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For over 50 years, mass market retailers, MMR has been the definitive media authority across key retail channels including discount, grocery club, e commerce and specialty. Now, Retail MediaIQ, MMR's parent company, is building on that legacy by integrating the trusted editorial insights and extensive reach of chain drug review into the MMR platform. At the same time, Retail Media IQ is expanding its editorial focus to include the fast moving convenience store channel. The result is a powerful, unified media platform that reflects the full scope of today's retail ecosystem. Backed by decades of expertise, deep industry knowledge and editorial excellence, the new mmr, which debuts in October, will deliver the most comprehensive view of retail and reach the largest, most influential audience of decision makers across the retail and consumer packaged goods sector. The strategic expansion of MMR mirrors the challenging dynamics of the industry and affirms the publication's mission to be the go to source for insights, analysis and access across every retail vertical. Check out the link in the digital liner notes to this episode. To reach mmr, make sure you're subscribing to their newsletter.
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Hey everyone, my name is Finton Gillespie and I'm Global Director of the Ad Partnerships Group at Snap Inc. And you're listening to the CPG Guys Podcast.
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Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. Your host, Sree Rajagopalan and Peter V. S Bond explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. I'm your adorable co host pvsp. My daughter is not a pop store nor my wife a podcaster on iHeartRadio, but I do my best to hold ground when compared to the celebrity life my co host lives. You know him as the patriarch of the Raj family media empire. His daughter Rhea and Lara are legitimate entertainment sensations and his wife Kavrita runs her own podcast, Lights Camera Conversation. As for Paparaj, as his daughter's fans refer to him, well, in addition to podcasting, he serves as the Chief Revenue Officer at Think Blue Consulting and he is also the former President of Sales at General Mills. He is the man known as SRI who can't join us today. He's actually on his way to the FMI for some meetings there, but he's with in spirit. I'm looking forward to seeing him later this month in Las Vegas when we convene for Grocery Shop. That's going to be a big event. All right, make sure you are subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform, Apple, Spotify, Audible. You can even ask Alexa. Hey, play the CPT guys podcast and she will. I probably set off about 300 devices by just saying that as we were listening. But in any event, you can find not only our latest episodes, you can even go back and consume some of the 200, or, pardon me, the 520 plus episodes we've already published. All right, so let's get to our guest. Finton Gillespie is the Global Director, Ad Partnerships Group at Snap Inc. The parent company of Snapchat. Today, we're thrilled to welcome a guest who sits at the crossroads of of technology, advertising and retail transformation. Finton is a proven leader in digital media and partnerships, helping brands and platforms unlock growth through innovation. Over the course of his career, he's worked with some of the most influential players in the space, guiding how companies think about connecting with consumers across channels and leveraging data to drive measurable outcomes. At a time when retail media is evolving at lightning speed and AI is reshaping the playbook for marketers, Finton brings a unique perspective on how advertisers and retailers can work to deliver true shopper value. Not just impressions, but real outcomes. This is going to be a humdinger of a conversation, folks. Please join us in welcoming Finton Gillespie. Finton, welcome. How you doing, man?
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B
Hey, how's it going? Thanks so much for having me here.
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So I don't know if you know this, Fenton, but our audience, they are very engaged and they love to learn as they are listening to our melodious tones in our conversation today. So what we're going to do to quench their thirst is we're going to include in the digital liner notes of this episode links to your LinkedIn profile, Snap Inc's LinkedIn page, and Snap Inc. S corporate website so that they can learn a little bit more as our conversation goes on. So, so with that, I'm going to get to the questions. Let's start right at the top. Finton, I want to understand your personal career journey. What brought you into the world of media and partnerships? And what does your current role at Snap entail as partnerships?
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B
Thanks so much. Yeah, so I've been in the industry for almost 17 years. You can probably hear the accent. I'm from Dublin and Ireland and I was fortunate enough to come out of university just as all of these first wave of digital platforms were exploding. I was super interested in E commerce. My family business is in like tool and machinery retailer. That was the game I was in and I worked through that store in Dublin, McQuillan Tools. Give him a shout out from when I was a Very young age taught me the art of selling, but also gave me a hunger in digital because at that time Google and ebay were evolving. So I built a shop on, on, on ebay, sold everything that my uncles didn't want in the shop and that got me really interested in digital tech and innovation. And Google was, you know, launching their, their Irish operation at the time and I was fortunate enough to join their graduate program and that really immersed me in the world of, of digital auction based media. And, and so that's really the generation I've grown up in. And that's, you know, I've only known auction based media and did various roles at Google in Dublin. Then I went to Johannesburg with Google, helped set up our agency business there and then had a great career at Google in London where I sort of began our independent agency program working with the likes of Jellyfish, Icrossing, Crowd, essence, many of whom have now gone on to be absolutely massive agencies, and then worked on our Group M business. And then I was in Cannes in 2015 when a young Evan Spiegel came to launch Vertical Video ads. I think a lot of people thought that this young platform called Snapchat was crazy, launching Vertical video as an ad format when everything else was horizontal at the time. And obviously Evan had that vision. He'd launched Stories, he'd launched an innovative ad format. I was quite compelled by that and luckily got an introduction to him which led to me joining Snapchat as we opened our operation in the uk. And as part of that I was basically told, right, look, we're moving from a business that was run on DFP and mostly paper iOS to our very first ads API. Go sort of build out the first vertical teams to support the evolution of that with obviously all the experience that you have at Google. So built out the vertical teams and built out our UK business working with partners at the very beginning, from 4C, when we first launched the ads API to many others along the journey and then ran our gaming business. So gaming is a huge business on the other side of the Atlantic. So ran that into Apple's ATT changes and then came back to the UK to run our large customer business there. And I really built that large customer business on the back of strong partnerships with the ad tech ecosystem to. And then for personal reasons, my fiance's American, we decided to make a journey across the Atlantic where I joined our revenue partnerships business at Snap, which is really a business that's all about engaging with the broader ad tech and partner ecosystems that we support. And I Now lead that team, which is global in scope. We partner basically with all of the largest ad tech partners that support our business and are really critical to our business. So whether that's independent agencies, whether that is campaign management platforms like Smartly for media buying, whether that is measurement partners that help our CPG brands do omnichannel measurement all the way through to MTA Solutions, etc. And so on. So it's a big ecosystem, extremely important one to Snapchat. And really with ad tech and with partnerships, you must meet the customers where they are, no matter what outcome they're trying to drive. You must have solutions. And some of those solutions you can build yourselves and others you have to partner. And so that's really the crux of where I am now and where the team is now.
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I assume that based upon my boyish good looks, you would assume that I'm a gen zennial or millennium. Right. But I realize when you mentioned vertical videos that I always give away my age when I hand someone my phone to take a picture of me and it's always horizontally. That is fundamentally different than today's generation.
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B
Right.
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So it's critically important that you understand where the audience is going. It's very much.
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B
That's right. And like we'd seen this when I was at Google, we'd seen that YouTube was just transforming the way people interact with video and we'd spent a lot of time teaching brands to act like YouTubers. Right. And you know, Snapchat was on it. The real growth spike in Snap's trajectory was when the first selfie enabled iPhone came to the market and suddenly you had a completely new wait, there's a.
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A
Camera on both sides of the phone. What's that?
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B
All I have to teach you that now, Come on. And we rode that wave. And like that was what Snapchat remains to be about. You know, it's about close friend communication visually through the camera. And we continue to open to the camera, which is very different to other social platforms. And we, we encourage that creation, that playfulness, that rawness. And that's very, very much been part of Snapchat in the nine years I've been here.
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A
Very much about a genuine community of connections and friends, not about mass influencer communication. That's another thing I love about it. We're going to get into some of that in a little bit. But yeah, you lead global ad partnerships. How do these partnerships shape Snap Inc's go to market strategy in the broader media ecosystem?
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B
Yeah, well, like as I said, partnerships are critical to Snapchat's success. And you know, as I said, from the early days of our ad business, which was built on dfp, to the early days of our ad platform, built on 4C, so the early support of many of our independent agencies, as we first scaled out vertical video ads and performance solutions, you know, partnerships have always been the foundation of our business. So in terms of like the key ecosystems that we support today, like our independent agency businesses is thriving. We support hundreds of independent agencies today. We've evolved our badging program, we give them edu and scale support, we give them incentives so they have the sort of confidence to test Snap with their customers and be our resellers and that is thriving. And what I love about the indie agency community is they're always on the edge of the innovation, they're always tech enabled, they move very, very quickly and they're hyper rational. So they're willing to test you, but you've got to prove yourselves as a platform. So that's indies and then campaign management. These are all the SaaS platforms that are evolving that integrate into our AD APIs. So if I take Smartly or Sprinklr or Cargo Commerce, what these platforms do is they're providing an automation solution that allows large enterprise brands who might be buying from eight different social platforms, the ability to do that all through one interface. And that's really important today because social has proliferated. The number of platforms that you buy from has proliferated. And so what they found is that, you know, for those that are buying media, hands on keyboard, 47 minutes in every hour can be saved by logging into one platform rather than a number of platforms. And I think when you add the automation and AI layers and creative and reporting layers on top, they become very, very powerful solutions for the industry and support and integrate with most of the largest ones. And then we do a lot of work in sort of the signals and measurement space, understanding that customers obviously measure in many different ways and we tried to reduce the friction there. So a good example would be our integration with Shopify where you can go into their app store within a few clicks, sync your catalogs, get conversions, API measurement and off you go and set up your business and ad accounts without even having to leave Shopify's UIs. So that's built on something we've built called business extension. And so that really enables a Shopify merchant to go from zero to one very, very quickly and be best set up for success. And then many of the measurement partnerships, there are so many now Depending on the type of customer, you know, what size they are and what they need. So when it comes to retail media, you know, it's all about omnichannel lift and offline measurement lift. So we partner with in market circana when it comes to customers that are trying to drive the installation and for purchases in an app, we have MMP integrations done with all of the major mmps. When it comes to the evolution of privacy, safe measurement, we've done integrations with the likes of Snowflake and Liveramp to make sure that the largest, most complex customers are able to get what they need. And then even then to lead generation where we've, you know, we can sync leads now in the likes of Zapier and leadsbridge. So we strive to ensure that we can provide the solutions no matter what type of customer, what objectives that they have, and measurements obviously critical to that. And then we do more areas like audiences. So we're integrated with Experian for audiences. So if you wanted to target folks using third party audiences, we enable that through our partnership with Experian. And then like in the retail media space, we do a lot of work with the retail media platforms like Symbiosis and Kodi, make sure that. And when it comes to the pipes of retail media that we are well set up so that, you know, the retail media networks themselves can extend off site with ease when it comes to Snapchat. And the final area I think which is probably the most interesting, exciting is the sort of creator and social platform space. And obviously a nod to Unilever's CEO who created a lot of excitement with his comments on how they're going to double down on the creator economy and investments in the space. But propping that economy up is the ability to, to find creators that scale across all the platforms that they're on and initiate projects with them. Rights, all that's all that fun stuff. So we've got APIs that allow Snapchat creators to be surfaced in platforms like Creator IQ, Later.com, sprinkler, et cetera. So it's quite a large ecosystem and it props up our entire global ads business, which is in the boat. It's a very important ecosystem to us and we have really strong, deep partnerships with many of the companies I've just mentioned.
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A
I'm going to assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, all of these integrations for your independent agencies, it means that they have an opportunity to take advantage of all these capabilities the way the big holdco agencies are already doing because of all the work you've done?
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B
Yeah, they're available to everyone. And like we rely on agencies feedback to make sure that we're building partnerships in the right way. And it's often the case that agencies bring us new partners that we may not have engaged with. And so there are great feedback loops by partnering with the agency ecosystem. But you're dead right. Like all of these solutions that I mentioned, agencies can use. So when it comes to, you know, the torso tail digital indies that really prop up modern day cpg, DTC and E commerce, these new sort of Shopify scale ups, you know, they can go and integrate conversions API very, very quickly with Shopify and get a customer ready for Snapchat. Whereas in, you know, without an integration like that, getting pixel set up or server to server integration takes so much time, you go into ad tech IT queues and that can be really cumbersome. So a lot of these solutions I've mentioned just make it easier with a couple of clicks, easy to integrate and get set up and run.
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A
Finton, I don't know if you've been back to Cannes since you first went there 10 years ago. This past year I was amazed at how one of the major hotels on the quas was completely overtaken by creators. It is the creator world that we live in. The other thing I noticed about can was as much as it's historically been about agencies taking their clients to celebrate the creative, the presence of retail media as a financial force in the industry was very predominant at Cannes Lion. So I'm glad to hear that you're working with some of the ecosystem partners in that space as well. Independent agencies themselves are often more agile and innovation driven than the big holding company giants. How are you seeing them lean into platforms like Snap to drive differentiated value for their CPT clients?
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B
I think it all starts with how much they're scaling the platforms that they're buying from and you eventually get to inefficiencies and you must try new platforms and scale them up. And so indies are generally faster, generally speaking faster to adopt and test new platforms. And as I said, they're agile, they generally have a tech moat, they're thinking about automation of their people based service model. And you know, the indies, a lot of the digital paid social indies, they have a backbone in sort of ecom, dtc, that's their sort of wheelhouse but, but they've really embraced like you mentioned at can, the UGC and creator economy as the backbone because they know that to win in modern day Social media advertising, you have to have a backbone of creative that pops. And generally speaking on Snap, if you look at the research that we publish called authenticity Sells, what we're seeing is that creators and UGC who front the ad, the full screen vertical ad on Snapchat and stories in and amongst your close friends, those ads are performing better, have higher dwell time and deeper engagement and obviously that leads to better performance. And so what you're seeing with modern day indies is they're using that combination of that creative backbone driven by UGC which is like to succeed on social platforms you have to have a huge throughput of creative. And generally the trend there is from UGC combined with the moat that they generally try to find, being agile or trying to figure out all the platform nuances for their customers to drive the most cost efficient growth. And that's what you see a lot through the, in the, in the ecosystem evolution certainly that we're overseeing. And so I think they're all, they always have an eye for finding incremental audiences and they're always, they always have an eye for finding an edge on the platforms they're buying from. And so it's no surprise that they are leaning into Snapchat, a platform that has nearly a billion users. And when it comes to the MTA solutions that many of these indie agencies use like Triple Whale or North Beam or Phospha, you know what we're seeing and what they're measuring is that Snapchat now is the lowest CPA across all platforms. In a recent Triple Whale study, we are driving higher roas versus our competitors Phosphor seeing the same thing. They're seeing Snapchat as the top channel for customer acquisition, winning on both CPA and ROAS. NordBean showing that Snapchat delivers the number one ROAS lift from a one day to 90 day window in a recent study. And so, you know, we've got a platform that's got huge scale and reach, but also a platform that's delivering outcomes not by how we measure, but how the third parties measure. I think that's a critical thing, is making sure that we can deliver value and deliver results no matter how a customer or their indie agency measures the results. And I think a lot of the work that Snapshot's done in the last two years is on that point rather than just looking and optimizing to our first party outcomes, making sure that we show up in a Google Analytics or one of the MTA solutions and that has a specific setup and it can drive Far better outcomes for the customer. And so generally speaking, that's the sort of playbook that the indies are using. They're coming to us because they can find incremental roas and we're delivering results.
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Yeah. As I talk to brand advertisers, it's very clear to me that they require two things for them to be able to justify shifting their budgets in this day and age. One is scale, and it's pretty clear that SNAP has that scale. The other one is transparency of measurement. All too often platforms offer a black box solution. I'll give you your measurement. Trust me, I'm measuring it correctly. And what I hear you saying is I'm going to, I'm going to let my clients measure how they want to do it because that's what they need to compare apples to apples and how they measure their budget. And it's what their leadership, you know, the investments that are going against these platforms have moved from, you know, an assistant brand manager to not only the brand director and oftentimes the cmo, but in many cases a lot of this now with digital advertising goes as, as high as the board. So that measurement transparency is important, isn't it?
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B
Yeah. And actually we've done a lot of work with CFOs when we speak to customers about measurement. Right. It's because it's not about the CMO or the head of digital. You know, when a company, particularly in.
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A
Modern day, it's the guy with the wallet.
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B
Yeah.
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A
It's the woman with the wallet at the company.
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B
In modern day E commerce. Right. In dtc, the business is run on ga. Right. It's, it's run on Google Analytics. It's not run on what the ad platforms say. Right. And that was a big realization point for us about three years ago when we realized that we needed to pivot our entire ad platform into where customers actually measure and care about. And a lot of those efforts have now borne fruit. We have 70 optimization which allows you to optimize that in session. Click that. Google Analytics allows you to show better in Google Analytics. With Google Analytics 4 GA4, we can now bring that data in and start to better understand the customer outcomes. So I think there's a lot of evolution there. But really crucially, it's about making sure that we show up where the customers measure and where the CFOs sign off. And I think when you talk about like performance measurement, you know, running on Last Click, as we all know, has, has huge limitations, particularly when it comes to Gen Z, who are moving through these platforms with, with far more force. And so you need to make sure that you have a measurement solution that caters for these social channels where all of these users are, that incorporates views and clicks. And so that's why you're seeing this sort of evolution away from a last click measurement into these MTA solutions. They're sort of critical for propping up modern day E commerce advertising.
- [24:06]
A
Fenton, am I going to have to post my own personal Google Analytics score on my LinkedIn page soon? Is that what you're telling me? Are we getting that class? How is it?
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B
How does it look?
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A
Yeah, exactly. How does it look? Well, I haven't been in the dating market for a long time now, so I'm wondering if that's going to be integrated into some of these dating apps too. Right? I mean, I'm. Someone asked me the other day, like, I'm going to need your Google Analytics. I'm like, you need my Google Analytics? What do you, what do you mean by that?
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B
Well, did you know that Gen Z, they don't look for phone numbers anymore, they just ask you for your Snapchat username. So phone numbers are becoming dormant now as well.
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A
There you go. That's. I know, I know. I noticed that. I was looking at, we use Slack internally for communications and I realized that everyone used to have their cell phone number number and nobody includes it anymore. Even that's going away. Forget about the, the phone number in any event, you know, what advice would you give to agencies looking to leverage Snap effectively within their Omni Channel media strategies for their CPG brand clients?
- [25:13]
B
Yeah, well, I think like first off, like we have an agency badge program, we have an agency platform where agencies can come and say, identify themselves and we give them support. So that's phase one. Make sure that you know who the right point of contact is. And we have a robust agency program there where we give proper service to agencies, which I think is a differentiating point actually in a, in a market where they struggle sometimes to get service and support from some of the larger platforms. So that's the first one. And then we have a badging program which also involves examinations and, and certifications so we can give them all the education that they need so that when it comes to the client conversation or adding Snapchat into a P, that they're confident to do that and they have all the materials that they need. So the agency partner hub, the batching program is definitely the starting point. And then when it comes to CPG and their objectives, as I said, we have all of these solutions. So if it's a big complex CPG brand and they're looking for offline lift, we have teams that would support that, that would bring in a third party like Circana and make sure that when we're designing a campaign that we're able to demonstrate Lyft, but when it's a DTC e commerce brand, it's on Shopify, making sure they're set up with really strong signals that they're integrated at the gate so they have the best chance of success. That we're using some of our features like dynamic product ads that we're setting up, prospecting and retargeting, but we have all of these teams that provide the service and then we have all of the product solutions at the ready to make sure that they're set up for success. So generally speaking, we take each client and their needs case by case. We try to be as curious as possible and understand the customer need, understand their marketing objectives, and then we have all of the solutions across the funnel at Snapchat. Now to deliver those outcomes at scale.
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A
And the level of managed service versus self service to some degree, up to the independent agency and their level of familiarity with what your solutions are. How's that all work?
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B
Yeah, generally speaking, most of modern day indies have robust paid social divisions, so they understand how the paid social landscape works. I think Snapchat is still very much differentiated in that when it comes to creative, the bar to entry is actually lower. You know, think about the fact that Snap is very raw, very playful. It's not about polish or showing off. So when it comes to an actor recording an ad, they can do that just with their own phone. Right. So the barrier to entry is much lower. I think the juxtaposition there though is that, you know, many CPG brands care a lot about their image and are sometimes not willing to take the risk. But, but we run AB tests. You can do that on the platform. You can test your polished corporate creative versus something that you give in the hands of an actor. And that's sort of the approach that we would apply when it comes to optimization.
- [28:11]
A
Remind to our audience, I am speaking with Finton Gillespie. He is the Global Director at Partnerships Group at Snap Inc. All right, so let's get back to this measurement component. Proving ROI remains critical for agencies and as I mentioned, brands who are looking to justify how they are moving dollars from the old world of linear television and print marketing into the new closed loop digital world. So specifically, how is Snap helping advertisers measure real business outcomes, especially sales lift and conversion that IRO as that we're talking about.
- [28:47]
B
Yeah, so we start really with a foundation of really strong signals. So making sure that when we onboard a customer that they are set up really well on conversions API and there's a number of ways to do that now which as I said makes it a lot easier. So if you're a Shopify merchant, we have two click solution to get you that. If you don't, we have partnerships with the likes of data hash, Telium, Liveramp, Snowflake that really helps customers get to that strong signals foundation because obviously without strong signals you're not going to have the best chance of success in scaling, optimizing and measuring the outcome. So everything starts with strong signals to the extent even within the very top of our Ads Manager UI we have an ads readiness score and signals is sort of the really important part of that. And a lot of the UI developments that we've made in Ads Manager teaching customers that they need to improve their signals and we give a signal score of bad to okay to good to let them know where they are in the journey. And I think that's really important as the starting point. And then once you have that foundation of strong signals it just depends really on the type of customer and how much you're spending. Generally speaking, the smaller customers are very content with Capian Pixel plugged into one of the platforms. They're using either Google Analytics or a triple whale MTA solution. When you go up to the large CPG brands where the majority of products are sold in a retail environment or offline, you know the ways the solutions there really are with in market or circana based measurement where we have solutions there to prove that lift. So you're running a campaign as a Coca Cola or Oreos, you're able to actually see the lift that's driven in the networks that Circana and Inmarket have. And that's obviously a critical part as well when it comes to proving that lift and proving that those sales happen. And I think the modern day marketers, particularly on the enterprise side when it comes to complexity using this triangulation so you know they're trading on something that's real time. So be that you know, Google Analytics or platform reporting or the MTA and then they have monthly reads when it comes to Lyft and then they're using, you know, either the omnichannel lift solutions that I mentioned and or an MMN infrequently to sort of understand that the channel Mix is optimized. So generally that's what we see. And as I said, we have solutions in place for all of those areas.
- [31:18]
A
Looking ahead to next year into 2026, what's your boldest prediction for the intersection of agencies, partnerships and platforms like Snap in this world of commerce media? There's a lot going on. I'd love to hear what your take is on. Where's the puck going?
- [31:36]
B
Right, yeah. Well I think like when I think about agencies again, people based businesses and then I think about this wave of agentic AI that's coming very, very quickly and you see the largest agencies in the world, like publicists are really embracing that and many of the indies are as well. So I think we can't help but say that AI agents for paid marketing are going to be a thing. In fact, when you look at the ecosystem, particularly in SaaS, look at triple Whale which introduced their own Slack based agentic chatbot where you can literally go into Slack like, like you're plugged into Slack, many of us are for our workflows. So you can plug in all your well, data and you can say hey what does my ROAS look like on Snapchat for 35 plus females? It'll pull it all down and you can say well I want to optimize more of my spend into that cohort. Go and do it. So it'll actually make the changes for you. And so you're bringing that sort of like Slack based written communication platform, you're building that integration through an agent into Slack, making that job really easy. So when it comes to reporting data, visualization, making changes based on insight, I think you're just going to see this big wave and it's not stopping. And we're certainly seeing an evolution of the sort of campaign management ecosystem to sort of support that. I think another area is certainly conversational commerce. So the whole idea of bringing ads like we have done into the chat and that ultimately facilitates one to one communication between a brand and a user and we're seeing that as a trend across the industry and smartly built solutions others have as well. So I think you're going to see see more of that sort of behavior develop. So conversation driving the users to the conversion powered by the digital platforms. And I think when it comes to indie agencies, as I said, they've been known for building moats with technology and so I think that will continue to accelerate as well as the cost to code or vibe code goes down, it becomes easier to look at your business as an agency business which is a people based business. Identify where the repeatable tasks are and then use some of these new AI tools to build a moat that helps you automate, helps you scale an indie business with less people, and ultimately drive success on behalf of your customers. So I think they're some of the ones I'm thinking about into next year. I'm certainly seeing signs of them now and I think they will continue to accelerate into 26.
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A
Being on the agency side, my other avatar, the thing that certainly keeps me up at night is the fact that but as all this transformation is going on and agentic AI is contributing to how we're changing the work we do and the level of involvement it requires that the agencies fundamentally change their overall pricing model. So that's another mechanism that's going to play into where agencies sit, what they do and how they derive value, deliver value, certainly for their clients, but derive value for their own shareholders and owners. So big things going on there. Finn, at this point you've seen the media landscape from a number of different vantage points. What leadership lessons or guiding principles have helped you in building trust and value in the partnerships that you create throughout this ecosystem? Because I think our audience would really like to hear this, right?
- [35:02]
B
Trust is the key word, right? Because partnership's all about building trust and showing the partners that you care and building for the long term. So I think building for the long term, definitely one of them. You know, you don't develop partnerships overnight. It requires blood, sweat and tears and lean in on both sides. Another one which I think is really important, you're going to have highs and lows in partnerships. So one of my mottos that I learned from my old boss, Mark Howe at Google is don't shy away from a shitstorm. So when things go bad, face up to them right away and deal with them head on. Don't shy away because your partners will thank you for that. There's been a number of examples which I won't go into details over, that's really helped me in my career delegate to elevate, like put your trust in your team and in the teams of your partners. You know, let them go and own an ecosystem. Let them go and figure it out with your guidance. Putting your trust in your team will get your team behind you in the end. I think for me, I have a passion for the product. I like to understand the product, the nuts and bolts level and I'm always curious. So I think it's really important to understand things at a super granular level in digital ad tech and really when you're engaging in a partner, making sure that you have all that curiosity to really understand the partner and how they work as much as how it can work for your business. And then for me, another leadership quality that I love is just leadership by wandering, which is just be in the trenches with your team, be in the offices with them, show curiosity on what they're doing, and ultimately that goes a long way to helping again build trust with the teams that you have.
- [36:36]
A
To our audience we want to thank you for joining us twice each week for our podcast conversations, and we greatly appreciate the over 39,000 followers on LinkedIn who like and share our content. It's amazing that five and a half years later we've built such a loyal audience that loves to engage with us, whether we're at a conference or I'm waking up in the morning and someone's out for a run and they send me a message, hey, what did you mean in that episode that I'm listening to? It's really quite impressive. Please do follow us on your preferred listening platform and while you're there, make sure you're giving us a rating and even write a review for us. The rating helps make our podcast more findable, and the review tells us whether you like what we're producing and inviting on great guests like Fenton here. We look forward to seeing you in person this fall at one of the many conferences we're attending. Grocery Shop will be a big one in a couple of weeks for us. My big takeaway here is snap. SNAP is built for its agencies representing big brand partners, a whole host of integrations that make their ability to build audiences, serve up campaigns, and actually measure it the way those brands need in order to justify how they're spending their dollars. Very easy and very turnkey. It's all in there. The integrations, the ability to take the signals they have and create the right audiences and then ultimately measure the performance makes SnapBank's platform highly valuable to brand advertisers, something that they should be squarely focused on as an investment strategy. Finton, thanks for taking time out of your day to join us on the podcast. We really appreciate it.
- [38:24]
B
Real pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [38:26]
A
And to our audience, as I mentioned, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of Wait for it, the CPG Guys Podcast. Goodbye Foreign the content in this podcast episode is provided for general informational purposes only. By listening to our episode, you understand that no information contained in this episode should be construed as advice from CPG Guys LLC where the individual author, hosts, or guests, nor is it intended to be a substitute for research on any subject matter. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by CPG Guys llc. The views expressed by guests are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. The views expressed by CPT Guys LLC do not represent the views of their employers or the entity they represent. CPTGuys LLC expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or other damages arising out of any individual's use of, reference to, or inability to use this podcast or the information we present in this podcast.