# S2 E19 T40 Scott Messer

S2 E19 T40 Scott Messer 

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[00:00:00] Tom: You are listening to the Middlemen podcast with  

[00:00:03] me, Tom Limongello  

[00:00:05] ​ 

[00:00:21] Tom: Welcome to the Middlemen.  

[00:00:25] Introduction and Return from Break 

[00:00:36] Tom: Um, we have been away for a couple of weeks and it has not been for a lack of being busy or being on vacation. It's been, uh, super busy for all of us. But, I wanted to bring us back to the beginning of the middlemen and sort of why we're here, and I think that'll give us a, a good introduction to Scott Messer, who has joined the call. 

[00:00:48] Tom: He's both a friend, a collaborator, a business partner of ours. When we started the Middleman podcast, Todd and I started this because I was coming from the retail media [00:01:00] perspective. He had run A DSP and we were talking about how retailers were turning into publishers and. 

[00:01:06] Tom: In that world there were a lot, a lot of things to talk about. As retail media started to get a little more sophisticated. As it has become more sophisticated, the types of topics that publishers, uh, talk about in the, in the media space, the, the kinds of things that we hear on market architecture, um, are now becoming more relevant. 

[00:01:25] Tom: And so I thought, what a great time to bring Scott on. Um, and we're not only just bringing him on for today. He, we are gonna do a, a, a new format with Scott, um, as part of the middlemen because he's been somebody who the best publishers in the world bring him in to vet vendors to, uh, help them figure out how to grow their revenue. 

[00:01:49] Tom: So, without any more ado on that, I'd like to introduce Scott and say 

[00:01:55] Scott: Well, hello, Tom Todd, great to see you again. So [00:02:00] glad to be here after all this time of not being here. But I've been, uh, really excited listening to you guys and encouraged by your, by your foray here, and I am just super stoked to get to lend my, my opinions to this conversation. 

[00:02:14] Todd: Well, I think part of it is, you know, for, for those listening, uh, I've known Scott for what, at least a decade, maybe 15 years, he and I grew up in the publishing space. And he and I have, have bumped into each other and the amount of respect that I have for, for you Scott, and your expertise and experience is, uh, of the highest level. 

[00:02:36] Todd: And you, you really grew up. We, we as, as digital advertising, grew up right. For the last 15, 20 years. That was your career. You were right there at the beginning. You, you grew up with it and, you know, having had a chance to talk with you over the years about the, like, the rise of programmatic, the rise of audience, the rise of, of really everything in, in the world of, of digital advertising. 

[00:02:57] Todd: It's been, you know, fascinating [00:03:00] to, to like watch what you've built and, and great to always chat with you and have you and I had a chance to have really in depth conversations around the tech and products and the landscape and what's working and what's not. And, uh, I think that's been, a key part of your success. Scott really knows. Everyone and anyone on the ad tech side of online publishing and has some great perspectives on why we're here today. And as we start to see our retailers, publishers, and our publishers, retailers, the Eyes of Commerce Media, it's been an interesting conversation. 

[00:03:30] Todd: 'cause that's a lot of where he and Tom and I have collaborated on some projects over the last year or two and it's, and I think there's an interesting juxtaposition. Uh, of what's happening now in this space and in online advertising. And so, Scott, welcome. And, and you know, maybe a good starting point is how big of a tectonic shift do you see happening with online publishing? 

[00:03:54] The State of Online Publishing and Major Industry Shifts 

[00:03:54] Todd: Right? We have the, the programmatic changes, the regulatory changes, the rise of ai. You know, what, what's your [00:04:00] perspective on, on what is the state of things and, and is it as transformational moment as maybe some of us, you know, have heard or, or talked about? 

[00:04:07] Scott: I think it's as definitely as big as, as you've heard and have talked about, this is, um. Definitely one of the major shifts of online. It was an era called.com. There was sort of like internet 2.0, which might have been like 2008 to 2014. And there I would mark like the rise of, of programmatic. 

[00:04:30] Scott: Todd, that was also when Native was invented and that was what, um, that was the big thing that we bonded over early days. And I was like, wow, this guy's smart, and he's gonna go start a company about native ads. Maybe I can work with him one day. Um, and then, you know, there's this, this big shift that's happening is really around traffic. 

[00:04:53] Scott: Right, and content distribution and how you move people around the internet. Um, and to, to revise my history a little bit, [00:05:00] if you looked at it through the lens of content distribution and discovery, it started with like the AOLs and the yahoos being portals and having keywords and content was discovered through there. 

[00:05:11] Scott: And then the, the internet sort of broke free of those eras and Google wrangled it into a search engine and you accessed it through that way. And publishers felt the traffic woes of Google search and there was a lot of great content out there that people weren't even searching for or finding yet. And so you actually bought traffic and you exchanged traffic and this gave rise to the Tablas and the out brains and the Zu Nets and the M GDS and every other company that that came around with that. And for a while, I'd say like 20 14, 16 through. In 2022, there was a good quid pro quo of moving traffic around on the internet. Facebook was a part of it. Um, YouTube [00:06:00] was a part of it for a little while. They sort of took their traffic back from them. Google was playing nicely inside the algorithm world, and they were giving out more than half of what they were keeping. And then all of that changed. Uh, I think it goes back to, uh, zero $0 interest rates during the pandemic. Uh, a glut of SEO tools, hitting the market fueled by free cash, uh, and then the ability to create content with ai. All of this hit and literally exploded content on the internet. Google couldn't even keep up with it and indexing it. 

[00:06:36] Scott: And that's when you had the Google Reddit problem where everything you search for was, you know, the best laptop according to Reddit. And everyone was adding that, uh, Google couldn't even get rid of the spam fast enough and they couldn't re-rank it, and it literally just inundated and sunk the entire machine. 

[00:06:51] Scott: And then I think when they had, and then they, they went through a series of core updates that just kind of like nuked part of the internet. [00:07:00] They were like, we have way more than we need from a traffic and content perspective. If we don't think that it's of the best quality entirely, we're just going to make sure nobody goes there. 

[00:07:11] Scott: Like we don't have to care about that stuff. And then LLMs came and, and sat on top of that chat, GPT, which compounded Google's problem, made them eat their own tail a little bit because now Google has to release. Gemini and their search tools, which actually cannibalize some of their traffic and their other pieces of revenue. 

[00:07:31] Scott: And all of this has led to a giant, uh, decrease in publisher traffic and that's bad. So from a traffic standpoint, we're in a, a whole new place, and that's probably the scariest thing to publishers from a advertising perspective, a lot of it's still the same. People are still buying and selling ads. Some of the systems and mechanisms which are in the middle are starting to change. 

[00:07:59] The Rise of Curation and Retail Media 

[00:07:59] Scott: And [00:08:00] I'd call that like the rise of curation. And you can go back and listen to, uh, my chat with Gareth Glaser that we did for Bler Tech about sort of the shifting of DSPs and SSPs and the power struggle that goes on in there. Um, and then you have this new thing called retail media, which. Is new. It's not new. 

[00:08:19] Scott: It sounds like the old stuff, they're kind of acting like publishers and all of that is true, which is really what's been a lot of fun working with you guys on, on retail media projects is because I get to be this publisher expert and bringing all the sell side tools to people that are involved in selling products. 

[00:08:35] Scott: So it's a different world for them, a different world for me. But they all meet in the middle where these retailers are publishers and they need ad tech help. It's not MarTech, you're not seeing MarTech show up to these parties. It's ad tech and it's ad tech operators and ad tech mechanics. Um, and I hope maybe on this one or maybe the next one we'll get to talk about like [00:09:00] yield optimization and retailers. 

[00:09:03] Scott: Retail operators don't know what the word yield optimization is, but it's literally tattooed on the arm of every single publisher. So. 

[00:09:13] Tom: Yeah. I think that's part of, one of the things that I've learned in talking with you is that, yeah, yield optimization wasn't, it was a bridge too far for retail. Dealers because they mainly were like, okay, we have an audience and we're gonna go and find the cheapest possible, uh, way to fulfill that. And so media quality was a challenge. 

[00:09:34] Tom: Um, and that was sort of where the story ended. They didn't even get to yield optimization and you know, you saw a little bit of that in the sponsored search world where. Relevance started to become a, uh, a sort of mitigating factor in terms of the way people would bid. But yeah, I think we're in the very early stages of that in the retail media 

[00:09:52] Media Quality in Retail Media Networks 

[00:09:52] Scott: Yeah, and you, you bring up media quality, which is, um, I think part of our topic for today and some new [00:10:00] people are getting a taste of media quality, and that is these retailers and the retail media networks by their, through their offsite efforts. Uh, I think there's been a lot of, um. Public stories in the press about media quality and some of the problems that happen. 

[00:10:16] Scott: I don't, I couldn't tell you if there's, there's been more stories about bad traffic than there used to be, but it feels like there's a lot more, um, I think the response to them are kind of the similar of like, oh, something bad happened again. You know, let's shuffle our hands for for two weeks and then move on to the next problem. 

[00:10:37] Scott: Advertisers are getting sick and tired of getting dragged through the mud when these bad things happen. And I think that the buy side and sell sides have matured enough to start aligning their interest and goals to deliver outcomes for their buyers. And that means, uh, putting down [00:11:00] some of their bad habits. 

[00:11:01] Scott: I think like the MFA stuff that Chris Kane and Jounce Media worked on a while ago is really important. Some of the transparency stuff that you're seeing coming out of the DSPs, the SSPs, uh, certainly since is a big part of bringing that transparency to the marketplace. And now, um, it, I think the, the open internet is becoming a safer place to hang out again. 

[00:11:28] Scott: Maybe this is like the. Like the, the Bloomberg era, like the Rudy Giuliani post New York like side of the open internet again, like it's finally safe to go back out there and it open Internet can be a very, very bad place. Like you don't want what's in there all the time, but if you're looking at the signals correctly, it's a great place to to be. 

[00:11:52] Scott: And there's a lot of great content and a lot of great audiences and a lot of great media executions available for you. 

[00:11:58] Tom: So maybe I think we should double [00:12:00] click into this part of the discussion because I think this is where you're. Expertise really shines. This is outside of where the retailers are, this is much further a field. So this potentially shows the future. 

[00:12:12] Tom: And I think there's lots of retailers out there who are like, I don't know how to think about the open web. Much easier to think about my own sponsored search. Maybe I'll go to CTV, maybe I'll go to Facebook. But . Brian or Kelly just had a LinkedIn post and it was, I think you probably saw it. 

[00:12:24] Tom: It was like, uh, I was talking to somebody about going on the open internet and they told me it's just much, much easier to go onto Facebook and Google. You know, tell me why I'm wrong, basically. And he, you know, the entire rant went for many, many comments. Um, but. Media quality is at, at, at the center of this. 

[00:12:43] Scott: Yeah, it's the open Internet's safer now because there are more tools that are available to you. I think there's been a better discussion about how to operate those tools and I think that the, the pressure of curation and sell side curation and sell side decisioning [00:13:00] that have been, you have a new contender vying for those brand dollars competing against the DSPs, and that may be enough pressure to make. 

[00:13:12] Scott: Uh, brands question their DSP decisions, uh, to show them that there are other ways to buy this inventory where your CPMs are more aligned, you're not using vanity metrics, and you're still delivering outcomes. So it's a, it's an aligning of the marketplace like this. Transparency is what is aligning it. Uh, there's fewer places to hide for bad actors, and frankly, there's more than enough content out there. That you don't, that you as a buyer don't have to operate in those low places. Um, so from a, from a signal perspective, you know, the question is like, what are, what are these buyers looking at and how are they doing at it? Uh, it's kind of like a triple filtered system. Uh, the SSPs are using more [00:14:00] sophisticated technology to vet who comes into their networks. 

[00:14:04] Scott: And not just on a one-time basis, but on a repeated basis. So these SSPs are constantly culling their, uh, inventory supply for bad actors and removing them on a regular basis. This helps them with what we can later talk about is traffic shaping and bid throttling or request throttling, where SSPs can only send so much traffic to A DSP that the DSP will accept, and they want to have a really high win rate. 

[00:14:33] Scott: So if you're sending them a bunch of garbage and the DSP isn't buying it, your win rate is low, and the DSP. Just doesn't spend as much money on you, but if you can make your, your ratio of win rate, of win bids to lost bids higher, you're getting a larger share of the wallet. And so it behooves the supply side to call their inventory and only work with quality partners because those incentives for working with bad [00:15:00] partners aren't the same as they used to be even two years ago. 

[00:15:03] Scott: That's taking the MFA out of it. Yeah, go ahead Todd. 

[00:15:06] Todd: No, I was gonna say, I think that's a a, a good point about, as the guy who ran A-D-S-P-I, I think the challenge always was, in our point of view when I ran the DSP, was, hey, it's up to the, to the user, right? The buyer, the person transacting on our platform. We're just a tool. We're like a shopping cart. 

[00:15:22] Todd: You're going down the aisles at Costco and you put in the shopping cart what you. And I, I'm not sure the buyers and the, the users of the DSPs really understood how much control they really had, and one, and then two, even if they did, it was just an overwhelming amount of inventory and, and the signals coming from the supply side were too limited. 

[00:15:42] Todd: Right. You couldn't, some of them even hid. Like where placements were on the page, they weren't giving full transparency of placement IDs and URLs and and so forth. And I think d the DSP side has gotten better, to your point of like requiring more and more transparency around the transaction and the metadata. 

[00:15:59] Todd: And I think the [00:16:00] sell side has realized, wait a second, if I've got legitimate inventory, I wanna wave that flag in as much metadata as possible to say I'm the good guy. Buy for me, don't buy from this tale of glop or slop, I 

[00:16:12] Scott: I, I will defend the SSPs though, for passing truncated URLs in the early days because, um. You could steal audience data from complete URLs and so, but 

[00:16:27] Todd: sure. I'm not saying they were malicious in it, I'm just saying Right. It, it sort of 

[00:16:31] Scott: Yeah. And this is the, the nuclear arms race of programmatic ad tech. Like there's, there's too much tension and friction in the system to have a disarmament and a full truce. 

[00:16:43] Scott: And the only way forward is like. Race for nuclear weapons in ad tech. And so it's always one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, but signals is actually the, the disarming mechanism. Transparency [00:17:00] and showing this is what I'm sending, this is what I'm getting, this is what I'm buying, this is what I'm not buying. 

[00:17:04] Scott: Having that sort of, uh, lubricant in the market will make it a lot better. . That's how supply is helping from the signal side. And then I think, Todd, you're right, the DSPs are starting to do this themselves. And you said that, um, A DSP is just the tool, but really there's traders on that side and there's people and there's brands on that side looking at it, I think now some of the DSPs are taking a more proactive approach in protecting their clients. 

[00:17:34] Scott: And it's like the difference between shopping in, uh. I can't even mention retailers unless I offend any of them on the, the Middleman podcast. Shopping in a store that's all full of junk food and sodas versus going into like a air one or a Whole Foods where it's only organic food, right? So it's like, don't even shop in the DSPs that have garbage, right? 

[00:17:59] Scott: Or that [00:18:00] have this stuff for you. At least go to the place where it's properly labeled, it's put behind the shelf, you know, you gotta get ID to buy it. Like whatever you want it to be. So the DSPs are taking more responsibility because sell side curation is willing to steal their money if they can't protect their clients. And we're going to see some of that shift because brand safety is moving back into the supply side. I won't just derail us on curation, I promise. But the, the signals themselves that we're seeing, all kinds of like ad telemetry and things that are on the page. It's a combination of scraping data plus midstream data, uh, and these really valuable data sets are coming out of it. 

[00:18:40] Todd: Very interesting. Unfortunately, I, I'm gonna drop now. You guys are gonna talk more, but Scott, it was great to see you on the middleman and look forward to watching what you and Tom do from the publisher perspective  

[00:18:49] Scott: Absolutely. 

[00:18:50] Scott: One day laid there.  

[00:18:53] New Signals and Transparency in Digital Advertising 

[00:18:53] Tom: Hey Scott. So we're back. We have almost the same clothes on. Um, we had a little bit of a [00:19:00] glitch in our recording studio, so we're taking a take two. Um, but I wanted to pick up from the discussion, because as you were talking about how sellers have all these new signals, is it gonna be attention, is it gonna be, ad ratios? It sounds like a little bit of like death by a thousand cuts. Like it sounds like it's just cost on top of cost or complication on top of complication. 

[00:19:23] Scott: You know, that's a, that's one way to look at it, but I don't think that this is a burden for publishers. It's this transparency part and getting to see how the buyers regard you and so you can make changes that ultimately optimize your system. I don't think it's death by a thousand paper cuts. 

[00:19:40] Scott: I think it's like sunshine by a thousand pinholes. Um, and each one of these metrics that allows the sellers to see how the buyers are scoring them or considering them and sort of vice versa and how that impacts spend and revenue and daily bid rates and all those metrics, [00:20:00] um, that's a big amount of sunshine getting poured into the industry because what this is really about is the flight to quality and the pursuit of outcomes. 

[00:20:11] Scott: And when that transparency is there, publishers have the incentives and the tools to go and fix their media quality and present themselves better to the buyers. 

[00:20:21] Tom: I like that. Um, it is a throwback to, uh, the late eighties, early nineties, George Herbert Walker Bush, thousand points of light. So, um, but you know, I'm a Dana Carvey fan. Every once in a while I watch those old SNL clips. Um, but yeah, no, I, I think that it, that's a good way to sort of. Turn it around because it, it, it seems like publishers have this sort of problem, especially my perspective coming from it in the retailer world where, the publishers are sort of in the dark. 

[00:20:55] Tom: We, all we cared about was the audience and we didn't care about where they [00:21:00] went. And that's one of the reasons I'm excited to bring you in as part of the, the middlemen is that. Publishers may have been in the dark, but you're one of those people bringing them into the light. So, um, so thank you. 

[00:21:12] Tom: Um, and you know, I, I think that, yeah, well, I think, I think it's gonna be interesting because it's a constituency that doesn't get a lot of airtime. Um, and so that's, that's sort of what I hope we, we can do in terms of bringing in guests from your network. Um. But I, I want to keep going deeper. I want to hear on these signals, what are the publishers and the buyers gonna get from that? 

[00:21:36] Scott: Certainly, um, you know, there's, there's some of the older signals, right? The, the double verify, the pixelates, the um, fraud logic. Uh, IAS that are in the, the fraud and sort of suitability standpoint. You have some of the ad fontas and the news guard, which are a different type of suitability. Um, but the, the really newer [00:22:00] signals that we're seeing, or what I sort of call ad environment and supply chain, um, and those are around MFA lists. 

[00:22:08] Scott: Um, whether it's an AI generated site, you're also talking about things like ad density, ads to content ratio. Uh, general click-through rates, attention from Lumen Adelaide are in there. Um, so a bunch of these companies that are sort of doing this work, deep sea.io, fu analytics, Gera and uh, sovereign on the publisher side with their signal product. 

[00:22:32] Scott: As well as jounce media. Uh, and Scope three is actually making a huge push into this signal. Um, and some of them are selling the raw signals themselves that can get packaged up inside systems and some of them are selling like sort of a prepackaged list or, or things where it might, might be something in the, the news suitability. 

[00:22:54] Scott: You know, I don't think there's really. Uh, a gradient that you wanna accept that there's just sort of a [00:23:00] score of this. It's really fascinating to see how this is getting ingested into the larger systems, especially when you talk about curation. And I know I promised not to, um, sidetrack us on curation here, but it's, uh, it's interesting to see when you go into some of these curation platforms. 

[00:23:20] Scott: Like Microsoft Curate, index, , marketplace and the other ones that these signals are available. And you can just push a button that says, I want the sp uh, you can't push the SP 500 button. That way you can push like, I want, um, non MFA sites. I want. You know, a certain ads to content ratio across all of my buys. 

[00:23:43] Scott: I want a certain X, Y, Z, and you can just sort of toggle those things on and they're available for you to choose media quality. 

[00:23:51] Tom: I think for the listeners who, you know, obviously coming from the retail world, may not, may not sort of be able to. Latch onto sort of what, what this means for me. [00:24:00] Hearing the add to content ratio, um, is one of those easy ones when you look at a site the content is in this tiny window in the center, or it's hard to get at the content, you could imagine just asking for a certain ratio could help. 

[00:24:14] Tom: Um, I could also see it being gamed in ways where viewability was gamed back in the day. So that, that one I think I can hold onto. I do, I have heard. I've gone fairly deep in understanding a little, uh, the attention side of things, and I felt like that was a way of leveling the playing field. Especially in the retail media world where everything is supposed to be an outcome without clicks, it's hard to sort of have a playing field that says, Hey, if we look at it based on attention. 

[00:24:42] Tom: TV out of home may score better than say, mobile, uh, or other very clickable, very viewable, channels. So for me, that's sort of the types of things that get exciting when I hear about these new capabilities. Um, is that like, what, what do, what do you think of when you, when you hear these new things.[00:25:00]  

[00:25:00] The Importance of Standardized Metrics 

[00:25:00] Scott: Uh, I like them because they're, they're a little, not only are they a little bit more objective. Then something like viewability. And if, if you know me and you had done the deep research, if you pushed the deep research button when you did this one, Tom, you would've seen that. I'm on the record saying that, uh, attention metrics are just as bad as viewability and have just as many problems with it. 

[00:25:23] Scott: But it, it's a, it's in the right direction and it's fine. . They're a little bit more objective, but you're also using the, the same information that the buy side is using is being passed to the sell side, and that's the most important part. I don't care if you're using, uh, a foot long ruler that's actually 14 inches long, as long as everybody has the same one. 

[00:25:44] Scott: That's the part we need to just have these standards where buyers are saying, we're considering things in certain ways. We may not tell you what the threshold is, but. You should know that there's a continuum and you can look at the average, you can look at your cohorts and you know, your competitors to figure out whether you're above or below the [00:26:00] line. 

[00:26:01] Scott: Um, that's a really important thing. And a great example of that was when Google rolled out, uh, lighthouse and their, um, speed scores. That was a really big tool for publishers to improve the quality of their pages because it's a really hard thing to measure. Um, and when that came out at the same time when, uh, Google was rolling out amp and page speed was an important thing, and so they wanted publishers to see for themselves, you're being slow and here's exactly why it is, and here's how you can fix it. 

[00:26:33] Scott: I'd say Lighthouse was probably one of the biggest advancements in. Usability of websites, um, and moving the entire industry forward. And in the same way these signals are available, 

[00:26:44] Scott: Anyone who's selling to the buy side needs to make their versions available to the sell side, and I would highly recommend that they do some of it on a free basis. 

[00:26:52] Scott: Alright, double  

[00:26:53] Scott: dipping from both sides is really unfair. I think. 

[00:26:57] Tom: Okay. 

[00:26:58] Scott: Uh, when, when we had the [00:27:00] fraud and viewability vendors, right, and even with comScore is in this bucket of knowing your audience stats. 

[00:27:07] Scott: Like, why should a publisher have to pay to know what their viewability score is, or to know what their fraud rate is? Or, you know, why should it? Publisher have to pay comScore to be listed or to manage their listing. Really, it's a buy-side service, but I understand economics and that's, that's the way it goes. 

[00:27:27] Scott: But publishers did sign up for all those things because the buy-side was using them. And you needed access to that information. So it's really great to see things like jounce. And since with, um, open Sensara now giving away their tools to publishers, you kind of, you have to go through a signup process and you have to maybe, you know, sign something, but it's generally free to join some of these. 

[00:27:50] Scott: Um, and you're empowering the publisher. And by that, both of those companies that I mentioned and several of the other ones are becoming associated with arbiters of [00:28:00] media quality and sort of holding the torch, you know, for, for shining the light into the publisher community. And we need more of that. 

[00:28:08] Scott: Anyone who's creating something opaque and obscure in the middle doesn't really belong in our industry anymore. 

[00:28:14] Tom: Yeah, what, what it sounds like, there are certain companies out there, they could be buy side, they could be sell side first, um, but they're taking the market leadership position to give away. You know, telemetry in ways that would help, uh, facilitate more transactions in ways where quality is prioritized. 

[00:28:36] Tom: Is that fair? 

[00:28:38] Scott: Yeah, and I, you know, I don't think they see it as like a loss leader in giving it away, but their goal is to. Improve media because their clients are interested in media quality and outcomes. And so if it means, you know, helping publishers see their data and fix their data or fix their sites to improve the data, then it's, um, super important that they [00:29:00] do that. 

[00:29:00] AdMonsters Sell Side Summit Preview 

[00:29:00] Scott: That's what we're gonna be talking about in Nashville. For AdMonsters Sell Side Summit, uh, it's August 17th through 20th in Nashville. Uh, the theme is. Beyond the browser and into the signal. Um, it's two of the big things we've talking about. Um, I'm hosting that event for AdMonsters. 

[00:29:20] Scott: I'm very excited for 

[00:29:21] Tom: Yeah, that's exciting. 

[00:29:22] Scott: come, reach out and I'll get you, uh, my discount, which I don't know exactly what it is, but I'll find one for you. Uh, we'd love to have, uh. Everyone from the sell side and the buy side's actually welcome as well. Uh, Stephanie Lazer from Amazon will be speaking on day one. 

[00:29:38] Scott: Taz Patel, uh, for perplexity ads will be speaking on day two. And then there's a lot of workshops on both a strategic level and a technical level. So there's sort of two tracks through that, but the theme of beyond the browser. 

[00:29:52] Tom: put, we're gonna put that in the liner notes for this episode. And it's exciting to have you, the face of AdMonsters this, this [00:30:00] summer. Um, probably the most exciting thing that's happening before the Labor Day holiday. So, yeah, I think people should get on it. 

[00:30:06] Tom: And Nashville's always fun, so. 

[00:30:08] Scott: Nashville is always fun. It's a, it's a great time. Um, they're also announcing they're their second annual, uh, dream team. It's sort of like a fantasy draft of ad ops professionals from the sell side. Last year I was the, the inaugural CRO for that program. Uh, so it'll be fun to hand over the reigns to our next, uh, CRO as well as the rest of the, the dream team there. 

[00:30:29] Scott: You can, you can check us out in 

[00:30:30] Tom: Well that, that. 

[00:30:31] Scott: and jerseys. 

[00:30:33] Tom: That is something that the retailers who are listening and the people who are in the, in the retail media world, uh, that love the middleman, um, these are the types of people that you should be learning from if not hiring. So yeah, this is a, , a good, a good step, in the learning process for a lot of retail media networks. 

[00:30:51] Scott: That, that's a good point, Tom. And let me, let me pivot in that direction a little bit of like. Retail media is ad [00:31:00] tech. It's way less MarTech than it is ad tech. And, the concepts of this are, sort of nuanced to publishers themselves. And I think that if you're looking for really strong talent to staff your retail media, you should look at the people who were on publisher ad tech teams previously. 

[00:31:20] Scott: Because they have the experience, they have the bones, they have the yield optimization, they have a bunch of the skills and talent that you need. Um, and with publishing jobs sort of vanishing slowly. I think there's a few of them available. I. 

[00:31:35] Tom: Yeah, there's also I think, something to be said about how up until now, the retail media network landscape has been sort of hesitant or just not sure what to do with publishers. I think one of the things we needed to solve first was. 

[00:31:53] Tom: Is CTV gonna be part of retail media? Um, and so having a logged in capability similar to their, [00:32:00] uh, their own site, uh, was, was something, but when it's some, at some other site where somebody is not logged in, um, and the, the quality of it was questionable, whatever. I think the first. Attempts to monetize that were seen as, okay, we're finding these people on sites that are have, you know, maybe aren't the best sites. And so I think now. Based on what you're telling me about the new telemetry that exists, um, how can you start to bring publishers into the retail media, uh, world more directly? 

[00:32:30] Tom: Todd and I talked about this with, the electronics world where Best Buy, um, was looking at, , really deep partnerships. Those were big, press releases, but didn't really turn into much. Um, but I'm, I'm hopeful that, you know, in later 25, 26, we see more of that. 

[00:32:47] Tom: Um, so I don't know if that's gonna be a topic at at Ad Monsters, but maybe it needs to be something that we talk about on the middleman again. 

[00:32:55] Future of Publisher and Retail Media Integration 

[00:32:55] Scott: It, it certainly will be. Um, you know, I think we're looking at [00:33:00] everything that a publisher can, can do to connect to budgets and spend. I think retailers are really looking for how to extend the use of their data. And their sales relationships, but they need media and impressions as a vessel to do that, and they don't have enough of their own. 

[00:33:18] Scott: And so you have to go offsite, whether that's walled gardens or the open internet, you still have media. I think the, the walled gardens have done a really good job of, talking about media quality and justifying UGC content as brand safe and sort of giving them the tools, the open internet needs to do that as well. 

[00:33:39] Scott: Um, but going more to like specific publisher to publisher basis, I think every pub should be asking themselves, what can I do to service these retail media networks? And to answer that question, you have to ask what are the needs of the retail media networks? And I think it's inventory one, uh, data two [00:34:00] and three, measurement and attribution. 

[00:34:02] Scott: So I think the first one is easy. The second one is, uh, not hard, but can be complex and you can form some really great data relationships, especially in if you have a large IDD audience and you want to work in the clean rooms. There's some great work out of like optimal and the Canadian grocery networks where they're running like a very large clean room scenario. 

[00:34:25] Scott: It's more, from what I understand, it's more  

[00:34:27] Tom: like Loblaws or somebody, or. 

[00:34:29] Scott: Yeah, and it's more robust and complex than, you know, the US and the groceries and the, and the publishers. Uh, and so there's a, there's a bunch of data work that you can do to help them, and ultimately that ties into the media, the attribution. 

[00:34:45] Scott: Right. How do you help close the loop for them? Um, I think that retailers are not entirely ready for that conversation yet, and publishers are willing and waiting, but we haven't gotten to that [00:35:00] point yet. So I think the open internet collectively can do more to make more connections because Facebook has a conversion. 

[00:35:08] Scott: API, snap does, TikTok does. Everybody has those. Where's the conversion APIs for the open internet, right? Like, how are these things going to work? Um, and then of course, being a better media quality partner. Nobody wants to advertise in the open internet when it's not a safe place. 

[00:35:28] Tom: Right. Great. , I'm starting to hear little inklings of, new guests that I want on the pod now that you're talking about how things are done better in Canada. We just did a good one where people are doing things better in the UK so maybe that's a theme for us, finding those pockets of the world where , there's points of light. 

[00:35:46] Tom: So thank you again for joining and uh, I guess you get to sign off, uh, this episode 'cause you're the latest member of the middleman. 

[00:35:54] Scott: Thank you very much, Tom. It was really a pleasure. Todd, I know you're not here at the moment, but thank you as [00:36:00] well. I'm gonna think of my catchy slogan and tagline to take us out, but for now, thank you very much for having me. I look forward to being back and everybody do good and be great. 

[00:36:11] Tom: I talk to you later.  

[00:36:12] ​