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Adam Singolda Wants Publishers To Collaborate To Fight AI Junk
00:32:43
Next in Media talked to the founder and CEO of Taboola about the state of the open web, what he thinks about the Google trial, and why publishers may have to start working together to compete for consumers' time and advertisers' wallets.
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- [00:01]
Mike Shields
Accurate up to date customer information is critical to your business growth. It all starts with quality data. Epsilon has spent decades ethically sourcing the industry's top ranked consumer database covering every marketable U.S. household. With a commitment to transparency and privacy, see how you'll predict future buying behaviors and build a lifetime of customer loyalty. Discover the deepest customer Insights available@epsilon.com data that's epsilon.com data. This week on Next to Media, I spoke with the ever optimistic and always thoughtful Adam Singola of Taboola. Adam and I talked about why he's actually really optimistic about the open web, but he thinks publishers may need to take some drastic action to grapple with AI. Adam also gave his take on Yahoo's comeback, Google's legal troubles, and how publishers can compete with social video algorithms. Let's get started. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Next Media. I'm Mike Shields. My guest this week is Adam Sangola. He is the CEO of Taboola. Hey, Adam, thanks for being here.
- [01:05]
Adam Singola
Hello. Hello. Good being here.
- [01:07]
Mike Shields
Great to talk to you because you are a person that will be, will talk about a range of things and have a take on everything. So I always appreciate that, so much going on. But I want to ask you about, you know, we're, we're still working. We're kind of in this weird period now where we're waiting for what's next with the Google trial. Been kind of fascinating though. And you've been, you've, you've seen this played out. Like what, what do you think about what is going to happen? Realizing that this thing might get dragged on forever. And I don't know if we're going to feel the ramifications of the market right away. But where do you think this might be going? And are people in the industry bracing for something or moving on?
- [01:41]
Adam Singola
Talk about first question, huh?
- [01:42]
Mike Shields
Mike, jump right in.
- [01:44]
Adam Singola
Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, I don't want to be speaking on behalf of the doj. That's obviously above my pay grade. I can tell you the way I think about it is there's a lot of things that Google is doing that works obviously for advertisers. They have about 10 million advertisers who work with them. That obviously means they're doing something good for them because they stick around and they work with the things that, you know, I'm always kind of bothered by or think are challenging to me and being like this for a long time. One is that, you know, Google, for the life of them will have this sort of identity crisis with their partners. They would always Prefer, I think, you know, to keep a consumer within the Google ecosystem versus sending that person to a publisher, to journalism, to an app. And we've seen this, you know, over the years. You know, that was with publishers that we've had E commerce websites. Now with Gemini, you know, we're, we're being challenged with traffic.
- [02:36]
Mike Shields
There's more and more time on their stuff, less time on other places. Yeah. That you see and we never really know.
- [02:40]
Adam Singola
Yeah, there's, there's, there's a misalignment because when someone sticks around within the Google ecosystem, they obviously have something to gain. And when they lose the consumer to a third party, which essentially built the Internet as we know it now, was.
- [02:53]
Mike Shields
Their promise initially send you where you want. Yeah, that was.
- [02:56]
Adam Singola
There's this forever conflict which creates anxiety because if you're a publisher, big or small, you over time, you know, you grow to rely on that traffic. If you're an E commerce website, big or small, you rely on that. And now with Gemini and depression that, you know, Google is filling from OpenAI, you know, who knows what's going to happen. So I think that is one area of tension that I'm not sure how it gets resolved, if at all. Then you have the advertiser community that obviously, like I said at the beginning, appreciates the value they get from Google, but they always have this challenge of they don't know what is this black box really doing and how is it being spent on and operated or is it being spent elsewhere and how do they make those decisions and who makes those decisions. And so there's this tension that exists for the most part, I think, not as a lack of value because Google creates perhaps the best value in the inner industry to advertisers, but whether from a human gap, which is control and transparency which we as humans who operate businesses want. This is kind of the puts and takes on that business which now they're being, you know, they're navigating, you know, with the eyes of the government, but very publicly.
- [04:03]
Mike Shields
Right.
- [04:04]
Adam Singola
We as an industry, we just want I think hopefully to see Google making more good decision versus bad decision as relates to us.
- [04:12]
Mike Shields
You're right, like Google has been friend and foe, but there's, there is this anxiety and this like, I don't understand how it works kind of feeling. But is there a sense that because people shouted about some of these things that they're accused of for a long time, should this have happened years ago? Was the government too slow here? What's the feeling among the market that.
- [04:31]
Adam Singola
You Hear again, I don't know about the speed of like the investigation, all that stuff, but there's also multiple investigations. There are two. So. So you know, again it's, it's not my field. I think to me what I always hope companies at the size of Google choose to do is to put out their identity, their culture, their policies about who they always promise to be. How do they always promise to protect their partners and clients in a way that rely on them? Because right now I can tell you we work at Taboola with 9,000 publishers and 15 to 20,000 advertisers. I constantly hear about what's going to happen with Gemini. Will traffic go away? I get this question all the time. I get this question all the time about transparency and control. How do we know, you know, how is our money being spent and how will that change over time? Can we rely on that? Can we hire more employees because we know that line of revenue is consistent or not? I hear that all the time. You know, I hope that as Chapula, I can tell you we're now almost $2 billion in revenue guidance this year. I hope that we'll forever have an opportunity to be transparent with people around us. This is who we are and this is who we hope to be forever, especially as you become bigger.
- [05:42]
Mike Shields
So given that's really interesting that you're hearing that all the time. It's not an easy time to be. It's never been easy to be a digital publisher. It's not easy now. Certainly you got this anxiety with you got the cookie thing going on, what's going on with Google, what's going to happen with AI that made for advertising thing. There's all this noise and not to make this podcast start out incredibly negative at you know like there's a lot of talk about what should we worry about the open web and is it viable? Is that motivating to brands? We can't walk away from the open web as important versus I got to worry about my own goals and stuff.
- [06:15]
Adam Singola
I can tell you what I tell my partners, our clients and investors as well. I was never more optimistic about the open web and for the following multi field reasons. One, when you look at the AI revolution and how far are we from adopting AI fully, It is unbelievably far away from us. If you look at publishers, big or small, how much of their business overall is optimized using AI? Very little. Are we really personalizing the experience for consumers like TikTok does? Are we really offering you lifetime value journey so that Sometimes you see commerce, sometimes you see video. We'll offer you an email subscription. We're so far away from that. As I look at still the engagement of most publishers and again, not to get too specific but you know, call it the average publisher, they get, they get between one to two pages per session, right. So that means the average person reads one to two articles. Maybe that's not enough. They should read 3, 4, 5, 10, 20.
- [07:12]
Mike Shields
Yeah, that's a fleeting moment to grab them.
- [07:14]
Adam Singola
That's not enough. And it's not for lack of value because publishers and going back to the reason why, I'm optimistic. So what I think we can do so much more with AI2. I think in the world of social networks and TikToks and all of those, you know, news or quality news plays such an important role for humanity. I mean we, we never want our children to discover things that matter like science or healthcare or technology or news to be discovered by user generated content environments when there's no policy, no editorial, God help us all.
- [07:44]
Mike Shields
That's scary. Yeah, right.
- [07:45]
Adam Singola
So, and I think you're seeing iconic platforms, agree, right. You're looking at companies like, you know, Apple, Samsung and other great iconic brands who surface news to consumers. Why do they do that?
- [07:58]
Mike Shields
They're prioritizing it for a reason. Right?
- [07:59]
Adam Singola
Because they think it matters. It matters to consumers, it matters to our future. Again, that's my belief. I'm not speaking on behalf of them. I believe they do it because they think it plays an important role for consumers and the type of decisions they can make and in the engagement they can have. So I'm looking at that, I'm saying that's encouraging to me. I imagine that over time we'll see news in, you know, Tesla should have news in every car. And we're going to see many great companies saying, well, we should have personalized news within our systems. So AI lack of yet of adoption excitement and it gives me, you know, optimistic point of view. I think that we're going to see a whole new slew of distribution channels, not only search and social. We're going to see users discovering news in their car, in their kitchen, on their phone and all of those trusted environments. And third, I think that the arpu, the revenue per person is too small today. Today we're making money a little bit from display, a little bit from native, a little bit from, you know, maybe subscription.
- [09:02]
Mike Shields
Right. You gotta get those numbers better or.
- [09:03]
Adam Singola
It'S gonna be, we need to grow. Look, compare this. Meta makes about $200 a year in the US per person, $200. Think of how much money you pay for Spotify for your Netflix and you're still not getting numbers. It's amazing. I mean, they're so good at it. Can we be 10% as good? Can we be 20% as good? I'm not saying let's be as good as Meta, but can we as an open web community, as we look to improve our data connections and diversification of revenue and use of AI, can we be, you know, 20, 30, can we get there? Because I think right now my estimate, we're in the single digit. Well, so I think there's an ARPU expansion opportunity. So between AI distribution and revenue per person from 1 to 10, we are 2. We can get so much better.
- [09:48]
Mike Shields
Right, but that sort of implies to me that you're any one individual publisher or even big media company. It's really hard to compete with those, the kind of tools you're talking about. Does the industry, the publishing industry, I guess, need to collaborate more so they can get this benefit you're talking about from AI and trying to get the art Pro up? Can anybody do that on their own?
- [10:08]
Adam Singola
I mean, we can collaborate. I don't think we have to in this case. I'll tell you why. Funny enough, publishers, like most humans, we tend to change a lot of times only if we have to. And we may reach that moment in time with the growth of ChatGPT and OpenAI and with the growth of other LLMs that offer different distribution to consumers, and of course search engines that are now adopting generative AI. We may have reached a point in which we have to change and we have to evolve and do things a bit differently. And I think that's exciting. So. So to me, would we enjoy, you know, kind of like a collaborative approach? Yes. But maybe even our own internal metrics, our own internal dashboards, maybe those are enough for us to say no, we're going to do things just a little bit different and it's going to drive enough growth to get us going and move up and right over the next few years.
- [10:58]
Mike Shields
All right, let's take a quick break. I'm here with Lee Lewis, he's the director of Platform Adoption at Epsilon. Hey, Lee, thanks for being here.
- [11:04]
Lee Lewis
Thank you.
- [11:05]
Mike Shields
So I just want to ask you about this increased role of people based identity which is coming at a time when there's so much change in signal.
- [11:12]
Lee Lewis
Absolutely. Thanks for the question. Consumers are expecting a seamless experience across all channels, whether they're browsing and getting an ad, receiving an email with a product recommendation or receiving a postcard in the mail. The only way to do that is to create an identity solution that understands who the person is. In digital media, we use touch points like device IDs and cookies. Although we use them for recognition, they do not represent people. And so an identity solution can use those as touch points to recognize individuals. But ultimately it needs to be anchored in individuals.
- [11:48]
Mike Shields
Now how does AI help you there?
- [11:50]
Lee Lewis
Right. As consumers we generate tons of data, right? What you buy, what you view, you know, the types of content you, you like to consume online. There's so much data that's available to us and the way we use that is very critical. Right. Using signal from all of these different channels and consumption patterns helps us create potentially interesting experiences via these different channels that ultimately will lead to conversions.
- [12:18]
Mike Shields
All right, great stuff Lee, thanks a lot.
- [12:19]
Lee Lewis
Thank you.
- [12:21]
Mike Shields
One of the would be saviors of the open web digital publishing is retail media. This idea that you're going to go off site and all those, all those companies that have done really well turning into advertising companies on their own properties are going to go outside and find those people all over the place. So I wonder if you think that's realistic, but I also wonder if you think we're going a little bit too far with retail media.
- [12:42]
Adam Singola
Retail media has something that I think is unique to it and something that will grow a lot over time. So from a supply perspective, it's a fairly concentrated industry. You're looking at, you know, five to 10 big retailers, obviously the largest two and then the next five, 10 and they probably equate to, and I don't know the numbers but most, the vast majority of commerce. So from that perspective, to me, you know, it's less exciting to necessarily imagine what you can do with them. They'll do whatever they need to do. They're big enough to run their own show. However, from a budget perspective, you know, others extension point of view, I can imagine many of them will need sort of third party sources of supply, rich consumers and get growth similar to how you know Google, when search needed more supply, they've launched your, your ad or network. So we'll see something similar here. And in that respect we'll see a lot of, you know, growth coming from retail media as a source of demand to many publishers, many apps, many, maybe ctv. We're going to see retail media kind of like, you know, expanding the reach and that can be billions and tens of billions of dollars. So that can be significant. So the supply side I think a bit concentrated and my guests, long term, they do what they need to do. And from a budget perspective, I think there's going to be an opportunity to work with them to kind of provide value to those retailers and consumers to find great, you know, products and offerings. So that, that, that I think is exciting because again, we're at the very beginning of it from that perspective.
- [14:17]
Mike Shields
You mentioned news and Apple. Can you talk about what you've. The deal you guys made with Apple pretty recently.
- [14:22]
Adam Singola
So, Juan, let me just say it's very exciting. It's exciting because it's, I feel like we're entering this before I even speak about that specifically. We're entering this area where we're advertising is just, it's the new pink. You know, it's just so exciting. You're staying your seat.
- [14:36]
Mike Shields
It's funny because it was, it was at one point like hated, almost like a get away from me. And now it's, everyone's into it. It's, it's really, it is really true.
- [14:43]
Adam Singola
Because the reason is if you're doing advertising right, it's great. I give an example. I think that Instagram ads are great. I like those. I click on them, I buy things from them. I would pay Instagram a dollar a month to see more ads. I would be happy to pay to see more.
- [14:57]
Mike Shields
They're like the magazines of the past where you enjoyed the advertising as much as you did the content a lot of times.
- [15:02]
Adam Singola
But yeah, and search ads are fine too. Like, so when they create value to you and they're relevant or they kind of open your chakras to say, I didn't know. I like that. It not only it's okay, it's actually value creative. So from that perspective, I think it was always the same. When it's done right, it's, it's great. And when it's not done right, it's hateful, you know, and we've seen things that we didn't like over the years. So from that perspective, you know, hopefully this is more of the good type of advertising. And remember, when advertising is done right, it's an opportunity to expand your offering, making it more available, more affordable, lower price options for consumers. So it's a very good thing for consumers when done right. So this is my level set. And what I'm really liking as a participant in this ecosystem, much like you and you and I have been here for quite some time.
- [15:49]
Mike Shields
Yes, we have.
- [15:50]
Adam Singola
Is that you're seeing this whole new type of companies that say, we can do advertising, we want to do more of it and we want to do it the right way. And for me that's so I feel fortunate to be considered, you know, to work with companies like Yahoo. You know, a year and a half ago that we started a 30 year journey. When I raised money for Taboola in 2007, Yahoo was not in my target addressable market. I never thought anyone was going to work with Yahoo and you know, anyone's going to work with Apple or anyone's going to work with Microsoft. And now these are fantastic partners that we not only get to work with, we get to learn from as they run as very exciting companies on their own. So I think this is my level set is wow. If you're listening to this and you run a startup that's in advertising or an investor investing in advertising, or you're a publisher or an advertiser, we are entering this second act of our industry where the future is going to be more than Google and Facebook. There's going to be a lot of great iconic companies that want to participate.
- [16:52]
Mike Shields
In our ecosystem and a reinvention of what we're talking about. We mean that we're talking about advertising.
- [16:57]
Adam Singola
This is a good day to be listening to this podcast. And then just specifically with Apple, we're again honored and really to be working with a company like Apple. And specifically what we're doing with them is we're powering advertising for Apple News in four markets where Apple News is available. Us, uk, Canada and Australia. And you can see us. If you're in that market and you open your iPhone, you may see an ad either on your main feed or is you're reading a piece of content from one of your favorite publishers. And again, what's great is that not only, you know, it's, you know, hopefully sizable. And we mentioned publicly we're a public company now, so we mentioned it could be one of our bigger partners over time. It's just more of an opportunity to attract even more quality advertisers. It's an opportunity to get further validation that, you know, advertising is an opportunity for businesses to grow the right way and be in front of users that are having, you know, this product. We're still early, this was announced earlier this year. But it's, it's, it has a lot of great momentum. Advertisers love it. And for me, you know, I had this moment in can I said this publicly as well, that we met Apple and it was me and my team and it was one of those moments, you know, when you, when you're a founder of a company. You have moments, you know, when you kind of have to pinch yourself.
- [18:14]
Mike Shields
Yeah, they're actually talking to me here.
- [18:16]
Adam Singola
And remind that it's real. You know, this is, this, this is actually a real moment that I'm sitting there and I'm almost having, like, you know, I'm looking from the side and my team is there and Apple is just telling us how happy they are with the partnership and their honor to work with us. And I'm like, I couldn't believe how nice this moment is and how big our dreams should be over time.
- [18:36]
Mike Shields
All right, speaking of big dreams, we talk about AI a lot and the anxiety and the unknown. Tell us what Abby is and what we should be thinking about there.
- [18:43]
Adam Singola
Did you see the video?
- [18:45]
Mike Shields
I saw some of it.
- [18:46]
Adam Singola
It's four minutes, Mike. I mean, come on, you can give us four minutes.
- [18:51]
Mike Shields
I have a short attention span, as you know.
- [18:53]
Adam Singola
Okay, I'll send you the. I'll send you a story version of that.
- [18:56]
Mike Shields
Yes, please.
- [18:57]
Adam Singola
Vertical 30 second version on that. So for those who have not seen it, check it out. It's four minutes. I promise you it's. It's going to be fun and entertaining, basically. Taking a step back, when I look at the advertiser journey, and specifically, by the way, the open Web, Google has 10 million advertisers, Facebook has about the same. I'm looking at the open web, the number is much, much smaller. To give you an example, Taboola, which we're guiding for almost $2 billion in revenue, where we have about 15 to 20,000 advertisers and we are considered a fairly large.
- [19:27]
Mike Shields
Yeah, that sounds terrific. But relative to those guys. Yeah, it's crazy, but.
- [19:31]
Adam Singola
Right. So as I look into the journey of how do you get advertisers to become successful advertisers? In fact, how do you get businesses become successful advertisers so they can find growth, which is the common theme for all businesses in the history of time. We all want the same growth. It's the American dream. You know, you have an idea, you start your small business, it becomes bigger business over time. You hire employees. You know, it's such an amazing, inspirational part of, you know, to me even being in this country and on this journey, I love that so much. However, you know, my wife has a flower business which has been running for a bunch of time now, and she's doing well. And I ask her, you know, what's your cpa? What's your cpm? What's your cpc? And she's like, what the heck Are you talking about?
- [20:17]
Mike Shields
How could you not think this way?
- [20:18]
Adam Singola
What she said cpa. We have the same accountant. What are you talking?
- [20:21]
Mike Shields
Right, right.
- [20:23]
Adam Singola
We're married. So I bet you that if you ask many mid sized businesses that have good sized business and you tell them, come join advertise with us, if you talk edtech to them, they would not understand what you're talking about. They can speak to you about their own metrics. They don't know how to speak to you about your metrics. And I think it's as much as.
- [20:48]
Mike Shields
We think this is like the whole industry, the whole world is advanced like this. They're not there. Most of them.
- [20:53]
Adam Singola
Yeah. And we're following Terry Kawadja's Lumascape and we think this is the entire planet. It's not. It's our map. It's not their map. And their map is driven by their own metrics. So I think with the revolution of generative AI and in general, as we're looking to make the process easy for businesses to become successful advertisers, we wanted to, in the front end, at the very beginning, add a conversational layer so that you can talk to us about your business as if you're talking to your friend in a bar and just tell us what is it that you, you know, what you're trying to do. You can say, I'm in the fashion industry. I have a store in the Manhattan. I have an e commerce website. But I really want my site to be more digital. Okay. And then you can say, I need to grow. My average product is $500. My margin is 30%. I know how much I can afford. You know, I really can't start with more than 10,000amonth. That's because that's what I can afford now. Is that enough? How much do people like me spend? I know you have all this question by the end. This is literally the level of conversation you can have with Abby, which is what we had launched. And by the end of it, Abby will essentially have a campaign ready for you to go on Tabura.
- [22:04]
Mike Shields
So instead of filling out a long form with all these questions and you get it to somebody and they help filter you somehow, this is like filtering this person in real time and then also producing something for them to use.
- [22:13]
Adam Singola
It's Don Draper. If you watch Madman, you know, it's the ultimate account manager that is in fact, not only the expert of Taboola technology, they're the expert of your industry because they have looked at a thousand clients like you. They'll say, by the way you should use this thumbnail for your campaign. You approve it. That's what I think. And by the way, we should really make it at the daily cap to get $1,000, no more, so you can learn and then let's make it. And it will imitate all of those advices. And by the end of it, what we've seen is your campaign will be live about 75% faster. You don't get the frustration of making a mistake. A lot of advertisers when they work with Taboola, they come up with creatives that are being not approved. They may say if you buy this coat, you will forever be worn. Not true. Now, right?
- [23:01]
Mike Shields
So you get all the way to the end and they have the wrong creative and then slows everything down. So this would stop that? Theoretically, yeah.
- [23:07]
Adam Singola
It was a precursor for this whole thing to. It's the best, best practices, the best data driven approach. It's fast, it's conversational and it's fun. So the Abby, we recorded this form four minute video and I walked the streets of New York and I walk into a bakery and a fashion store and I walk into my wife's which is the hardest client. She's very tough, especially with me. Then the goal was just to introduce Abby to them and have their campaign launch. And my hope is that Abby is just one step on this puzzle that Taboola is trying to pursue of growing from 15, 20,000 advertisers to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and becoming a must buy for big, mid and small size businesses.
- [23:54]
Mike Shields
How do you let them know about it? That's got to be one of the hardest things. I mean you can walk around New York all you want, but that's not going to scale and it's not easy. Everybody knows Facebook and Google, these small businesses. How do you get this out there?
- [24:03]
Adam Singola
It's a great question. There are multiple channels to kind of reach potential businesses. One actually one of our larger kind of way of people discovering us is the buy Taboola though to any one of the publishers, many of the best publishers on earth who work with .. You know, NBC, CBS, you know, Yahoo today, McClatchy, Fox Sport, many, many greats, you know that work with us. There's a bite Ebulla for disclosure purposes next to the recommendation and ads. A lot of advertisers who see an ad on those loved publishers click on it and they start the self service process. So that's one way. And in the self service, Abby will now be introduced. We're going to Actually spend money ourselves to reach to businesses and try to acquire businesses that way. And of course we have our sellers. We have you know we operate a fairly large sales organization about 6, 700 people around the world. Sellers and account managers that will rich clients and introduce Abby. And over time while Abby's intuition I think the intuition we have when you hear about Abby is more of a small to mid size. In fact over time I think Abby will be mostly used or at least equally used by big advertisers who would want and generative AI machine like account manager. Yeah, think about them all the time. You know I was like what if I had a million account managers at Taboola? Would I be better? Of course I would be better. Yeah, I don't have a million very.
- [25:31]
Mike Shields
Costly but yes, but what if I.
- [25:33]
Adam Singola
Could and perhaps this is my million account managers vision strategy that I can now give so much am power to my clients.
- [25:42]
Mike Shields
To that point you're talking about mostly small and mid sized businesses and maybe you level up but it is interesting you're seeing this move towards. Well the generative AI I think is very exciting. The media buying and planning optimization with the AI driven aspect of that is moving fast with especially with Performance Max and Advantage plus and this potentially there's different points of view in that that's good, smarter media buying, faster decision making. But then that scares people. You live, you're giving up the role of the brand and media agency and there's control of mistakes. I guess that's a big way of asking like is it where do you see this trend of AI driven media buying going and what are the challenges there?
- [26:23]
Adam Singola
So I think it's going to expand our growth rates. We're going to, the industry will grow faster, there's more advertisers and more businesses and more publishers will succeed. We spoke about some of those trends. We spoke about on the publisher side, AI adoption, the use of AI for lifetime value optimization and revenue diversification. We spoke about new distribution channels on the publisher side. On the advertiser side we spoke about lower churn rates and higher net dollar retentions also known as spend. Because if I can succeed faster I churn less and if I'm successful and have this account manager I spend more. We sprinkle a bunch of things that can make things better. To me that means more jobs, more companies get founded, more money being invested. And let me speak about something I know dearly which is our own people. You know what I hope is that over time they get to spend less time optimizing CPCs for their clients because a machine can do it at least as good. And I want to spend less time interacting about why this title was rejected and this title should be right.
- [27:27]
Mike Shields
Little headachy things that are probably.
- [27:29]
Adam Singola
It's mundane things that my amazing super Avenger team deals with, whereby I think what they could do is come up with new strategies to say. I'll give you an example. Let's say you are a bottom funnel advertiser. You buy with a last click attribution to make a purchase like an ecommerce buyer. And you have a great account manager that helps you manage that and make sure your spend is stable. If that account manager had more time, maybe they could have said, you know, if we had a mid funnel campaign that it's worth testing, we could warm up the funnel so that your leads would become cheaper. On my current campaign, you can get more conversions for the same price. What do you think about that? And the client would say, well, that's a great idea. How much should I spend? Give me $10,000. Let's see if I'm. Even if directionally I'm right, even if that account manager failed, that was a great exercise of partnership and, you know, being human because that's what you expect relationship to be part of. So to me, the black box ness which traditionally makes us feel, you know, itchy is mainly only itching if it comes with lack of control and lack of transparency. So long that the box, it's still a black box in the sense of it's great, it does the magic, you know, but it gives me as an account manager and as a client understanding of what's going on and an ability to control it if I want to.
- [28:50]
Mike Shields
Right, but you're not talking about getting rid of a thousand people and not having any of these important strategic jobs anymore. That's not where you're hoping this goes or seeing this go.
- [28:58]
Adam Singola
I think you were doubling and tripling though the teams. I think agencies have more people over time. I think companies like Taboola have more people over time and it's because they think the churn rates are going down, the average spend per client is going up and I think publishers are going up. And when things go up, generally more jobs are being created, more funding takes place and I think that's optimistic about. I think this podcast will be remembered the early days of the second activism.
- [29:25]
Mike Shields
I feel good. This is very, this is taking a very positive turn.
- [29:28]
Adam Singola
Even though it started with, you know, Mike Shields, after more than a decade of friendship saying he did not have four minutes to watch every video, even though that's how.
- [29:37]
Mike Shields
Why is everything wrong with the world?
- [29:39]
Adam Singola
Despite of that, we're still very optimistic.
- [29:42]
Mike Shields
Yes, this is a left turn, but I want to ask you about one thing, because you mentioned it. You and I talked about this recently, actually. You mentioned thinking about partnering with Yahoo. And if you were told that in 2008 and how different things were. If you asked me a couple years ago, I didn't see a great ending for Yahoo. It seemed like it was going the wrong direction. It's been pretty remarkable since the Apollo deal. What do you make of that? And what do you hear about. You hear really good things about that Apollo experience. Like, how did that happen? How'd that work?
- [30:08]
Adam Singola
Yeah, I mean, again, I don't. I don't speak on behalf of VR, but I can tell you what I did say and what I strongly believe that is relevant. And actually, I just said it on a. On a panel two weeks ago at Zeta Global panel with Linda from X and John Scully from Zeta. And it was. It was. Dan interviewed us, and I spoke about it with everyone. It always doesn't matter how big or small is your company. The value of a management team and then the team at large that has a culture of execution and ability to be transparent with each other, that is passionate and almost obsessed with something versus a company that has less of it, it's amazing how different the outcome looks like.
- [30:49]
Mike Shields
It really matters, that stuff.
- [30:50]
Adam Singola
And I think that, As a reminder, 100% of people listening to this podcast very much, including you and me, Mike, is that we're all fairly average people. None of us wrote the mazurka at the age of six, which Chopin did. And none of us, you know, wrote a symphony for 30 people at the age of five like Mozart. None of us will ever do that. Mozart.
- [31:12]
Mike Shields
I'm barely trying here in this podcast. Yeah, I'm coaching.
- [31:14]
Adam Singola
You're doing very well, and you're definitely one of the best ones. But I'm saying the difference between being the best versus failing is not about being a prodigy. It's about execution, passion, culture, making more good decision versus bad decision. And this is a long way of saying that. And I'm not speaking ill about people before, but, yeah, I went through many, many, many different, you know, iterations. But the current version they have, which is Reed and Apollo on the board, and then Jim and Matt and Rob will just join them. And these people are very, very good, and they're very good together.
- [31:49]
Mike Shields
Yeah, that matters, too.
- [31:50]
Adam Singola
And for us, you know, from the sidelines. We get to work with them and see how aggressive they are about where things are going. And that's nice because you want to work with people that want to make things and go up. And I'm very again, feeling lucky that Yao could work with anyone. And, you know, and I feel like that we got to do this together for even though I wanted 50 years, but a Polar negotiated down to 30. Okay, it's good and I'm happy and I think I'm very optimistic about how things can go.
- [32:19]
Mike Shields
All right, well, here's to 30 really good years coming up. I'm feeling excited and optimistic now. Adam, awesome conversation. Thank you so much for your time here. Let's talk again soon.
- [32:28]
Adam Singola
Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
- [32:30]
Mike Shields
Thanks again to my guests this week, Taboola's Adam Singola and my partners at Epsilon. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more. What's next in media. Thanks for listening.