Why Ad Tech Might Finally Get a Piece of That Creator $

Summary

Next in Media: Why Ad Tech Might Finally Get a Piece of That Creator $

Release Date: May 21, 2025
Host: Mike Shields
Guest: Connor McKenna, Partner at Luma Partners

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Introduction

In the May 21, 2025 episode of Next in Media, host Mike Shields delves into a transformative discussion with Connor McKenna, a partner at Luma Partners. The episode, titled "Why Ad Tech Might Finally Get a Piece of That Creator $," explores the evolving landscape of the creator economy and its intersection with ad technology. Connor shares insights from Luma Partners' recent DMS event, highlighting the underutilization of creator-driven content by brands and the potential shifts that could reshape this dynamic.

The Underspent Creator Economy

Connor McKenna kicks off the conversation by addressing a critical observation from Luma Partners' DMS event: "brands are way underspending on creators despite the massive amount of time people spent with their content" (00:35). He emphasizes that while the creator economy garners significant attention, there's a substantial gap in how brands allocate their advertising budgets towards creators.

Time Spent vs. Advertising Spend

Connor elaborates on the disparity between the audience's engagement with creator content and the actual investment from brands. "Creators have, as an aggregate, 20 billion of spend compared to 200 plus for the platforms that are all reliant on them" (04:56). This statistic underscores the immense potential for ad tech to bridge this gap by facilitating more efficient and scalable connections between brands and creators.

Converging Media Platforms and Creator Fragmentation

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the convergence of various media platforms and the resultant fragmentation of creators. Connor explains how platforms like YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and Connected TV (CTV) are increasingly intertwining, particularly around video content. "There's a perfect convergence of all this and what is underlying, you know, YouTube but creators" (03:42), he notes, highlighting the shift from siloed platforms to more integrated ecosystems.

Impact of AI and Media Consumption Shifts

Connor identifies AI and changing media consumption habits as pivotal factors influencing this convergence. "Media consumption is a very interesting part. And that's where the creators come into this, where we're both converging around types of formats at the same time that we are, you know, getting more and more fragmentation around creators" (02:11). These technological and behavioral shifts are creating new opportunities for ad tech to tap into the creator-driven content landscape.

Challenges in Integrating Creators with Ad Tech

Despite the evident potential, several challenges hinder the seamless integration of creators into the ad tech ecosystem. Connor points out issues related to workflow inefficiencies, brand safety concerns, and the difficulty in measuring ROI. "It's not super scalable today. Right. You can't go execute, you know, massive buys across a wide range too easily" (09:48), he explains, emphasizing the need for more streamlined processes to facilitate large-scale creator collaborations.

Historical Attempts and the MCN Days

Reflecting on past efforts, Connor references the era of Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs) on YouTube, which struggled to drive significant value despite managing numerous creators. "MCNs didn't drive YouTube. The thousands and thousands of UGC creators really did, you know, in the early days" (12:47). This historical context highlights the complexity of monetizing creator content through traditional ad tech models and underscores the necessity for innovative approaches.

Opportunities for Ad Tech in the Creator Space

Connor is optimistic about the evolving landscape, citing several emerging trends that could catalyze the integration of ad tech with creator-driven content:

1. AI-Driven Optimization: AI can enhance workflows, streamline content creation, and improve the measurement of advertising outcomes. "With AI, there's going to be more and more opportunities to measure that in unique ways where you can drive that and then also, you know, make the workflows that much more efficient" (11:02).

2. Cross-Platform Campaigns: As creators distribute content across multiple platforms, there's a growing need for ad tech solutions that can facilitate "media buys across platforms all at once through a creator" (05:42). This cross-platform capability can provide brands with a unified approach to leveraging creator content.

3. Enhanced Measurement Metrics: Developing standardized metrics to assess the ROI of creator-driven campaigns is crucial. "How do you tie creator spend to user acquisition costs so that you can buy it in the same way you might buy performance advertising?" (11:02).

4. Creator Empowerment: Empowering creators with tools to manage their monetization strategies beyond platform-controlled mechanisms can unlock greater value. "Creators are going to start to just demand to be a bigger piece of the conversation and start thinking themselves in that way" (08:25).

The Role of Regulation and Market Dynamics

Mike Shields raises an intriguing point about the potential impact of regulation on the ad tech and creator economy. Connor responds by acknowledging that while regulation could introduce new dynamics, platforms like Google and Meta will continue to hold significant control over data, audiences, and AI capabilities. "They control the data, they control the audiences, they control the, you know, the AI underneath" (21:15). However, he also suggests that regulation might spur the development of third-party tools that enhance the integration between brands and creators.

Future Investment and Market Trends

Looking ahead, Connor anticipates a surge in investment towards platforms and technologies that facilitate seamless creator-brand collaborations. "There's going to be, you know, there's so many creators, can be a million different experiments to be run" (15:44). He expects both new startups and existing players to innovate in areas such as automated workflow management, advanced measurement tools, and comprehensive buying platforms that operate across multiple social media channels.

Conclusion: A Transformative Opportunity

The episode concludes with Connor stressing the vast untapped potential within the creator economy for ad tech to harness. "There's a lot of power that they wield on intent from consumers" (22:13), he asserts, highlighting the critical role creators play in influencing consumer behavior across diverse platforms. As the media landscape continues to evolve, the synergy between ad technology and creator-driven content stands poised to redefine advertising strategies, offering brands unprecedented opportunities to connect with engaged audiences.

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If you enjoyed this detailed exploration of the intersection between ad tech and the creator economy, be sure to subscribe to Next in Media for more insightful discussions with industry leaders shaping the future of media, marketing, and advertising.

Transcript

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[Mike Shields]

That's V U E P L-A-N-N-E-R.com this week on Next in Media, I spoke to Connor McKenna, partner at Luma Partners. Connor and his team presented some pretty intriguing slides at Luma's DMS event last week. Basically saying that brands are way underspending on creators despite the massive amount of time people spent with their content. Connor thinks a few new dynamics may change all that while providing ad tech an entry point to this lucrative sector that is mostly in off lim. Of course there are reasons why this may not happen. We get into that as well. It's a pretty thought provoking topic overall and I think hope you'll enjoy. So let's get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to Next in Media. I'm Mike Shields. My guest this week is Connor McKenna. He's a partner at Luma Partners. Hey Connor, how's it going? Thanks for being here.

[Connor McKenna]

Hey Mike, Doing very well. Thank you for having me.

[Mike Shields]

Great to talk to you now because we, I saw you last week, you had put on, you guys put on your huge DMS event in New York which was excellent and there was a particular section that really caught my eye and I wanted to talk to you about it. So I grabbed you and specifically it's about, I think it was interesting and I'll let you frame the way this, this section came together. But you were, I think it might surprise people. You guys were saying as much as we talk about the creator economy and there's excitement around it and brands are doing a lot more there, that there is a gap in terms of time spent with that kind of content and advertising for a number of reasons. But I'll let you frame the conversation Brad, that I have, what point were you initially trying to make there?

[Connor McKenna]

Yeah, so I think based on our conference we do the state of digital and we're always trying to think of what are the biggest trends driving advertising and marketing dollars and Technology and a lot of times that sort of channel specific, you know, commerce media. We've talked about creator before as a channel and well, we were realizing this year is there's, there's these sort of bigger underlying forces impacting all this around AI outcomes and sort of changes to the media consumption. And so that media consumption is a very interesting part. And that's where the creators come into this, where we're both converging around types of formats at the same time that we are, you know, getting more and more fragmentation around creators and who's actually producing this content. And so, and this brings together different ecosystems, right? It's not just social, it's how these are interacting more and more. CTV interacting with podcasts, et cetera. And so, you know, part of the thesis is if you look at all those forms of media, Spotify, Meta, YouTube and then, you know, Disney and the rest in CTV, a bunch of these are converging more and more towards video and video distribution and sometimes, you know, distributed on TV. YouTube's probably the best example where it really crosses the chasm of both these. They've got YouTube shorts, which directly competes with Meta and TikTok and the rest. And then you've got the fact that the most watched thing on the, you know, the big screen in our living room is actually the YouTube app, not YouTube TV, but YouTube itself, where they're.

[Mike Shields]

Competing with NBC and Disney and wherever else.

[Connor McKenna]

There's a perfect convergence of all this and what is underlying, you know, YouTube but creators, right? And that's not just YouTube, but it's also, you know, meta, even more so. And historically we viewed these as wall gardens, right? They are siloed, they're separate, you go to buy them. Actually, ad tech has not done a lot on top of them because they're such controlled platforms that it's hard to make about that. But yeah, you know, sort of sitting in between them. But increasingly, you know, when Meta was one year social graph and YouTube was, you know, UGC, creators had very little power between because they only really used one of them. Now as they're converging around forms and creators are incredibly important to this dynamic. There's actually a lot more stability to these platforms than there used to be. And therefore the fact that creators as an aggregate have, you know, 20 billion of spend compared to 200 plus for the platforms that are all reliant on them is a very interesting dynamic because they're all moving towards time spent, but not time spent with, you know, social. It's time, entertainment, content, is creative content that is across all these platforms. And so then I also, I always think about where is there fragmentation from supply in for ad tech? Because you need that.

[Mike Shields]

That's an opportunity that that's right.

[Connor McKenna]

And there's just mass fragmentation of creators and what it means to be a creator has dramatically changed over the last number of years. And even you know, the number of players like yourself that have been historically part of bigger brands increasingly are brands, you know, along their own names and are using that to drive across this ecosystem. And so that was the sort of fundamental premise there, which is there is this massive opportunity as we start to move forward, the buckets that creators binge kind of like really bottom level affiliate or top end sponsored content start to go away and they can be part of the broader paid media ecosystem overall is the sort of big underlying thesis there's.

[Mike Shields]

All right, so a bunch of questions coming out of that because I think it's super interesting. One of the things you talked about was how so many of the big creators, whether they might be a YouTuber, you know, by reputation or history, but they all kind of distribute on all the platforms or lots of them do cut downs for TikTok and cut downs for meta or they build different, you know, different genres or fan bases there. That theoretically opens a way to do a media buy across platforms all at once through a creator. But that seems inherently challenging because of the Wall Garden thing you mentioned. And then I want to just ask you about what maybe ad tech's reluctance to try and get into this space. But what about the like the cross, the fact that these guys distribute everywhere, does that change things?

[Connor McKenna]

I think it does. I think it changes the dynamic with the platforms almost more importantly than it does the ad tech is then the next layer down from that. But the, you know, if you thought about, you know, Mr. Beast just being on YouTube right then YouTube has a lot of control and we've seen this with a lot of those platforms and they change their algorithms and things of the past. They're all now courting the same creators, especially the mega ones to be on their shorts to be and you know, making longer form content to be making podcasts that they have to bring more consistency to those, to the creators.

[Mike Shields]

They can't your people around like they might have been able to in the past.

[Connor McKenna]

I guess as much let's, let's still, let's not say there's not going to be any jerking around and they're not going to do that.

[Mike Shields]

There's only so many big guys yeah, yeah, you're saying.

[Connor McKenna]

So that's one, that's one dynamic. The other is we have seen this in. So we did this, this fundraiser company called Many Chat that someone invested in and they do a lot of the chat marketing underneath Instagram and other platforms. You know, if you, you know, Common X, you, you know, get this code and enter that, you get this one to one communication channel on Meta. But what is, what's actually underlying that? Because a lot of their customers are, you know, creators or prosumers where they use that to inform their customers or potential customers and drive them down the funnel is creators have been thinking for a long time about how do I move my audience to different platforms, how do I monetize them in different ways, how do I collect information? And so the more of that, they're using, you know, shorts as just the top of their funnel, which then they will flow through to. Okay, now subscribe to my substack, maybe listen to my podcast where then they'll monetize in different ways on those platforms. So they are thinking sort of cross platform on all these different things from what's the best from distribution to monetization to, you know, maybe actually selling merchandise and goods. So there's, there's that dynamic as well. So one I think is that the platforms have to actually manage competitors like they haven't done before. And then two, creators are leveraging all these tools as if it's their marketing funnel and that both those opportunities create opportunity for third party tech to sort of on top of that, whether that's supporting creators or supporting the marketers and advertisers who are trying to get in front of audiences via these creators, yes, they can do it by buying ad slots on YouTube or Meta, but if there's ways to do even more, connecting directly to creators, which is really the powerful place to be, that's where they want to take advantage of it. And historically that's been very tough just from it's been very services and workflow and challenges along those lines that just made it tough to scale in general.

[Mike Shields]

Would you say when you talk to brands and media agencies, is the spending gap, Is it because they're still kind of moving money out of traditional channels and it just takes time? Or is it. Do they say it's just really tough to buy creators at scale because of all those workflow things you talked about? Is it because they're just not sure about the whole space still and it's brand safety or it's weird like what, what is the big Big holdup if there is one you hear about.

[Connor McKenna]

Yeah, probably all of the above. I also don't think they think of it as a spending gap. I think they see that, you know, the spend ToWards Meta and YouTube and other platforms is all going against that content.

[Mike Shields]

I'm buying creators, right? I'm buying YouTube ads. What's the big deal, right?

[Connor McKenna]

Yeah. And they think of creators as the just pure sort of authentic voice component of, hey, this person is directly sponsoring. And you know, you get a lot of that authenticity control of it. You also get a lot of content out of it. People use creator content to then, you know, repurpose and use elsewhere. So I think they all see the value of that. It's not super scalable today. Right. You can't go execute, you know, massive buys across a wide range too easily. There's obviously platforms that have been working on making this smoother and more efficient and there have been, you know, some M and A deals around that in the last few years. So I think people are seeing that opportunity. It's still pretty disconnected from your other channels, right? You're, you're, you tend to be buying creators on maybe the reach, expectations and frequency and things of that ilk versus what you might be buying from an audience perspective on, you know, whether it's on the walled gardens or CTV or other channels as well. I think part of what's been tough to do is, I mean, this is tough in overall ad ecosystem. We talked about this too, is how do you tie like, you know, brand spend to outcomes? How are you measuring the ROI across these?

[Mike Shields]

Probably harder to do than just, well.

[Connor McKenna]

You don't have the data, the data sets with, with the platforms. You don't have the ability to go do, you know, a geo test or any of the, some of the traditional incrementality stuff. I think there's, with AI, there's going to be more and more opportunities to measure that in unique ways where you can drive that and then also, you know, make the workflows that much more efficient. We're already seeing some platforms, you know, lean into. How do you tie creator spend to, you know, user acquisition costs so that you can buy it in the same way you might buy performance advertising? Or how do you tie it to the, the context and how do you know the context of a type of creator is really going to drive a lot more value? And there's some interesting platforms doing that on YouTube. So that's where this starts to get interesting because it's sort of, it's separate from the platforms, you can sit on top of them and drive a lot of value that, that's you know, not happening inherently there. And then importantly, you give a lot more value to the creators. Right. If they are driving the direction capabilities, they capture a lot more of that spend. And this has been particularly true as you know, YouTube and Meta have pushed towards shorts. Right. It's a lot harder to get credit for your monetization in a YouTube shorts.

[Mike Shields]

It's just confined space. Yeah. Okay, a couple of questions. So over the years, even going back to like the MCN days and when YouTube really started becoming a bigger player, like there's been attempts at trying to bring some automation to this category, make it a little bit more programmatic. Like we know I remember companies having like a way you could buy like a ton of brand mentions in one shot or some kind of affiliate thing that was like really quick to execute. But it seems it's inherently challenging when to do custom integrations in a space that's. So that requires a lot of integration versus like the way ad tech works. Why might that be changing?

[Connor McKenna]

Yeah, well, I think, look, creators are just becoming a much bigger part of the media pie today and the media ecosystem. So whether it's, you know, you've got major TV stars that have now shifted and they're primarily podcasters and things that ilk that, that some is just getting more, you know, enterprise driven and a lot of those purchases and, and, and sales, I think there's, there's a lot of opportunity to bring more workflow to it, unlock a lot of that creativity. And one of the big challenges is it's like it's host red and it's managed and all the rest. And you need to work inside guidelines like you actually can't just take someone's ad and put it into your YouTube, you know, video feed that actually is against their, their compliance rules. It needs to be more authentic to that. But that even that space is way underserved. The number of people that are actively doing that into their YouTube videos, where it is still them, where they can capture a lot more value is, is super low. I think same thing with you know, Instagram and Shorts and the rest. It's, it's very challenging. It's usually an entire, you know, part of your video. And so that workflow of aligning companies with influencers that can actually drive value and then make the review process and all the rest is something that has only been constantly improving. And I think it's even stronger when you bring in AI where You can start to create stuff, review stuff, manage it much faster. So that's one component of it. And two, I think creators are going to start to just demand to be a bigger piece of the, the conversation and start thinking themselves in that way. How can they drive the monetization more directly instead of having it be controlled completely via the platforms? So those two dynamics started to move together. I mean, with McNs, I totally agree, it was challenging. The thing is that frankly, MCNs didn't drive YouTube. The, you know, thousands and thousands of UGC creators really did, you know, in the early days. That's because it wasn't the same form of entertainment. As it becomes similar forms of entertainment. The biggest players have big roles and there's a lot more of them and there's a lot more companies really building business around it and there's better software and technology to manage it. So I think those are all together making it more useful. But I think ultimately the fact, if you could start to think of unleashing some of that creativity and tying it more towards outcomes and sort of using AI to, to, you know, sort of connect those dots, then you can think of some of that upper, upper funnel, you know, creator dollars as paid media. Right? Not just sponsor budget or something special.

[Mike Shields]

I have a couple of thoughts coming out of that. So one thought. Do you think there is going to be a wave of new investment where there'll be somebody's trying to come up with a buying platform that cuts across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok at the same time? Or is it going to be more about, you know, automating the workflow across all these platforms or automating product placements?

[Connor McKenna]

Yeah, it's really all of the above. I mean, I think there's going to be, you know, there's so many creators, can be a million different experiments to be run, you know, different regions or different products are going to focus on different channels where they have, you know, even stronger capabilities. But some of the, you know, Unilever has said they want to 20x the number of creators they work with. This year over 50% of their spend will be on social and creators. So clearly they're seeing a ton of value from the amount of time spent on these platforms. I think that only increases the, you know, what creators could do with those platforms. And it doesn't need to be, you know, I think if you're a creator today, your focus is not being isolated one platform. So inherently then you start to say, how can I, instead of doing, you know, budgets for meta and budgets for TikTok or whatever and different content. How can I start to bring that across my entire audience? Because that's really where I drive a lot of value for brands. There's mass fragmentation of the number of creators you go work with. From that perspective, that's been a challenge to go, you know, find that effectively iterate on it, right? It's, it's sort of test, it goes back to Merck classic like set up the workflow, run it, test, get the report, you know, a while later like, or you've got the affiliate, you know, super bottom direct response type advertising that you can see quickly but is still, you know, a challenge. So it's, you know, a lot of these things are coming together at once.

[Mike Shields]

How theoretical is this? Are you seeing from the people you talk to, like some of the usual attack suspects wanting to invest in new startups in this world, are the, you know, the incumbents going to start pushing new creators? More like what's going on in the market?

[Connor McKenna]

I would not say I'm seeing the incumbents necessarily focus on it. Part of the reason it was in our state of digital is get people to think about this space in a new way. The agencies are definitely spending a ton of time thinking about it. It's a huge area of growth, it's a huge area of focus from brands and so it's, it's becoming increasingly critical. I think the, there is a massive opportunity there. The notion of these businesses or these, these platforms or wall gardens becoming more stable platforms is something I've been thinking a lot about, you know, even ever since I met the ManyChat CEO and we were talking through this concept. So I don't think that's realized in the ad tech landscape today. Too many people have been burned sort of buying on these platforms, but anyone on the service aside has done a ton into creators and increasingly there's very much actionable companies that are doing more in this ecosystem to either bring, you know, better commerce capabilities towards creators, better workflow to, you know, brands and creators getting together. Starting to tie that from a measurement perspective to traditional forms of, of measurement so that it can be bought in the same bucket. I mean there's a lot of that happening. I will say it tends to be more creator specific today. You're not seeing, you know, the programmatic ad tech space isn't investing heavily there yet. What will be first is probably some of the measurement stuff because if you can align it towards multi channel and omnichannel, then it starts to open up that aperture. So at least from the overlap. Right. Companies that are measuring stuff there will start measuring stuff in this space even more. And then the buying always sort of is flow down from that. It's not similar we saw that with when it was desktop versus mobile. Right. Now that conversation is you can't measure it first. Right.

[Mike Shields]

But I wonder, because there's a structural challenge there, that the budgets are parked in certain areas and they're measured a certain way. And then I guess the more that the unilevers of the world say we're going to do this, you got to figure out how to measure it for me would help push things towards that paid media channel and let everything be apples to apples versus just having these silos with their own metrics, their own KPIs.

[Connor McKenna]

Yeah, I think that's. That's right. I mean, I think as also, let's just take YouTube again as, as an example, like if YouTube starts to be considered more like TV, which they're not today, there's a massive discount between a CPM on YouTube just buying through YouTube than there is buying on CTV. Despite the amount of time spent and the fact that for YouTube they're still catching.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah.

[Connor McKenna]

The primary device though for YouTube is, is the TV now. Right. And that means that creators that are spending or that are distributing through that as their primary channel can get a big bump in the size of their business and value in the media ecosystem. And that alone opens up the aperture of how they start to think about managing their business, what tools and technology they need. Versus. Yeah, I'm only focused on the content side of things and I'm going to go upload and I'll get paid whatever YouTube pays me and really just focus on building audience. They start thinking about how to optimize that. Right. So all those things are coming together at once. I don't purport to have a crystal ball as to how it will play out. There's a reason I'm a banker and not a tech entrepreneur here, but. But I can more so we try to see like what is this 30,000 foot shift happening where there sort of creates the opportunity. And certainly there are some very interesting, you know, growth companies that are starting to tackle this area in big ways.

[Mike Shields]

I wonder if regulation or the threat of regulation might actually help accelerate this. Meaning that like it's been a wall garden world and they've been sort of doing their things the wrong way. I'm not saying that there's going to, they're going to all be opened up to every single dsp but if, if, if a Google gets broken up and if others have to kind of follow suit, that would create more of an opening for an ad tech player to try and plug into all these platforms and do something.

[Connor McKenna]

Yeah, it certainly brings a whole dynamic into play. I think in the early days it's going to be more of a, I think it'll be driven more by creators who are really leaning to try to help opt and brands wanting to optimize across and they'll, you know, sort of tape ways to do it together. I wouldn't view any of this as a discount on the platforms themselves because they don't know that it's a, it's a value transfer because the, the inventory that they control is super valuable. It's more of a, you know, Broadway, right? Yeah, exactly. And they control the data, they control the audiences, they control the, you know, the AI underneath. These capabilities to determine what to show who, when is still incredibly powerful. And that's not changing. No creator has that right. But if they can, if they've got a really strong audience that they can capture not just here but sort of like reach them across their funnel and really inform even better purchases, there's a lot of power that they wield on intent from consumers.

[Mike Shields]

So I guess last thing got it for me is we're besides this ad tech opportunity, you guys laid out just the. I know people realize how big creators are but the, the time spent number. Do people in the industry totally grasp that? Because I think people just assume still. Well, there's still so much linear and there's still so much sports which I'm not denying that but that when you put them up against each other that is a pretty wild thing to view.

[Connor McKenna]

I think agencies definitely are. The ad tech ecosystem, not so much. But you know, this isn't, these are brand new slides. So this isn't something we've been talking about too too much time. We talked last year about the importance of creators and sort of reframing what is a creator because you know, as I see it, sort of personal brand is becoming so important across anything, whether it's sports, media, politics, et cetera. And a lot of that is then spent on these platforms, but not just one, it's across all of them. And so influence is sort of spread across there. So I think people understand how much time is spent on these platforms. They still think of it as oh that's the wall gu and I can't touch it or I can't manage it. The challenge is when they're Siloed. It's just hard to break in as they start to sort of align. That's where brands say, I need to manage across these more holistically. And especially if the time spent between them gets more, you know, at parity, that becomes even more interesting. And so those are the dynamics. I mean that in and of itself, whether it's through creators directly or not opens up the aperture for what ad tech can do in the space. Commerce media opens up the aperture of what, what they can do with these wall gardens. Because at the same time, and the Amazon is competing with TikTok and meta more than they ever have before, advertising is clearly a huge focus for them. They're making partnerships around doing direct commerce via Amazon checkout in meta and Meta's doing that because it's really freaking hard to get people.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah, it's hard to get people to buy stuff on the platform. Right.

[Connor McKenna]

Build your trust, all, all of that. And so, you know, commerce media is another avenue where ad tech is like, you know, one of the biggest topics in commerce media is bringing platforms off site. Right. Bringing your demand into other channels. The biggest channels are, you know, Meta and Google and YouTube.

[Mike Shields]

You're right. Social shopping is also is like treated as a total other. Where it seems to, there seems to be an opportunity to bring that together with the retail media space a lot more.

[Connor McKenna]

Yes. And so I think a lot of this is converging towards. Okay, these platforms are incredibly important. There's more opportunity for ad tech to bring other capabilities on top than there were before. And then underneath that, let's not forget, it's not just the platforms. There's this huge creator opportunity that increasingly is the foundation that these are built on. Like when, when meta was a social graph and 50% of your time was spent with who you followed and, and generally there were people you knew that was all meta to monetize. Right. I wasn't monetizing my friends. Looking at.

[Mike Shields]

No, no. Sally's posts are not up front exactly.

[Connor McKenna]

But as, as Now, I think 7% of time spent on Instagram is with your friends and is not even with people you're following. It's entirely just based on entertainment interest. All of a sudden that importance of creators to them is incredibly powerful and starts to change the dynamic.

[Mike Shields]

Yeah, that's a game changer. Connor, awesome stuff. Thank you for helping speculate the future with us here and break this down. But this is great, great conversation and let's chat again.

[Connor McKenna]

Yeah, thank you for having me.

[Mike Shields]

Thanks again. And my guest this week, Loomis Connor McKenna and my partners at View Planner. 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. We'll see you next time for more. What's Next in Media. Thanks for listening.