Transcription
Ramsey, welcome to the AW360 podcast. I'm so pleased to have you on today. Thank you. Glad to be here. To start things off, you're president of Prisma. Tell us about Prisma. Sure. Prisma consolidates all of the financial and contractual workflow that's been under MediaOcean for a decade plus of Spectra, Aura, Radia. And Prisma. Prisma has historically been known as the digital financial and contractual workflow provided by MediaOcean to the largest agencies and advertisers. And since I joined nine plus years ago, we've more than doubled the size of the business and have brought together a bunch of brands under the Prisma name. You have elsewhere described your career not as a marathon, but more of a relay race. How has that philosophy shaped your approach to leadership? And how do you see it reflected in Prisma's role within the broader media ocean journey? It's a great question. And it's Bill Wise, my CEO and partner for 20 plus years. who says that the thread that binds the phases of my career across the army, politics, banking, and the last 20 years of advertising has been innovation and supply chain. And so in markets that are moving and innovating quickly, you have to adjust everything. and go through phases of growth and consolidation. And examples in the advertising space over the last 20 years, search and social, programmatic, where I grew up, CTV, retail, advanced currency. And so in my career, and even with a company, I shift where I think I can provide the greatest impact. I was CEO for four and a half years, head of partnerships in M&A for four and a half, and now back leading the entire Prisma business. And so for me and for the company, we'd go through these phases of addressing innovation and consolidation. And I believe our mission has been to consolidate and compress and converge the advertising supply chain. And that means we do things and operate sort of differently as we go through the phases of that. And it just means you're sometimes using fast twitch muscles. Sometimes it's slow twitch muscles. But in the context of where we are, I think I and we adjust what we're doing to address the innovation that's happening in the market. Well, few markets are more innovative than what we used to call television. I'm not even sure what we should be calling it anymore, but that's probably a subject for a whole other discussion. How is Prisma helping buyers make sense of all the complexity around modern television? And what does true orchestration look like across so many disconnected platforms and formats and, in my case, television apps? What we have seen in TV over the last 20 years is that TV has grown almost 4x. In 2004, it was roughly $65 billion. Most of that was linear. But if you fast forward 20 years, you still have linear at more than $50 billion. You've got online video, social video, which is a form of TV, and then CTV. But the fundamental goal of the brands and agencies who are buying TV is really the same, which is understanding reach and frequency against audiences and being able to orchestrate that in a way that drives the outcome that they want. And whether those are brand-oriented or sales-oriented outcomes. So over the last 20 years, everything and nothing has changed in the market. everything in terms of the technology, the amount of data, the destination, the way we buy. And so what's important in this very fragmented TV market is that you are coordinating the media and creative messaging and pricing and analytics to be able to manage this very fragmented and diverse but rich supply chain of advertising. You said that if you still view ad serving as plumbing, you're behind. How has ad serving evolved into the core orchestration layer for modern marketing? And what are some of the biggest misconceptions buyers still have about it today? It's one thing for an ad server to simply serve an ad and report that it's actually happening. But back to my TV example, To be able to do that in linear online video, CTV and social video, the way buying happens, the way targeting, the way measurement happens is very different. And so ad serving has moved from, oh, it's a commodity that I just need. It's a foundational part of coordinating the creative and the media for the largest brands and agencies who are literally spending billions and billions of dollars to move brand awareness, to move product, to impact the enterprise value of the company. I think of advertising investment as the lifeblood. And I think the ad serving is critically important. We're in this muddy, middle, gangly teenager phase of the new form of advertising being IP-based and all digital. And for the next 10 years, we're dealing with fragmentation. And I think it's critically important to lean into all the pieces of technology and data, including AI, that allow us to do it very efficiently. Well, you mentioned AI. Let's go ahead and discuss that for a bit. AI is undoubtedly having its moment. How do you separate the hype from the actual help that AI can provide? And what are some of the most meaningful ways you're seeing AI enhanced planning and transactions and optimizing in real time today? Yeah, I think Bill Gates said that he thought the impact of AI in the short term was overestimated, but in the long term, underestimated. And it is both a new technology, a new language, a new way of thinking about how we use technology and data to impact the advertising supply chain. And I think the real value of AI is the practical applications, developing high quality code faster, automating manual tasks, optimizing creative, surfacing insights. And so when it comes to the orchestration that I talked about, powering it at scale takes a lot of intelligence. And I think that's where AI is coming in. So we're seeing both work that we're doing And the work that agencies and advertisers are doing to have it make significant impact on planning and transacting, measuring, optimization. I don't think it's about replacing the people, rather amplifying the good things and removing what we can in all of the manual steps in this very fragmented ecosystem. Yeah, I think a lot of people always tend to feel very reassured when they hear people like yourself talking about how they're not going to lose their jobs. Their jobs are just going to get a little better and a little easier. AI may take away some jobs, but what will likely happen is people that understand AI will take jobs. And so we're investing in generic AI just to get people comfortable with all the different AI that's out there. And there's lots of places and programs to do that kind of training. And then there's very specific role-based training. That's how does an engineer use, for example, Copilot to develop and QA code more efficiently. And so I do think that we're going through a transformative period as an economy and specifically in advertising, where if you come into this space, you really should have a baseline of knowledge about AI because it's embedded in nearly everything that we do. We've moved or are moving from walled gardens to what you've called hedged gardens, which is my favorite expression this week for sure. What does that mean for advertisers trying to navigate this semi-open ecosystem? And how does independent interoperable technology like Prisma help level that playing field for them? Yeah, we're definitely in a market that has open web hedged and walled gardens. And how high the hedge is, is really an indication of how many barriers there are for the buyers to access inventory and data and do it in an algorithmic or API automated way. in order to be able to manage the complexity of whether it's dozens of brands, hundreds or thousands of campaigns. So I think over time, the buy side, typically the largest agencies and brands have the power of the purse to begin to negotiate more access to data in a privacy compliant way. so that they can do what they need to do, which is understand, not just based on what the seller is saying, but what they see, what valuable third parties see in terms of what's being delivered to whom and what's the actual impact of that. And so our role in that is to try to converge that complexity of the plan to pay process in such a way that the buyers, whether they're buying open web and still using cookies, or hedged and using a PII through a privacy-safe way where they can match with the partner, or walled gardens where they have to access the audiences and the inventory directly. in a way that they probably long-term wouldn't prefer, but because of the scale, because of the access to data, they're going to do. So our role is to consolidate as much of that over time and to work with them to give them as consistent a view such that they understand, if I have one more dollar to spend, where would I spend it and why? TV right now is in the weirdest place of all time, in my opinion. You'd mentioned linear, CTV, all of that. The combination thereof is mind-blowing to me at times. How do you define simplicity in a world of direct and programmatic and hybrid? I think everything and nothing changes, and we should ground ourselves in the things that aren't changing. which is a brand wanting to invest dollars. If I'm a beer producer and I've got $50 million, I have to make a choice about whether I'm going to build a new brewery or invest that in advertising to drive sales. And so that doesn't change 20 years ago to now. And the way buying happened 20 years ago was far more simple. You used one currency, Nielsen. You bought directly from the seller's At that point, the largest buyers were probably five of them, the Holkos, and there were about 12 companies that sold television. So you knew and trusted the content and the partner, and the process was relatively efficient, even though it was manual and automated in a very different way. So we've come forward with massive technology and massive data, and we've introduced a lot of inconsistency in terms of standards and operating systems and measurement and data, but we still have to get back to the fundamental simplicity of buyers and sellers contracting in the most simple and straightforward way and taking advantage of technology and data. So I try not to wallow in the acronyms but rather focus on the simplicity for us given that all spend starts and ends in Prisma. Can we, as a system of record, be the place where the spend can go to the largest sellers of television as directly, as efficiently as possible without a lot of the ad tech tax? Unless there's a value of that programmatic supply chain, that the supply chain is bringing forward with transparency and automation in a way that helps the brands and helps the publishers. So for all the complexity and the innovation that's happened in programmatic, For television, I think it harkens back to a much simpler time where the vast majority of television that's being contracted is between the largest buyers and the largest sellers. And I think we have a role to play to re-simplify what that is and drive real efficiency and trust in that TV supply chain. Is there anything right over the horizon that you see coming up that is particularly exciting to you and maybe represents new opportunities that the whole industry, our industry, is really going to benefit from? I do think we think in decades because At the scale that we're operating and the partners that we have, there's not a question about whether we're a business in two, three years. We're not a startup. We need to act like one, but we're not a startup. And so I tend to think in the longer term, like what are the big things over the next decade? And I do think that AI in its many forms is fundamentally going to change the advertising experience. You're seeing that as a consumer when you use something like ChatGPT. And I think we're on the cusp of some really interesting innovation as it relates to use of AI for advertising that greatly simplifies and automates what's happening. So I'll jump on that AI bandwagon and say I have drunk the Kool-Aid, although I do think it's going to take a fair amount of time for it to really happen. play out. I do think it's some of the most exciting things, even more so than 20 years ago when we started the programmatic exchange, right? Media was almost 20 years ago. And that was really exciting, heady times. I think the stage is bigger and the impact is bigger with AI. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for taking part in this today. If one wanted to find out more about Prisma and yourself, where should they go? You can always visit go.prisma.mediocean.com, or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, regardless of where you are on the globe, and I will connect you to the right team. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for taking part in this today. This was fascinating. Thank you very much.