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Next in Media
Inside the Ad Tech Alternative Saving Brands Millions
00:14:29
Discover how direct-buying infrastructure, first-party data clean rooms, and large language models are transforming streaming TV advertising by maximizing premium sports inventory and eliminating costly programmatic fees.
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- [00:01]
A
For us coming next, what we're truly excited about, and again, we're working on this now with Paramount, is how can we use that data and Tatari's data and large language models to bring about kind of an AI driven performance in the media execution. Right. So if we have two brands looking at two impressions rather than assigning them randomly, we can use all of that data and the language models to see this impression is actually better fit for brand A and the other one for brand B, and then make that happen.
- [00:33]
B
This week on Next in Media, I chatted with Leo o', Connor, EVP of streaming at Paramount Advertising, along with Philippe Engelbrecht, CEO of Tatari. We shot this one live on the ground in Cannes, the fabric studio where we took the temperature of the real programmatic TV ad market. Whether we're about to see an influx of smaller brands coming to tv. The timely discussion in light of Walmart's recent acquisition of Vibe. Leo and Fleet also talked about bringing more brands into live sports and where the brands are really able to maximize their data via ctv. Let's get started. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Nepstin Media. We are shooting on location today in Cannes. I've got two guests this week. At this moment, we've got Philippe Unc Ingebrick, he's the CEO and co founder of Zatari. And Leo o', Connor, EVP of digital and streaming at Paramount Advertising. Thanks, gentlemen, both for being here.
- [01:14]
C
Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.
- [01:16]
B
Very timely to talk to both of you right now. So much going on in this world. Leon, I'm going to start with you, so talk to me. Just what does the streaming advertising market look right now? There's all this excitement around what can happen with ad tech or programmatic. It seems like a lot of direct still, maybe a lot of P's and maybe a more cautionary approach for some brands. How would you kind of characterize things?
- [01:40]
C
Yeah, I think the market, it's dynamic, of course, but I think it has stabilized a bit. I think in terms of the different transaction lanes you talked about, I think we spent a lot of the last few years kind of hammering out those transactional norms of, you know, what a brand means when they say they want to do a PMP or a direct deal or a PG deal. We're no longer, I think, talking, we're talking on the same, we all mean the same thing when we say those things. And I think it's been, it's been helpful. It's, you know, but I think there's there's still a lot of, you know, a lot of dynamism here with new entrants to the space. There's streaming itself is growing a lot. So, yeah, it's a, it's, it's an ever evolving place, for sure.
- [02:21]
B
And then on that note, how would you just kind of to characterize the current upfront climate? It's kind of, you know, it's been interesting. The, we've had uncertainty in the, like, the economy's been strong and growing, but then, you know, you know, you know where consumers are. We've got a lot of global things going on. What's the, what's the market like right now?
- [02:39]
C
Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to comment too much around the upfront. I mean, we're, we're super excited. Our first upfront coming together is Paramount Skydance. We were just, we just wrapped up earlier this spring, a great series of dinners with our product and sales team, all together with. Yeah, we, so we're excited about our new story. And yeah, we can't comment too much about the marketplace.
- [03:00]
B
Philippe, let's, let's turn to you. So we've talked earlier about this before, but streaming advertising growing, that's great. It's kind of the growth. Growth sort of concentrated in specific places. But it seems like brands might be leaving something on the table, in your view, in terms of the. When programmatic is a primary path. Can you talk about that?
- [03:19]
A
Yeah, and this is indeed something we discussed last time. So there's a lot of talk about Programmatic TV and Programmatic ctv. And it is our observation that the true premium TV and the programming and the content, such as sports, doesn't necessarily present itself or doesn't necessarily live in those programmatic pipes.
- [03:44]
B
I think it's all in one place
- [03:46]
A
and it's not nice. Not always the case. And so publishers and I don't try to speak here for Leo, but publishers will often hold that premium inventory sacred for the direct sales, for the sponsorships and stuff like that. And so for brands leading only on Programmatic tv, they're essentially missing out and possibly the most valuable component of the
- [04:11]
B
market, especially as more brands come into the space that way. What, they want to add more?
- [04:16]
A
Well, yeah, especially when brands come to tv, they, they, maybe they live with the dream of, of appearing and, you know, and an NBA final, so to speak. And then, of course, you know, if they just buy programmatically, it's never going to happen.
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B
Right. And they miss out on the next win the championship, which would be, you know, Be tough to, tough to swallow.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So talk to me. What. So Upstream is a solution for that?
- [04:41]
A
Yeah.
- [04:42]
B
Give us a little bit of just an update on what's going on there.
- [04:44]
A
Yeah, sure, sure. So Upstream is technology that we built and acquired over the years. Took us quite a while and we released it, I think it was in February of this year. One of our key partners in that moment was Paramount with leo. And so essentially think of it as a parallel operating system next to Programmatic, where we place our technology directly into the ad server so that we allow brands to buy it immediately hopp over all dsp, SSP like technology, which was truly only meant or particularly meant for digital. And so when we do that, we get all the benefits of automation but without, you know, especially for the brands without DSP fees or SSP fees, obviously 100% brand safety because they know they work with Paramount directly. Definitely no fraud. I think that's the brand's perspective. I think you probably have an angle
- [05:38]
B
on that as well.
- [05:39]
C
Sure.
- [05:40]
B
From the outside, Leo, you might think, well, the market's, everyone's growing, like there's no problems here. What's, what do you, what, what might you need this. What were you feeling that made you want to participate?
- [05:48]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think even, even just backing up, you know, as your sleep was answering your prior question. I think we've seen as. As more and more people have started streaming as their primary way of watching tv, we see that not every streaming experience is the same.
- [06:03]
A
Right.
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C
You may get a, you know, someone catching up on an old library episode, watching the news, watching a huge sports event like the Next Win or, or watching the UFC on Paramount plus or someone watching a new episode right when it drops. And you may get millions of people watching at once. And these things are like a huge audience like that is a horrible thing to waste by carving it up into one by one impressions. But some of those other environments may be great for a programmatic environment. So I think we're really trying to get smarter about matching the right content experience with the right buying model. And you know, we've been long partners with Atari and I think the kind of work that these guys do optimizing was creating a lot of ad ops work. And I think what we wanted to figure out is like how can we, how can we make the adopts work simpler and tap into all the good things of Programmatic, but still, you know, mash it with that right. Content experience as well.
- [06:51]
B
And so it's early. Right. But what was the implementations process like and what's been the response so far?
- [06:57]
C
We hammered out a lot of the details with, with Philippe's team just kind of on the, on the adopts infrastructure. We had and we had to, we spent some time doing that but I think we landed in a good place and I think as a result we've seen, you know, what used to be several hundreds, if not thousands of line items and optimizations really being simplified down to a, you know, a handful of things that we're every, every week to kind of make these things step it
- [07:19]
B
back a little bit. You guys could both maybe jump in here is the. There's been a lot of discussion about whether the CTB needs it. Should we have a common identifier? Should we have some kind of equivalent to the cookie? Are they going to be a bunch of different ways we target consumers? It's, it's probably even more renewed in terms of discussion with live ramp going, changing hands. But what's kind of going on are most brands bringing their own data and identity needs to the market or what's been at what's been left of practice?
- [07:47]
A
Yeah, so I mean like when we first came to seen almost 10 years ago now, I think Tatari back then was unique because we arrived to the market asking our brands to bring their first party data to us so we could bring about a measurement of the effectiveness of their campaign on kind of an outcomes or performance basis. So that's always been there. We even built special purpose tech for that. It's called think of it as a high purpose CTV data cleaning solution. So that's always been there. I think maybe your question is more about like what can we do next with that? How can we then flex that first party data into the media execution of the buying process? I think that's happening. Right? We see more and more of that. I mean retargeting or lookalike audiences are a very simple example of that for us coming next. What we're truly excited about, and again we're working on this now with Paramount, is how can we use that data and Tatari's data and large language models to bring about kind of an AI driven performance in the media execution. Right. So if we have two brands looking at two impressions rather than assigning them randomly, we can use all of that data and the language models to see this impression is actually better fit for brand A and the other one for brand B and then make that happen. It's way more cost efficient than running auctions in a DSP like setting. And yet it yields the campaign performance improvement for the brand which makes the Paramount inventory then it turns even look better. So that's how we see first party data manifesting itself.
- [09:29]
B
I want to go back to the auction concept. Do you see, I don't know how often do brands bring their own gate of the party? How often do they insist upon a certain identifier versus using CTV in a more traditional way, Reaching frequency and those kind of things.
- [09:44]
C
We still see a mix. I think we're seeing more brands do come to us with audiences and I think your point is valid that a lot of those are still kind of built on different spines and we have to be flexible to work with all of them. But yeah, it's definitely been increasing. We see a hybrid of more identity driven deals and folks that are just buying our reach in frequency, which even those deals rely on, you know, a good common understanding of identity.
- [10:09]
B
Do you, do you both think you mentioned this. It's interesting that I think people might have assumed eventually TV becomes so programmatic that it's auction driven and every impression will be up for grabs by 5,000 different brands and find the perfect one. Is that realistic or is that something that's just not going to play out with the technology we have? We about to start with humanity.
- [10:29]
A
I can't speak about the kind of how realistic the technology is. I think it comes back to Leo's earlier point. It might not be the best way to do so because there's these certain moments in tv, right? A season shows finale where you know that everybody is watching it. 10 million people. Why would you do that? Because the beauty of TV is reaching large audiences in one fell swoop. Audiences that never heard about your product and you and you bring about awareness for future consideration and conversion. It would be a shame.
- [11:03]
B
Right?
- [11:03]
A
Right. And I think that that's what we've been talking about and we've put our money where our mouth is for years now and we have partners like Paramount fully getting it and jumping on board with it with success.
- [11:16]
B
Leo, do you find like. I think there was an assumption that eventually TV will, just because it's digital, it will become one to one fully and everyone will make their own ad and all. Yeah, that probably doesn't make sense across the board I'm imagining.
- [11:28]
C
Yeah, I think it's. We believe that the automation and everything that can be automated will. But I still think that having these huge audiences, maybe you show them the same brand but there's maybe some overlay that is more segmented. So if you see the ad in A certain region of the country, for instance, it's a little more personalized. But the ad itself, I think we're really seeing these huge collective audience moments. Still care about that, brands still care about that and wanting to know that your brand can be seen in the second break and you bought a spot in a huge show or you know, you bought a spot in a, in a huge sporting event. And I think it really, it's the yin and yang like you have those, but you also want to be able to do that hyper precise one to one follow up when the next day when you're reading the news or you're following up and watching last week's episode. So I think it's, it's kind of having that combo is really where we're seeing the performance work.
- [12:19]
B
Last question and you could probably both maybe chime in here. TV still, you still see the frequency challenge that hasn't gotten away yet. There's a lot of promise and in different technology tackling that does this product or what could, what can be done about that and is this product part of the solution? Maybe. Philippe, I'll start with you.
- [12:35]
A
Yeah. And actually like I want to speak up a little bit to the defense of Paramount and other publishers here, right. Because you know, sometimes we hear people complaining about over frequency and I feel like they finger point very quickly to the publishers. But that is not the case that actually people who complain or it's the demand side that should look inner inwards, right. Because ultimately they leverage multi DSPs and each of these DSPs in a multi faceted DSP way. They all start buying these and they don't talk to each other. And then if there's three DSPs each correctly frequency capping at three, then you're still going to have nine. And so now Leo's done a bad job and I think it's completely unfair. So to answer your question, when you buy direct, I know for a fact that Paramount is going to strictly adhere to that. And so there is no issue. So that's my version. I had to speak for you for a moment.
- [13:29]
C
I appreciate that. I mean I think we do what we can when we integrate with partners, whether it's direct, we know it's home cooking and we can frequency capture that with a ton of control. When there's a third party kind of doing some decisioning there. We do have some integration frameworks where we ask basic things like pass us the a domain of the creative and we have some technology where we can do that. But again, when you have lots of different control, right? Yeah. I mean, and I think these things can be, you know, and when the tech is really good and it is all finding that same like heat, seeking the audience, you know, you find the audience.
- [14:02]
B
Yeah.
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C
It can kind of over. Yeah, exactly.
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B
All right. Well, it's not your fault.
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A
It's not my fault.
- [14:09]
B
The conversation. Thanks so much for coming out here.
- [14:11]
A
Yeah, it's our pleasure.
- [14:12]
C
Thanks, Mike.
- [14:14]
B
Thanks again to my guest this week, Paramount's Leo o' Connor Tatari, CEO Philippe Ungerbrick and my partner Zatari. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. See you next time for more what's next in media. Thanks for listening.