Episode 17: Ana Milicevic of Sparrow Advisors on cookies, the DMV and the past and future of adtech

Summary

Episode 17: Ana Milicevic of Sparrow Advisors on Cookies, the DMV, and the Past and Future of Adtech

Release Date: February 12, 2025 | Host: Ari Paparo | Podcast: The Monopoly Report

In Episode 17 of The Monopoly Report, host Alan Chappelle engages in a compelling discussion with Ana Milicevic, founder of Sparrow Advisors, a boutique management consulting firm specializing in the digital advertising space. The conversation delves deep into the intricacies of privacy in adtech, regulatory challenges, cross-border data transfers, and the evolving landscape of digital advertising.

---

1. Understanding Privacy in Adtech

Key Discussion Points:

• Misconceptions of Privacy: Ana emphasizes the fundamental misunderstanding surrounding privacy, arguing that it is often seen as optional rather than a core right.
• Data Usage Rights: She advocates for framing privacy as data usage rights, which shifts the focus from mere compliance to the actual utilization of consumer data.

Notable Quotes:

• Ana Milicevic (03:37): “I prefer to think of it as data usage rights rather than privacy because that shifts the conversation back to ad techs who are like, oh yes, we're privacy compliant, to having to talk about how they're actually using customer data.”
• Alan Chappelle (02:34): “Adtech loves simple get out of jail free privacy platitudes.”

---

2. The Role of the DMV in Data Privacy

Key Discussion Points:

• Data Sales by Government Entities: Ana highlights that entities like the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) are significant players in data sales, often overlooked compared to third-party adtech firms.
• Consumer Control: She argues that consumers should have more control over who accesses their data and how it's used.

Notable Quotes:

• Ana Milicevic (05:00): “If I were a consumer, I would happily pay to never get fraudulent direct mailings containing my car VIN and vehicle information.”
• Alan Chappelle (07:04): “The DMV sells customer data on the regular.”

---

3. Regulatory Landscape and State vs. Federal Laws

Key Discussion Points:

• State-Level Fragmentation: Both Ana and Alan discuss the complexities of having 49 different state privacy laws, which complicates running internet businesses across the U.S.
• Federal Privacy Law Prospects: There is optimism about the emergence of a federal privacy law, although concerns remain about its effectiveness.

Notable Quotes:

• Alan Chappelle (12:56): “We're going to see more state laws around health data and AI, and it's just going to upend the apple cart.”
• Ana Milicevic (14:19): “A federal privacy law would be incredibly helpful, but it would probably be just a milquetoast legal nothingness.”

---

4. Consumer Perception and Advertising Intrusiveness

Key Discussion Points:

• Evolving Consumer Attitudes: Increased exposure to hyper-targeted ads has led to greater consumer annoyance and a demand for better value in advertising.
• Trust and Loyalty: The intrusive nature of current adtech practices negatively impacts consumer trust and brand loyalty.

Notable Quotes:

• Ana Milicevic (16:26): “There's an increased awareness on the consumer side that maybe there's a better way to communicate value.”
• Alan Chappelle (18:30): “If you can focus on health and location data, a lot of the rest of the data-driven ad stuff starts to fade away.”

---

5. Cross-Border Data Transfers and Global Implications

Key Discussion Points:

• Impact of EU-U.S. Data Frameworks: The potential breakdown of data transfer mechanisms like the Privacy Shield poses significant challenges for adtech companies operating internationally.
• Operational Challenges: Ana discusses how data localization requirements could force companies to establish multiple data centers, increasing operational complexities and costs.

Notable Quotes:

• Alan Chappelle (28:00): “What is the net impact of not being able to transfer data from the EU into the US?”
• Ana Milicevic (32:48): “If we're serious about data localization, procurement departments will want to very granularly understand where your data centers are.”

---

6. The Future of Adtech and Monetization Models

Key Discussion Points:

• Alternative Monetization Strategies: Ana suggests that adopting diverse monetization methods, akin to those in China's mobile-first ecosystem, could lead to a more sustainable and consumer-friendly adtech environment.
• Rebuilding Adtech Foundations: There is a need to fundamentally rethink and rebuild the adtech infrastructure to better align with consumer rights and privacy.

Notable Quotes:

• Ana Milicevic (21:00): “Having a clearer value relationship and giving users the ability to pay for content online in different ways would be transformational.”
• Alan Chappelle (23:16): “We sold advertisers on everything is targeted and measured perfectly, but neither of those things were true.”

---

7. Call for Industry Transformation

Key Discussion Points:

• Consumer-Centric Advertising: Both speakers agree that the advertising industry must better communicate its value to consumers, moving away from intrusive practices to more respectful and value-driven interactions.
• Need for Structural Solutions: Emphasis on developing systemic solutions rather than addressing isolated issues, ensuring a healthier ecosystem for both consumers and advertisers.

Notable Quotes:

• Ana Milicevic (25:09): “We haven't nailed the value conversation. We need to explain advertising better to regular humans and what it enables.”
• Alan Chappelle (24:23): “We have an incredibly low-quality media environment today on the other end of this.”

---

Conclusion

The episode underscores the critical challenges facing the adtech industry, particularly around privacy, regulatory fragmentation, and consumer trust. Ana Milicevic provides insightful perspectives on how the industry can evolve by rethinking data usage rights, adopting diverse monetization models, and prioritizing consumer-centric practices. The conversation highlights the urgent need for systemic regulatory solutions and a fundamental shift in how advertising value is communicated and delivered to consumers.

---

Additional Resources:

• Subscribe to the Newsletter: Monopoly Marketecture.tv
• Podcast Archive: monopolyreportpod.com
• Join the Community: Slack Community @adtechgod.com

---

Thank you for tuning into The Monopoly Report. Stay informed with in-depth analyses of big tech's antitrust challenges and the evolving adtech landscape.

Transcript

[Angel Reese]

Huddle up. It's me, Angel Reese. You can't beat the postgame burger and fries, right? Know what else you can't beat? The Angel Reese Special. Let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun, of course. And don't forget the fries and the drink. It's gonna be a high C for me. Sound good? All you have to do to get it is beat me in a one on one. I'm just playing get the Angel Reese special at McDonald's now. Ba da ba ba ba.

[Alan Chappelle]

I participate in restaurants for a limited time foreign welcome to the Monopoly Report. The Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on the global advertising economy. If you are new to the Monopoly Report, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Monopoly Market tv. And you can check out all the Monopoly report [e-mail] I'm Alan Chappelle. This week my guest is Ana Milicevic, the founder of Sparrow Advisors, a boutique management consulting firm that focuses on the digital ad space. Ana and I have a bit of a three degrees of separation thing happening over the last 15 years where we haven't really interacted a ton directly but have shared a number of clients in common. And so I'm really excited to dig in with Ana. Hey Ana, thanks for coming on the pod. How are you?

[Ana Milicevic]

I am well. How are you doing?

[Alan Chappelle]

I'm doing okay. It's been a busy week, but I'm sort of par for the course these days in privacy and regulatory world.

[Ana Milicevic]

Yeah, 25 kicking off pretty hot. Looks like somehow this January feels like it's three months long and like three days long. Alternatively so.

[Alan Chappelle]

Well, we'll have an adventure filled year for sure, certainly in the in the ad space. So I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things kind of related, but we're going to start with the concept that adtech loves. Simple get out of jail free privacy platitudes. The idea that if your company is doing X, then you don't really need to worry about privacy. So for example, for years everybody was saying we don't touch PII or our data is first party. And even some of today's discussions around data clean rooms sort of implies this idea that if you use dcrs, then you don' really need to worry about privacy. Are these concepts helpful to the marketplace? You know, why or why not?

[Ana Milicevic]

You're going to get me on the soapbox early on. I'm Climbing up just so everybody knows. I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what privacy is and it feels like something that is optional and kind of fluffy fuzzy instead of fundamental. And so I prefer to think of it as data usage rights rather than privacy because that shifts the conversation back to ad techs who are like, oh yes, we're privacy compliant, to having to talk about how they're actually using customer data, potentially sensitive data. And in the era of big data and AI, every data point is potentially sensitive because computationally you can come up with a lot of different, very, very inaccurate but seemingly correct things about someone. So I think the first mistake was not clarifying what privacy means and that it's not optional.

[Alan Chappelle]

You raise a really good point if you look at the self regulatory codes which I know are not as big a deal now in light of all the state laws and GDPR or whatever, but the they really were more intellectual property based than they were privacy based. I mean there was everybody needs to provide notice and some flavor of opt out choice. But most of the rule set even in the DAA code is focused on the third party ad tech guys. And the reason for that is that everybody was concerned that the ad techs were going to take, you know, data from, you know, Forbes.com, shout out to Jim Fanfeller, he loves this stuff. But dude, taking the data from Forbes.com and you're taking that user and monetizing that user three clicks down. And so that was very IP based and it's funny that still sort of gets lost in some of these types of discussions.

[Ana Milicevic]

Yeah, and I think that was a perfect example of mixing what a medium enables you to do, which was this early programmatic audience ripoff scenarios versus well, let's take a step back and understand what consumer data really means in this day and age. There are opt out scenarios. Yes, but in the grand scheme of things, if I'm a regular consumer, I do want to see ads that are better tailored to me. Like you know, right now I get ads for dropshippers on T, on the New York Times, logged in subscriber, you know, everything should be hunky dory. If this is the best advertising can do as a whole, then we've failed as an industry because that's just a terrible experience for me as a consumer. On the other hand, I definitely want to be able to be more in control of who has my data and who does what with it. But in this stack rank scenario of who I should focus on first as a regulator, I wouldn't put ad techs at the top of that list. I would put the dmv because the DMV sells customer data on the regular. And I'll give you a great example. So the state of Vermont has about, I think under 700,000 people, probably about let's say a quarter of a million cars. They make about four to five million dollars a year. This is my, my data is a little old on this. Couple of years old. So maybe they make more now because usually when you have stuff like that floating around, you tend to charge more over time. Now that's a great business. Comes out to about 20ish dollars, just under $20 per car. As a consumer and an owner of the car, I would happily pay 25 $50, $100 to never get one of those fraudulent direct mail mailings that contain my car VIN and information about my vehicle mailed to my house address. Like this to me is a threat. But this is fine. And there's no way for me as a consumer to opt out of this particular experience. But sure, let's focus on the ad techs who are maybe charging a little bit less for a universally available audience anyway.

[Alan Chappelle]

Well, yeah, but we love focusing on the wrong things. I mean, that's just. But in the states, one thing to keep in mind is that the first thing the government does when they write a privacy law or rule is they exempt out the government in most instances. Take a look at, you know, there's a whole bunch of freak out and I think it's, it's well justified with the gravy analytics guys who are, you know, selling location data all over the place, but their biggest customer is often law enforcement. And so, you know, there's, there's a tension going on here because there's one side of the public policy world that's saying, wait a minute, we've got to just stop this wholesale sale of location data. On the other hand, you know, the government wants its data and so it's going to be interesting to see how all that plays out. But boy, it kind of sucks for the ad tech community writ large to be associated with those types of practices. And there's a part of me that thinks that, you know, metaphorically, I wish that the larger ad tech and data world could just take that model and kind of spit it out.

[Ana Milicevic]

You know, every couple of years someone tries to do like a, some pass at a more cogent platform for consumers to be able to say what they want to be targeted on. And because I like pain, I look at These kinds of settings for myself and Google and Amazon and whatnot. And every time I look at these platforms that have such an exorbitant data advantage over everyone else, I find out something new. Recently it was that I was a fan of the Portuguese national soccer team, which I assure you I'm not. And, you know, things like that.

[Alan Chappelle]

Why would you hate the Portuguese national soccer team? I heard they're really going to take the whole World cup this year.

[Ana Milicevic]

I'm sure they're fine, gentlemen. I just. I have no opinion about them, but Google thinks I'm really into them, so. Yay, advertisers looking to target people who are really into the Portuguese national, you know, football team. On the one hand, we seem to have a very nefariously developed system that can help you target individuals very granularly, which is true with regards to the use of specific types of data, like location data. And I think the first data protection laws around this that states tend to adhere to originated from a stalking case that unfortunately had a tragic end, but where somebody was able to obtain location data of the person they were stalking and go and hurt them. That was kind of the catalyst for looking at these things. And I think you hit on something really interesting, which is we kind of in the US Tend to solve the smallest, most visible, most obvious problem first, and we don't look at systemic solutions. European regulators take the exact opposite view of this. They look at an entire system and design 8 million different rules at system level and then get excited about enforcing it. But a lot of the stuff they're regulating doesn't originate in Europe. So you have that kind of contention of, well, wait a minute, you want to use this service, you didn't build it, but you want to tell me how to construct my service so it can run in your borders, where The Internet doesn't really conceptually deal well with borders. But that's a whole other podcast topic that we're not going to go into. It's a decidedly different approach, and I think neither is particularly great. But I would love if the US at least considered the consumer's needs in all of this regulatory activity and thrashing about around privacy.

[Alan Chappelle]

Yeah, I mean, the one thing that, that I, and I've been talking about this for literally 20 years now, there really needs to be some thought around the scale and scope of data collection. And I know that there are some operational challenges to, like, where do you draw the line and how do I know that? Anas, you know, at a scale of eight, and I'm at A scale of six or, you know, there's certainly challenges to that, but the idea that we have almost entirely a one size fits all view of this stuff where 1000 data points is treated almost the same as two data points, that seems like inherently problematic to me.

[Ana Milicevic]

Yeah. And which two data points is it? You know, my Social Security and address that got collected while I was filling out a mortgage application or I was doing a quiz off of Instagram and I'm making up my household income and the number of cars I have and stuff. It's like those are vastly different types of data. In the data Melee, there isn't really that differentiation. But I'm curious, hypothetically speaking, who do you think should own this regulatory task? Because we've kind of left it up to the states and now we risk breaking the common digital market because Rhode island wants to have a very different privacy policy and perspective on privacy than California with its 40 million people and fifth largest GDP and whatnot. What is the right level? Because I don't think we're at the right level now.

[Alan Chappelle]

Yeah, I mean, the great state experiment will hopefully end soon. And it's not that there isn't some really interesting innovation taking place in the states, but it is very quickly going to become impossible to run an Internet business with 49 different state laws. And all due respect to the folks at California, there's a whole question. I'm getting off a tangent here, but the idea that you're running these things through ballot initiatives is really problematic in and of itself. But what I still think is going to happen, maybe it's 2026, but, but perhaps even 2025, is you're going to see more state laws around health data and AI and it's just going to upend the apple cart. Somebody over on the Republican side of the fence, probably Ted Cruz or somebody like that, is going to get really upset with all this and is just going to demand a single state law, which ironically is going to end up being, I think, a rather milquetoast law. They're going to preempt all the stuff going on in California. By the way, IFRIN's David Leduc and I over at the NAI fight about this constantly, but I'm still, I actually think people are overthinking the filibuster. And I do think that there's going to be a of federal privacy law in the very, very near term, maybe a year or two.

[Ana Milicevic]

I think it would be incredibly helpful to have a federal privacy law, any type of indication or framework But I agree it would probably be like the milquetoastiest of milquetoast kind of legal nothingness that is just going to serve the checkbox. Oh, we have something and not really actually do anything to further the rights of consumers with regards to their data. And I think a large portion of this is for as long as we've had a direct marketing ecosystem in the U.S. the amount of and the mechanics of data collection that are happening. And again, I don't want to put this just on digital channels because the problem didn't originate just in digital channels. We're just experiencing it a little bit more viscerally in digital channels today. That data collection and activation mechanism is incredibly opaque to the end consumer. Just adding a modicum of transparency I think builds for a better ecosystem for everyone. But it's also an ecosystem of fantastically misaligned incentives where nobody is really incentivized to transform it or to evolve it. It's just kind of like it is what it is. There's a lot of money sloshing around. Figure out how to grab some of that money and let's keep going.

[Alan Chappelle]

But isn't one of the problems is that it's so complex and consumers generally just don't want to be bothered and rarely can be bothered to. I know there's a bunch of startups over the years that say, look, you can create your own profiles and we'll give you a free toaster once a year or something like that. But those things have had real struggles, those models, because consumers, generally speaking, really can't be bothered with a lot of this stuff. And that's one of the, one of the challenges here is like, you know, how do we create incentives to do things that are not going to harm consumers? When generally speaking, I don't think we can even agree on what it means to harm them.

[Ana Milicevic]

But I think that is that perception is shifting a little bit partly because we are so hyper connected. Everybody is hyper exposed to all kinds of ads. When you're consuming something about yay far like six inches away from your face and you get a really, really mis targeted ad or a very intrusive ad, something that you perceive as well, why am I getting ads for this particular medication? Or why is this in front of my face? Is a very different kind of riling up for a consumer, then okay, maybe I got this direct mail, oh, this crap again. I'm just going to throw it to my shredder and be done with it. And I think that there's an increased awareness on the consumer side that maybe there's a better way to communicate value. Maybe if brands really want to talk to me directly, maybe I can get something from them. If Target wants to reach me so badly, maybe they can send me a voucher of like $5 off or something like that rather than, you know, seeing the same old, same old tired blast campaign and sorry, Target, I love you. I'm not putting you on the spot, you're literally the spot. But any larger advertiser has to be thinking about these things. And the concept of customer annoyance, that is definitely there, hard to measure. No one is incentivized to measure. But if I were gunning for tenure at a university that is aspiring to have a strong marketing practice, this is what I would be researching. And it's the adverse effects of the ecosystem that we've created on consumer trust, on desire to spend money with a particular retailer, on loyalty and some more.

[Alan Chappelle]

So it's funny, one of the things that I think the states are getting right is that they're sort of identifying some of the real significant challenges. Because if you can, if someone can figure out health targeting and location targeting or at least put those to the side, then a lot of the rest of the data driven ad stuff outside of big tech anyway, you know, starts to fade away. I mean it's, it's, it's, I don't want to completely undersell that there are risks and annoyances and considerations. But, but, but if you really want to just get rid of the bad stuff, it's almost like, you know, focus on figuring out health and location. If you can do that, I think it would go a long way.

[Ana Milicevic]

I agree those two are particularly challenging. But I also think you can get into a lot of scenarios where a very generalized location that's not specific and generalized information about health. We think this person is in their 50s. So we're going to show them all of these anti dementia drugs individually that may feel intrusive, but the actual targeting behind it is very spray and pray kind of. So the same kind of targeting parameters you'd put in a linear TV campaign, you're putting in digital. But again, because this is in front of your face, it feels like it's targeted to you. So you're kind of going, and so when you evaluate these things on how they actually happen, there'll be a lot of like, well, we didn't target based on health or location. It's just kind of how it's evolving. And that's the, I often think about that famous Quote on like, well, how do you define pornography? Like you know it when you see it. It's the same thing here. It's incredibly hard to define what should be the guardrail for a consumer, but when it's crossed you're like, aha, that's it, that's too much. That is, that is too intrusive. It's, we shouldn't be doing that again, it's, it's solving specific problems as opposed to looking for a structural, systemic solution.

[Alan Chappelle]

Yeah, I think that makes sense. But now bringing this back to the ad tech community, like how do we change the currency? Where we move beyond just the platitudes and where folks are really focusing on what is important.

[Ana Milicevic]

I would say sometime in the last 20ish years being able to monetize content online through something other than advertising. So when you look at the way the Internet has evolved in the east, in China, where from the get go it was mobile first, but you as a consumer had about 80 million different ways of paying for the content that you're consuming. Micropayments, stickers, sponsorships, tips, what have you. That I think creates a more interesting and robust and almost self policing ecosystem. If we could borrow some of that into the western ecosystem, that would be fantastic. We can't because ours evolved at almost pre broadband time. We piggybacked a lot of stuff onto poor cookies that were never intended for this purpose and have been kind of pulling along this incredibly financially healthy industry on their little backs for decades now. And it's very hard to go from a system that sort of functions to all right, we need to kind of gut the whole building down to the foundations and rebuild and we'll be done in about six months. But something's going to emerge better on the other end. That's impossible to happen. But I think having a clearer value relationship and giving users the ability to pay for content online in different ways would be transformational to a lot of these structural challenges that we're seeing.

[Alan Chappelle]

Yeah, I think that's a good point. And when you think about the advent of the consumer Internet economy And you know, 25 years ago, you know, we sold consumers on everything is free, Everything is free and then we also sold the advertisers on everything is targeted and measured perfectly.

[Ana Milicevic]

And so neither one of those things were true.

[Alan Chappelle]

Well, fair enough, but, but those two selling points is sort of why I think we're here.

[Ana Milicevic]

I completely agree. We wholeheartedly bought into this both on the consumer side because hey, it's great to be able to Read the paper that you used to pay a couple bucks for every day, or you subscribed and got home delivery and whatnot. Like, oh, I can read it online now. Excellent. Why not? But we of course never considered the ramifications of what this does to previously rather healthy media ecosystems in a relatively short period of time. And we're talking about smartphones emerged in 20 2008, so 2010, so it's really like 15 years from very healthy media ecosystems to wasteland of today. So not, not to go all dramatic, but, but we, we do have an incredibly low quality media environment today on the other end of this.

[Alan Chappelle]

So one of the things that I just want to point out, and one of the reasons I started taking over the reins here at the Monopoly Report, is that I really did want to change, move beyond kind of the platitudes and move beyond mic privacy. And the hope of this podcast has been like, how do we make privacy and regulatory stuff sexy so that it becomes part of the lexicon that people that not just privacy folks or regulatory folks or, you know, lawyers are talking about? It's really like, how do you get something that the, the regular business people can get their head around? Which is one of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on the pod, because I think you get that perspective. That wasn't what so much a question is really me blowing smoke, I guess, but, but there it is, I think.

[Ana Milicevic]

I think that's the fundamental problem, right? There's like 11 people who really care about this stuff. And the reason we have any type of privacy push now is because One of those 11 people in California happened be someone with a lot of means who got up and said, this is not right. We need laws against this. And voila. CCPA a few years later. To me, it's that value conversation, which I don't think we as an advertising industry have nailed. Like, most regular humans who are not in advertising don't care about advertising, particularly. They're not lawyers focusing on privacy. Privacy or IP or data usage rights or whatever. If you ask them what do they think about advertising, they're like, ugh, that's so intrusive. You know, every time an ad comes on, there's too many ads. But I get up from my television and go and, you know, go to the bathroom or go do something else or whatnot. So we're not welcome by regular humans, we being the advertising industry. And I think that's the fundamental problem here. You can't like really force somebody to pay attention to you, that's not how Alpha attention works anymore. And now this is my second magic wand moment. If I could go back and magic wand this, I would try to do a better job of explaining advertising to regular humans and what advertising enables so that we're welcome. Because, hey, you can watch this sports broadcast because State Farm's picking up the check. That's a much better message. Then here's, you know, four pharma and three insurance ads. And we'll throw in a local auto dealer as well.

[Alan Chappelle]

Well, that's what they used to do way back in the 50s. Not that I remember this stuff or any, but like they'd, you know, Uncle Milton Berle would come on and he would say, hey, you know, thanks to the good people at Gulf and Western or whatever the company was, here you get I Love Lucy and here it is. And, and so the quid pro quo is really clear.

[Ana Milicevic]

If you're watching Twitch streams now, that's the experience you're getting because newer generation creators understand this much better than the current generation of media companies, platforms, et cetera.

[Alan Chappelle]

So I want to shift gears for now because there's something that's sort of breaking and we're going to talk a little bit about cross border data transfer. So you talk about sexy topics, cross border data transfer. You know, you've got the TikTok ban and all of the craziness there, which is sort of, if Nothing else, the TikTok ban is setting a blueprint for the European Union to say, oh, I get it. Social media platforms, bad, government surveillance, bad. The answer is blocking those social platforms from your country. Great. But there's a second thing that just happened. There's a group called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which, no, I don't think anybody here really needs to know what they are. But the one thing you should know is that they are integral in a treaty between the EU and the US which enables this, this, remember, a safe harbor. And then the privacy shield. Well, the new one is the data privacy framework. Okay, so you've now basically pulled the pin out of the data privacy framework and kind of invited the Europeans who really aren't that happy with how the US government surveillance practices are to start. You're now telling the eu, okay, we get it, banning social media companies is fair game. And the second thing is it's like, oh, that data transfer mechanism that, that you know, you guys have created with us and we've kind of held, held our noses. Well, what happens when that goes down and you can no longer like in an ads context, like is, I know this is way too long winded but, but like what is the net impact of not being able to transfer data from the EU into the us?

[Ana Milicevic]

The first thing that I'll flag here is, and you know this way better than I do, but the legal timelines are very different than ad tech timelines. So the fact that this nonsense has happened could actually be kicking off a fairly lengthy several year process to see how it hashes out. In the interim, I think most folks are going to try to continue operating business as usual. But if these kinds of decisions continue getting made, at some point US based companies are going to start evaluating whether it makes sense to continue operating in specific regions. Now with regards to the eu, you want maybe the UK market, that makes sense, but like do you really need to be in every country in the eu? Perhaps not. And so what I find particularly interesting to see is if we're going to try to impose borders and sovereignty on Internet technology, which we really haven't up until now, and it's not an easy concept to glom on at this late stage, but I can see something like that shaking out. And if it does, and if US companies start retreating from certain territories, that has the potential to create a vacuum in those territories for another empire's technology to enter, which we've seen in Latam, which we've seen in Africa, in Southeast Asia, or the ideal scenario would be that there would be some sort of vibrant native homegrown media ecosystem that could step in. But I think that's a really naive, very rose colored glasses perspective to take. So it'll be fun to see where this one lands and when it lands.

[Alan Chappelle]

Yeah, I think that in terms of the risk around cross border data transfers, that may happen sooner rather than later because there's already some, there's already some legal challenges to this new data transfer framework. And like, all right, if you're an ADS person and you're thinking, well Alan, how in the world does this impact me? It's like you're going to try to close a, you know, a half, you know, million dollar deal or a multi million dollar deal and the data protection officer located in Germany of your biggest client there is going to say hold.

[Ana Milicevic]

On, he's going to send you a.

[Alan Chappelle]

Fax, he's going to send you a fax and he's going to say we forbid the data transfer. You need to engage in data localization. Try doing that in an ad tech setting where like three quarters of the participants are all processing their data in.

[Ana Milicevic]

The US well, but the quote unquote good news here is that a significant portion of the ad tech industry falls under the cloud platforms category as well. Amazon, Google, other friends. And so if we are serious about data localization, then all of a sudden procurement departments are going to very granularly want to understand where your data centers are to like whatever the local version of zip code is. And understanding that no, you can no longer have one data center for Europe and US East. Now you need to have a data center in Belgium and Luxembourg. So that'll be fun.

[Angel Reese]

Yes.

[Ana Milicevic]

I don't know if there's enough space in Luxembourg for a data center, but yeah, maybe.

[Alan Chappelle]

Well, I think we're going to end it there. Ana, this has been a fantastic conversation and it's just such a pleasure to riff with you on this kind of stuff.

[Ana Milicevic]

Oh, likewise. I feel like we could just keep going forever and ever, which probably the four people still tuned in would be grateful not to.

[Alan Chappelle]

No, no, no. That just means we'll have to have you back on soon.

[Ana Milicevic]

Part two. I love it.

[Alan Chappelle]

All right, thanks so much. Take care.

[Ana Milicevic]

Thank you.

[Alan Chappelle]

That was a really fun conversation. We've got a bunch of other fantastic guests coming up on the Monopoly Report podcast over the next few weeks. Please subscribe to the [e-mail] or on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcast.

[Ana Milicevic]

Thank you for listening to the marketecture podcast. New episodes come out every Friday and an insightful vendor interview is published each Monday.

[Alan Chappelle]

You can subscribe to our library of.

[Ana Milicevic]

Hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to [e-mail].