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- [00:00]
Tim Peterson
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Matt Adams
Hello.
- [00:11]
Kamiko McCoy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Digiday Podcast, a show for anyone who is just absolutely dying to know what curation looks like when AI agents are handling the advice. I'm Kamiko McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday.
- [00:24]
Tim Peterson
And I'm Tim Peterson, executive editor of Video and Audio Digiday Media. Kamika, I was thinking about it. I think this is the first episode we've done on curation, which surprised me because curation has been such a big buzzword, and especially, like 2024 was a huge buzzword. And so the fact that it took us this long to do a curation episode. Yeah, I just, I wasn't expecting that. Were you or were you like, God, if we could have gone a little bit longer, maybe.
- [00:59]
Kamiko McCoy
Well, I will say, one, late is better than never. So glad we did address it. But two, I guess it's apt, right? Because when you talk about, like, curation, this ties into this whole conversation of, like, the supply chain, who owns it, who gets to do what. And we've had conversations kind of flicking at this. We talked about it with Ronan Shields and Seb Joseph and, like, who gets to own the supply chain and how they show up. Curation is part of that. So I guess while late, still very apt.
- [01:29]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, long time coming. But pretty timely, especially because. So for this week's episode, we had Matt Adams, who is the global CEO of Stagwell Media Platform. And Stagwell just launched its curation platform, Stagwell Curate. And so we wanted to have Matt on to talk about, okay, one, what is curation? Because that feels like a bit of a roar track test where everyone just kind of has different answers for it. But then also, why does an agency holding company like Stagwell need to launch its own curation platform? A lot of the curation platforms that have come out have been from ad tech companies. And then like you're saying, how does this fit into what's becoming a bit of a tug of war or a power shift in a way of who owns access to inventory? Historically, it's been the ad tech firms, and that's largely been the supply side platforms. But now you have demand side platforms like trade desk with OpenPath getting direct access to inventory. And now you have an agency holding company, as much as they're working with Stagwell is working with Magnite Stagwell Curate. Matt also mentions they're going increasingly directly to publishers to source this inventory. So I thought it made for a really interesting question for Matt in terms of what's the trajectory here. And he actually, he didn't deflect that question either, which was nice.
- [02:59]
Kamiko McCoy
No, it's very interesting because nobody wants to step on one another's toes yet. Stepping on one another's toes. So I was really grateful to have Matt kind of break that down and also give kind of a future forward looking, look, forward facing look. That's a mouthful. And how this all shakes out.
- [03:16]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, it felt like a really candid conversation. We always appreciate candor here on the Digiday podcast.
- [03:22]
Kamiko McCoy
Absolutely. Shout out to Matt. So with no further ado,
- [03:32]
Tim Peterson
Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.
- [03:34]
Matt Adams
Oh, thank you for having me. Absolute pleasure.
- [03:37]
Tim Peterson
Happy to have you. Because we get to talk about a whole collection of topics that all kind of wrap up into this prism, if you will, with something that you all at Stagwell recently launched, which is Stagwell Curate. I think it was 2024 at our December Digital Programmatic Marketing Summit, where kind of the running joke was that curation was the buzzword of the year, which I think was surprising because there were so many other buzzwords that could have been. But that was the one that kept coming up in conversation. And there were a number of launches of curation platforms and everyone was just kind of talking about curation. And the thing that I struggled with and I remember talking to this was brands and agency execs at this event was I've been covering programmatic advertising since 2011 and I was having a hard time understanding what curation was. Is this a new thing? Is it a new name for an existing thing? And talking with folks, some people were just like, oh yeah, I think it's like white labeled private marketplaces. Other people were like, I'm actually not sure I'm here to find out. Other people were like, eh, it's kind of bullshit. You all now have your curation offering with Stagwell Curate. Before we get into the specifics of Stagwell Curate, Matt, what is curation?
- [05:00]
Matt Adams
Yeah, for us it's. Well, it's a good question. It sounds like there's definitely many answers to this. I think we look at this as how we qualify, how we quantify and score inventory for clients. And I think that's in its most simplest way, it's like, how do we ensure that the ads that are being bought by clients are on the right sites with the right quality signals on the supply side that are going to meet the client's campaign objectives? And I'll probably say like in its most broadest sense that what it is it's curating the right pool of inventory for your ads to run on. And as I say, there's a thousand different ways in which you can do that. Like many, many good different ways and different paths can all lead to a strong answer. And that's why we built out the Curate platform, which is to generally look at sort of like pre vetted inventory from an always on pool that we know is going to perform and meet the client's objectives depending on their campaign and what they're trying to do as a brand.
- [05:58]
Tim Peterson
And so why does that need to be a product in Stagwell Curate as opposed to just a standard practice?
- [06:05]
Matt Adams
Yeah, I think that we have a supply team within the organization and that supply team's job is to ensure that we've got the right supply at the right time, at the right quality for the clients. I think what we're seeing within the sort of like if you zoom out a little bit from curating inventory is that we generally believe that the quality of supply and the quality of inventory is one of the biggest differentiators and the biggest levers right now that you can pull within the programmatic ecosystem. So a huge amount of focus within the sort of demand side platforms, a huge amount of focus is within how much you're executing the ads. The algorithm optimization that you might be doing against a campaign that's buying. We kind of felt there was less focus focus or an outsourced focus at arm's length around actually where the ads are running and are we running at the right place at the right time? And in a large organization, how do you make it easy, simple and powerful for your traders and your buyers to access their inventory in a way that's specific to what they need it? So that's, that's kind of why we chose to, to kind of take a little bit more ownership of this than a lot of outsourcing in terms of the supply side. And that is that, that helps us be more transparent with clients. We kind of build that together, we kind of share the platform with them so they have a really good understanding of where their ads are actually running and how we've created that imagery for them.
- [07:31]
Kamiko McCoy
I'm curious, I want you to dig a little bit deeper into that. Right. If you're looking at like a car dashboard, a check engine light comes on and that's how you know it's time to go and have your oil changed. What were the signals for you guys that Stagwell needed its own agency owned and operated curated marketplace here? What Were some of the signals you guys were seeing?
- [07:52]
Matt Adams
Yeah, so we were looking at sort of like variety of signals that come across this in terms of some of the technology partners that we use. Like we haven't, you know, tried to kind of like reinvent fire when it comes to the technology partners. We're looking at the kind of best in class tools. So some of them that we use do things like we've built our own domain health check tool on top of some of the kind of Sincera data, for example. So we've got close partnership with Trade desk and the OpenSensera part of their stack in terms of utilizing their API. So for example, we'll look at factors that sit across there. So we have sort of like three broad factors that we weight in terms of really understanding the kind of different domains and the different dimensions that exist across those domains. And we factor them across a score of 100. So we'll be looking at things like ad quality. We majority weight the factor towards ad quality. So that's how we most directly sort of impact the user experience, by extension the kind of the outcome for the advertiser. And then we look at things like within the ad quality, things like ads to content ratio, average ads in view at one time, ad refresh rate. There's a lot of publishers that might be like gaming refresh rates, for example, overloading pages with ads that score poorly. So the ad quality kind of like feels as one of those three kind of really starts to drive the backbone of the kind of quality scoring on the domain health. We look at things like technical performance. So that's kind of as simple as looking at an additional layer of page weight CPU usage. So the ads are actually loading in a clean, fast environment. So heavy slow pages are going to be degrading that effectiveness. Even though you can serve a bid, even though that bid can be served like it's a really poor suboptimal user experience. So we kind of, even on quite high quality sites you might have a low technical performance. So this starts to kind of be a good match against things like ad quality that might be really high on a premium publisher site. And then we kind of like the third part of that is in what we call supply chain transparency. So we look at things like ID absorption rates, supply path diversity and reseller ratios. So we want to look at how many hops each buy, each ad's coming through. So we try and make sure that each ad and the inventory is not passing through too many intermediaries or lacking proper identity signal and Those sort of three parts, ad quality, technical performance and supply chain transparency, come together for us to start to build out the scores as part of the curation is actually starting to look at that domain health check. So really trying to understand, okay, where's the ad actually running? A lot of that can be outsourced, but we think we can change the weights of those depending on what the client wants to do. And we can create custom solutions for particular brands. So some will have more need to upweight one of those three variables than the other. But we tend to have a very high percentage of the overall kind of index of 100 put into the ad quality side.
- [10:47]
Tim Peterson
And are you sharing that scoring with the publishers? Is the publisher able to see how the their scoring, especially at the different factors to understand how their inventory may or may not be merchandised in stagwell curate?
- [11:01]
Matt Adams
Yeah, it's a good question. The answer is like yes and no. So no, it's not a platform that they can kind of log into that's kind of open source because this platform effectively holds all of our inventory buying rates. So it's obviously behind our own internal firewalls, so only our teams can access it. So we wouldn't obviously you can't have a publisher seeing another publisher's rates and so on and so forth and the kind of deals we've got packaged in there. But we will be working with if there's like a publisher that we've been working a lot with that has a good score and for whatever reason that the kind of combination of that index across those three factors starts to shift, we'll be talking to them about that. Some of those could be moment in time. So things like the technical side of things could be like a moment in time. It could be the scoring could be changing based on some challenges they're having in their site load or some technical releases they're doing or something like that. So it was quite objective around this. But fundamentally we'll be quite open and transparent to say, look, here's the data that we're using, here's how we're using that data. So we put our own view across the sincere weightings. We kind of curate that again to try and this is specifically looking at domain health. They won't be able to log in, but if there's a publisher that we think is valuable and could do a good job to serve a client's campaigns, then we'll absolutely be having those conversations. Well, this is what we're seeing. How do you respond to that and how could we fix this or not fix that together?
- [12:18]
Kamiko McCoy
Is it too early to talk about AI? Have we missed them? Can we get into that?
- [12:23]
Matt Adams
Well, it didn't come up in the. Was it the 2024 conference that, you know, you were saying at the top of the top of the record, we
- [12:30]
Tim Peterson
were talking about AI agents.
- [12:31]
Matt Adams
Yeah, we can get as well. We've done at least 10 minutes without, so I think you're good.
- [12:34]
Kamiko McCoy
Okay, perfect. My AI checkpoint here. I'm curious, right? When you guys mentioned that AI agents are kind of evaluating the Adam Tortore and things like that and helping with the checks and balances, how were these agents built and how are they kind of being. How are they monitoring? Right. To ensure that the curation is correct. There's no hallucinations and things like this.
- [12:57]
Matt Adams
Yeah. So think about it from getting into sort of technical guts of it. Say we're running our domain health checkers using that sincere data process variables. I just said. So we're starting to build out those lists and there's obviously millions of these that are running it upstream that are running at any potential time. In terms of the URLs that an advertiser can advertise across. This is a global tool, so obviously covering all regions for us around the world, not just in North America, but all the way into our kind of APAC region. What we tend to do in terms of AI is we use a combination of AI. The predominant one in there, we use claw, but actually OpenAI. So we use an OpenAI API key. The traders will then tell the curate platform through the natural interface what inventory they're looking for. We then take that prompt, we package that into a query, that prompt that they're using in terms of I'm looking for this type of audience interested in these types of things at this particular moment in time. We'll then be using the prompt and they package that into a query that goes into open API and then that is effectively scoring and ranking all of the kind of big log file data that we have. There's a bigquery data, and then resurfacing what inventory we feel is right for them. And they can do that in one or two ways. So they can either do that in a, hey, here's a solution that's kind of right for you, if that makes sense, and here's something that we think is positive for you and that will come back from the API, or we still have a very kind of white glove service internally for our traders that the clients could get benefit from the supply team. So in this instance, the tool can either select existing deals that match with the inventory the trader's looking for. It could recommend inventory that we should put into a deal in a very bespoke way. So say, yeah, we've got that, or say, actually, we've got that and we've also got this. Would you like to consider something else that we think is relevant? Or we can also say, well, the traders can still log into the curation platform and actually create the deals themselves. So the AI is there to be a faster and smoother way of building a picture across so many different inventory sources, across all of the publishers that we see they can do that. Or you can say to the supply team, hey, I need you to build me something very bespoke. I've got a very kind of niche way of doing it. My clients got some very, very specific parameters in terms of what wants to be recommended. The supply team can then build that in any place around the world they can build that in, and then the buyers can go straight in and pull those deal IDs off to put within the DSP. So we have an MCP on the back end that we created with all of our existing deals, as well as domains, the apps, the CTV apps and their quality ratings and the contextual categories. And then we're using that OpenAI API key to be able to take the prompt from the traders, push it against that MCP data, and then get the response back to that. So that's probably about as technical as I get in terms of the build on it. But we're using AI to just be able to analyze a lot of data and a lot of potential in a really, really fast way that I don't think you could do before. And I think when you use third parties to do this, back to some of the questions at the top, you get bias and you genuinely get bias in terms of monetization bias in terms of margin bias that comes back. So we are looking at how do we take more ownership of this ourselves? And we genuinely think that you can have a great beard against a terrible ad experience that's not great for the brand. So actually we think this is a real unlock in terms of it's not new news, like you say, it's been talked about for many years, but actually sort of taking some ownership of this and putting something out there and saying, this is what our buyers have to use. They have to go through the system and tool. Therefore, in a global organization, we have a lot more control over that supply. We have A lot more influence to know that what we're buying for our clients is a great buy. And there's so much inventory that is still terribly executed with the programmatic ecosystem. We need to eradicate that out from our clients media spend.
- [16:50]
Tim Peterson
I appreciate Kimiko taking us to the bleeding edge of things with AI. I have a very much more basic rudimentary question. I'm curious how this works from a client perspective. If I think of curated marketplaces as being you go into a jewelry store or record store, there's kind of the stuff that's available to the hoi polloi and then maybe there's a back room or a basement with a velvet rope where if you're a certain type of buyer, you have a certain level of budget, you get to see the real good stuff. I think of that being that velvet rope backroom being what curated marketplaces are. With Stagwell Curate, is this the default or even like the only inventory source for clients or is it an option we use?
- [17:39]
Matt Adams
We use different partners to help power the inventory that comes in. So we might be using like Magni. We use some of the free will creation hub as well in terms of. In terms of bringing that inventory in. And we can bring anything in that sits outside of those from like a supply perspective. So there's no. We think we've got most of the supply marketplace covered. I think the way I'd think about
- [17:57]
Tim Peterson
it is how many publishers are available through Curate?
- [18:01]
Matt Adams
Oh, I don't know the number off the top of my head, to be fair. I can probably find out if you guys. But there's two ways to think about it. If it's not in there, the supply team will go and get it for you. So if you're a trader, you've got a specific need for it. There's a team that manage that platform and people know who they are. We've got a global head of supply across the group. So it's like I can pick up the phone, I can jump on teams and say, hey, I'm looking. It is. I can't find it. There's a specific show I want to buy into. There's a specific part of Disney that I need to get into. I can't find it. Can you help me? And that will be put into the platform for them bespoke. So if it's not in there, we can go and get it. Right? In terms of the open market, what we're generally seeing is from an SSP's perspective, most people have the same access to most Inventory. Now there's very, very little differentiation. And I think even over the course of the first seven months of this year, the differentiation in terms of, hey, I've got a bespoke supply, I'm the only one that's got this. Unless you're within some big wall garden inventory in the YouTubes and the Amazon Primes and so on in the world, everyone can access everything within 99%. So actually the days of using proliferating supply, I mean some are slightly different. Like the kind of Google owned supply side will have access in certain inventory sources, but in general you can find most things in a much smaller way. So we're trying to remove that out from a client side. The answer I'd give to your question, like, how do you get into the VIP area, right. How do you get behind that velvet rope? Is like if I kind of pull the analogy forward, it's like the client's shopping in every shop in the mall, not just in the record store. Right. And therefore what we say to the client is like, you've got access to all of this. You can go into the platform. Like we set those parameters together in terms of the ad quality, the technical and the supply chain. Like what do we believe together is the most important? You can see the results of that in terms of delivery domain health. You can then see the lists that we're pulling out in terms of the publishers. We've been using historical performance data outside of platform in order to help kind of what's worked well and do we want to continue doing that? Is it still scoring as a good ad experience for the consumer and hitting their message? So fundamentally they've got access to all the stores in the mall through one particular platform. We have not experienced and I don't believe that I will experience any issue of, oh, oh my goodness, I couldn't access this particular publisher, I couldn't access this particular streaming platform. All of the publishers have been helpful in terms of moving their inventory in and I just think that will continue to grow as this program builds out, particularly as we scale faster and harder into other parts of the world where if you go into Asia Pacific, they're very, very, very unique and very, very localized inventory sources. So that's going to have quite a different approach to how we might package inventory from there than it will do in say kind of Western Europe and into North America where you've got like a pretty, you've got a pretty sane set of partners that we might use. From a supply perspective.
- [20:52]
Tim Peterson
Why do Magnite and Freewheel need to be part of this. Why not just go to the publishers directly?
- [20:57]
Matt Adams
Well, we are doing more of that as well. So I think Free will have kind of two solutions, two kind of bites of the cherry from their technology. So not only from the curation hub, but also the buyer cloud. So the old beeswax technology that they bought so we can then buy in a biscuit way across that Comcast ecosystem. So we could buy for a client, we could be very specific at ad break in show and we can kind of laser in on those again if that's really relevant to a client's message or a tactic that you want to deploy. So all of this for us is kind of leading to how do we remove that middle layer? And I think that middle layer is a really interesting broader conversation around what is the value of that middle layer?
- [21:40]
Tim Peterson
What is the value of that middle layer? So you spoke with Sam Bradley who covered the launch of Stagwell Curate and in your interview with him you described Stagwell Curate as an attempt to reduce the company's reliance on ubiquitous marketplace solutions like the trade desk, OpenPath. What's the issue with OpenPath?
- [21:58]
Matt Adams
Well, I don't know if there's an issue with OpenPath, but I think what you've got is you've got a world at the moment that we're seeing and the conversations we had and I'm conscious, I always do with salespeople and salespeople are saying their solution's way better than everyone else's. Right? You need to have your brain in an agency. An agency you need to know everything about everything. Right? The client would expect you to know everything about everything. So it's a full time job reading and researching some of these things as well as the job you get paid today. I think we're seeing a couple of things. You've got some SSPs that say you don't need a DSP anymore. So if you take like Pubmatic, like very vocal from the top of the organization, founder down, like we can execute straight through. They've built like a Claude chat interface, very slick, it's very good. You can come find, you can execute all the way through here. Microsoft for their system where you've got the ad server on the back end. So obviously magnot have springsever. Microsoft have their own ad server that allows us to push closer to publisher because we could use their ad server and that helps us all the way through to billing. So that drives efficiency that we yield for clients within my organization and it drives efficiency for them so where we have the ad server capability within some of these tech layers and Microsoft always is a publisher and Magna is an aggregator of supply, those things really interesting. So free will buyer cloud is exactly the same. That allows us to reduce that. It's a much more efficient way of working when it comes to getting closer. And we will build our own publisher deals that we can put into curate as well. So where we can negotiate direct for publisher, where we think that's the right thing to do, we think there's a benefit to a client, we can go direct to publisher and come in. And we're seeing more and more publishers like, well, hey, actually I'm paying this tech tax the other way in terms of having my supply accessed by multiple SSPs. How many front doors do I want, how many ad control do I want within that environment? And some of the more premium publishers at the really high end that don't normally working this way are starting to have different conversations with us and I'm sure with many agencies in this space. So I think for us it's really about the future. The middleware is depending who you ask the question, SSPs will say DSPs don't exist. But what you're seeing now is the DSPs have their own supply. So Open part is a good example. Right. Hey, we used to be very agnostic. We're kind of like the antithesis to the Wall Gardens from the Trade Desk perspective. But we've kind of now got our own supply. And in that supply you've got all the firm favorites and they can go by Disney inventory and their supply. Okay, there's a natural question that everyone has asked as to like, well, is that still agnostic? Is that still unbiased? Is there algorithmic bias within that against your own supply? And that's, we're working through that with the Trade Desk. We see positive steps in that direction. To be clear, do you have a
- [24:40]
Tim Peterson
recommendation against buying openpath like some of the other agencies issued reportedly earlier this year?
- [24:45]
Matt Adams
No, we don't have a recommendation against that to be fair. I think we take it on a case by case basis. I think where the Trade Desk have made big strides is about control layers. So I don't think it's any secret that when Open Path was launched at the beginning of this year, it was defaulted within the campaign ecosystem. And I think our buyers would always want our buyers to have control over supply. That's not saying it's not Open Path, but it's saying if you Suddenly in any DSP, if Google suddenly defaulted you into running everything on YouTube, you'd be raising questions around that. Right. And I think buyers need to have supply diversity and supply choice to make sure that we're accountable to our clients for that. Now we've run some great tests with OpenPath with some of our agencies in the group and it's performing really, really well. And in some other instances it might not perform as well. That's just based on the client, their objectives and what they're doing. If you compare that to the supply side of Google where they've got all of that kind of vast inventory. If you're in a more performance oriented space, then that may or may not be the right path for you to take in terms of utilizing the trade desk supply. There are difference like Adex for example, works incredibly well when it comes to performance inventory. There's some unique areas of that because it's part of that kind of wider GAN GMP kind of ecosystem within the Google organization. So it's a case by case basis. But I think if I'm a middle layer at the moment and we're seeing some very aggressive moves, you got, as I said, some of the SSP saying hey, you don't need a dsp. Cut the whole thing out, right? You've now saved, you know, I don't know between depending on DSP 7 to 12%. Right? That's compelling. That's really, really compelling. Hey, and the publisher is getting monetization, they're getting better levels of monetization. We love that we want to create this virtuous circle, not a vicious circle in terms of publisher monetization, particularly in some under loved areas like news for example, where we think massive opportunities to kind of increase spend within news for the benefit of the advertiser as a kind of like a slightly under loved sector right now, particularly in the US market. So you've got these folks that are saying, hey, I don't think you need this part of tech stack. You've got the DSPs responding to say well we've got unique imagery sources, you've got unique data sources like Viant have some amazing unique data sources that can really enhance the campaign. You can only access that by operating through the viyant dsp. So Google have access to their inventory pools, Amazon et cetera as well. So you've got this kind of completely bifurcated position where the DSPs are trying to build out some element supply. The SSPs are saying we don't need a DSP anymore. You then get into all the other weird and wonderful, weird, but probably wonderful evolutions like ad cp, adx, agent to agent, like how, how are they executing? There are no common standards at the moment across the industry. Right. There's some great work from the IB Tech Lab. It's coming out for the U.S. i wouldn't say it's fully formed.
- [27:25]
Tim Peterson
Yeah.
- [27:25]
Matt Adams
So that's getting to the finish line. But there are no common standards of how a publisher connects to a buyer, whether that is direct or whether that's through a third party. And I think some of these will naturally drop by the wayside. And I think that lack of common standard for us is really difficult. Some publishers will put their eggs in one basket. Some publishers will say no, no, no, I want to work on a custom basis either with an agency, group or an individual advertiser, depending on how the media is being bought. And that makes our life really difficult. I don't want to have seven engineering tracks going on within my organization. Utilizing AI, utilizing a gentic level of buying should make my buyer's life easier. We should have a. Ideally, our north Stars have a single point of entry for the whole of the publisher ecosystem. That's the goal. We can't have five different agents. You have to ask them all the same thing because they're connected to different publishers. That sort of defeats the purpose. And I think there's still a huge way to go in that curate just takes us one step closer to actually knowing that inventory and actually where we're running regardless of the supply source that's feeding that platform.
- [28:30]
Tim Peterson
And so is the trajectory here eventually stagwell cutting out that ad tech middle layer entirely?
- [28:37]
Matt Adams
I don't think so. I don't think that's the end game, to be honest with you. I think there'll be a balanced approach to that. Like I said, there are many, many amazing elements of a benefit to a client that you can get within. Let's take a DSP for example. Like the traders have an incredible and really well developed omnichannel measurement loop that exists within their platform. If burn cost streaming, you buy some out of home, maybe you're buying in the kind of open market or you're buying in the display video CTV for example. Right. So if you're all in as an advertiser in the trade desk and you're running a lot of your media through it, there's a really big benefit to that. You won't get that from a. From a direct basis. You'd have to have another measurement model. So for some smaller clients, maybe in SME space, that's a huge benefit. I'm sure it's a massive benefit for other large scale clients. With some of the other DSPs. For example, if just take DB360, the way we can connect that back into what we're doing in the wider search ecosystem within that full stack within Google, incredibly powerful and still probably the most used dsp, I would guess. I don't know the numbers yet out there, so I don't think you'd be cutting off your nose to spot your face if you said, right, all of this is out. And I think you'd have a real challenge with clients as well. Will there be some clients that say, look, if I've got a very, very unique and very pointed goal and outcome and I know I can get it across, It's Pareto's law, 20% of the publishers will drive 80% of the reach. So if I could work closely with those 20% and I can do a direct integration, why wouldn't I? And the answer is, well, it probably would work for you in that particular instance. So I think all agency groups which were one of us starting, there's a kind of glide path here, but I don't think it's a cliff edge in terms of working with middle layers and ad tech vendors. I think over the next two to three years there'll be a consolidation and we're seeing that already. Like, you know, you're seeing that. And even Microsoft deprecating some of their AppNex's kind of technology, we're seeing some of these partners and vendors. I think there'll be some acquisitions and mergers, I'm just guessing over the course, particularly on the supply side. And some of those are getting stronger and some of those are struggling a little bit as well. And they're trying to find out, okay, within this AI future when you just can go direct and you can connect an MCP or an API with. I wouldn't say it's a little difficulty because I think my engineering team assumed me, but it's much easier than it used to be. You've got vibe coding that can support fast iterative experimentation. That's a blessing and a curse, by the way. 5. Coding was a different conversation, but within large organization. But I do think there'll be a glide path and a rebalancing of what goes direct and what goes through a tech layer.
- [31:13]
Tim Peterson
Okay, yeah. Because Kimiko, this reminds me of the conversation we had with our executive editor of news, Seb Joseph and our senior ad tech reporter, Ronan Shields earlier this year where we were talking about this kind of inventory tug of war that's going on between ad tech companies, but then also agencies and the rise of the unified ad platform and how like everyone's kind of becoming a unified ad platform. Even the idea of, well, agencies becoming unified ad platform.
- [31:42]
Matt Adams
Yeah, that's an interesting concept. I've not heard it expressed in that way. And I think when you, when you define unified ad platforms, you see do you mean an agency just. Just almost playing the role of those middle layers and that tech stack.
- [31:56]
Tim Peterson
It's kind of like if you, you have in the past you had a demand side platform, a supply side platform, you even had ad exchanges, there were all kinds of other layers to it and now those are kind of blending into unified ad platforms. But then if you have agencies like Stagwell with Stagwell Curate, where you have an inventory platform or you're sourcing the inventory through supply side platforms like Magnite and you're going through freewheeled buyer cloud, but you're also going to publishers directly, what's stopping you from just turning Stagwell Curate into a unified ad platform? And that preempts a DSP or an ssp?
- [32:37]
Matt Adams
Yeah, I think that's a good question, isn't it? I think the. I think and everyone's different by the way. So I sort of try and couch it in that because I think you can get to a good answer with this in many different ways. I'll say it's like writing an English essay when I was at school versus a math examination. A math exam is there's a quantitative outcome and you can get an A in English with five different approaches to it. Right. So it's kind of like trying to. The crash analogy is probably that I think we have to be very careful around our lack of bias for our clients recommendations. And I think from the years gone past, if you think really back to, I don't know, Mark Pritchard from P and G when he was there starting this whole transparency supply chain, a very valid and necessary conversation that was kicked off by them, there's still some distrust in that and there can be distrust in recommendation. And I think we build solutions that enable us to use technology in a better and different way. So as an organization we've got partnerships, what we think are the best in breed organizations at Stagwell that enable us to build solutions that are better for our clients. I don't think I'm going to build technology that's better than Google and I don't Think I'm going to build technologies better than tradesk. I think that is a naive ambition because I don't have 3,000 engineers and I don't have the capex development that Matter's got right to build the RAD platform. And I don't think I'm going to beat their recommendation in terms of the algorithmic power that you need in order to do that. That's not everyone's view, but that's our view. So what we will build, for example, our kind of agentic operating system for end to end media called the Media Machine, which we launched a number of months ago, has got direct integrations into all the platforms. So our buyers can go in and they have a natural language conversation talking directly into DV360, directly into the traders, directly into Snap, directly into Meta agent to agents. They can talk to it. They could get either we can push data in or we can pull data out to find audiences. I don't think I'm going to build a kind of metalay as a unified app platform. So that's the question. To execute better, we found a way that we can execute across multiple platforms and we can have a measurement loop across that, which has been a challenge, a historical challenge I think for many years. But I don't think an agency group is going to have a better technology solution to buying Google's inventory than Google will do Google or anyone always make recommendations that are interest of the advertiser? Maybe, maybe not. Yeah, so it's like, you know, and that's our job to build solutions like your aid to make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure that we're utilizing the right data that we can. Like when we built our Media machine, for example, we built our own mcp. We found that when we did an MCP to MCP connection with some of the publishers, the MCP from the big publishers or ad tech businesses blocked some data coming out without naming names. So actually they were like, oh, out of these variables, we can't pull them all out. So we reverted and we put it through APIs in the end. So we have to make sure we've got the right bandwidth in the API from their end. But because I can pull all the variables out of an API, so you've got to be quite careful. Oh yeah, you can access my MCP, but maybe I'm not going to show you 10% of something because in my interest not to, or maybe I won't let you write data into my MCP to match an Audience, I'm just going to push it to yourself. So we had to create this kind of unified layer. But I think the kind of neutrality of an agency is always really important to get behind. Because when you're working with scout advertisers, they always say, well, hang on a minute, what are you making out of this? And why have you built this? And why am I getting charged or not getting charged for this? And where does that revenue sit? And some instances that makes sense for them. In some instances, you've got to be a little bit careful to walk the right line of that.
- [36:40]
Tim Peterson
I think the idea of the MCP being that opinionated is really interesting, but we could go down a whole rabbit hole, save that conversation.
- [36:48]
Matt Adams
Yeah, that's probably about the level of knowledge. I've got mcps, to be clear, so you might find something better. But it's not always like this great nirvana like MCPS will solve all your problems. I'm not entirely sure that's the case everywhere these days.
- [37:05]
Kamiko McCoy
I'm thinking of this. I think when we started this conversation, even the conversation that we had with Set with Ronan that you mentioned, Tim, I was thinking of this like, you know, the western movies were like, this town ain't big enough for the two of us. This is me having a conversation with DSPs and SSPs and agencies. It seems like, based on the conversation that we're having here, Matt, that that may not necessarily be the case. I'm going to add the caveat for now, but I do appreciate you walking us through what that looks like for Stackwell.
- [37:29]
Matt Adams
Yeah, I think the town might not be big for 20 of them. I'm not sure about two of them. Let's hope there's more than one left at the end, or my job's going to be a lot harder and yours will be a lot less interesting in terms of the people that you can talk to. So I think it's going to be fascinating. I think it's fascinating in the next six months, not in the next two years, to see where this middle layer, the proliferation, the ease and the speed of development within AI platforms and technology using LLM models or coding. Your own solutions will disintermediate. And I think that the cream will rise to the top. And I think those that are in the middle of the middle will maybe potentially sadly fall to the bottom.
- [38:10]
Tim Peterson
Let's see, I was already excited for our Programmatic Marketing Summit in December. Now I'm even more excited. I'm also thinking about setting the agenda and the theme for that event and trying to stick away from just throwing agentic AI at everything. Maybe inventory control or inventory management should be the theme of that one. But Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show.
- [38:33]
Matt Adams
Yeah, definitely root there.
- [38:34]
Tim Peterson
Yeah. Well, Matt, thank you again. This was a really fascinating conversation. Learned a lot, and also helped me to make sense of other things that are going on in the industry. So thanks for joining. Kamiko Ono all right.
- [38:46]
Matt Adams
Thank you. Absolutely. Pleasure. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
- [38:56]
Tim Peterson
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Digiday podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening. Get more from Digiday with our daily newsletter sent out each weekday morning. Visit digiday.comnewsletters to sign up.