Ari (5:18)

Right.

Sean Black (5:19)

At the end of the day, it's, how do we start now? Putting more accountability to the creative that you're actually doing, but doing it in real time. And I didn't want to spoil some of the things that I'll probably talk about with Ari. But using AI in a way to make things faster, quicker, starting to analyze the creative, where people are watching what they're looking at, what are the intent that you're starting to see, and using that technology to help better the way that you're engaging with those consumers. So we just think about it in a way that you could really back that into your core strategy and making it really a valuable KPI than just saying, well, I've got X amount of completions or I got X amount of clicks. And by the way, you know, click through is great. And then the drop off is 90% on the website.

Ari (6:05)

Right?

Sean Black (6:06)

So someone said, well, we had amazing click through, but you got no one there. All bots. The last bit is, you know, the vanity metrics, God, I've been around long enough. I had hair at one point, I didn't, wasn't all gray. And, you know, so when we started thinking about all the vanity metrics and the way that to really assess performance, all we're asking you to do is start pushing it to the point of where you're actually measuring your audience, the profiling of who those people are.

Ari (6:34)

Right.

Sean Black (6:35)

How do you create the audience that you want that is more engaged with your product? And how are you going to create a definition of what that looks like and then pushing that into the media in that way? So with all of the insights getting from an AI to telling you what people are actually going to see in your creative, is it working? Is the intent correct from the signals that you're pulling together to really understand the dynamics and that and more of a fluid consumer in that depth. But then last is, you know, what's the attention that you're garnering? I mean, I really find in the marketplace now it's a little hard because everyone's talking about attention, but what does that really mean? Or what's the benchmark? What makes sense for you? I don't think anyone can hear, can say that they know exactly what's right or wrong. But I think we have to continually challenge the marketplace and again, say the fugazi.

Ari (7:28)

Right.

Sean Black (7:28)

What are you faking? What are you not? What's real? Do you actually own tech that can support some of the decisions that you're creating and the audiences that you're looking for? What's interesting is I probably blew through five slides faster than I should have, and I had a lot more time, but in that, I can go up and introduce Ari back onto the stage.

Jeremy (7:49)

Sir, I've been told I need to sit here.

Sean Black (7:51)

Okay. Well, they said my left. This side was better for me.

Jeremy (7:54)

Now since Jeremy went off script, I think we have to stick to the script or my.

Sean Black (7:57)

I could just turn off the stage.

Jeremy (7:58)

No, my organizer is going to have a heart attack. And then we just got to, like, you know, sit here and do our jobs.

Sean Black (8:03)

Sounds good.

Jeremy (8:03)

Thank you for that presentation. That was interesting. It forced me to Google the spelling of fugazi when we started building the schedule. And there are alternative spellings. I didn't know that. I was thinking I could have started.

Sean Black (8:13)

The mantra in the room. We all could have started pounding our chests.

Jeremy (8:15)

We could have been like DC Band. DC hardcore band. So. All right, so I'm going to ask the stupid question first. Like, if you're watching video, why do you care about attention? Like, aren't people watching the video?

Sean Black (8:26)

Yeah, I mean, I think when we think about attention, it's more so on the KPI of what are they doing?

Ari (8:32)

Right.

Sean Black (8:32)

We know that there's the leaning in.

Ari (8:34)

Right.

Sean Black (8:34)

And at the end of the day, those people are watching, are they? Are they not? So what our challenge is as a video company is how do you start looking at attention in a way that you know that not only someone is watching it, but they're actually doing something with it. And it could be using AI to really start to understand is the creative doing what it needs to do to draw your eye to a brand or to some sort of metrics.

Jeremy (8:58)

Attention, in a sense, is why so many, you know, TV commercials have humor in them. Because it gauges you or emotion or things like that.

Sean Black (9:06)

Well, like Chris had said, right?

Jeremy (9:07)

Yeah, right, Exactly. We don't have any flow erasure anymore. I'm glad we spoke about that. So what's an example? I mean, you showed some on the screen, but I'd love to hear what, like, in a practical sense, what are some of the common ways people. Advertisers are trying to grab attention?

Sean Black (9:23)

I think it's turned into a way now of. It's not about the shock and awe. I think the attention that we're trying to measure and create is how do you get someone like we have a travel and tourism client who typically would run a 15 or a 30 second spot and just be fine with that today. But I think the digital world, right. Whether it's CTV or olv, gives you the opportunity to now allow that consumer to choose different places to go to tour in that destination, or finding out more information and actually accounting for those metrics as the proper way. And I'll give you a funny example is that sometimes we actually see the opposite. That we see a higher engagement and lower completion rate because that person was able to engage with the brand sooner.

Jeremy (10:09)

Right, right.

Sean Black (10:10)

Than waiting till the end when finally got, you know, the logo appeared for the brand.

Jeremy (10:14)

So is, should we think about this sort of thing as an enhancement on traditional video ads or is there a problem? Traditional video ads?

Sean Black (10:24)

Look, I don't know if it's a problem. I think that people inherently, especially when you look at linear to digital. Right. It's. That's the asset I have.

Jeremy (10:31)

Right.

Sean Black (10:31)

And I don't want you touching my asset. I don't want you putting, you know, or I can't afford to put all of this different variations. Right. That goes back to when we first were in the web. It was, I can't do 900 different banner sizes.

Ari (10:43)

Right.

Sean Black (10:43)

This is what I have. That's it.

Jeremy (10:44)

Right.

Sean Black (10:45)

But I think being able to do that in a way it just helps, right? Yeah.

Jeremy (10:52)

And in the, in the traditional way, like if you think about rich media within banner ads as a subsegment, it's always like, okay, we're going to use interactivity on some portion of our media and then we'll reinforce the basic brand messages on the rest of it.

Sean Black (11:05)

But their biggest issue back then was the uptick in, in the tax of it. I'm charging you $3, $4 now. There shouldn't be.

Jeremy (11:14)

Well, is AI part of that? Is that because part of the. There's a cost of the vendor, you have to pay your point roll fee or. So there was the cost of creating the creative. Suddenly was a new cost you weren't expecting. So how is that, how is AI helping with that? Is that something that you're looking into?

Sean Black (11:30)

Yeah. So we use. So AI for us is actually a faster way to get to the same result that we would have. So we work with companies like, I'm sure you've heard Lumen or Neuron in the marketplace. Typically you would go and take your own creative, you'd put it into a platform, there Would be some people would have software on their desktop and then as based on what they're watching on the video, it would hotspot.

Ari (11:54)

Right.

Sean Black (11:54)

It would show you where those people are looking and engaging. What we try to do now is use Neuron in a way where it's faster. I could do it in a day. But it's against an AI model and we're putting that creative and saying, oh, by the way, your logo isn't up on screen long enough. The intent is really low. The engagement seems to be really low. If we now create more of a rich experience, putting it back into the AI model and measuring that.

Jeremy (12:20)

Sure. I'm not familiar with Neuron. They're a different startup.

Sean Black (12:22)

Yeah. So Neuron basically is. So Lumen was panel based.

Jeremy (12:26)

Right. Lumen's a panel based. Attention Neuron.

Sean Black (12:28)

There's no panel. So what they've done is they've taken all those signals in and allow us to actually just upload creative and then it does it. Same way that you would see from a Lumen output shout out to our.

Jeremy (12:38)

Sponsor Adelaide, who also agnostic.

Sean Black (12:42)

So it doesn't mean.

Jeremy (12:43)

All right, so in your slides, I thought it was interesting you showed this Danone example where it was prompting the user to ask an AI question of the brand. Is that a first of its kind? I've never seen that before.

Sean Black (12:56)

Yeah. So that was one of the first ones that we developed. It took a couple of things. And something also that we're doing is we're creating twins. So I'll explain how these two work together. Twins are as we're creating audiences and then allowing an AI to actually become that Persona, that segment. And then you could ask that segment questions. What are other places that I should reach out to you? What are other places to engage with you? But using the same concept in the creative. But the only thing, and this is something that everyone has to be consider of is you can't open it up.

Ari (13:28)

Right.

Sean Black (13:28)

You can't have chatgpt behind it.

Jeremy (13:30)

No.

Sean Black (13:31)

Because now the engagement can be really long.

Jeremy (13:33)

Yeah.

Sean Black (13:34)

So there's guardrails that you're putting in some of the acceptance. But using AI in a way where you could change the image like so for example, I'll go back to my kids marketing days. If I was Hasbro and I had several play school toys to use. But I'm a parent of a kid 0 to 2, I may not know what toy to use. So I may prompt different questions and the toy actually comes up in the creative.

Jeremy (13:56)

Did you actually build that yourself? Or is there a vendor involved? Like, how did you take us through the steps? I think people will be pretty interested.

Sean Black (14:03)

In hearing about that if anyone knows. So dailymotion is I left earlier and made fun. But in all seriousness, we were born the same week as YouTube, so we've been around a long time. We are part of Canal Plus.

Jeremy (14:18)

You have to say it that way.

Sean Black (14:19)

I have to. I'm legally held to that. So we have an entire studio that can do pretty much anything. Of course, we are using third party.

Jeremy (14:29)

Yeah. You're not building a model. You don't have a bunch of GPUs or anything.

Sean Black (14:32)

But thinking through the concept and then being able to just punch these out for our clients. So yes, it's done through studio that we have as a part of the whole.

Jeremy (14:40)

And there are companies who are building per brand commercial chatbots.

Sean Black (14:45)

Yeah. And we don't claim to be creative. I'll never sell you creative. It's usually just part of what we're doing.

Jeremy (14:50)

All right, let's talk about Fugazi, because you did bring that up. So let me throw out a metric at you and you give me your reaction video complete rate.

Sean Black (15:00)

I mean real. I think it's bullshit, but it's real.

Jeremy (15:04)

All right, now we're getting somewhere.

Sean Black (15:05)

Here's the difference.

Jeremy (15:06)

Why is it bullshit?

Sean Black (15:07)

Because unless you can really put the metric behind it to understand who the real audience is that you are targeting and being able to understand at the end of the day, matching it back. So here's the example. Anyone can go and book media. And by the way, I sat on the agency side for 20 some odd years. So I kind of hear all this crap in my head at the same time. But when someone says I got this great completion rate. Okay, but you could have run me in an app that had to have a high completion rate. And that's wonderful. But at the end of the day, I got no uptick.

Jeremy (15:39)

Right?

Ari (15:40)

Right.

Sean Black (15:40)

And I think again, Chris stated it well. Is putting the things behind it to whether you're measuring the intent or you're measuring conversion or you're measuring insights in terms of the audiences and understanding, are you actually in hitting the right person?

Jeremy (15:55)

Well, this brings up the general question about intent metrics. Whether a metric is. We all want it to be calculated properly. That's the first stage. But does it correlate with business outcomes is really what we want to know. I think it's hard. So do attention metrics correlate with business outcomes for advertisers?

Sean Black (16:15)

I think if you set up the proper KPI in the beginning. And that's what I was trying to allude to in the deck.

Ari (16:20)

Right.

Sean Black (16:20)

It's. Look, not every KPI is right, but sometimes you have to think about what is the KPI that works for me and my business. So we have clients, again, like a tourist client who may be just promoting a destination or a state or a place to go. And they're not necessarily having us link off to Expedia to book the trip, but for them, if I can drive people to actually find out more places to go, things to do to them. Engagement's a great metric because they're proving that the people we're serving the ED to are the right people.

Jeremy (16:50)

So engagement, meaning mousing over the thing. All right, now what engagement means also is going to differ enormously depending on the platform. So watching a video ad on a phone, desktop versus television in the living room, how does that take? How does that cut through the planning and execution?

Sean Black (17:11)

I think. Well, what's interesting is that I made this quote a long time ago. No one would be talking about QR codes and advertising unless Covid hits.

Ari (17:20)

Right.

Sean Black (17:20)

I mean, outside of the fact technology's equaled everything out. But you couldn't go to a restaurant. You couldn't. Everyone was trained to start using QR codes. Well, if you use QR codes in ctv, right. Being able to.

Jeremy (17:31)

Gotta be fast. You gotta be really fast.

Sean Black (17:33)

But. But we've proven that the people who use them as a postage stamp. That's funny. Well, there's also a pause button, so don't. You can pause, but I'm not looking at as a primary KPI. I'm saying it's sort of like a free add on to what you're already trying to create as these.

Jeremy (17:50)

Right. I think most people agree with you about QR codes.

Sean Black (17:53)

So looking at each of the sort of mediums and what they do really well, I'm not going to put a QR enabled creative running on a mobile environment.

Jeremy (18:02)

Right? Yeah. How would you take a picture of it?

Sean Black (18:04)

Correct. Exactly.

Jeremy (18:04)

You'd have to borrow your friend's phone and then they'd be the converter.

Sean Black (18:07)

Then it'd be awkward.

Jeremy (18:08)

That'd be confusing.

Sean Black (18:09)

Then you'd know what I'm looking at.

Jeremy (18:10)

Right. Okay. Aside from QR codes, Okay. I love talking about QR codes, but let's talk about a more pragmatic example. Let's talk about an interactive video ad. What are the considerations on interactive video ad, let's say in a living room.

Sean Black (18:28)

Well, I guess it would be the same type of environment. Right. So you see now a lot of people are using the remotes themselves. Being able to enable the Roku remote or Comcast was doing. I've seen where you can now click right or left and see more information. So that's really what we're talking about here.

Ari (18:44)

Right?

Jeremy (18:45)

Right.

Sean Black (18:45)

At the end of the day, that person may not have spent time watching that spot at all. They weren't engaged. But having some sense of engagement works in that environment in mobile or in game will change what the creatives to do to based on. Look, I'm not going to go and put what I just showed you with all of that high engagement into a mobile placement that's going to be this big. You'd be foolish. Right, Right. That's the fugazi.

Jeremy (19:10)

Now let's talk about fugazi as a relate. Does anyone know what fugazi is? It may not be all native English.

Sean Black (19:14)

Everyone.

Jeremy (19:15)

It's like a pretty obscure word in English. It means bs. Okay, so what was your point about audience? So I thought that was pretty interesting where you had on the one hand someone who claims to be an NBA, NBA fan and the other hand you had someone who actually was taking actions that an NBFN would take, like looking up the rosters and the points and stuff like that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sean Black (19:38)

Yeah. So my point is but it's about challenging where you're and who you're working with. At the end of the day, what are they actually building the audience off of? I could talk for us and you know, we didn't want to make this the commercial for Dailymotion but we're a video player. We see 4.5 billion streams a month. We have search signals, social signals that we pull in. We have predictive targeting being able to understand where those people may be going. So we have real tech that allows us to create what that Persona, what that person essentially looks like and then dimensionalize them. It's again, not just about who you think that person is, but what are their interests and what are those other interests that they may we talk about a term years and years ago frequency over time.

Ari (20:23)

Right.

Sean Black (20:24)

The amount of searching that you do starts identifying who you are in the time that you're doing it. That's kind of what we're doing. But we've built a model to be able to consume our video player data again. So if someone comes to you and says oh yeah, I know your audience is better, well how. How do they know your audience is Better. Do they really have technology or are they just pulling something off of publishers websites that they've got a tag on.

Jeremy (20:47)

Right. This resonates a little bit with what Dr. Roberts talked about this morning from DDM. Did you have to see that?

Sean Black (20:53)

Yeah, 100%. And the philosophy and the way that dot dash and the way they think about 100%.

Jeremy (21:00)

Tell us a little bit about your approach to identity. Are you just throwing identity out the window and using these sort of behavior signals or is like identity part of the package?

Sean Black (21:10)

We don't. So our signals are created as Personas and audiences. We don't pass them to anyone. So they're not set up in that way. They're not a cookie. They're not. I mean it's a little bit different in France because of just the sheer. I mean we are number one over YouTube so we have a lot more cookies in that base.

Jeremy (21:26)

You're like Jerry Lewis. You're big in France.

Sean Black (21:27)

Yes, exactly. Yes, I'd like to believe that. I don't know if I'm going to be as big in New York after this but. But for us it was about when people go right now into platforms. They're using IAB segments. They're typically. Or you're the larger companies who have one to ones and you can match but who knows? That person could have been an old segment or an old audience. And same thing with the iab. For us, it's what we're doing is looking at today based on that information and then giving you a better way to just understand where to reach that person. That's it.

Jeremy (22:02)

Yeah, that makes sense. How does some of the stuff you're talking about, attention, custom, creative identity, how does it translate through programmatic pipes?

Sean Black (22:13)

It doesn't.

Jeremy (22:14)

Okay.

Sean Black (22:15)

I mean in all honesty, I mean look, when you're a publisher on our side and there's hands on keyboards on that side, I'd have no control.

Ari (22:25)

Right.

Sean Black (22:25)

I mean I could say that we could optimize and change some things. I mean we typically are a lot more managed service because of the things we're doing. But it really comes down to that person and what box they're checking when they go and activate a campaign. You know, for us we're using it in a way to then just better the signals.

Jeremy (22:43)

Right. Well, obviously as a seller you prefer advertisers to be close to be working with you direct. But if you were just putting yourself in the head of a buyer, what would you be doing differently given what you just said? Like if you were in the mind of a strategic buyer thinking about buying video, looking for attention. Does it make sense to continue using programmatic or not or somewhere in between?

Sean Black (23:04)

How do you think about that problem in that context? The way you put it, it could be both.

Ari (23:08)

Right.

Sean Black (23:08)

So I can have a client who comes to us who is buying PMP or a pg, and based on what they understand of their audiences or the signals that they've put in, they're getting some results. And again, they're setting their KPIs on their end. What we do is we step in at that point and look at what their objectives are and what they really understand of the audience, and we create a playbook. So now what I'm doing is I'm handing you a playbook that says these are the types of properties these people are on. This is the types of things that are important to them. This is where you should predict in terms of what you're running. And then, of course, I'm using that naturally, just as a part of our managed service.

Jeremy (23:44)

Right, right. It seems like many publishers are moving to sort of this hybrid push and pull kind of model.

Sean Black (23:50)

That was my point, is that's the theme when I was just saying it's the fugazi part of it. Right. You have to then ask the company or the publisher, how the hell are you doing that? Like, where are you really getting that from? And when I could sit there and say, I have a video player, I'm seeing this stuff.

Jeremy (24:08)

Yeah, it's very easy. And I think later on there'll be more discussion about this, about how publishers can say one thing. But whether it's true or not is let the buyer beware. All right, well, Sean Black, thank you so much for being here. This is a great conversation. Give him a big ham.

Host (24:34)

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Jeremy (24:50)

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