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Welcome to the Big Story, a roundtable featuring members of the Ad Exchanger editorial team. Every week we bring you an in
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depth discussion of key developments in digital marketing and media.
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This episode is brought to you by Zada. Zeta's AI platform unifies paid, owned and earned media into one powerful growth engine, optimizing performance in real time and driving measurable outcomes with confidence. Don't Hope for higher ROI. Expect it with Zeta. Learn more at zetaglobal.com ADExchanger. We are in the midst of the new friends, the younger sibling to the TV upfronts. Our reporters Alyssa Boyle and Victoria McNally have been pounding the pavement and subjecting themselves to a torrent of unskippable marketing jargon. In between the glitz and glam of the presentations where video platforms peacock themselves in front of buyers, we're going to hear from them today about what's popping at this year's NewFronts, what's the buzzword everyone's parroting? And where are people mentioning the topics that AdExchanger loves best? Programmatic performance, data and tech. But before we dive into the new fronts, we are going to hear from our associate editor, Joanna Gerber. There is in fact an Off Broadway play right now about data and AI, so of course our intrepid reporter Joanna had to go and see it and drag a few colleagues along for the ride. Alyssa, Victoria, and Allison. Joanna's going to share what she thought was interesting about how data tracking and AI is showing up in our pop culture and what these messages mean for an industry as it tries to maintain trust with the people it's tracking or serving ads to across the web. I'm Sarah Sluice, editorial director at Ad Exchanger, and before we dive in, just make sure you mark your calendars for May 18th to 20th in Las Vegas at the Park MGM, where you can get a boost on how to make smarter decisions, be more effective, and improve performance by using AI in marketing. You can use the code POD10 for a 10% discount to sign up for our programmatic AI conference. So there we go and let's get started. So, Joanna, we've seen the Playbill. There is in fact a play about data and AI out there. You went to see it. What were your thoughts as kind of an ad insider seeing this play that's maybe intended for more of a general audience? What was it like?
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C
Yeah, I think Alyssa and Victoria will agree with me when I say there were parts of it that just hit a little too close to home. There were a lot of Just kind of references to kind of archetypes of people who work in tech and software engineers. And we were like, I swear I've interviewed that person before. And I think one of the extra funny and kind of eerie parts for me is that the company in the show is a software company called Athena. And the previous day, I had actually interviewed Zeta Global about their new AI agent called Athena. And in the play, Athena is a bit of a ethically complex company. So I came home that night, and Zeta had actually sent me a couple of Athena Brandon things. And I was like, oh, this feels a little dystopian right now. But they actually did touch on advertising once or twice in the show. I know there was a line that really resonated with Victoria. Victoria, if you want to share that a little bit.
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D
Yeah, I posted about it to LinkedIn today. Yeah, there's a part. It's also worth pointing out up front that the playwright has been working on this since 2018, and they've made sort of changes to the script as they've been running it over time. I think it was in D.C. before it was in New York, and then it's been workshopped other places. So this line very much felt like it was maybe from an earlier time before the focus was more on immigration and surveillance and, like. Well, not. Not surveillance. I mean, that's kind of the core focus, regardless. But there's a line that Sophia Willis's character has when she's sort of talking about what it's like to work in tech and how it's, like, damaging her mentally. And she brings up the example of, you know, I look at people in my life who are posting these pics of their vacations and their, you know, parties to Instagram and just, like, living their lives. And all I can think is what kind of ads are going to be served to them now that they've posted this.
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A
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Like, I feel like now, like, showing some in your feed, it's like, a little. It's a little too revealing. It's like showing someone your search history because of how well it's able to predict what you. What you're going to want to see. I feel like there's, like, always been this line, you know, in the industry. Like, I can't, you know, can we actually explain programmatic to, like, our relatives? Like, when we're at Thanksgiving, Like, I mean, at this point, like, do you feel like we want to. You want to be able to explain to us around the Thanksgiving table, like, what was the. What was the level of ominousness there?
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D
It's. It's so funny you bring that up as well, because, you know, the play ended and, you know, we were getting up and sort of talking to each other about, like, oh, God, that felt really real. And there was this older couple behind us who interrupted us to go, oh, are you working at places that do that evil stuff? And we had to be like, no,
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we were afraid about it.
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D
Yeah.
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B
Because I think it's worth mentioning that in the play, I think the. The concept of fighting the good fight was this protagonist that you were describing named Riley, who is so emotionally torn up about what she does for work that, you know, her version of. Or way to make good of this for the situation was leaking the information to journalists at the New York Times in. In the play. So at least, you know, I could. I could proudly say, you know, hey, you know, we're not. We're not doing that. We're the ones who are leaking it so that somebody else can do something about it.
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A
So the play takes a critical view of data and AI. I feel like from the moment you hear, like, off Broadway play about data and AI, you're like, okay, no, it's not going to be like a pro. Pro. A pro data and AI take. But what was kind of the nature of the critique? Is it kind of about this surveillance aspect, Victoria, where the data is being misused to deport people or something? You mentioned immigration. Like, is it. What's kind of the areas where there's
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C
discomfort without spoiling the entire play?
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D
It does go live.
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C
It's playing through this weekend. So if anybody wants to grab tickets, we. We would recommend. We all really liked. Does center a lot on the idea of surveillance and also the idea of kind of casting judgment or believing that you kind of can understand a person's entire identity based solely on data points, which. And I wrote about this in an op ed I published this week, is kind of the entire crux of advertising. We take these data points, we use them to craft an image of who we think a person is, what they will do, how their actions will reflect who they are. And that's how we target people. And in advertising, I think that's, you know, generally low stakes. Like, obviously there are times it can be sensitive information, especially if you're targeting in an industry like, you know, health care, pharmaceuticals, etc. But generally speaking, if I get served an ad for, you know, men's sneakers, all right, I'm not going to buy the men's sneakers. Sorry, if you guys lost a few dollars, we move on. But they then do talk about that in the context of things like immigration. And if you make a mistake and you say, oh, I predict that this person is going to bring harm to our nation, whatever that means, that's a question of life and death, effectively, that is a question that literally someone's life can hinge on. So I think the crux of the play, for me, at least from the perspective of someone who covers AI and advertising, is that you might look at data for one purpose, but that doesn't mean someone else couldn't use that same data for an alternative purpose that is a lot less, maybe good natured. And even if you are looking at it from a positive perspective or an ethically neutral perspective, it's not clearly delineated between good data and bad data or safe data and unsafe data. Because depending on who has that information and what they want to do with it, as we know from when I sent the RFI to literally the ad tech community a few months back, information in different hands can have very, very different effects. Which I guess is kind of a vague sentiment, but it's also true.
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B
And to, to piggyback on it too. I think the, the, the, the critique of, you know, how data and AI can be used, you know, is basically just as Joanna described it. But it's interesting to see on the flip side, the apologists, if you will, or the, in this case, the company employees who, and it just, I think it really speaks to, you know, how we try to spin the positive story around something that is negative or can be perceived as negative. So in the play, you know, a lot of the employees were talking about, oh, you know, we're, we're, I don't know, just like empowering everybody to follow their dreams and we're creating a better country and we're changing the world for good and all these other, I don't know, fluffy stuff about how positive it all is.
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D
Yeah, and you know, like, that's also a part of the play as well. There's a back and forth between like trying to streamline stuff and make stuff less manually taxing. But then like, okay, but if you're doing that, then you're also creating all of this, all this opportunity for stuff to go wrong in a way that a human might not necessarily track. So like, you know, like, bureaucracy is terrible, obviously, but you can at least point to like, okay, well, someone did that wrong and then if I talk to them and they fix it, then we can get my application back on track, but in a case where an AI is doing something. And I think that, like, beyond the more sinister implications of talking about this in regard to immigration and deportation, like, there is sort of a takeaway that even just advertising execs can grab onto, which is like, you know, Nai is not going to be able to make every decision. And you do still need somebody, I hate to use the term human in the loop because that's become such a buzzword now, but you do need somebody who's going to be able to actually push the button to, like, accept or deny something or to like, make sure that something goes out because otherwise, like, you don't have any accountability. And yeah, that's, that's when I come back to a lot the, the IBM thing of, like, a computer can never be held accountable, so can never, it should never be able to make a managerial decision.
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A
I feel like in the early days of this podcast, we talked a lot about how this data could, like, theoretically be misused. The bidstream data. And I think, yeah, we've seen since then a number of examples that have become public where this midstream data is used to track people, not for the purposes of serving them the men's sneaker ad, but something else which I don't think anyone in this industry really wants. It's not, it's not good for the industry, but it's technically possible. And I think one other thing that you, you said, Joanna, that is interesting to me is that there's this discomfort with people collecting data, which I think we, we know that. But then there's also a discomfort with the data being wrong. Like, oh, once you have it. But like, if there's something that's not quite right about it or you're drawing an inference that's incorrect, like, that's also income uncomfortable. So, like, if you're going to collect it, like, you have to kind of be right about it. Like, it's almost. You might think that having incorrect data might be a source of comfort, but in fact it's actually more. More, I want to say upsetting, but more. It makes you more uneasy if then like, incorrect data is using to draw conclusions about you.
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C
I also want to just flag that. So I was very lucky. I got to stay for a talk back with the playwright after the show. By complete coincidence, my former university was having an alumni night at the show that night and they said, hey, want to stay for a ton? Shout out, Wesleyan roll cards and wow, that was embarrassing. Anyway, in the talkback, in the talkback Matthew Libby, the playwright, did specifically say that he genuinely had empathy for Manisha's supervisor. Manisha's the protagonist of the show who is pushing back pretty strongly against this use of AI, but his supervisor is pretty gung ho about it. And Matthew Libby did say, I really understand and have sympathy for this character, and it is making his job a lot easier and it is solving problems. And there's a specific use case that the supervisor gives an example of regarding his own family. And he basically is like, hey, if we had the tools we had now, my parents lives would have been a lot easier. And again, I'm trying not to spoil anything, but point being, it wasn't just saying all AI evil, no positive use case. It really did talk about the nuances. And as Victoria was saying, the idea that streamlining can be beneficial. But again, when there are pros and cons to everything, I think it's really easy to just look at the pros if the cons don't affect you individually as a person. And I think Data, which was the name of the play, I'm not sure if we've said that really called into question, like, are we thinking about the negative effects that things that benefit us might be having on other people?
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A
Data to Play, not Data the Musical. Sadly, it's okay.
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C
Alyssa thought it was Data the Movie.
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A
So let's kind of put a, put a bow on this for our listeners. Like, let's say we're, you know, we're in the industry where, you know, we know that we're in an industry where people call the ads creepy and there can be all these negative effects, but we want to do good in this industry and also have the people using the tech, you know, trust what we're doing. Is there, is there any kind of positive takeaway in terms of how to engage with Data and AI in that nuanced way where there's a positive benefit as well?
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C
I think for me, the takeaway was that if you see something you don't like happening within the environment you work in, speak up about it. Even if your particular action feels like you're not directly contributing to harm, you might be on the user experience side or you might be, you know, just fixing small bugs in code.
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D
But if you know the code is
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C
being used for a larger purpose that you disagree with, you think it's causing harm. Say something. Whether that be to your supervisors, whether that be to journalists like us, like, it's not being complacent isn't really an option when the tools we have are so powerful.
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D
I think I would also point out that like not all data needs to be personal data and there's lots of data that you can build AI tools for that won't necessarily intrude on anybody's sense of privacy. For example, contextual tools that are looking at the actual content of what's being advertised and lining up with that rather than lining up with the people who are watching it on the other end, which is a lot of the kind of stuff we've been seeing at newfronts this week. Beautiful.
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A
I love, I love the segue, Victoria. And, and that's actually been like a battle for a long time because a lot of people in digital really want that show level data what they have in TV and it's, it has been missing heretofore ironically for privacy reasons. Victoria. How, how's that for something. Because of the, the Blockbuster era law, Video Privacy Protection Act. Okay, go on, Alyssa. I interrupted.
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B
Oh, just get just one last thought about AI too. So I think to Victoria's point, there's use cases that are less, less creepy, more palatable, but it's also the role of AI and it's, it's, you know, how, how tenured it could be in, in any sort of company structure. So you know, not to sound cliche, but like AI is meant to be an assistant and it's not meant to be, you know, making, to Victoria's point, any managerial decisions because it can't be held accountable. So yeah, so look for, looking for safer use cases and not, not elevating AI too much or putting it on a pedestal.
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A
Great. Well, let's dive more into the new fronts. But before we do that, we're going to take a quick break and hear from our sponsor, Foreign. I'm Sarah Sluice, Editorial Director of Ad Exchanger and I have with me here the Chief Growth Officer of Zeta, Ed C. Who leads the charge in helping businesses and CMOs achieve measurable, high impact marketing outcomes. Thanks for joining us, Ed.
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E
Sarah, great to see you. Thanks for taking the time with me today.
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B
Yeah.
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So what's different in the year, the year 2026, about how brands and agencies are approaching ad tech?
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E
So Sarah, I think it's a really, really interesting time. For years we've all been talking about ad tech and Martech and all these different things. But at the end of the day, as a marketer, what am I responsible for doing? Helping people make marketing decisions, helping them make buying decisions. Through a series of touch points. Adtech and Martech are actually artifacts of our history, of how we bought Meteor and how we managed our own touch points. What's finally happened with today's technology is we can release some of those artifacts and bring ad tech and martech together. I think that's going to be a huge thing. We're seeing more and more people doing that, and it's releasing marketers to have the freedom to really say, how do I reach Sarah? How do I recognize Sarah? How do I reach Sarah? How do I offer something relevant? And how can I see the results of the communications I'm having with Sarah?
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A
So, yeah, let's talk more about that freedom that comes from blurring the lines between ad Tech and MarTech. What else happens when you kind of unify things and blur them, bring them together?
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E
Well, a couple of things happened, Sarah. Instead of saying, how much did this channel produce? We actually started saying, how profitable is Sarah? To us, it changes from measuring a channel to doing what marketers are really responsible for, creating a profitable customer and saying, what did each touch point? What did each offer? What did each thing actually contribute to the profitability of that particular customer and allows the marketer to actually say, I'm managing a supply chain, and I'm managing the most important supply chain to a company, the customer supply chain.
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A
So how does that unified customer view then empower marketing teams and agencies once they know about this profitable customer?
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E
Well, one of the big things here is it lets them do the really unsexy side of marketing waste management. And that is incredibly important. Making sure that you're able to stop the wasted impression, the extra touch point. We have all probably in the last two weeks, bought something and then got another impression trying to sell you the thing that you just bought. It helps take those things out, things that you would never buy. It allows us as marketers to say, I am being able to recognize a pocket of opportunity with precision. I can reach that pocket of opportunity again with precision. I can be more informed of what relevant items I can bring to that person, and I can leave enough data to actually say what's working, what's not, and see the results. It's incredibly empowering. It's incredibly freeing. And as a marketer, it helps you have a better conversation with your cfo, which some of those conversations haven't always been so positive.
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A
Okay, so less waste, more profit, better meetings with your cfo. Thank you, Ed, for weighing it all down for us.
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E
And it slices bread along the way, too.
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A
Wonderful. Thank you to Ed and thanks to Zedek for supporting our podcast.
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E
Thank you, Sarah,
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A
And we are back. So Alyssa and Victoria have both been on the ground at the new fronts, which is kind of the younger cousin, I think, of the upfronts for the people that maybe couldn't get invited to the upfronts. Although now we have companies like YouTube that are in both, actually, which is interesting. But the rise of streaming is changing the way the upfront market works. So how is this kind of showing up in terms of the new front, its structure, what people are talking about?
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B
So, to your point, Sarah, the lines are blurring between new fronts and upfronts, because upfronts, you know, historically were for those traditional broadcasters like NBC and Paramount, and then the new fronts were for those digital first companies getting their foot in the door to compete for the TV ad pie, or a slice of it, at least. So now we're seeing companies kind of participating in both. Or, you know, Comcast had a new front, whereas, you know, some other YouTube has both. To your point, Netflix is in the upfronts. You get the point. Lines are very blurred. So I would say that the main difference to me that I see is upfronts still focus very much on content, and advertising is a segment, but it's more of an afterthought. But I think the new fronts are very, very hyper focused on data technology and advertising and anything that can get a media buyer interested.
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D
I also think it's worth pointing out that this is the first time, I think, in a very long time, if not ever, that the new fronts is so much further away from upfronts. In the past, it's been the week before, so it's meant to be almost like a continuation. And I think you get, especially with those sort of blurred types of brands and publishers, you get the like, oh, if I can't get an upfront, I'll do a new front kind of deal. Although, you know, in YouTube's case, they're all over the place. But yeah, and I was doing a story earlier this year about CES and upfronts and sort of how CES has become like the default beginning of the upfront season before upfronts actually happens. And I was talking to David Cohen from the IAB about this and he said, like, yeah, that was part of the decision, why they decided to move it up to March, partially because the upfronts conversations start so much earlier now and then, also partially because, like, with possible becoming a bigger deal in the ad seen, if possible, in late April, and then you had would have had new fronts beginning of May, and then you would have had Regular upfronts in mid May. So that's like three continuous weeks. And then for us, you have programmatic AI the end of May. So, like, yeah, it's a bit. It's a busy time, so it's nice to have a little bit more breathing room and have new fronts pulled up a little bit more.
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A
And, you know, what are the themes that have stuck out to you so far this year? Oftentimes there's a little bit of buzzword bingo or everyone's saying outcomes or performance or I don't know what they're saying, so. So you tell me.
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D
So I should say we've. We've been dividing and conquering a bit and I've been sort of more focused on like the social. First I went to Google, I went to TikTok, and then you went to Samsung and Walmart Vizio. So like, we've been kind of spaced out a little bit. But on the social side, I've been seeing a lot more focus on. On AI optimization and connecting with creators. Both YouTube and TikTok are announcing, like, contextual tools specifically so that advertisers can find creators to work with, which is really interesting. And you've been seeing a lot more of the TV side of things.
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B
Yeah. So I would say outcomes and performance in particular are the buzzwords of choice that I've been hearing. And at some point I thought I was hearing the word performance so often that I started to wonder if there was an SEO strategy in the background that I was missing. I don't know. Or may they were thinking, oh, if we say performance enough times, the odds are that a journalist will write it in her piece. And then there you go with the SEO strategy.
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D
So I think that's more like GEO rather than SEO, because it's. We have to blast it into the ether and hope a third party picks it up.
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B
And this is why you're the one covering the AI. Oh, another. Another theme too, which is important and I think maybe ties all of this together is a focus on innovative and. Or interactive formats. So like pause ads, shoppable ads, home screen ads and a bunch of other fun stuff that you probably saw Victoria at the TikTok and TV presentations. So, yeah, and if I had to put a common denominator under all of that, I would say, let me try that again. The digitization of TV and the expectation that it should act like social media.
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D
Oh, and then also everybody's announcing partnerships with Amazon. Everybody. Either Amazon DSP or Amazon Ads, like Comcast is doing it. Tubi is doing it. Who else?
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B
Well, there was Yahoo referenced that they had a recent announcement with Netflix and Netflix had recently partnered with Yahoo and Amazon to put their Amazon and Yahoo's audiences onto Netflix inventory through those two respective DSPs. So that, that was a lot. But that came up at Yahoo too,
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D
and then Samsung too. Right?
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A
That's a very interesting observation, I think for our audience too, especially as we think about the Amazon DSP and becoming a threat to Trade Desk and Google and having having an open ecosystem on both ends potentially is significant. You know, if you think about Google, you can definitely buy everything through the DSP, but you can only buy YouTube like their inventory right through one route. So if Amazon is opening the pass up to its inventory as well as the DSP side, like really interesting to think about. So good observation there. And then actually I want to talk about Amazon's big competitor, if you will. At least on the retail side, Walmart's been growing like insane. Like it went from like 4 to 6 billion from 2024 to 2025, still 1/10 the size of Amazon, you know, which is like more than 60 billion versus 6 billion last year.
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B
But.
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A
And Walmart's kind of following the Amazon playbook of Amazon has the fire tv. Walmart bought Vizio. It's got a lot of places to run those retail media ads. And this is the first time that Walmart and Vizio did their new front as a fully integrated company. So tell us a little bit about that. I love seeing, you know, retail media and CTV smushing together. It's fascinating.
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B
Yeah, I feel like that smushing together of retail media and CTV is the, like the. It describes this whole closed loop attribution theme that everybody wants. And if you're watching the video, oh, another buzzword.
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A
I love it.
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B
I love it because it's a buzzword. It's a buzzword. It barely has meaning anymore in the sense that it's a buzzword. But the point is when it comes to, oh, we need to see performance metrics from tv, how do you do that? The easiest way to do that hypothetically would be sh and tying in retail media because the whole point is to figure out if someone actually bought something because they saw your ad. So I think the whole industry has been waiting to see how exactly the
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D
use of Vizio's tech and data would
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B
help Walmart actually achieve that goal and how they were actually going to use Vizio to grow Walmart's advertising business so that it can compete with the likes of Amazon and others. And so I think the major announcement that that answers that question is that it comes down to Visio's operating system and consolidating streaming data and workflows through that. So in English, so new Vizio TVs. So if you buy a Vizio TV now, you're going to be forced to activate that TV using a Walmart account. And if you already have a Vizio OS operated TV because there are others, you know, you'll be prompted to add a Walmart account. And I believe the idea is to eventually phase out the Visio login entirely so that everyone's accessing their Visio streaming device through a Walmart account so that it's much easier to connect the dots between the impression and the sale at the end of the day. And to my point earlier about there being other TVs, so Walmart, I didn't realize this before this week, Walmart has a private label brand of TVs that it calls on TV. O, N, N. I thought it was a typo in the press release and I was refreshing it. Like when are they going to find this typo? But no, it's a real private label brand of TVs, as is Vizio now. And so the these on TVs also have Visio OS. It used to be Roku OS. So that this kind of shines a light on the competition that's happening here.
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D
Now they're use Vizio os.
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B
So with this change of that I described and the fact that Vizio is now operating as a private label Walmart brand, Vizio says that its OS can reach between 25 and 30% of all US households, or rather has the potential to reach that percent. So that's, that's they're coming after scale and they're doing it from the os.
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D
LNN just makes me think of Onion News Network. Is, is the weird part of that, like, why? What is it? I mean, I don't know if we know what it stands for there.
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A
There are no unique brand names left, which is why on Amazon there's all those like Chinese sellers that are literally just like a string, as if someone smushed their keyboard down. Like it's so hard to get a trademark these. Yes.
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C
So my mom loves to make a running joke that you can tell something is an Amazon brand if it's just like seven consonants in a row with absolutely no vowels in there.
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D
So. But the other thing that's really interesting from that perspective is I feel like a lot of OEM sort of, and a lot of Channels in that space. Sort of talk about like having first party data, having people logged in and being really excited to reach audiences that way. Tubi made a big deal in their presentation about how they don't require a login. And they still were leaning into the idea of personalization, but less from the perspective of finding like an exact audience demographic and more about like we have something for everybody. We have twice the library as everybody else. So someone's going to find exactly what they're looking for to watch and then you can buy ads around that thing. And I think so far, yeah, there's their presentation is the most. That's fine. Felt like an a traditional upfront both because they had a big focus on content. They had a bunch of people from the movie, Remember Me, that I think is coming out soon to sort of promote like the original content that they're doing. They had some creators coming on to talk about their stuff, but then also like they had just a very wild aesthetic going on. And maybe I'll send some photos if you want to use them for the post that we put up on the website for the podcast. But they had a sort of a death to the monoculture kind of thing going and then also like a very like Renaissance art thing. So the, the first thing when you walk in there was a giant coffin filled with TV guides and like a thing that's a death coffin.
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A
Yeah, I, I sounds like they got a lot of creative rain. Okay. Yeah, cool.
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D
Yeah, a lot of like very specific art history references and like a string quartet playing what were very clearly vitamin string quartet covers from Bridgerton episodes. And it was just, it was like very stylish in a way that like, I don't think of New fronts presentations as being kind of cool.
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A
They're filling out the stuff, hiring some cool, cool firms to judge things up.
- [31:34]
B
I think that it sounds like the way that Tubies presentation went reminds me of Netflix's upfront last year, not just because there was a Bridgerton exhibit, but also because Netflix is sort of this, it's becoming one of the biggest competitors. And so other smaller players are kind of either not, not necessarily coming after Netflix, but comparing themselves to Netflix in a way that makes them look better. So you know, Victoria, you mentioned that like to be referenced Netflix in the sense of we have more titles than them, maybe twice as many. And then today we saw Future Today, which is a smaller publisher. They have some brands called like Happy Kids and Fossum and they claim that between those two brands together they have five times the amount of titles as Netflix does. So I think we're seeing these free ad supported TV players start to lean into the volume of their content as a competitive differentiator.
- [32:24]
D
To your point also, Tubi was very adamant that they should not be considered fast TV because they are technically free ad supported. But like fast conjures up the idea of watching stuff live, like, you know, individual channels. And they were, they were very clear. They were like, we are 95% viewed on demand. And so that was really interesting in terms of like, there's this sort of ongoing conversation in CTV about whether or not fast channels are high quality enough in a lot of situations to be worth advertising against. And you get those people who are like, oh, I only want like the top 10, like major streamers and I'm not going to deal with any fast stuff. And then 2B was trying to make the argument like, we are one of those streamers. We are one of the top 10,
- [33:06]
B
please give us money.
- [33:07]
A
Oh wait. Because fast is not associated with, with, well, premium anymore. Every time it's like, this is like the story of, of my career at Exchanger is that companies like create and define a category and then they're like, no, like, we're not an SSP or like we're. That we're an exchange or we're. No, we're actually an ssp. We're not, we're fast. Oh no, we're not fast anymore. It's like very, it's just. Yeah, it's very Groucho Marks.
- [33:32]
D
We're not social media anymore. I think Snapchat was saying that stuff last year.
- [33:36]
A
It's like, yeah, so I think we're almost out of time. So I'm going to like zoom, zoom through a few more. A few more things. Right. So we have. With performance. Right. I think performance could be about measurement. The data collection that Joanna was talking about in the first half of the episode. It can also be about formats. I mean I, I grew up with the call now, you know, Dr. Ads. But like what, what is the new call now? People will hate that I'm making this comparison. But it is, it's the new better call now. Right.
- [34:14]
D
So I know Tubi has already had interactive ad formats going. Like they've had a lot of pause ads. They're sort of leaning into it a bit more with like poll pause ads. They're introducing, speaking of Amazon, they're introducing their own version of Amazon's X Play where you pause and it shows you like who's in the cast, what's you know, what soundtrack is currently playing. And then also there's a little button of like click here to buy stuff. TikTok's ad formats are really interesting. That was really the, the big focus of their, their presentation this year. They didn't really talk about like data or I mean there's a little bit of measurement stuff, but it was all sort of like the main focus was the ads and they have, they have a logo takeover that they're doing so that when you open the home screen Instead of the TikTok load, it'll get like washed over by like, I don't know, Audi or like Volkswagen, you know, some like, some like recognizable brand. And then they also have a sequential primetime ad is what they're calling it. So it's not technically interactive, although I'm sure there are probably clickable elements. But it's meant to be experienced like while you're scrolling. So you, you're scrolling through, you see the first AD, you're scrolling through again, you see the second one and then you see the third one and it's all within a 15 minute window. And they're all intentionally designed to be narratively sequential because I talked to some of the product team after the event about like, how do you come up with this idea while also trying to keep in mind like ideas of frequency capping and overly repetitive ads and like trying to make sure people don't get annoyed. And so they said like, yeah, the big thing is like making sure all of the ads are technically different and like narratively interesting. And of course none of these are going to be programmatic because they're, they're all very like fancy direct deal kind of stuff. And like to the, they sort of pointed out that like, oh, the logo takeover especially like you can't just have any old logo take over the TikTok logo. It has to be like a brand that you're willing to, you know, partner with. Right.
- [36:12]
A
I think the new fronts have historically been more focused on those direct deals. But you kind of read my mind, Victoria, because I was wondering like, is there any way to kind of automate these very bespoke creative formats? Because that's always like a huge hindrance to adoption and scale. I mean we've seen with Google's performance max that they're, you know, they were making like mail ads and making, you know, cropping, cropping things off to make them look vertical. Like there, there's ways to adapt ads in a more turnkey way for, for buyers. So I don't know If AI solves that problem at all or if in fact, you know, you get value by having your, your human creative teams do some stuff that drives better performance in
- [37:00]
C
the loop, one might even say in the loop.
- [37:03]
B
Yeah, I think eventually it's going to be a matter of making those ad formats available programmatically. But I think the maybe lower hanging fruit would be more of the pause ads or something to that extent as opposed to a really custom like logo or brand takeover. Sarah, to answer your question, what is the new call now? I think Samsung has an answer for you because it's using Amazon ads interactive video ad technology.
- [37:27]
A
That's the full term.
- [37:29]
B
So basically what that means is if you have a Samsung TV and a remote, which you have both, if you have one, you have the other. Anyway, if you're watching Samsung TV and you see a product that would be sold on Amazon hypothetically, you could press a button that would say buy now and it would go into your Amazon cart. So this is technology that should be rolling out over the summer, I believe. And if it's a brand that's not listed on Amazon, they could also have the option to put a call to action that's more like send to phone for example.
- [37:57]
A
I've seen the send to phone in the while before. All right, they validation that it didn't on Amazon Prime. Yeah, yes, yes.
- [38:04]
B
Oh, so yeah, right. That's coming to Samsung now. And, and they both companies claim that this is the first time that an external like CTV device company has access to this technology outside of Amazon. For what it's worth, we've heard it here.
- [38:18]
D
I have a bunch of remotes from various Roku TCLs that have buttons at the bottom for like it's, it's so fast that you can kind of see in real time like who are the big streamers because they're the ones that have the buttons at the bottom. So like we, we found the old remote from our previous TV like in a couch cushion and like, so we can compare them. And I love the idea of like, yeah, no, that's going to be a buy now.
- [38:43]
C
That is.
- [38:44]
D
I feel like that's a cartoon that we've done.
- [38:47]
B
Yeah, we just, I'm piggybacking off of this about what the smart TV buttons and what those buttons say about how important those streaming services are. For what it's worth, on my remote there's, I forget which four there are, but Peacock is one of them and that's Peacock is the button with the food stains on it. Because we can't stop watching Trader, especially over dinner.
- [39:09]
A
Oh, man.
- [39:09]
D
I feel like that. That feels correct. That feels like a. I mean, so much of, like, media news sometimes just feels like 30 rock jokes. And so when it is something that's happening at NBCU in particular, I'm like, no, that's correct. It's.
- [39:21]
B
You're.
- [39:21]
D
You're a 30 rock joke.
- [39:23]
A
I. I mean, we'll know that by now. Is really taking off when we start to have lots of parents whose children are accidentally buying things. Because I feel like that was the story of the App Store is like, people are like, why did I get a bill from Apple for, you know, $4,999? Because they were buying, like, tokens to some online game. So. So we'll see. Hopefully there's some guardrails. Guardrails there. As a parent, that's, like, where my mind goes to when we start talking about kids with remotes. As someone who's had to wrestle a remote from my child's hand on more than one occasion. Okay.
- [40:02]
D
Do they make remotes for little kids? Because that would be really fun. Like, there's this trope of, like, when you play a video game with your younger brother and you give them the second controller, but you don't plug it in, so they're kind of just tapping buttons. Like, give kids a fake remote.
- [40:17]
A
Do you know what, Victoria? I think you might have just solved a parenting problem for me. I'm into it. We do know how to turn off the Internet on, like, a device level. So. So, like, that's a. That's a sneaky thing to do. My husband will do that. If, like, they're like, why does it. But then the problem is there's, you know, they cash it a little bit, right? So there's a delay, and then they're like, why doesn't it work anymore? I love this. Okay, so I feel this is a good place to end. However, we got the upfronts just in a little bit of a month or so. Any predictions? Are we going to be kind of hearing the same thing, or will there be different. Different angle, perhaps? Or is it going to be, you know, more. More interactivity delivered by, you know, more A list celebs doing their contractually obligated promotion.
- [41:05]
D
Yeah, I'm sure they're going to continue the trend of the A list celebs being like, I don't know what media mix modeling is. Well,
- [41:13]
B
yeah, I think. I mean, to. To my point earlier at the top, that upfronts have less time dedicated to advertising. And tech and more time dedicated to content. So I think they're really going to have to distill their, their most, their most favorite competitive differentiator into a really snappy soundbite for all those audiences that are just waiting for Lizzo or somebody else to come on stage that they care about more. I don't know if Lizzo's coming back, but I saw her at Brandcast a few years ago and I'm just hoping that she comes back.
- [41:40]
D
She was at Amazon's upfront last, last year. She was talking about Twitch. Yeah, I will be very interesting to interested to see what the Warner Brothers stuff is kind of like because last year they unveiled their new NEO platform and as far as I know, it's still in beta. It's not, it's not like fully rolled out yet. And I've speculated about like, what's going to happen to that if it gets bought finally. So it'll, you know, I'll be curious to see what the conversation is like there for sure.
- [42:07]
A
Maybe we get a new acronym, wbdp. I don't know, like, too many letters.
- [42:14]
C
They're only allowed to be three letter acronyms, Sarah.
- [42:17]
A
You can't go to the four letter acronym. Something. Something's going to have to have to move.
- [42:21]
B
Okay, how about those VMVPDs though?
- [42:26]
A
Oh my gosh. Okay, well, we'll leave everyone while their head is still spinning. Thanks for hanging out with us for this time and we'll see you next week. This episode was brought to you by Zeta. Zeta's AI platform unifies paid, owned and earned media into one powerful growth engine, optimizing performance in real time and driving measurable outcomes with confidence. Don't hope for a higher ROI. Expect it with SEDA. Learn more at sedaglobal.com adexchanger.