Transcript
A (0:00)
In an effort to continue to educate myself in the world of ad tech, I listened to some ad tech podcasts that don't touch retail media directly. But in this case, there was such clear alignment with the world of retail media that I want to pull it into this world. Joe Zappa runs Sharp Pen Media, which is a marketing and communications firm for ad tech companies. And he was on a recent episode of the Ad Tech God podcast where he talked about his system for helping ad tech companies and their leaders differentiate themselves in the market through thought leadership and evangelism and advocacy. And it was a fantastic conversation. He laid out this framework for how companies should think about their narrative. Not their product announcements, not their new partnerships, but their narrative. And it made me think about how much most retail media networks need to hear this. The framework that Jo shared is simple. Don't lead with what your company does, lead what is wrong with the status quo?
B (1:10)
But there's first having a narrative, right? Like a drum you're going to beat over and over again. I call it a brand narrative. So you need to ask, you know, not just what are your products and features, what is your company doing? Yeah, but it's like, what is, what is wrong with the status quo? Whom are you championing? How are they being screwed over? How are you changing the industry to their benefit? And you know, what, what does the future of the industry look like if you win? So like a company like TV Scientific, a client of mine, like, I think, you know, they did a fantastic job of that. Right? We're talking about, we've been living in an era of unaccountable advertising. That's why Google and Meta have been eating the rest of the open Internet's lunch. If we could make tv, which is actually the most incremental advertising channel accountable, it would be not just, you know, a $60 billion industry if it ate all the dollars from linear, but it would be a multi hundred billion dollar industry. By bringing in performance marketers and SMBs, they told that story very effectively. They got acquired by Pinterest. Right? That is the kind of story I want to see every CEO, and especially ever every founder CEO out there telling. However, I know this is a podcast about the people behind the advertising industry. And so I would also just emphasize, I think this is an extremely valuable thing that anyone can do.
A (2:15)
And that example is from the world of connected tv. But the lesson also applies directly to retail media. TV Scientific didn't pitch that. We have a new attribution feature that they pitched that TV advertising is broken and we're the ones fixing it. And I get pitched a lot of retail media, product announcements, feature updates, new measurement capabilities, rollouts, betas, pilots, and honestly, a lot of them sound very similar. The problem isn't always the product or the rollout, it's the way that it's communicated. And so many of these announcements tell me what launched, but not really why it's anyone should care. So as a commentator of this industry, I'm trying to work this out. Is this genuinely additive to the ecosystem or is it a me too kind of feature? Is this something that brands and advertisers are actually asking for? Is it just a reason to be in the news cycle? That is why I don't cover a lot of product announcements. Not because they're irrelevant, but often because the angle is isn't clear. Later in the conversation on the Ad Tech God podcast, Joe made a point about what actually resonates when executives themselves put themselves out there.