← Next in Media
Next in Media
Medialink's Mark Wagman Breaks Down CES, and Why 2025 is the year of "Aggressive" Brand Energy
00:27:45
Next in Media spoke with Mark Wagman, Managing Director, MediaLink and Partner, UTA about his CES takes, particularly why the conversation around AI may be shifting from cost cutting to growth. Mark also discussed whether the TV industry is getting in its own way when it comes to identity and buying platforms, and whether any retail media networks will pivot to Amazon.
Loading summary
Transcript63 lines
- [00:01]
A
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 Nexting Media, I spoke with Mark Wagman. He's a partner at UTA and the managing director for MediaLink's data and tech practice. Mark and I broke down what kind of conversations he was having with brands and publishers last week at CES and why he thinks 2025 will be a year of real aggression for many marketers. To that point, Mark talked about why we may be thinking about AI and its usage in this industry the wrong way. We also talked retail media consolidation influencers and the ad tech Martech collision course. It's a packed episode, so let's get. Hi, everybody. Welcome to NEXT to Media. I'm Mike Shields. I'm here with Mark Wagman. He's a partner UTA and he's the managing director of data technology at medialink. Hey, Mark, thanks for being here.
- [01:15]
B
Hey, how are you? Great. Thanks for having me.
- [01:17]
A
I'm good. Wanted kind of to do a sort of post mortem on CES and there's like looking ahead at 2025 kind of pot. So you're the perfect guy to do that. We just got back, we're here. I'm still really tired. I'm thinking you're in the same place. You know, I want to ask you. It's funny because it's hard to sum up this massive conference, right. And it really depends on what you went to and who you saw in terms of what you think the themes were. But what's your hot take on CES this year so far?
- [01:43]
B
Listen, I think the hot take going in was that we were going to see a lot of. Of more of the agency side, I think conversations given a lot of what was happening in the space leading up to this, obviously the IPG Omnicron announcement and whether it was going there. I think, frankly, most of my time was spent talking about the same problems that have plagued this industry for quite some time. Right. Measurement, the idea that we have too much of things and making sense of what makes them unique. Right. Like immediately, we sit in a lot of these great conversations between buyers and sellers. Media, ad tech, Martech, the future of identity, currency, AI. I think the broad stroke Here is that marketers want more, but they don't want more without taking something off of that chessboard. Right. The idea that folks can continue to have their kind of headcount, you know, cut and manage more and more complexity with more and more tools, not only like the money that comes out of the ecosystem, but I think what is required to run a marketing department is just infinitely, much more complex than it was a year ago. I was supposed to solve a bunch of this and that was, you know, another key topic of a lot of conversation.
- [02:53]
A
Totally. And it's, it's, it's not a, it's not a magic wand kind of thing so far. It's, people want that to, you know, fix all that stuff. And it's both a, how do we do that, should we do it? And then, you know, how quickly can we do it? That doesn't make it easy.
- [03:06]
B
Yeah. And I think there's a mindset shift, Right. I think a year ago, or at least for the last 12 months, everything or a lot of things that have been written about AI have been written about, you know, through the lens of cost reduction and taking people out of the equation and as a cost savings thing. I think I heard a lot more conversations. Obviously very self serving to this industry in which we live. But I love it in the sense of the coin flipping a little bit and thinking about it through the lens of, okay, well, what if we didn't, you know, use this as an excuse to cut 10 or 15% of our heads and what if we kept those teams the same and now just empowered them with some of this, like, could we work 20 or 30% better? Could we have 40 or 50% better results in ROI on some of this stuff? If we can use it, which again to some of us is like the obvious, like no, no shit. Pardon my French. Yeah, right.
- [03:55]
A
That's like, Right.
- [03:57]
B
But, but in an industry where like, you know, everybody for the last couple years has been waiting for this impending recession and waiting for the, the sky to fall. It was always one of these things of like, well, it's going to cost us all this jobs. Now imagine if you don't think about it from that way. Right. Imagine if you're, you're a lucky one out there and you've got the ability to kind of keep headcount where it is. And now you can truth this as a superpower.
- [04:16]
A
Let's use it to win, not to gut. Yeah, yeah.
- [04:19]
B
Let's use it as a way, you know, if you're fourth or fifth in A given category in a given, you know, food beverage category or CPU category. Let's use this as a way to leapfrog two or three of those brands and not just try to like hover here at a little bit better margins or better ebitda. Let's use it as a way to move up the funnel. And I think that's, that's interesting.
- [04:36]
A
Yeah. Especially if people feel generally pretty decent about the ad economy broader or state of economy. I mean, you know, who knows with world events and new president everything. But yeah, we're less than like, can we get through this recessionary period? What's going to save us to like, let's go. Hopefully you. You're right. The. There is a, A lot of themes are recurring this like what are we going to do about identity and targeting that everybody's been trying to figure out post signal life for a long time still coming up. You know, what did you think? And this is. It struck me I was at an open AP event where there's a lot of talk about identity graphs and needing to collaborate for. To make CTV more like tele, more like digital. And you had a lot of announcements going on with Comcast for the Universal ads product. Disney's got a big ID themed event. Are they a little bit in conflict because they were competitive and not making things simpler? What did you think about that whole thing?
- [05:28]
B
I think they're all positive. I think that people are kind of putting them in all in the same bucket and they're. And they're not like if you, if you peel those things apart a little bit. Right. I think one, you know, a lot of Disney's, you know, conversations this week were around live and making the live experience more attractive for a marketer where. Right. And I think they rolled out some, some identity capabilities in that space. They rolled out some targeting and programmatic capabilities in that kind of world. But that was all through this lens of, you know, you think about ctv, you think about ways to differentiate content libraries are hard to keep buying and buying. But live sports is something that arguably keeps giving and giving. And if you can make the live sports asset more attractive to marketers and make it easier to buy, easier to take advantage of. I mean they use a great example talking about that for overtime, Texas, Arizona State football game. Right. Where you know, in a historic world. Right. Like a frequency cap would have potentially prevented you as a brand from taking advantage of the second and third and fourth overtimes, even though you probably had.
- [06:30]
A
Some of the most important moment. Right. That you want to Yeah, I think.
- [06:33]
B
The jig and I think this idea of interoperability amongst the streamers and the networks. Right. This has been a problem. You know, arguably, dare I say the cookie solved some of this for us years ago. Yeah, the cookie provided at least an underlying understanding.
- [06:48]
A
It was helpful. Yeah.
- [06:49]
B
You could compare apples to oranges, you could compare a publisher to a publisher and get a decent directionality in terms of like, is one better than the other? Or if you were a little bit more intelligent, you could start to translate, you know, what is one on publisher X verse equal to on. On publisher B? And I think largely, if you think about Open ap, that was some of what they promised from day one when it was more of a, a data driven linear play of like, let us not only help you translate audiences, but let us help you make sense of what, what is one Paramount equal to on one NBC and what is one Disney equal to here? And I think if you, if you get anybody on the phone or on a video call to talk about what keeps them up at night, it's incrementality and the overlap amongst those. Right.
- [07:32]
A
That is not fast. We didn't, we didn't figure that one out yet.
- [07:34]
B
Not fixed at all. And you and I as consumers, what I, what I do think too is, is the instacarts at World are bringing this to life and others in terms of just like connecting the dots between our respective worlds as professionals in this advertising marketing world, but also consumers of content and consumers of a lot of these products, which is like, we understand as people, we shop at Home Depot and Target and Walmart and all these stores. Right. And so we're asking ourselves the audit question of okay, if I could, if I spent all the money to build my own identity. Spine. I want to target Mark Wedman. Where do I target them? Is Walmart the right environment for me? Is it in digital out of home play? The right environment for me is, is, you know, within the retail media network space. Am I diving deeper into one of these financial media network plays as well? So understanding how incrementality plays, again, that's not a new concept. It's been around for quite some time. Right. It's, it's an industry thing here. Cord.
- [08:25]
A
Yeah. Wouldn't it be great if we could isolate the value of every single dollar? And, and yeah, but, but, but again.
- [08:30]
B
Like as I, I'm a sucker for analogies, as you know. And like, you know, as you think about more and more folks who came up from digital getting into some of these more various Senior roles across the industry buy side and they're demanding that more and more of all of this stuff that we buy look like arguably like the digital ad impressions of years past, which were I could literally with a cookie show and add exposure to some sort of ad conversion and I could start to connect the dots and I could start to attribute things. That's why media mix modeling is vogue again. Like MTA is interesting again, not only because you've got digital people in roles now, but you've also got AI that you know, that's making those things faster, cheaper and more effective to run.
- [09:10]
A
What about getting back to television for a second there? A lot of. And it's gone on for a couple of years now, but there's a lot of excitement around can we make TV look like Facebook and Google with the millions of advertisers. Right. And make it really easy to buy? Lots of announcements there. Are we bullish on that or is it a little bit too complicated when you have six different ways to do it and the identities in the graphs are all a little bit different for those mid sized and small business advertisers?
- [09:38]
B
Yeah, I, I think it's complicated. I think, I think there's one school of thought that says if you're going to win in this battle, you need some sort of conversion signal, right. Which is what Amazon has, has been able to. The what Walmart has with Vizio.
- [09:52]
A
Why they. That's why the small brands love the platforms.
- [09:54]
B
Yeah, yeah. 100 and, and that signal, as strong or weak as it is, at least provide some sort of North Star to point your algo at, purport your thing at. I think there's also a big push to just make TV easier to buy and streaming easier to buy. You know, if you're a small business, you need, you know, the Traditional construct of 10,000 line items broken up by DMAs, broken up by this and understanding. No. And so I think that's an area that, you know, some platforms have done better than others and you know, Disney and Hulu had been a strong player in that space and obviously meta and what they're up to. But I think you're going to see a lot of players, you know, understand that like, you know, the Fortune 100 right now, the Fortune 500, the Fortune 1000, it's a bloodbath, right? Like to get, you know, we, we saw this, right? Those are the folks running at CES from meeting to meeting, ping ponging back and forth. They're getting pitched everything and they're having A hard time understanding what do I do here? Do I spread my money even thinner and work with everybody? Because, hey, as a consumer, I am on all these platforms or do I spend the time to actually, to your point, really understand what an impression is worth to me as a marketer on all those platforms? And it's easier certainly to spread out your money and sprinkle it out and hope good things happen. It's much more difficult to actually have the frameworks in place, the data models in place, to at least get to like the 8020 rule. You don't have to get down to, you know, the, the one to one deterministic, you know, Facebook machine type of model, but being able to just add kind of that layer of confidence on top of this to know, hey, I'm buying this user. Because, hey, in this environment, on this screen, at this, you know, opportunity, they're much more likely to perform the way I want them to perform than if I found them an hour later on Netflix or Hulu or somewhere else?
- [11:36]
A
Yeah, so if you're, if you're those TV companies, you, you could fight that battle for the, those Fortune thousand brands. You could say, let's make the industry bigger because this is really, it's going to be a bloodbath, like you said. Okay, what about. This was not a, I don't know, call this a CES announcement, but Amazon rolled out, which I took as like a, almost like retail media in a box offering, like, we'll do this for you. Which was interesting because you had so many, again, all the retail media companies in force at CES all talking about their data and their, their scale and their graph. Did you take that as a, I wonder if we'll start to see some consolidation and some big companies saying, let's just hand this over to those guys, or am I reading too far into it?
- [12:18]
B
I don't think you're reading too far into it. I think this, they've done this in the past in terms of realizing and waking up one day and saying, hey, and I know this is, I'm being flippant here, but realizing, hey, holy hell, we've got all the building blocks that a media network or an ad network would need. Why don't we just put these in a nice little box and sell it as that kind of toolkit or DIY set that exists in marketing. There are dozens of vendors who would do the same things. And frankly, you can cobble together your own Frankenstein stack and get something live pretty quickly. You know, as you mentioned before, I run our data and tech practice. But I'm the guy in the room who always says, sometimes the data and the tech is the really easy piece of this puzzle to make work. And I think that's Amazon's argument here to some degree, which is like the data and tech is largely getting to a point of commoditization in terms of functionality and what it can do. If you look at these retail media networks, none of them have really, some are extending onto ctv, some have built better shoppable units, but largely these are e commerce players with ads. And I'm being, again, being very direct, but that's, that's what they are, right?
- [13:19]
A
It's not revolutionary what they've built. Right yet.
- [13:21]
B
Yeah, you've got eyeballs and you've got a data set. And essentially that was the game back in the ad network days. And what ad networks did was roll up a bunch of websites to create more eyeballs. And what these e commerce players have realized is, holy shit, we, you know, if you compare us to more of.
- [13:36]
A
A traditional ad, off the charts, yeah, this is great.
- [13:39]
B
Yeah, yeah, we look pretty good. We have side traffic, we have people buying, we have people engaging. And so the engagement rates on these sites are ridiculous. You know, again, with Amazon playing in the space, you always run that risk of anybody saying, hey, if I play in a category that is somehow competitive or complementary to them, there's that risk of like, you know, do I want to be a retailer who competes with Amazon using Amazon's tech? I think that they have largely gotten over that, especially in the cloud area. Listen, I, I, I moderated two panels last week at ces. I had a handful of people coming after me after the second panel asking me essentially, hey, we're trying to make that same decision of do we launch an ad network? And some of them are non traditional. There was a financial services provider, there was a cybersecurity company that was actually came up to me after that conversation. So again, I think people are realizing it's pretty easy to flip this thing on. You know, the most important and the most valuable pieces of these technology platforms and tools are the integrations into the demand side. Because retail media is not something that if you build it, they will come. There are more impressions than marketers know what to do with. You need a sales team, you need a value prop, you need something to exist. Me spinning up ads on insert retailer website today, without that plan, you're lost.
- [14:52]
A
And that's why I wonder if I'm just picking on Albertson. Stevie S. One of these guys, are they going to say, that's a lot of work? I, you know, the margins are great, but we got to have a team and our own tech. Maybe we just hand this over to somebody, get a check, you know, and we lose control. That's like, I wonder. I'm totally speculating on those kind of companies, but you know what I mean.
- [15:11]
B
Sure. I mean, you know, there are, I'm sure that there are AI companies that we don't even know about that are about to go pitch these companies and saying, hey, you don't even need Amazon. Like, here's literally the piece of code and we will do this. I think retail media right now is, is nascent enough, and that value proposition does need to be articulated by a human in a kind of onetoone fashion, where I do think there's immense value in having somebody who understands that brand, whether it's CBS or Albertsons or, or any of those guys. Right. Like, you understand that brand, you understand what it stands for, you understand why a consumer comes to that site and what they look for. You know, I think in your analogy there, if you kind of bundle this whole thing up, you kind of get to a world of just, you know, a handful of SSPs that represent the entire industry in terms of supply, which is maybe where we're moving.
- [15:54]
A
All right, shifting gears a little bit, a couple more big topics. What. I am not an expert on Supreme Court law. I don't know what's going to happen, but TikTok seems pretty vulnerable. Were brands talking about that? Are they worried? Is there a contingency plan?
- [16:08]
B
I had a couple off the record conversations and nobody seemed too worried. I think most people think that is going to come down to the President elect at this point. Right. Kind of making seem to want. Right. Well, I think, I think some days you would say the guy wants it to, to exist because his followers, his contingency, you know, argues that it is the way they make money, it is the way they, you know, produce content and monetize it. I think there are other days when he probably turns it on and sees things that are not too, you know, happy on him and says, I don't want to be a part of this. I think having Elon in that room is going to be a whole other thing. But listen, I think this is one of those things. As one marketer put it to me, like Wagman, I've got enough on my plate right now to worry what, like, D.C. is going to think about this and if they turn it off they turn.
- [16:49]
A
Worry about it when I have to.
- [16:50]
B
Yeah, exactly. And, and to think that they will not have a plethora of places to go put that money. I think is the, you know, is, is, is a, is a lie. And there are many ways to put it. I think, I think the, the brands that will be bummed the most, right. Who have been. Those who have been really able to get things out of it throughout, not the traditional ad experience, the live shopping guys, I think marketers who have really figured out how to take advantage of the creator and influencer economies in this world. Right. And those are the ones who I.
- [17:17]
A
Think you can get eyeballs. It's, it's if you had a special connection to TikTok creators or TikTok functionality or something that will be harder to replace, seemingly. That's interesting. What about this, Mark? This keeps, this has been talked about for years, but it's, I keep hearing it a lot more. Is, are ad tech and Martech coming together? Should they come together? Is that on your plate? Are people talking about that? And why is that coming up now.
- [17:40]
B
Shout out to an old boss of mine, Maureen Little, who I worked with back in the days at turn and she and I used to have this debate ongoing, right. And she used to call it the shotgun wedding between Martech and Attack. And there, because there was all the. Back when I got into the early days of, of Programmatic, the early, early days. I remember when I, I was at an agency for a little bit and somebody had sent around the wrong file. It was a CSV of email addresses and oh my God had, right? And now all of a sudden like this is, this is commonplace. And I think, you know, frankly, it's the data collaboration, the data clean room that kind of brought this to the forefront, right. If you think about everything that the addressable TV market promised, it was I could go find Mark Wagman at his set top box or wherever he is. But oh, by the way, you have to tell me what Mark Wagner's email address is and where he lives. And so early days, right? Like that's what these, these, these publishers were asking for was send you an Excel file of everybody you want me to target. And then people say, well wait a minute, that doesn't seem the safest thing in the world. And insert clean room capabilities where, you know, everybody can put set and get up. So I think they're coming together. I think the organizational kind of design within these marketing teams is frankly the biggest hurdle in a lot of these cases. Right. Like it's still largely right. Like, there's still a lot of marketing teams that are organized like pre sale and post sale. Right before I know who you are, here are all the things that we do to prospect and find more people and make them work. But the minute they become a customer, they buy a sweater, they buy a car and, and there's a different timeline. Right. If you're in the auto world, like you're, you know, I'm going to go, I'm not going to go buy another car in the next two months. Right. But if you're in, if I'm buy a sweater, I might buy a pair of shorts in two months. And so those worlds have to come together more, I think, I think this was the promise of journey builders and other types of tools there. I think companies like Braze have been a really good job at doing this for marketers. I think the world in that case is like literally endless in terms of what you can, what you can do. Things like wallet ads are, are fun and new again in cases. Right? Yeah. And like all of a sudden I can start to make, you know, click on an ad unit I see for a given product or, or an offer and all of a sudden in my phone get delivered a, you know, coupon.
- [19:42]
A
Which would have sounded so sensitive and scary not long ago. Now it's great, it's amazing.
- [19:47]
B
And now you write and like Apple has, has inter integrated that into phones in such a way where, you know, I'm in Chicago, I walk down the street past Jimmy John's. Guess what pops off of my phone. It's my Jimmy John's, you know, loyalty card number. It reminds me, hey, it's right there. And so there's a lot of cool connectivity there. But I think that, yes, we are certainly blurring those lines. I think, you know, consumers are also more willing to opt into these things. And I think that's a new thing where you and I as just consumers understand the value of seeing more relevancy in our lives with respect to some of this stuff. And so if it means I'm going to serve, be served a bunch of generic ads or something a little bit more tailored to what I'm actually trying to do, sometimes I'm willing to give up more and more, which I think is a newer trend.
- [20:29]
A
Another huge story last week, again, not really a CES store, but just happened to come out, is the, the meta moderate moderation pullback again that people aren't like processing this still. I'm always cynical, like, yeah, right, no one's going to make change in your behavior. This is so integral to what they do. But I don't know. Did you, did you get the feeling that brands are worried about that? Just gonna have to wait and see. Are they pissed or they don't care?
- [20:52]
B
I think brands are tired frankly of having this conversation in debate. I think on, on one extreme you, not extreme, but on one coin you've got marketers who feel like, you know, especially in senior roles, it's their job to put their brand in environments that stand up for their brand and what.
- [21:10]
A
They, that really matters to them. That's precious.
- [21:13]
B
Yeah. And, and you're, and those are the ones that have largely stayed away from Meta and X and other of these platforms just because, hey, they don't represent what I want to be and what where, what I want my other consumer, what I want my customers to see. And then you certainly got the other school of thought of, you know, my, my job as the chief marketing officer is to drive shareholder value and if those platforms provide shareholder value for me and drive sales and drive conversions and who am I to be the guy who said or gal to say, no, I'm not going to let this put.
- [21:43]
A
My moral opinions aside and just make, you know, make my numbers right.
- [21:47]
B
So I think frankly, it's like everything in life, this will come down to how this plays out. Like, you know, it has gone into place now and you know, depending on how many quote unquote, scandals arise is part of this. Right. Like, I think you'll see marketers lean in and lean out. I think frankly a lot of people are, are very, you know, tired of talking about the polarization of politics from that perspective and don't really want to make those decisions. And so do I feel like anybody's going to pull out in totality right now? No, I mean everything I continue to hear in market, you know, would suggest that the, the ad platform is performing arguably better than ever before in terms of just like true roas and being a successful platform for all, all types of companies, big and small. But again, we'll see what happens here, right? Like if there's another right presidential scandal of some way shape or form or God forbid, another, you know, global pandemic. And all of a sudden this platform is the thing that is, is sharing all the disinformation.
- [22:41]
A
Right? Because I remember writing about these things and you know, you, how many ad for what stories can you write or how many bad adjacencies stories can you write where people are like, oh God. So it depends on the gravity. I think that'll be really interesting because people do get tired of this these topics. Any other takes from this week where brands are thinking, the climate that you have any like thoughts on where we're headed, predictions, what to look for in the next, you know, six to 12 months?
- [23:05]
B
I think we'll see. Aggressiveness is maybe the word I like to use right now in terms of like I think brands.
- [23:10]
A
Masculinity is back.
- [23:12]
B
Oh God. Maybe, maybe in the sense of like these brands. Listen, this is not, these aren't new themes, right? Like you and I have been in this space for quite some time but like this industry has a very short 10 year. They are feet are held to the fire. You are, you need to show results today whether you're selling cars or streaming downloads or apps or subscriptions, whatever it is. You, you are Mr. Or Mrs. Head of Growth for these organizations. And I think if last year was, you know, again we were waiting for a recession, maybe it didn't come. We were waiting for what would happen in the election. A lot of people kind of waited to see how that would play out. Talked about AI again as a cost saver. That's where I think that like a lot of brands this year are tired of waiting. Right. Like let's go for it. Let's get like let's do something now. A lot of the conversations I were in were like okay, that's cool you're telling me about all these things but I want to get back to my office on Monday and set a plan forward as to how we're going to run a pilot here or tell me what you're going to. Don't show me another case story that says, you know, 37% more brand awareness. Get more specific with me. Tell me how this is really going to do and how are you putting skin in the game. I think even today, right. Hot off the presses and maybe you saw this and maybe you didn't, but T Mobile's acquisition of Vistar, talk about.
- [24:22]
A
An aggressive move, right?
- [24:23]
B
Super aggressive movement. That's a great deal, right? T Mobile is a leader in the.
- [24:29]
A
World of unexpected given the other phone companies forays into the space. It's pretty wild.
- [24:35]
B
Yeah. A leader in the space with respect to the telco industry. I think Vistar has always been looked at as kind of the tip of the spear with respect to digital out of home and bringing together some of the promises that that industry has, has had for years. And if you think about one of its biggest problems, frankly measurement like the data Set that these. So I think we'll see more and more deals like that that frankly do start to solve. Not just like roll ups for roll up purposes and more ad servers coming together, more this coming together which again we'll start to see and I get it but like these are the ones that are more exciting in the sense of like you know there is a gap in the market for something like this and now these two industries coming together with respect to kind of more programmatic out at home tech with, with all the data and location data and, and, and, and handset they like there, there's a model there that starts to get marketers more exciting about spending in things like digital out of home. And I also think this is a year where you know, TikTok ban be damned. I don't think you know, sorry for all my friends who continue to play in the, in the 30250 game but like no marketer right now still really wants to talk about you know, banner ads and sky.
- [25:38]
A
That's more than heat is for. Certainly not, not at all.
- [25:41]
B
And if you think about where the heat is and where some of these brands are creating competitive advantage, it is in the creator and influencer space. And it's not the half a million dollar Kim Kardashian tweet or post. Right. It's in the, it's in the micro influencer. It's in finding the thousand people across this country who have small niche audiences who spend big money in a given category and those people can move this market quicker and faster than any banner ad or any for athlete, any TV spot. And so I think that's another area, you know, publicist acquired influential.
- [26:11]
A
Yeah, I wonder if you see more deals like that or roll ups of these micro influencer.
- [26:16]
B
It's another area where tech needs to be kind of injected too. Like the old adage of I'm a brand, I've got these objectives. Find me a group of influencers. Today it's largely just a set of rules that aren't very sophisticated. It's hey, I need a person this but imagine a world where you could inject all the performance data from previous campaigns and put some AI on top of that. All of a sudden now you can start to get predictive and say hey, if I'm a brand trying to launch a new streaming platform and I need to attract these types of audiences now go find me a group of diverse set of creators that can do that at scale.
- [26:47]
A
Yeah, not a bunch of one off deals but a huge help me make.
- [26:51]
B
It easier for me and brokerage and oh, by the way, help me measure that, go beyond just like the coupon code game and help me understand what I'm actually getting. I think that again, going back to my point about incrementality, you know, marketers just want to make sure that the dollars they put into market not only continue to work, but aren't duplicative. Right. That aren't wasted because I'm finding that same person as they're flipping around or trying to drive the same outcome because I didn't think about the consumer journey as I needed to. So.
- [27:17]
A
All right, Mark, it's going to be exciting. That's I like this new theme of the the aggressive takeover kind of go for a year. Let's. Let's do this again. Thank you so much for your time and hopefully we have a great 2025.
- [27:29]
B
Awesome. Thank you, sir. Have a good one.
- [27:32]
A
Thanks again to my guests this week, Media Leaks, Mark Wagman and my partners at Epsilon. If you liked 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. We'll see you next time for more on what's Next in Media. Thanks for listening.