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"Why did we anoint Google and Apple as privacy czars?"
00:32:19
Next in Media spoke with Tim Vanderhook and Chris Vanderhook, co-Founders of Viant Technologies. The CEO and COO of the ad tech firm talked about their Trade Desk rivalry, whether a Google breakup will be good for their business and the open web, and why CTV offers a chance for fewer monopolies.
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- [00:01]
Mike Shields
Collaboration is a new competition. The One Audience alliance by Elemental TV unites premium publishers to tackle CTV's biggest challenge, fragmentation. By collaborating over AI powered audience insights and inventory, we're creating an ecosystem where advertisers win, publishers thrive and audiences stay engaged. Join The Movement Redefining CTV@elementaltv.com One audiencealliance that's E L E M E N T a l t v.com Oneaud I e n C E A A L L I A N C E this week on Next in Media, I chatted with the very outspoken Tim Vanderhoek and Chris Vanderhoek, co founders of Viant Technologies. If you follow the two brothers over the years, you know they don't really hold back. And we got into it talking about why the ad tech industry has sort of failed at self regulation yet why regulators often seem a few steps behind big tech. We also talked about the impact of a Google breakup and whether Amazon is actually on the same kind of monopoly path and what role Apple is or isn't playing in this ecosystem. Tim, Chris and I also touched on Viet's would be rivalry with the trade desk. Why they are actually both hopeful that CTV will offer a nice reset for the duopoly tropoly we've seen over the last decade.
- [01:05]
Tim Vanderhoek
Lots to get into.
- [01:06]
Mike Shields
So let's get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to Next in Media. I'm Mike Shields. I've got two guests this week. We've got Tim and Chris Vanderhoek. Tim is the, they're both co founders of Via Technology. Tim is the CEO. Chris is the coo. Gentlemen, how are you? Thanks for being here. This is going to be exciting. It's going to be a little hard to manage I'm worried about but we'll get through it.
- [01:38]
Tim Vanderhoek
All right. Thanks for having us. Glad to be here.
- [01:40]
Chris Vanderhoek
Thanks Mike.
- [01:40]
Mike Shields
Lots to talk about. It's been a while since we've caught up. I'm psyched about this. I'm wondering where to start but I think, you know, it's hard not to talk in our universe about all the big Google news. There's really been almost you know, there's been the announcement about their ad tech business being declared a monopoly. They're still in the middle of their search trial. They're looking at remedies in both and not to mention cookies are now staying forever apparently. Why don't we start with like just a bigger would be breakup question. I'm questioning whether this is going to have a. Obviously it could drag out for a long time how much is this going to immediately change the business, your business, the market? What are your immediate thoughts there?
- [02:19]
Chris Vanderhoek
Yeah, I mean I'll get mine first and then you go. I mean to me competition is great for choice. And I think what we've seen is Google had lock in through the monopoly setup that they had. And so for Vyant, we think we're going to benefit tremendously because it creates that opportunity for advertisers who are rethinking their ad tech stack. So to me I think it's great for the open web, great for independent ad tech. You're going to have a number of advertisers, it's already happening, spilling out of Google Ad tech. But with a formal breakup, there will be no lock in or necessary reason to use Google's ad tech stack. If they break that YouTube, I guess.
- [02:58]
Tim Vanderhoek
Requirement and I think even if it takes, you know, three, four or five years, right. They're going to appeal it all that there's been a lot of damage done. If you read the evidence that came out on that, it was pretty damning.
- [03:09]
Mike Shields
Yeah, they did not come out looking good. I mean that's no matter what.
- [03:13]
Tim Vanderhoek
And we've already seen a lot of customers, you know, spend leaving DV360 even though DV360 wasn't part of that. We've seen a lot of spend move away from Google. I think you've seen they, they report network revenues are down and they have been down for almost two years. So minus the fourth quarter, that was the only time it was up. I think in the last close to two years. I think in the first quarter it was, it was down again. So I think you're seeing spend leaving Google products. I think in the from an ad tech perspective that's already happened. I think that this accelerates that. I think that benefits, you know, other players in the industry, whether that be other ad exchanges, SSPs. I think, you know, DSPs winning that. But the other thing I would say even just around the cookie fiasco, I think the damage there is, yes, it was a lot of resources wasted, but I think a lot of people are realizing, wait, why did we for the last four, five years, why did we anoint Google and Apple as privacy czars?
- [04:07]
Mike Shields
The irony was that you're having them getting broken up for monopolistic tendencies in by the government and then they are kind of dictating how the so much of the business works on the other end and then no one's doing it. That's kind of the crazy part of.
- [04:21]
Tim Vanderhoek
This, it's a realization, I think among companies, I don't know how you know, at least our view is, you know, it's kind of like, you know, let's say two years ago if you came out and said I'm doing fingerprinting, you might get sued. Like you might get sued. But literally Google came out and just said it's okay, yeah, we're doing that. And now it's like, I guess it's okay. So I think it's a, it really is. If there was going to be a privacy czar, it should have been a government body. And regulation and I think our industry has done really well with both the early on and self regulation. But when regulation came out, ccpa, cpra, whatever the other state laws were, and even if there was a federal law, I think our industry has done a really good job of complying with those. But when you get put in an impossible position by a monopolist, either Apple or Google, it's a different equation. You're not really solving for privacy, you're solving for an entity that's, that is controlling privacy away from you. It's privacy for thee, but not for me.
- [05:19]
Mike Shields
Make an issue point because the industry is long tended towards let's do self regulation as much as we can, or let's work with the government when we need to. But you now in a place where does the government just feel too, too many steps slow, where they're not going to remedy, they're not, they're not tackling this cookie issue, they're not tackling the AI search monopolistic stuff that's coming up now or the future. Like who can drive the Trump administration to do what they want. But do we need the government to be more future looking on these kind of things?
- [05:48]
Chris Vanderhoek
I mean, I think it's almost impossible for a government to be future looking because they don't know where these companies are going. I mean it's hard to tackle even AI 10 years ago. It's hard to, you know, imagine where it would go. So I think the government's always going to be reactive in these situations. I think it's just way too bureaucratic. I mean the fact that Google is a monopoly is not news to anyone. Everyone in independent ad tech has felt it for more than a decade, probably closer to two decades at this point. It's that process that needs to get fixed, is the reactive process to it. How do you speed these things up? And it's above our pay grade, but ultimately it's the Time frame to get to a decision that takes too long because look at how many dead bodies.
- [06:32]
Tim Vanderhoek
Are all along this path.
- [06:34]
Mike Shields
And that's the thing. You can't go back and bring back all those bodies and have them restart. Now that's the. I remember writing about the tube mogul thing where they were screaming about the what you, the YouTube. You can't, you couldn't buy YouTube other than using Google Schools. And that was at least a decade ago. And yeah, it just thinks and they're not coming back. I mean they got a good acquisition, everything like that. But that, that, that marketplace dynamic can't be recreated.
- [06:56]
Tim Vanderhoek
But even think of them that I don't know. But that very well may have been a big reason that forced their sale. Even with Adobe. You know, Adobe has great assets, but it is really unfortunate. But I think that new rules have to be put in place. You know, when I think a little bit forward, you have to then look at the, the incentives. You know, when anyone starts a company, Mike, you have your own company, we have our own company. Everyone starts a company and thinks I want to grow this thing huge. I want to be incredibly successful. And in the back of your mind, everybody would love to build such a successful business. You had a monopoly in something. The problem is, is that incentives, let's say you do build a big powerful company, that's really important. Well, the incentives are such in capitalism that you have to keep going. There's no end state, you must keep growing.
- [07:44]
Mike Shields
You're done growing. It's cool now that that's not how it works.
- [07:46]
Tim Vanderhoek
You have to keep going. So it's a natural thing in business that if end up creating monopoly in one area, you must eat other services and sectors. You must do it. And that to me is where I really do think, and this is almost counter the way I think about business, but we've seen so much damage done here, especially with the rise of AI. I think the government does need to really think, you know, prospectively. They really do need to think the.
- [08:09]
Chris Vanderhoek
Damages should be punitive.
- [08:11]
Mike Shields
Yeah. Not, you know, getting in trouble for past mistakes. Do you think I'm close to developing a monopoly, by the way?
- [08:17]
Tim Vanderhoek
Hey, depending on how well how many views this gets, we get over 100 views.
- [08:21]
Mike Shields
It's possible.
- [08:22]
Tim Vanderhoek
Yeah.
- [08:22]
Mike Shields
Okay, what about getting back to the. I know a lot of this is so theoretical, but we think that we know what the government might want to do in terms of forcing pieces of Google to be spun off. You don't think brands and publishers are going to wait and See and maybe I'll be, I'll be part of the new independent Ad X or GAM or whatever. There'll be a reshuffling and the independent ad tech players, the other players will have an opportunity to jump in and make moves.
- [08:47]
Chris Vanderhoek
Well, we want a fair marketplace where the best product wins. I wouldn't call Google's products the best products in the marketplace but their market share has maintained pretty substantial. So I think in the end what we want is a fair marketplace where the best product can really shine. The lock in that Google created partially the lock in that the trade desk is trying to create around UID 2 and things of that nature. That's where we, we want those things to go away. Let it be a fair, make it interoperable the way the open web is supposed to be. And I think we'll get our fair share and other companies will get their fair share.
- [09:23]
Mike Shields
You mentioned the trade desk. That was going to be one of my topics here. You guys have been, you know they've long been the, they were the up and coming, you know they were shouting at Google and pro, you know they were the populist open web company. They have become huge and established. Obviously you've been critical of them and their role here. Why. So what are people not understanding maybe about their practices? And I'm a little surprised you don't see people see other, other leaders at this outspoken. But what made you guys want to go there?
- [09:53]
Chris Vanderhoek
Well by the way we're critical on our own company. Yeah, well you should work here. The same external of LinkedIn around our competition we do internally around, around buying as well.
- [10:04]
Tim Vanderhoek
But I don't know. I think that the Mets don't like the Yankees. They, the jets don't like the Giants. I think there's a little bit of that, I think that, that there's healthy rivalries between companies and that's totally fine. I think that when we start talking about certain things I think you know, when narratives get spread in the industry we really do, we love the industry. We've been in this industry since 1999. We were running a business on AOL dial up modem in our parents house. That's how early we were. And I think that, that the health of the, of the industry has been in question for quite some time is because there's, there's a couple of dominating forces and I think that when companies go out and create narratives that we think are false and are bad for the industry we're going to speak out.
- [10:47]
Mike Shields
Against that and it's a storytelling industry. Right. So that you get a lot of that.
- [10:51]
Tim Vanderhoek
It is. And then going back to incentives, a lot of people cannot speak. You said that it's very unique that somebody like us will, will come out and speak up and talk out against things or whether it be competitors or industry wide things, everyone is, they're conflicted because they likely get so much money from them. Whether to be Google or Amazon or trade desk or whoever, they're conflicted and they can't. So we're not. And in some cases we are. But we think it's for the betterment of the industry and maybe even our company that we have to do that. So I think that's why we're outspoken on those. I don't think that we're taking cheap shots or anything like that. I think they're all substantive issues. Maybe we have some fun on social media here or there, but that's just, I think that's just some rivalry ness. But a lot of the things that we've spoken out about, we just, we think that they're not correct narratives.
- [11:40]
Chris Vanderhoek
In the end, we don't think UID2 is a long term good solution for the industry to bet on. It also is an identical practice to what Google did. It draws lock into the trade desk and that's less choice. So in the end we believe household is the correct approach. Email address and here's just the thing. Who controls the email address? Google does. So if Google giveth, they will take it away.
- [12:03]
Mike Shields
Right.
- [12:03]
Chris Vanderhoek
If you're building your strategy on that Sandy foundation, it's not going to be here in the future. So in the end we've taken this approach around household. We've been adamant about it and even at this point Google's jumped on board. You're seeing the industry is moving away from email hashed email as there's a renaissance.
- [12:22]
Mike Shields
It's sort of old school things like MMMs and whole household driven marketing. Is that for you guys? Obviously that is a, you know, on one end that's you zigging where they're zagging, I guess. But do you think household works because it's more effective? You know, is it a privacy thing? Because I, I often wondered how long hashed emails was going to be okay with privacy experts. That's a very personal thing that, that people are sharing without their knowledge. Why your. Why is your position what it is? I guess.
- [12:50]
Tim Vanderhoek
Okay, so there's certain, there's a lot of reasons, right. Like said that Google and Apple are making tons of moves out there to make sure the email addresses can't be communicated. But put those aside. Our industry has been. We literally took all of traditional media's money because we said everything is measurable over here in digital. And we can track you across sites and apps and show you, we can show the right ad to the right user at the right time. Number one, that's never been true.
- [13:15]
Chris Vanderhoek
Biggest lie of our industry.
- [13:16]
Tim Vanderhoek
Right. And number two, you don't need to. And I think that, that what's happening right now in the industry is a realization of that. It's been a quiet realization, but this is why, you know, we. I recently wrote about how the part of the open web is dying and those are things that are dominated by last touch attribution. And this made our industry and for a long time when we were specific media, we highly benefited from this. But it's a good example of almost being caught in the digital ad attribution matrix where you think you're providing all this value. And we watched marketers for years cut tv, buy more display ads, buy more Google branded search, buy more social. Look at it today, retail media buy that ad right at the point of purchase. But does that really drive new customer demand? Is that really driving, you know, should.
- [14:09]
Mike Shields
That get all the credit for every bit of branding that happened? For that one moment the person just.
- [14:13]
Chris Vanderhoek
Searched the benefits in that setup. Google, Amazon meta size and scale matter in the last touch attribution, but it's the biggest thing that we show customers is that all these purchases were going to happen anyway. And this is all waste, all waste. That fact that you're spending 54 billion in Amazon was their latest ad revenue all at the point of purchase. The closer you get to point of purchase, the less incremental sales you're driving. It's all happening anyway.
- [14:45]
Tim Vanderhoek
Now retail media might just be a cost of doing business with Amazon.
- [14:49]
Mike Shields
If you're a small seller, you almost have to advertise, right? No, they have exist.
- [14:53]
Tim Vanderhoek
Even if you're a large seller, you can search on a brand and not find it in the first, you know, seven or eight product listings. So it very likely very similar to selling at Walmart, you know, in the 90s and the 2000, in early 2000, same thing. That industry is just moving to digital. So that may just be a cost of goods sold. However, I think if I were to look at $350 billion spent in the US in digital, easily 70 to 80% of that money is decided on last touch attribution. And everyone can zoom out a little bit in Our industry and see marketers for years have been cutting television and then buying more of whatever the cost per whatever is the best on lot such attribution. And that gets the things like Google branded search which is probably 40% of total search money. It blows my mind that ford will cut TV and buy more of Ford F150. What everyone agrees with that, but why does it happen? And I think it's this quiet realization that CFOs are even waking up and their discussions with CMOs of cut that and buy more of that, they're starting to realize that that's not driving any new sales. Look at Nike. They had this whole transition of their business to straight DTC Ecom and they were getting more and more efficient KPIs over four or five years. But total sales are going up.
- [16:11]
Mike Shields
Right, Right. You were, you were zeroing in on on a much slice of the audience rather than trying to build demand.
- [16:16]
Tim Vanderhoek
Yes.
- [16:17]
Chris Vanderhoek
And nothing builds demand better than connected tv. TV has always been the primary stimulant of consumer demand for your product or service. Now that it's connected, we're able to properly attribute what's driving value for the advertiser because of things like Household id where we can link all these touch points to even an in store sale. That's the value that Viant Household ID does is it links all ad exposures without tracking people across the whole Internet to sales activity. And that's the main goal.
- [16:51]
Mike Shields
Okay, I want to come right back to ctv but just one more question what you're talking about. Do you worry that the CFOs are going to be a go a little wild in amidst this like weird current climate and like we're already in this ROI heavy, you know industry or you know, the push towards making everything trackable has already been intense and now it only promises to get more. So is that a worry in these.
- [17:11]
Tim Vanderhoek
Environments where there might be a potential economic slowdown coming? Potentially, I think you see some tightening and I think you see people take things out of less measurable things, move towards more measurable. However, what I will say with that is a lot of people think like that's just more branded search and more retail media and more. That's that where I said the quiet realization. We attract these companies that are understand or looking to understand what truly drives new business. If I spend another dollar in advertising, I should get another sale. That is why you advertise. You're not supposed to get the same sale. So we attract those marketers that think that way. It's what we call the smart money in advertising. Those clients that are looking for that and someone to help answer that question now. I do, I think that there is, there may be another push towards lower, lower, lower funnel, last touch attribution type ad products potentially. But there's, there's a wholesale shift of people moving out of that and moving into CTV and streaming audio. You know, even in, to be honest, even linear television, I think linear television is an on sale product right now that still performs really well. Right.
- [18:20]
Mike Shields
You get a lot, you probably get a lot of good value there. All right, let's talk about. Your business is much heavier in go back to the specific media era. You're way, way more of a CTV streaming centric company, I believe, than ever in the past. Talk about, let's talk about your strategy there. But also is the, in the context of what we were talking about, is it a much different market that is less dominated by these tech monopolies and identifiers and that is that a good thing or is it, or are we seeing the same stuff kind of get mapped out?
- [18:53]
Tim Vanderhoek
Well, certainly what I would say in ctv, we started another business called Zumo, you know, the free streaming ad supported business. And I remember in 2014, 2015, we were so early in that as marketers would buy an ad on a connected tv, they had no idea how to measure it. There's no cookie, there's no standardized, you know, CTV identifier.
- [19:11]
Mike Shields
Wilson wasn't looking at Dumo at that point.
- [19:13]
Tim Vanderhoek
Certainly it was tough sledding for years because he had to prove that it worked. So I do believe that that, that came. A lot of companies have come out with a lot of innovation around measuring CTV and it's not a last touch attribution product. By no means. You're not going to show an ad, 30 second ad and then see that, that out.
- [19:31]
Mike Shields
I mean, maybe, but that's going to be a small, I would think a small part of the, of the market.
- [19:35]
Tim Vanderhoek
A lot of people say shoppable TV but still yet to see. Yeah, scale. I think it's a huge catalyst for our industry because it forced marketers and agencies. How do we measure that? We got all this money moving over from traditional linear television into streaming and yet they're the same digital marketers here. We're needing to, to evaluate that and, and see what you get for your money. So I think that's caused a lot of innovation, number one. Number two, to your point, it's not heavily dominated. Google doesn't have a heavy grip on that, yes, they have YouTube, the largest CTV publisher.
- [20:07]
Mike Shields
Right. But they, they don't have their hooks into everybody else's inventory.
- [20:10]
Chris Vanderhoek
For example, everyone's smarter now where they know by allowing them to do it in the display business, it destroyed their company. And in streaming they're not going to allow that to happen.
- [20:21]
Mike Shields
I'm sure companies will attempt that, but it's just by nature, it may be difficult to pull off. Well, a little bit of a left turn. You mentioned Amazon a couple times. They are. If anyone is trying to rebuild the monopoly or the full stack, it's them. And they might be just aggressive capitalists or they might be skirting a line. Do you think is there a worry in the industry that they could be on the same path or are they so retail focused that that's not the case?
- [20:47]
Chris Vanderhoek
Oh no, I think they're definitely on the same path. Look at who's running the advertising business at Amazon. It's the former Google team. So it's the same playbook, the same individuals, the same execution. We see it.
- [20:58]
Mike Shields
The feds aren't really paying attention.
- [21:00]
Chris Vanderhoek
Right. I mean, yeah, but they're not a significant player yet. Obviously their strategic positioning gives them in retail incredible data. So many other categories. They don't have a data advantage that they get the halo effect for think automotive companies. Qsr, there's so many verticals. Financial services, it limits them, at least for now.
- [21:21]
Tim Vanderhoek
Yeah, exactly.
- [21:21]
Chris Vanderhoek
They don't have a competitive advantage, but certainly when it comes to what products are people buying, they've got a huge chunk of the US And I think.
- [21:29]
Tim Vanderhoek
It'S just go back to the incentives, the corporate incentives and it, it just is what it is.
- [21:34]
Chris Vanderhoek
You got to move the needle on.
- [21:35]
Tim Vanderhoek
You have to keep eating more and.
- [21:37]
Mike Shields
More services, especially that company. That's what it's what they're all about.
- [21:40]
Tim Vanderhoek
Absolutely.
- [21:41]
Chris Vanderhoek
And this is why I think getting back to the beginning of the conversation, what can the government do prospectively? I wrote a LinkedIn post around broadcast ownership rules. The government thought about what would be bad for the country. We need to limit ownership in certain areas so one company can't dominate our.
- [21:58]
Mike Shields
Area, state and space or two different networks or stations that.
- [22:01]
Chris Vanderhoek
Yeah.
- [22:01]
Mike Shields
From another time.
- [22:02]
Chris Vanderhoek
And so today what do you have? You have Google controlling traffic on the Internet basically completely starting to weaken because of social networks and Amazon and things of these. But that is where ownership restrictions could be put in place on how much of Internet traffic do you control?
- [22:19]
Tim Vanderhoek
Right.
- [22:19]
Chris Vanderhoek
Be put into a special.
- [22:20]
Mike Shields
That's a good analogy.
- [22:21]
Chris Vanderhoek
And abuse it. And.
- [22:22]
Tim Vanderhoek
Yeah. And I want to. I want to another point too, because sometimes people forget where they are in the. I use this term a lot. They. It's like everyone's stuck in the matrix. There's a magnificent seven that dominate the S&P 500. That is a large part of the economy and all of Wall Street. So if they were to weaken and couldn't keep eating other industries and they would falter and then people stop there. It's like, no, you would have a much strong. There would be much more innovation. The country would be much healthier with thousands of companies that are competing out there versus just one. And by the way, these are great companies. Amazon is an incredible company. You know, people get literally buy stuff and give them their money. When it shows up your door the next day, you're happy. It's unbelievable.
- [23:04]
Mike Shields
Yeah.
- [23:04]
Chris Vanderhoek
I mean, think of how great it's going to be post remedies, post breakup of Google. And there's now, instead of one $2 trillion company, there's ten $250 billion companies for M and A, for innovation. It is. America is going to win. Entrepreneurs are going to win. It lights up the capital markets again. Right now what you have is seven companies who have access to the cheapest money that exists so they can enter any market, lose money in perpetuity and win in the long run. And that's stifling competition.
- [23:38]
Mike Shields
Sure. Well, that's very patriotic. I got a little, A little bit excited there. I want to. I got to ask you about AI. Obviously, everyone does, but you, you have been out in front of it, you know, when some ad tech companies were. Now almost everyone says they have some sort of AI, something you have. We're aggressive in talking about it and investing there. What are you doing there? How do we, how do we. How do you explain to people that it's real? And then let's talk about broadly where AI media buying goes and whether it's good or bad for everybody.
- [24:07]
Tim Vanderhoek
Yeah. Well, number one, if it's real, you should show your products. You shouldn't just put an AI on it and that's it.
- [24:14]
Chris Vanderhoek
And if you. And that's why we introduce the product with a live demo, so people can see it's real.
- [24:19]
Tim Vanderhoek
Yeah, that's.
- [24:19]
Mike Shields
You got to do that or otherwise it's. It's a press release. Oh.
- [24:22]
Chris Vanderhoek
I mean, but even today, how many people release a product, you never see anything. Getting back to the point, the trade desk. I've never seen anything publicly about cocai. How does it work? Yeah, what is the same?
- [24:32]
Tim Vanderhoek
I mean, if it's, I don't know if it's that complex and people won't adopt it, well, let's see why you think of it that way. And I think, look, it's not just them. So that's just a marketing thing that companies will employ of. Oh, AI. I think for our direction of where we're looking to do and kind of our role. We're a dsp. We see for how much automation that a DSP offers versus manual IO based, you know, media buying. It's incredible. However, when you get into it, it's incredibly complex. DSPs over time, through customer demands of transparency and control, they, they've become so cumbersome. They're like Bloomberg terminals if you've ever seen one of these things. It takes specialized training and knowledge and I think that there's a move towards a lot of automation and simplification and DSPs that need to happen. That it was fine when DSPS came out when you were talking like desktop was the only device and display ads on remnant inventory on websites. Okay, but fast forward to where we are today across ctv, Streaming audio, Digital out of home, you know, many different apps.
- [25:35]
Mike Shields
You've had a lot of plugins and scaffolding there.
- [25:38]
Tim Vanderhoek
It's incredibly complex and the human can't keep up. So our focus has been around what automation can we provide by using AI? Prove the value to the customer, show the value to the customer. Our first product that we rolled out was AI bidding. It's got over 90% adoption. It literally does the bidding on behalf of the human because you can't keep up. Even if somebody logs in, a trader logs into our platform and changes price every hour, which would be insane.
- [26:05]
Mike Shields
It's still not, it's still not going to catch up.
- [26:07]
Chris Vanderhoek
This, the price of an ad at midnight is cheaper than the price of an ad at noon. And you can't be logging in online.
- [26:13]
Mike Shields
Who wants to live that way?
- [26:15]
Tim Vanderhoek
As a trader, this is, this market. It's 300, it runs 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. It doesn't sleep, it doesn't take vacations, it doesn't have a family. It just runs. So you have to have something mining the store and AI does a really good job of that in bidding. The other piece that we rolled out, which was AI planning, that's where we did a big product demo, you know, a live product demo. That's really about providing automation. A lot of times you get, you know, agencies planning oftentimes is a huge cost center. Lots of people, tons of market research, very expensive. Also when they pitch new business, very cumbersome on that agency, organization to pitch new business because they're essentially they are building. And what could AI do to automate that? I think that we showed the promise of that. But why would we do that as a dsp? Because if you get better plans from the outset going into the DSP, you're going to get better performance one and two. If AI can help you build a plan, get you 80% of the way there and then the human beats it up, adds all the contacts that they know about the client, all those things and then you can just click to buy that in the DSP with no human upload of campaigns Creative, you know, I can target, I can do a lot of simplification there on behalf of the, of the trader that our clients love. And not only that, it eliminates a lot of errors. So we just see that I can provide a lot of this automation that the industry really needs.
- [27:44]
Chris Vanderhoek
I mean just getting to our long term vision, we think it should be autonomous advertising. That meaning there's one human that manages in this thing, creates launches, optimizes, makes decisions all on your behalf. And that's where our North Star vision is that everything is handled with a launch from a human to actually get a campaign live to remove the complexity and add a whole bunch of simplicity.
- [28:11]
Mike Shields
This all makes sense to me. You know, you're seeing the so much of the action and investment on the sell side. Meaning like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Amazon, they are, they have their automated ad buying Tools, Performance Max, etc. Is the worry that they. That could take over the industry to a certain extent where only the giants are going to be able to offer that and they'll be able to optimize and their machines will know more than any of us can on the other side.
- [28:34]
Tim Vanderhoek
Sure.
- [28:34]
Mike Shields
Or do you think there's a. Is it a fair fight?
- [28:37]
Tim Vanderhoek
If you look at who's doing a really good job of this right now is Meta. Meta probably has some of the best truly AI based products and they have to do it again. If you go to the simplification piece they need to do it because they have 10 million customers. I don't believe that the PNGs and the Unilevers of the world are the ones that are spending the lion's share.
- [28:57]
Mike Shields
No, it's the long, long, long tail and it's. And they, and they had to deal with the Apple, they had to get smarter because the Apple ID thing hit.
- [29:04]
Tim Vanderhoek
Them really hard and Really, I believe they have a much smaller slice, you know, in the a hundred thousand or less advertiser spending the bulk of the money. And these are these e commerce direct consumer companies and they need the simplification as well. So I think Meta has done a really good job of providing automation for those customers, although incredibly savvy. What's really weird, we traditionally see them in one or two social media platforms and maybe a little bit of Google search and that's it. And the opportunity we see that we can provide AI based products that provide a lot of this automation to this group of marketers. And when they see the results in CTV and in streaming audio in particular, it's incredible. Their mind's blown because for years they've just been looking at Meta that's driving all of their conversions, self dealing on attribution. So they do have good ad products. But we really see the future is going after this group, a broader market.
- [30:00]
Chris Vanderhoek
One more channels y and getting to the question around do they have an unfair advantage? Deepseek shows you no they don't. And where is all the competition happening right now? It's happening at the application layer, not at the creating another LLM or found on top of a foundational model. It's all happening at the application layer testing the various foundational models that are available between, you know, Claude Sonet or OpenAI and may the best foundational model win. And you're going to see that, you're kind of see the advantages are leveling out, they're all getting similar each other. So I think that one layer up, the application layer and that's where true domain expertise is going to serve as the differentiator.
- [30:47]
Mike Shields
You'll be able to compete there because you'll be because of your inherent expertise or skills.
- [30:51]
Chris Vanderhoek
Exactly. And this is why as an entrepreneur, AI is so exciting. Before AI you had to work with a product team, get the documentation right. It all had to be understood throughout the human layer. And now with AI, a founder like ourselves can work directly with the AI to produce the output that we know solves this workflow problem in the industry as a founder. And so being able to apply our expertise as founders with AI side by side is helping to speed up these products.
- [31:22]
Tim Vanderhoek
Right.
- [31:22]
Mike Shields
So you're not limited to just only the, only the five biggest companies can do this kind of stuff when, when you're talking about this, you know, application layer that everybody can jump in on.
- [31:30]
Chris Vanderhoek
Absolutely. I mean you can bypass open AI and have a very competitive open source powered product today with deep seek and you're seeing WPP announced Deep Seek is powering them. These foundational models turned out if you invested at that level, there's a lot of lost money there at the application layer is where it's all going to unlock and that's why we're so excited about the advertising opportunity within AI.
- [31:56]
Mike Shields
All right, well, there's a million more things we can talk about. That's a perfect spot to end it though. Thank you both. Fascinating conversation and let's, let's not wait till I do this again.
- [32:02]
Tim Vanderhoek
You're right. Thanks, Mike.
- [32:03]
Mike Shields
Thanks for having a big thanks to my guests this week, Viance, Tim Vanderhook and Chris Vanderhoek and my partners at Elemental tv. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. You 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.