← Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
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- [00:00]
A
This is adtech God and I command you to listen to this house ad. So if you're listening to this show, just know that you've really stumbled upon a giant network of content across advertising, marketing, media, publishing, and of course the people that work in this great advertising industry. So go to market, check out all of our brands. We have multitude of shows from the Brand Forum, the Advertising Forum, the Monopoly Report, the Ad Tech God Pod, the Market and more. We are bringing more podcasts to our network. We are consistently and constantly bringing on new shows. So check it out. Market or search for any of those brands in the app that you use to listen to this podcast. Enjoy the show and see you all soon.
- [00:49]
B
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. Hi, this is Ari Paparo. I'm happy to bring you another recording from our Architecture Live event back in March. This one is from the TV Rev track where we had a track of TV and CTV focused conversations. This one is with James Willite, the VP of product for Index Exchange and it's called how to Reach a Mass Audience when there's no Mass Media. Hope you enjoy this.
- [01:46]
C
Okay, well, thank you guys and welcome back for session number two. I am joined here by James Wilhite from our sponsor, Index Exchange. So let's give it up for Index Exchange for sponsoring this, making it free. And we are going to be talking about how to reach a mass audience when there's no mass media. So can you just super quickly tell everybody what Index Exchange is as part of our conversation so that for those who don't know.
- [02:15]
D
Sure. Index Exchange is one of the top SSPs in the world, globally. We're active in every major market and we're responsible for making sure that publishers can monetize their inventory as efficiently as they can.
- [02:31]
C
Okay, so let's get, let's just dive right into it. So we, we. You know, I just sort of laid out this whole world of fragmentation and whatnot. Like how are you guys seeing that impacting just. Or are you. Let's start off with the. Are you seeing that impacting the way agencies and buyers are thinking about media now and how to run their ads?
- [02:51]
D
Sure. So I want to talk first about the difference between how media was activated in the past and how it's activated today.
- [03:00]
C
Thank you. Yes.
- [03:01]
D
So for when you think about mass media, for me, I think about like in the 1950s, 1960s, you had Ed Murrow, you had Walter cronkite, they had 20 to 30 million active viewers every week. Then we get into more modern period of 80s and 90s. The Friends season finale had about 60 million viewers. The MASH season finale is actually at the very top, over 100 million viewers. So that's what we think of for mass media and how people were reached at a specific point in time when something was getting announced at a very specific day of the week at a very specific time. But now we come into a period where you're marking things over the course of a week. So Stranger Things Volume 1 reached about 60 million viewers in six days. So there's still fragmentation. Yes, but you're reaching the same viewers and you get to reach them where they are, when they are.
- [03:55]
C
Right, right. That's an interesting way to look at it, because it is. But at the same time, are we starting to see where, you know, you talk about like the news, like you're seeing it like, you know, Those guys had 20, 40 million viewers and now, you know, when there's a war on, maybe they get 4 million.
- [04:13]
D
Sure. Well, that's directly on broadcast. They're also getting read on their websites, in the newspaper. So it is fragmented all over the place. It's the same size audience. It's actually a larger audience. US population has grown from 250 million to 350 million for the course from 1990s to now. So it's a larger audience that you can reach. You just find different places to reach them.
- [04:38]
C
But now is that a struggle that involves a lot more work from everybody? Doesn't it like to try and figure out where these people are? So let me ask, how hard has it been to get the people who are buying this stuff to sort of wrap their head around that, like, okay, you didn't lose them, they're just all over the place. They didn't disappear.
- [04:58]
D
Depends on the channel we're talking about. But if we're talking about CTV in particular, it does become difficult because you get a lot of things obfuscated if you're not getting show level transparency, if you're not getting measurement, because ctv, for those of you that don't know, is just measured in pixels. So, you know, quartiles, you know, impressions, you know, general locations of people. But you have to cobble all of those things together to determine if you're Reaching that audience that you wanted to reach.
- [05:24]
C
Right, right. And talk about, let's talk about transparency a little bit. Like what? Just so if someone didn't know, like, what is that? I mean, why is it a problem?
- [05:32]
D
So today in ctv, buyers generally don't know what they're buying, so they end up just buying household names, major broadcasters, because they're, again, the measurement is limited. The show level data that comes through is limited. Genre and rating are becoming commonplace in CTV monetization, but that's a very limited scope. That's like saying, I want to target people who live near an airport. You might get lax and you might get Omaha. It doesn't create the level of transparency you need to really activate those buys.
- [06:07]
C
Right, right. And people who are used to knowing, like, okay, your ad ran at 10:14am on an episode of Modern Family between, on the third, second A.D. on the third pod between, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that just seems to completely freak them out.
- [06:24]
D
Yeah, that's right.
- [06:26]
C
So one of the things I hear a lot about is contextual targeting as a solution for this. I know you guys have been doing some stuff around that. So what is contextual targeting and why is it so cool?
- [06:38]
D
So contextual targeting is a newspaper ad, it's a billboard, it's a post up of a lost dog in your neighborhood. It is some type of advertising that really makes sense contextually where you are in the place and time. As an example, I subscribe to the Sunday Times. I open that. They don't know who I am when I'm opening that. It's not addressable advertising. There's a Tiffany ad in there every Sunday. They know who the demographic is of people that buy the Sunday Times, so they're willing to buy there. They don't know who I am. They don't know that I read it. There's no impressions. But that's contextual advertising.
- [07:16]
C
Got you. Gotcha. So is it always just that or is it sometimes? Like with ctv? Can it be other things like the yo, is it a funny scene? Is it a sad scene? Is somebody ordering a pizza? Like what?
- [07:27]
D
You know, it's all of that. So all of the contextual relevancy of scene level data is relevant when it comes to contextualization. But also the show level data, when you say something like, I want to target sports, that's very broad. It could be pickleball or it could be the Super Bowl.
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B
Right.
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D
There's a wide range of sports. So when you get down into the contextual data and you can see who's playing who in a sport specific match or what show is airing. If it's a 10 year old show or it's something that just aired last week, that adds a lot of contextual relevancy that's really important for a buyer to activate on.
- [08:05]
C
Why is this sort of taking off now? Like I remember say 10 years ago, even probably longer, when TV was first being digitized. One of the big complaints is that there was just no metadata around it that like when they were digitizing it they'd just be like Seinfeld comedy or like you know, friends S1, E2 and that would be it. Like yeah, you're on your own. So what's, what's, what's happened to sort of make that just more viable now.
- [08:28]
D
First major step was standardization. So the IAB Tech Lab added contextual signals into OpenRTB signaling so that actually could get transmitted to the buyer. One of the major blockers over the last 20 years has been VPPA, the Video Privacy Protection act that prevents anyone from sharing show level data tied to any personally identifying information like IP addresses or device IDs. So that's what has blocked it in the past.
- [08:59]
C
Right, right. So then what happened was like AI did it. I mean, so I'll feed it to you. So like I've heard that AI like has that people are using that. That's helped tremendously to sort of help people figure out what's going on. And tagging all this stuff is that
- [09:14]
D
some of it is done with AI. So there's scene level analysis that happens that some of our marketplace partners use to get scene level data. But then there's also hands on keyboard, we have a exclusive right now with gracenote where they have people watching episodes, watching movies and adding all of that contextual data by hand, show level data, directors, actors, short descriptions, and then that gets tied into metadata obfuscated behind an id.
- [09:42]
C
Okay. That's a really hard job to explain to somebody if you have it like, yeah, I just watch TV shows all, all day and I sort of talk right down what, what's going on?
- [09:51]
D
Sign me up.
- [09:51]
C
Right. Seriously. So yeah, so tell. What are you. So gracenote, where do they fit into this? Because my understanding is gracenote was just like the company that sort of matched my songs to my iPhone.
- [10:04]
D
Yes. So originally gracenote was that, and then they combined with Tribune Media, which is. So their identifier is tms, which is Tribune Media Services. But their identifier is what holds the key to all of that metadata. Right. So originally they were a EPG or electronic programming guide data provider. So when you turn on your TV and you see this channel, the channel list and what's coming up generally in the United States that's powered by gracenote. So they had all of that metadata and just recently they started activating it in advertising as well.
- [10:44]
C
Gosh, you guys. And what do you guys talk to me about what Index Exchange is doing with them?
- [10:48]
D
Yeah, so we again, we have an exclusive partnership where we get their TMS IDs from our publishers and then we enable brands and agencies to target groups of those TMS IDs. So we just ran an alpha test in December where a brand wanted to target NCAA bowl games and it served at 100% all serving to bowl games. And then we are able to give them their proof of purchase at the end of the day so they could see all of their impressions, their spend all of the key metrics that they would want to see tied to that show level data and also stripping out anything that's personally identifying. So there's nothing in our database tying that user watching behavior to the user themselves.
- [11:31]
C
Right. So in some ways it's almost like going back to the day when we bought like, you know, we bought daytime because we assume like lots of housewives were watching it when back when there were housewives. And, and you know, and, and that was the thing. So is it or is it. But I'm assuming it's a bit more sophisticated than that.
- [11:48]
D
It is and it isn't. Right. You, you can say these are the types of shows that this audience watches and they could be housewives, they can be college age students, it could be there, there's. When you do contextual targeting, it is a proxy to an audience. Right, Right. So you are still doing that same type of activation that you were doing before, but now you have more optionality of when and where you buy them.
- [12:10]
C
Got you. And that's. That sounds like it could solve a world of hurt for what's going on with CTV now. Just like you were mentioning the data around audiences and addressable. But I know a lot. It's hard to get a lot of those data sets and hard to get them to sort of align across all the different sort of bubbles, if you will, or all the different silos.
- [12:32]
D
Yes. And that's for us, that's where we work with our marketplace partners to add curation layers. So for those of you that don't know, curation has always happened at the DSP level historically where data providers would add in things along measurement, knowledge about the audiences first party data. We've brought that up a level to the SSP where we have the full scope of a publisher's inventory, since it's not impacted by traffic shaping. And then all of that layering of transparency and additional data can be added on for the buyers to know exactly what they're buying.
- [13:13]
C
Got you, got you, got you. Yes. And then that takes away the whole, like, what you're talking about. The. Those laws with many letters in them that prevent people from. That prevent people from sort of sharing information in this. This sense that like, okay, you know, I don't want to be over targeted. Like, you know, and then I guess the other question I was gonna ask you is like, how does this play in with the fact that unlike digital, we don't know who's watching the tv. We know that it's on in a certain household, and a lot of times I guess we're guessing who's watching it. But like, does that seem to. That that would seem to solve that, or am I making that up?
- [13:47]
D
So it. There are different ways of solving that. So there's household identifiers, there's knowing which. There's companies, there's marketplace partners of ours that know who's in a household, who's most likely in that household to be watching that show at that point in time, given on the constituents that live there.
- [14:07]
C
Right. Is that. They call it probabilistic. Is that the.
- [14:10]
D
Yes, it's probabilistic. That's right.
- [14:12]
C
Got you. Yeah. So go. So they're able. But. But overall you're still this way. This way. I'm assuming you're able to just sort of say, we're hitting this. We're hitting people who like this type of content or even. Or we're hitting people in this moment. Right. Like there was that famous or infamous, as the case may be, where they were like five years ago when they said, we're bombing Kyiv and the air raid sirens are going off and they're running a funny ad for Applebee's next to it and it's like, yeah, don't do that. So are we able to, like, are we at a point now where we can sort of identify different moments and tonality and stuff like that with contextual?
- [14:48]
D
Yes, there were many instances back in the 2000 teens where those situations happened. That one in particular with Applebee's was very unfortunate. But there's also, you know, like a plane crash and you get a plane ad next to it. There's all of these things that come up. But adding contextual relevancy helps solve that.
- [15:10]
C
Right.
- [15:10]
D
If you're just buying an impression based on an audience, you don't really have an idea of where they are and what they're watching and how it relates to that experience. So adding contextual information helps resolve that
- [15:23]
C
and then that plays into your whole curation thing, is that.
- [15:26]
D
Yes, that's right. So when you know the user and the inventory and everything about it, you're able to curate it and package the available impressions so that the buyer knows exactly where and why they're buying.
- [15:39]
C
Got you. Gotcha. Now when you guys, do you guys work with the publishers on the curation piece, like how does it, how does that all go down?
- [15:46]
D
So publishers, of course it's their inventory, so it's their right to have curation applied to their inventory. So we work with them. They're, they're aware of the curation that gets applied, they benefit from it because they end up getting additional demand, incremental demand that they wouldn't realize if they weren't utilizing those marketplace partners.
- [16:08]
C
Right, right. And how big is contextual targeting now? Like, you know, we hear about it a lot. Like, is it because, do you think it's, let me ask, do you think it's going to sort of become the dominant way people buy CTV just because it does sort of let you get around a lot of these privacy and other issues, or is it one of several tools? Kind of.
- [16:26]
D
It's definitely one of several tools. Right now addressability is king and it's almost like buyers have had this tool of addressability to be able to do performance marketing and know exactly what outcomes were driven to a specific user, to a specific household. So thinking about things contextually is a different frame of mind for a buyer and a brand. And they're not, they haven't all switched over to this model yet. We do have more and more strict privacy regulations happening globally in different markets that are preventing certain data from being shared or giving users more control over what they are and aren't willing to share. So I do think that having these contextual tools now and what we're building towards in the future is going to be picking up a lot of steam in the next 12 to 18 months.
- [17:19]
C
Right, right. Because the other thing that I hear a lot is that the data sets are not always that great, that a lot companies like Truthset have done studies that like, you know, there's, there's, there's a range of quality in the first party data sets that a lot of these Brands have. And they're sort of. Yeah, whatever.
- [17:35]
D
Like yes, of course, right. You have logged in users. But for me, if I go to a website and I log in, I unfortunately somebody has john doegmail.com and I use that all the time to sign up for things. And there's a lot of.
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C
He's the guy.
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D
If you're here, John. I'm sorry. So there's a lot of that type of data that lives within first party data sets.
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C
Right.
- [18:03]
D
So it's gonna vary widely but you're gonna have a company like, except Experian for example that has high fidelity on their first party data sets and that might be different than some random website that has a paywall.
- [18:18]
C
Yeah, yeah. And it's funny as much as we hear a lot about privacy and people being, you know, certain people being up and it hasn't really become the problem, right. That we all like whether, I don't know whether that's the industry is just doing a good job about it, but people don't, you know, like you hear it much more with the web. Like yeah, I accidentally fat thumbed a pair of boots and they followed me around for like a month. Like you don't really hear about it with tv.
- [18:42]
D
The main reason I'm going to get a little technical just for a second. The main reason is because on web and mobile you have access to JavaScript so you can run a lot of code and follow people and cookie them and do a lot of things that end up tracking users. In CTV that is limited. And you, you also don't have yet it's coming. There's certain providers that are doing this, but you don't have retail media activations proliferated across ctv. So there's no couch to cart right now. In a lot of platforms where you see something, you buy it or you put it in a cart and they can follow you and retarget you. So it's more of a technical limitation I would say right now. And where we're at in the market, I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up happening though.
- [19:31]
C
Okay, okay, so the last two minutes here, just if you had to tell these guys, like what are sort of the one or two key things that they should take away from this moment about sort of, you know, this, you know, how should they think about reaching a mass audience when there's not, when you can't just buy primetime anymore.
- [19:48]
D
The main thing is mass audiences are still here. They're more fragmented, they're not as easy to find as T.J.I.F. friday on NBC. But there's still the same users, a growing audience, massive opportunity for brands to reach their consumers. And it's actually a lot better. Right. There's a better opportunity to reach a user or a consumer where they're most likely to have a positive outcome. So we just have to flip our mind from the 80s and 90s, where we were thinking about mass media, to now reaching those mass audiences where they are.
- [20:31]
C
Excellent, Excellent. Well, thank you so much. So right now, guys, we have lunch coming after this, which we should make everybody happy. And after lunch, we will be back. Right? So we have on here, we have. Oh, did I just know. I just screwed up. We do not have lunch. I'm an idiot. We have one more panel before launch, which is Inputs and outcomes, Two truths and lies about the trends reshaping ctv. In the other room, you have fandom as currency about the WNBA and then Living Room. The Living Room threat bad box 2.0 and CTV botnet. That sounds scary. So thank you very much, apologies for the false scare, and we'll see you soon. Thank you. And thank you so much.