing everything for clients already. That's nice, we can deliver that, right? So be like, here's your daily report for last week, here's a one minute and you're looking at all the statistics, you're pulling out the wins, you're looking at the losses, you're looking at recommendations. It does all that for you automatically. And that's all driven with AI.
- [08:47]
A
That's pretty cool. So in particular when we talk about cross channel, you know, the ability to push and pull things across all these disparate channels like TikTok, Instagram, etc. Is important. But how do customers think across channels? Because you can't like Dedupe really and you can't like, you know, use the same apples to apples, right? So how do they use your system for that?
- [09:08]
B
A lot of it is the getting the ads, the accounts created, the ads up, the money managed, right? That is like the heavy lift. Everyone comes with a strategy, right? Or most people do and they say like I want this much on social, right? I want this split on TikTok and Meta or and I want this much on Google. Like everyone's coming with that sort of plan. Our tools do allow, right, Some cross functional like mapping in terms of budgets. Like if Microsoft Bing is not able to spend their entire budget, right. It can put some on Google and use that up if you want to be able to use your full budgets every month. So there is some crossover in terms of that but like pulling the reporting back and the impressions. Yes, everything looks a little different on all the channels but everyone wants to be able to get that all back in one spot, right? So that they can like look at that side by side look at performance. This gets into like yeah, you want to a B test. You're able to do that quickly now because you can see all the data in one system and there are reporting platforms out there, but they're never tied to the actual execution side either of like being able to like do something with that data after.
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A
Yeah, I appreciate the Bing call out. We don't get that too much often on this part. So you know, we skipped over the sell side use cases. So you have customers that are media companies and publishers as well. Yeah. What do they use you for?
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B
Go back to like the legacy of like media companies out in the space, right? They've been like the, the cornerstone of like a lot of small businesses and a lot of small communities and they have millions of businesses in the United States that they've been supporting and selling digital media services too. Right. For since the dawn of like the Internet here they've been trying to like figure out how to like transform their businesses. So we support a lot of media businesses now as they are trying to make sure that they remain relevant in providing those solutions to those small businesses. So look at media companies, right? They may have like 300 flower shop owners, right. A lumberyard. All these people actually need to be advertising and they're able to like package those, those things up. But what their struggles are, right? And labor costs have gone through the roof just in terms of like being able to do effective media management. Customers want to be showing up on TikTok and these other places, right?
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
Like as a small business owner, you don't understand the constraints of how that actually like gets done in the back ends, right. Of people pounding keyboards and the right. Small businesses have small budgets and small budgets. Right. You can't put a lot of labor into that. So the answer is automation.
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A
Right?
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How are we going to be able to do this at massive scale and have strategies for flower shops, for gas stations and garages and all these smaller businesses where we can go take their data, which they already have in their systems, right. And be able to launch and build creative. And that's like the cool thing that AI is doing now, right? Is now I can build cooler creative and more effective creative, right?
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A
Yeah. Especially for the small advertisers who don't have the capabilities.
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B
Right. If you look back even five years ago, right. If I wanted to create a 30 second ad, whether that's for connected TV or these days like YouTube, right. Those would cost at least $5,000. Maybe you can get a $3,000, right? A good one's, $10,000. Be like now with AI, we're going to be able to produce those for dollars, potentially cents.
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A
Yeah, right, right.
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B
That changes the game. And now small businesses can show up different and media companies are in that spot to be able to provide that value. But they need the infrastructure, right. And the systems to be Able to execute against that now.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So that's what we provide a lot of those, those media companies these days.
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A
Right. It makes, makes a ton of sense. So you recently hired a good friend of mine, Eric Picard. Yeah, he's no lightweight. So it seems like you have a pretty ambitious vision here. Where is this all going? Like, is it, you know, a couple years from now where you're just, you know, hey, hey, Fluency, you know, run my campaigns, don't make mistakes or is there, you know, what's, what's happening here on some level?
- [13:31]
B
Like, like, obviously the agents in automation are moving in that direction and we're pioneering that. Right. Big picture. Right. There's trillion dollars of global digital advertising spend out there today. We've been testing and scaling fluency now for five years. Right. We started essentially building this in 2018, 2019 and went to market product market test, 2020, 2021, and we've been scaling this. We've been about 3 billion on our platform today already. Our current clients, you know, they manage well, more than double that they're bringing onto the platform. And our goal is to go get $100 billion on our platform and be the system of record for massive scale. But that is like meeting the market too. We had to be able to do that. So when you think about, like the automation and advertising, we already save up to 92% of button clicks in time already. And that's like, with just a little bit of AI right where this is going. Yes. There's going to be a lot more that you're able to do better creative automating the button clicks after with agents and even configuring our own software to be able to do more. Right. We are able to, like, look at what people have been doing and figure out what their strategies are. You ask a lot of, like, companies and be like, what is your strategy? Like, oh, I just give it to Susie or Tom and they know what to do. They have magic and be like, well, what is the science behind that? What is the logic patterns? Right. And figuring out a lot of those things is part of the art of, like, transforming these businesses from what they have been doing into, like, getting the automation in place.
- [15:14]
A
Got it. All right, let's finish up with a quick lightning round. I'll ask you some quick questions, you give me some relatively quick answers. You know, what is your number one market challenge?
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B
Number one market challenge is everyone's distracted by AI and is a little bit paralyzed right now of like, what do I do? Like, where do I go, that's at this moment in time, right? Going into quarter two, 20, 26, people are just like all over the place, right? And I think a lot of industries are feeling that and seeing that there's a lot of noise in the markets. So it's just. That is like the challenge right now is people just don't know what to do.
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A
Yeah, Deer in the headline situation, right?
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B
Yeah, exactly.
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What is your number one competitive advantage?
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Our number one competitive advantage is we pull it all together. No one pulls it all together at scale like we do.
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A
I ask everyone this, so don't be insulted. Why wouldn't the Googles and Amazons of the world crush you?
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B
Crush us? We enabled. We're enablers for them. We're ecosystem enablers.
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A
Right.
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B
People are not going to just pick Google or Amazon or TikTok at the end of the day, Right. They need a system that integrates with all of them. And we are close partners with all, all of those channels, so.
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A
Gotcha. Last question. If Fluency was an animal, what animal would it be?
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B
Wow. Stumps.
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A
Don't say lion or tiger. Those are cliche.
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B
No, I think it's probably like more elephants, right? It is big, it is infrastructure, it goes and does a lot. So, yeah, it's an automation.
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A
Automation, like one of those working elephants from Southeast Asia. Plants and stuff.
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B
Yeah, exactly what I'm thinking.
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A
All right, all right, sounds good. Well, Mike Lane, the founder and CEO of Fluency, thank you so much for joining us.
- [17:11]
B
Yeah, absolute pleasure, appreciate it.