# S1 E9-Kevel-Cloud-1

Episode9-Kevel-Cloud-1 

[00:00:00]  

[00:00:07] Elgato Wave Neo-24: welcome to the middlemen. I'm Tom Limongello, and I'm here with Todd Sawicki. We, as middlemen, live at the intersection of media and e commerce, and we would like for you to join us in our discussions where we turn that chaotic intersection into your comfort zone. This is an exciting episode for us because we have our first ever guest,  

[00:00:27] Elgato Wave Neo-24: James Avery, CEO of  

[00:00:29] Elgato Wave Neo-24: Kevel, and Kevel is a company we've been talking about on previous episodes,  

[00:00:33] Elgato Wave Neo-24: so we are very excited to get to talk to him at length. today.  

[00:00:37] Tom: Before we start, I wanted to give some context to the audience, because we definitely learn something from this interview. 

[00:00:44] Todd (3): I think the most interesting thing is the history of Kevel's transition from ad serving platform to retail media platform. And Kevel in its origins as Adzerk really breaks ground [00:01:00] focusing on native ad serving or Reddit was their big customer originally. And I hadn't necessarily made the connection of how native ad serving really enabled this latest generation of retail media. 

[00:01:15] Todd (3): And people knocked on Kevel's door from the retail media space. Cause they're like, Oh, I need native ad serving. And it makes sense, right? Product listing ads are native ads. Sponsored listings are native ads. Uh, sponsored recommendations are a form of native ad. It's all native ads. 

[00:01:30] Tom: Yeah, I think the problem is that when we were living through it. Native ads was a thing and it needed to sort of live on its own. And then when it sort of started to fall off, people will be like, Oh no, we're not native. I missed that lineage. Um, and it also means that you've been in retail media longer than 

[00:01:46] Todd (3): well, if you want to say that in terms of, right, because that I came from a company's Amanda, which is a native ad DSP, which became sort of performance, uh, DSP. And, you know, one of the things I think that even, you know, James, [00:02:00] we talked about too, is just, we're still surprised that native ad serving hasn't taken off more than it has, especially in the publishing space and the traditional open web content space. 

[00:02:10] Todd (3): And maybe retail media will be a big driver of that. And, you know, one of the interesting things about retail media is in its use of native ads is doing more server to server serving. And I think that is an interesting aspect of where I think the ad tech world should move, which is more server to server. 

[00:02:29] Todd (3): I mean, it, it, it can do server to server, right? The benefit of native is it effectively the native ad programmatic specification or native ad serving specifications come out of OpenRTB and IAB's work and industry standards there is. That it produces. The, the negative ad spec is really a CSS / HTML spec. 

[00:02:48] Todd (3): It, it's just delivering h TM L can be rendered and so it's easy to insert that into a CMS as other h other content like HTML that gets ultimately delivered to the page and [00:03:00] rendered in the browser. And so in, in a world where content. Or ads are embedded directly in the content as HTML, you know, around ad blocking it, you targeting is a lot easier. 

[00:03:13] Todd (3): That's where profile targeting and retail media really start to show up because you, you know, all that profile stuff is on the server. And so the decisioning around what ad is, is going to appear on the page is done on the server side. So. There's a lot here that's interesting in terms of, well, why is retail media winning in this world of enhanced privacy? 

[00:03:31] Todd (3): Well, because their first party, but the other thing, if they're building on native ads, is they can start doing more interesting things in terms of delivery of that. So I think that's that, to me, was one of the interesting aspects of the conversation and the histories and origins of cable today, and it's focused on retail media. 

[00:03:45] Todd (3): Is it wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been built and focused on native ad serving, which also I think is fascinating because it really, I think, starts to point out why wasn't gamma big player retail media. It's the big daddy of online [00:04:00] publishing, you know, why are some of the other players, you know, sort of late, like trade desk wasn't initially trade desk wasn't focused on native ads as a buying platform. 

[00:04:06] Todd (3): That's why my old company's Manta was, was. 

[00:04:08] Tom: Yeah. And that, and that's why you're seeing now they're, they're pushing into CTV, which is very server to server. So, you know, I think it all comes full circle. It's the specs get generated on the, in the web world where it's easy to munch things, whatever, and, and figure them out and then eventually moves over into the sort of almost like app ecosystem. 

[00:04:28] Tom: For me, that was something where I got a puzzle piece that I was missing. 

[00:04:33] Todd (3): Yeah, and that puzzle piece showing up and where does it go, I think starts to speak to the future of retail media morphing more into being the dominant form of native ads. And it really has been, probably sponsored search listings are a form of native ads. Then you got sponsored posts like the two largest ad players are almost entirely built on the backs of native advertising. 

[00:04:56] Todd (3): Meta and Google. Amazon is as the third, right? [00:05:00] Their ad business is almost entirely native, right? They have sponsored listings, sponsored recommendations. And so the world, yeah, I think that native ads won in the end, right? Which is fascinating, but in ways that I think the rest of the world is catching up and what's fascinating is we're going to start to see, I think, A real diversification of native ads as a lot more retailers jump into retail media. 

[00:05:24] Todd (3): And so maybe 10 years later than I thought, but yeah, native has become the future of online advertising as a result of it's really the basis of retail media. 

[00:05:37] Tom: Well with that, I don't want to delay any further for our listeners. Let's get to the interview with James Avery from Kevel. 

[00:05:45] Tom: . Thank you for joining the middlemen. Yeah, thanks for having me here. Absolutely. And I'm going to let Todd talk with you a little bit because he knows you from very early days. Is that right, Todd? Yeah. So James and I have known each other since [00:06:00] basically he started Kevel, which is formerly known as Adzerk. 

[00:06:04] Tom: Back in the day, I was a CRO for a large viral company. Publisher called I can have cheeseburger and James was getting started at that time and we met and actually I don't know if I interviewed some of your investors out here in Seattle or at least acted as a background check. But we go back to when James was literally just a guy in Raleigh thinking it'd be really cool to build. 

[00:06:28] Tom: An ad serving platform. And, here we are, gosh, 15 years later. And, it ad circus no longer known as ads, Erkin is now known as Kevel and is by far, I think the largest, platform API based platform for ad serving out there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I was thinking back to the Those days, and I always think about like you had to put it on your resume. 

[00:06:50] Tom: The site is I can ask cheeseburger, explain that to your parents. But it was great because it was really it was one of those early kind of meme sites on the Internet. And we always talked about, [00:07:00] what I was building focused on APIs, focused on innovation and advertising. 

[00:07:04] Tom: What would be the right native ad for a site? Like I can ask cheeseburger and I don't think we ever got there, but some really good conversations back then. Exactly. We quite couldn't and more so cause I think in terms of, I wanted to, so we were the, this was the early days of native advertising and that was, I think we were trying to figure out I was one of the, I think one of the first people to get quoted using the term native advertising and digiday back in the day. 

[00:07:24] Tom: And, I think we're, we're native advertising has, you It still isn't quite as advanced and as widely adopted as I think you and I would have hoped. But I always loved the idea of an API based ad server. I think one of the things that is now, especially the rise of retail media, people are realizing that ad servers need to integrate in lots of different systems. 

[00:07:47] Tom: You need to be able to customize, workflows into other systems. And I think the world is finally starting to recognize that there's more to life than gam. Thank God. And I was never the world's biggest fan of GAM. And [00:08:00] this is obviously before, right? I always bitched about the header bidding issues in terms of GAM sniping ads. 

[00:08:06] Tom: And that was always a pain in the ass. It was hard as a small publisher, even though we were one of the largest meme viral publishers of the time to have the resources to really push. Or ad serving in the ways that, that I always wanted to. So in terms of, one of your early big customers, I remember going back in the days was Reddit. 

[00:08:25] Tom: Obviously it was a big win for you guys. And I think is really what puts you put you guys on the map. Yeah, absolutely it's really what helped us, because I when I originally started adzerk The idea was like let's just build a better GAM But there's a lot of dynamics that make it that you can't really compete for display banner advertising And really it was sitting with reddit where we were working with them and serving their banners But then sitting with them when they were working on promoted listings And they were like man if there was just a way we could get all the value of what you do You But we could call you on the server side. 

[00:08:58] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And I was like, we can [00:09:00] make that happen. Like we had an API, but I was I was like, yeah, we have an API and then it was a crappy API. And then we went back and improved it really quick and helped them launch that. But but really that was the Genesis of the idea of Hey, this is an API ad server, but really what it should be doing is powering native ads. 

[00:09:15] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And then, like you said, native ads never really. I think met what we all hoped they would do. But in some ways, retail media is just the perfect native ad, right? If you're searching for you're searching for something, you see a promoted listing for the product you were looking for, but it's, a promoted version and the advertiser is paying for it. 

[00:09:33] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: That is a beautiful, perfect native ad. So that's what I like to think. Native ads morphed into retail media versus, replacing that. I think that's a, I don't know if people really have thought through that. Retail media wouldn't exist without native ads, right? In terms of where it is today and what's happening. 

[00:09:49] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And even the idea of A. P. I. Based development around ad servers. I think 15 years ago was radical. I was thinking back of even with Reddit. I might have been the one who [00:10:00] introduced you to my call back in the day to get you in the door there. Because Mike and I were buddies back in the day because we were doing, selling, with each other, against each other, and what have you, and the old Reddit cheeseburgers. 

[00:10:09] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Actually, a little bit of history that people don't realize is cheeseburger and Reddit almost merged. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. We, there was this this was right as Reddit right before it took off, and people forget this in summer 2012, Reddit takes off, Reddit comes back from the dead, and kind of Reddit 2. 

[00:10:27] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: 0, and Reddit had been largely owned by Hearst. Oh, Conde Nast or Conde Nast, right? They were the big early investor. Yeah, they were. And but they were already trying to dump it off and and so there were some VCs who were looking and we got a big round of investment from Foundry and we had some other VCs looking around, and one of them was, who had some ties to Reddit was like, oh, what we should do is combine Reddit and cheeseburger and. 

[00:10:58] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: We'll invest in that, [00:11:00] right? Cause as a win. So that was the play, but as we were like in the middle of all this Reddit took off and and so as a result blew up the deal, they suddenly didn't want to do it. It and other thing is Alec Alexis O'Hanlon and Ben Hall were buddies because of the whole viral meme publishing thing. 

[00:11:17] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so that was another aspect of it is there was a lot of interest in that. It would've been great for my checkbook, unfortunately, Reddit kicked ass on its own from a cheeseburger standpoint. And, but that was one of the things that people don't never knew is that we were close to merging. 

[00:11:31] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And, I think actually in part, one of the things that helps set up Reddit for success was the ad model you enabled them because they really struggled with advertising until they were able to adopt because the self serve and that little text, that little native text ad that they had. 

[00:11:46] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Really enabled them to make money. And I think, your Adzerk's, Kemal, formerly known as Adzerk's ability to create and inspire unique ad units was a key part of that. Did, was that, did you see a lot of similar [00:12:00] business as the business grew, in terms of Adzerk, where you primarily enabling other native. 

[00:12:05] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Sponsored listing type products, which again is what retail media is today. But what's the history of what goes from Adzerk to, obviously 10 years later, the rise of retail media, but what's the in between steps between them and today? Yeah. Reddit, it's like a great example of a really good native ad, but I think like we said, like native ads never. 

[00:12:24] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Never really reached the promise that we hope they would. I think there were just, there's not enough companies who are willing to really invest in building native. And so many of them were just going to rely on more and more banner ads, and everybody in there and just You couldn't standardize rage comic reactions and put those into the bid stream, right? 

[00:12:42] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Like you couldn't get the specific native, flourishes to be scalable, right? Yeah. And so what we saw is, we had, we have, we have great customers doing native ads. Like another, like a current one is WeTransfer. Where we transfer as a site where you send, large files, a lot of designers, photographers and they have these [00:13:00] beautiful native ads that they have a studio that helps design them. 

[00:13:02] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And they're absolutely their artwork, right? Like they win awards for that. And so there are all these beautiful native ad use cases, and we still love those customers. But the problem is, there's just not a lot of them, right? There's just not a lot of those use cases. That's what we struggled with, I think, was, how do you build, there just wasn't, on the ad sales side, it, as much as it worked, and right, we were trying to build the rage reactions, Tom, to your point, at Teesburger, but the problem is, James, like, why didn't it ever work out between Adsrp slash Kevel and Teesburger was exactly that, it was the demand side, right? 

[00:13:31] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: We just could never, Have enough business to justify replatforming onto adzerk. And so I think that was, one of the things that maybe that's the retail media shows up eight, nine, 10 years later, the current version, because obviously in a prior episode of our podcast, we talked about retail media has been around for a hundred years and has always been there, but this current version of retail media, digital retail media is new. 

[00:13:54] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And maybe that's suddenly there's demand and interest to really justify implementing [00:14:00] platforms like Devil. Yeah, no. And that's really what happened is that we, we grew steadily from that, 2012 to 2020, but really at about 2018, 19, we started to see retail media starting to really grow. 

[00:14:15] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so that's when we realized okay, this is really not that different from native ads, right? It's really just the perfect native ad. There's some other components like having a really good product catalog, having really good attribution that you didn't see a native ads that we added. But I think that was really the evolution of adzerk into Kevel is that when we saw that we said, okay like retail media is really the future here. 

[00:14:34] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Like I said, we still work with native customers. We have great customers building native ads, but retail is the market. That's big enough to really build a large company. Native ads would always be like, I think it's like a, there's like a good small business there, but there's not the huge opportunity that retail media is. 

[00:14:52] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: I wonder, too, in terms of you look at open web and online publishing, that people don't quite [00:15:00] understand how using something like GAM locks them into a certain paradigm. And, I think one of the things that's interesting about Kevel is if you have an idea for advertising, like a product idea, whether it's a native ad, whether it's a new approach to selling ads, If you can think of it, you can probably build it because of the API first approach of Kevel. 

[00:15:20] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And, what's your perspective on, do you think the open web world publishers, whether it's retail media or online publishers, do you think they've really understood That the importance of having the flexibility with an ad serving platform to enable new products. That's to me, I think one of the interesting things is people go, Oh, I had an idea up. 

[00:15:41] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Sorry, game doesn't support that. I can't do that. And do you think, do you see a lot of that conversation happening on, with your customers in terms of, The ones who adopt you, suddenly they have the ability to invent and build new products. Yeah, like when people come to us, it's usually because they have an idea of something they want to do that is innovative that they can't do on GAM, [00:16:00] right? 

[00:16:00] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so we have customers who use, they, they still use GAM for traditional banners and they use us for a really interesting native use case. Like Edmonds is a good example where, it's a kind of retail media adjacent, right? You're not buying the car exactly there, but it's very tied to a transaction. 

[00:16:14] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: But they wanted to build a really high, high end native unit that loaded inline, that loaded server to server, that, that looked beautiful. And they could do that with us, but then when they still wanted to serve some banners, they'll use GAM for that, especially because of all the existing support for GAM, and then also the lock in with ADEX you can't get away from that. 

[00:16:33] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: So there's really no, there's no way to compete with GAM on the straight banner side. But then once you want to do something that's not a 300 by 250. There's, you need other options. Yeah. And I think that, if we pull back a little bit, we started talking, we went straight into sort of, with the assumption that people understand what an API ad server would be. 

[00:16:54] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: But I think that, from watching some of your your appearance on Exchange Wire, [00:17:00] I think you did that a couple of times. There was some stuff in there where. You talked about how ads that were supposed to be native were fake. They were rendered with a JavaScript tag. 

[00:17:08] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And then, it looked like, and I remember that from my day as a quotient, we started with JavaScript tags, and then we finally moved toward an API solution. But what does that sort of capability open up? Because we were starting to talk about that, but I wanted to get that in a little more detail so people, listeners can understand. 

[00:17:26] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Yeah, absolutely. I think the primary thing is like when, because we're an API based ad server, you can make those calls server to server. And you can render them like they are part of your site normally, right? And so I think when you look at really well done retail media, you look at Amazon, right? 

[00:17:42] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Like you look at the product listings that are promoted and there's no difference. You do a Google search and you look at the, the search results. There's no difference, right? They load just as fast. They are relevant there. When you click on them, they work when, you have the right number of stars and reviews and all this stuff on Amazon. 

[00:17:58] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so really, that's what we're unlocking [00:18:00] with the API side of it is that, it's. It's yes, it's promoted, but it's not an ad in the sense that it's something added in after the fact, right? Which you'd see javascript load slowly or not look right or Like they used to fake the number of stars just so it looked like a product, like an actual product but I think most people have moved past that Especially in retail media, but I think when it comes to lots of other types of ads, they still haven't moved past it right. 

[00:18:25] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: I think there's people serving native ads with straight javascript. Oh, it drives me nuts. To your comment, you actually make a great comment from an ad tech perspective, and it's driven me nuts for years. Which is, native ads done right are a server to server call. And it delivers. I was back in, in my Zemanta days, right? 

[00:18:50] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: For listeners, I ran and built a native ad DSP. And one of the things about that is being a part of the native ad programmatic standards [00:19:00] work. And what people haven't really ever, most people haven't done in the space has looked at that and realized that's a CSS HTML based product. It's like you're, it basically it's a CMS standard. 

[00:19:14] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so you're delivering. HTML or CSS back into the page. So it can be server to server like I can deliver you code into your server, which can then render that with the rest of the copy on the rest of the web page. Your point. So it's all an integrated experience. And by moving it server to server, you get around ad blocking, you get around so many challenges and problems that publishers face in terms of the ability to monetize. 

[00:19:40] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And if they took this server to server approach, they could radically improve the user experience. Like a lot of the challenges with traditional based ad tags and JavaScript is right, heavy page load times, heavy browser resource utilization, all sorts of challenges. But if you did it the way that retailers are doing it right, which is server to server and [00:20:00] injecting it into the code effectively, it's such a better user experience. 

[00:20:03] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so it just drives me nuts that the industry hasn't figured out that they could radically improve the end user experience by adopting approaches like what you're talking about. It just. Crazy to me that this hasn't happened. And I think what happens in the kind of like big general ad tech space is that there's no trust. 

[00:20:20] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so you can't do it right. Because all of the advertisers have been convinced they have to run their own verification tags and those have to run on the client side and the bidding has to happen based on cooking and things like that. That's happening on the client side. Like they can't trust what's coming from the server side. 

[00:20:36] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Like it's a very low trust system, right? Everybody's assuming that everybody else is trying to defraud everybody, To some extent they are, but like that makes it really hard to do that. But you don't have those issues when you're direct selling native ads. You're direct selling retail media, right? 

[00:20:49] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: There is no, Amazon can serve those ads server to server. There's no need for all these like client side verification. They're reporting on it. There's a certain level of trust that has to exist, but people are trusting Amazon [00:21:00] to, to really report on those things and execute them correctly. 

[00:21:04] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: I think the trust factor is an interesting retail media and which you get to with and the rise of potentially, and I know it's a project you guys are working on, which is programmatic sponsored listings or programmatic retail media, which I imagine is an extension of the programmatic native ad spec and standards. 

[00:21:23] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And can you have a trusted environment? Like maybe perhaps talk through, is there a future for programmatic retail media? If you given the low trust environment, does it prevent things like the rise? So I think that's really interesting question. How you're gonna enable smaller retailers is, they're gonna build networks. 

[00:21:42] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Are they gonna embrace programmatic? They need larger audiences, traffic, what have you. And so I think that's an interesting question, which is okay. So what is the future of retail media? Does Programmatic have a place in the future retail media? Yeah, I definitely think it does. But I think it's going to be a lot [00:22:00] different than what we saw in the kind of traditional publisher space. 

[00:22:03] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And I think that's because a lot of these retailers, they have a lot more power than the publishers. If you're a big, large, you're a grocery chain, you're a, you're Best Buy or somebody like, you have a lot more power in the fact that people are coming and transacting on your site. And you have a lot of first party data. 

[00:22:18] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: You know who they are. You know what they're buying. They're logged in. It's a different dynamic than you're a news source, right? Or a meme site. And it's like you don't have as many people logged in. You don't know that what they're buying. You don't have that kind of monopoly on that data. 

[00:22:33] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so I think programmatical work a little bit differently. But like you said, we worked with the IAB to really launch the spec. And the goal was, how can you do promoted listings right? Because I think a lot of people looked at it and said, you could just use the native spec and you could just, go back and say, here, this looks like a promoted listing, right? 

[00:22:51] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And you have people doing that already, right? They can even, they even serve them in the kind of, outbrain taboola style, put something that's like a promoted listing in there. But what we wanted to unlock [00:23:00] was, what if you enabled Procter and Gamble to say, we need, we want to sell more diapers in the zip code, but we don't care if we're buying it from, Kroger or Instacart or, whoever else, like we're just focused on doing that in this, executing that in the zip code. 

[00:23:16] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: But you have to do it in the right way. And so what we did was really built in the idea of SKUs. And so you're actually bidding on SKUs. You're not bidding with a creative. And so you might say, these are the, these SKUs represent the, these 60 SKUs are the pampers that we're trying to, sell more of. 

[00:23:33] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And then those get natively promoted, whether it's in, Instacart or on Kroger's website or, or even Walmart's website, right? Like wherever, whoever is tied into that and then having real attribution that comes back to it. And so I think what's different there is I think that is that's gonna be a little bit more closed system, right? 

[00:23:50] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Because I'm sure publishers are gonna come along and say, we'll put promoted listings on our sites, but they're gonna convert like they do if you're searching for diapers on Kroger, right? And so I [00:24:00] think there's gonna be a much bigger divide, whereas in traditional, online publishing, it was really easy for people to spin up sites that generate a lot of traffic that look really similar that have the same people. 

[00:24:10] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: But they're not going to have that value like they did in retail or do in retail. Let's take the other side of it, which is, yes, the retailers are super powerful, but with that comes a level of not understanding that they actually are becoming publishers and they may actually have a pretty high bar in terms of, Basically creating an ad system that is sophisticated enough to handle all this stuff. 

[00:24:33] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so like maybe the biggest retailers out there are figuring this out, but some of the smaller ones, like if they come to you, what is the gap in terms of them being ready for a server to server installation? Yeah. It's fascinating cause we're really, we're an interesting time where. 

[00:24:51] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Kind of in that 2020, 2021 timeframe, middle of COVID so much as moving to e commerce, most retailers scrambled and launched [00:25:00] something. A lot of them went and just signed up with Criteo or Citrus or one of existing providers. I was at Quotien where we did this. Yeah. Yeah. They just, they're like, we have to get something up. 

[00:25:10] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so most of them, like most of them aren't starting from zero. But they're starting from a place where maybe they're just getting a check every month. Yeah. And then they're looking at the numbers and they're saying look, Amazon's making 8 percent of GMB back in ad revenue. And they look at their numbers and they're like, we're making half a percent. 

[00:25:25] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: What's like, how do we change that? And so those are the conversations we're always having. It's Hey, what is the path to get you? Maybe you're never going to get to 8%, but maybe you can get to 5%. And that's a huge meeting. All they want actually the goal with a lot of these retailers is to get to 1%. 

[00:25:38] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: 1%, right? Yeah, that's what they go to their boards with. And it's interesting that lots of conversations. With folks on the retail side and they're like, yeah, we sold our board on 1 percent and we're hitting a half or a quarter percent. We're like, we don't know what's wrong. Like, how do we get more? 

[00:25:54] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And I, so I think that raises an interesting question of who, when you look at your, the [00:26:00] arm and land scale, Escape RMN's Retail Media Network. By the way, I hate the term network within retail media because they're not networks. It's a single site. Like they're not a network of publishers. 

[00:26:08] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Like it, stop using network, call it a retail. I think you're going to lose that fight. You just, I know I've lost it, but it's not a network people. Can we stop using networks? It's not a group of publishers. It's a single site. Maybe Retail Media Publisher would be good. RMP. Can we charge, RMPs instead? 

[00:26:25] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: I know I've lost it. That's alright. No, I think we're going to have to do a special segment where you are from the movie network saying you're mad as hell, rain soaked, in front of the television cameras. Yeah, like it. When you RMM landscape, And, some people, Amazon, outside of Amazon, who do you think's done a really good job building, implementing, running an RMM? 

[00:26:46] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And who do you know, you look at whether it could be one of your customers, right? I know you've huge, great customers, who is the one that you look at and go, man, they do a great job. Yeah, I think there's a lot of them. 

[00:26:57] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And some of our customers some of them are [00:27:00] obviously walmart has done a very good job. Like they've they went out and acquired a native ads company ironically, to be the backbone of what they built So like they've done a good job of executing. One of our customers I think has done a phenomenal job as delivery hero they're the uber of parts of Europe and Southeast Asia, and they built a really compelling platform. 

[00:27:21] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And then speaking of that, like uber, right? Uber has done a very good job of where they started out, just slapping some stuff in there and to turning it into a really compelling business. That's probably going to push them to profitability. To Tom's point in terms of the, talking about success of retail media and 8%, half percent, right? 

[00:27:41] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: The market seems to be stuck in half percent for a lot of these retailers. One of the things we look at the landscape that we wonder, which is if you look at like Tom's old company quotient and Tom looks up and realizes like everybody who is a seller quotient. And their entire sales team has been snapped up. Like you, if there's, you are a quotient seller, you [00:28:00] have a good gig right now. And, but what's fascinating is to me, the other side of that is you look at the Scott Messers of the world, Scott's a friend of ours, someone we've worked with ad ops guru out there is you don't see the ad ops people getting snapped up and, they've invested in sales, but not the platform tech or ops side do you see strong ad ops teams? Do you see that's an area where they're a little blind? Like they're so focused on revenue. They haven't realized, guys, this is a lot of work. Yeah. I think a lot of that comes from when they're using some of those providers or they're using Citrus or Criteo, they're probably providing ad ops for them, but they're charging them 10, 20 percent rev share to do that. So that's a good business. If you can provide ad ops for that big of a rev share, but I don't think it's going to last. And so a lot of the companies that we're working with who are moving off of, one of these earlier platforms moving off of a citrus or critical or IQ, they are investing in ad ops, and they're going and finding those people to bring in and say, you're going to run this ad ops team. You're going to, you're going [00:29:00] to pull all our reporting together and all this stuff we know that all the like crucial things we know that ad ops do I think companies are starting to invest in those. 

[00:29:08] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: It's always funny to me when we go, we'll go talk to companies who are really making the leap and signing with Kevel and building on top of our platform. A lot of times they'll have, there's 10 people in the room and none of them will work there longer than four months. 

[00:29:20] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And they're all, they're basically, these retailers are really investing in building out these teams. And it's everybody you'd expect to be around, around the table, right? It's ad ops, it's sales, it's engineering it's data science it's product. And I think when you look around, it really looks like what, it looks like what startups look like, not like what traditional publishers look like. 

[00:29:41] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Cause too often you would go in to meet with traditional publishers that are just serving banner ads and who's in there. Maybe there's a sales guy, maybe not. A lot of times it's like an ad ops person and like a rev ops person. There's just that scrappy rev ops guy who knows how to, do header bidding and talk to the exchanges and negotiate new deals. 

[00:29:58] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And that's who's in the room. [00:30:00] But when you go to a retailer now it's product, it's data science, it's ad ops, it's sales. It's they're really investing it. What do you think retailers are getting wrong right now in terms of as they start rolling out retail media? We talked about the unit that maybe they're starting to build out these teams or investing in it more from a product standpoint, which is good. 

[00:30:17] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: What are the things that they're still not doing correctly? Yeah, I think sometimes there is there's too much of a focus on just the Traditional promoted listings. I think those are like the key part of retail. But I think when you talk to brands, they're like, yes, fine. We'll buy the promoted listings, but really, how do you get, how do you get incremental budget for us? 

[00:30:38] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so I think we're seeing some really good retailers start to innovate with, with the kind of branded shelf units and different sorts of carousels and different ways of saying, how do we advertise cross section, right? Like, how do we find those ways to bring in a buyer. 

[00:30:51] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so I think that's the, I'd say that's something that I see is sometimes settling for, yeah, we're going to run promoted listings. We're going to make, make our half percent that way, but then really trying to [00:31:00] think about, go talk to the brand and say what's going to get a lot more dollars from you above just, promoting your product. 

[00:31:05] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so I think that's a really big thing. And then I think also too, there's the companies that have like really outsourced it. Like we just know they're never going to get to that. That high level of return on GMB. So the ones we talked to tend to be the ones that aren't outsourcing it. 

[00:31:18] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: They're the ones investing in it, but the ones that, we talked to and have a quick call and they're like, yeah, we just get a check from Criteo and we're happy with that. It's I think that's obviously it's not gonna be a long term, sustainable solution. One of the things you bring, it's interesting you bring up about the ad units and their systems and brand things. 

[00:31:34] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Tom, I think this is interesting given some of your conversations in the space of how people are, how they're thinking about retail media and their spend, how they're, it's in some ways being shoved down their throats from a brand standpoint. How do they judge this? So I think this is, James comment is interesting, giving some of the conversations you've had with folks at the brand side and as they begin to look at retail media, too. 

[00:31:55] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Yeah, I think there's, always the issue of the brand is not trying to come up with other reasons why they [00:32:00] need to invest more in the retailer, right? So there is that, but there is the other polling thing, which is that we need to, Convert and, find people higher in the funnel to convert them into choppers. 

[00:32:11] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And retail media is very much a sort of low funnel loyalty play, which to your point, James,, promoted listings are great for that. But at some point you got to do some more interesting things. And I think. Europe has figured that out a little bit. Where like they have the more interesting formats on the site, but actually I had a question for you, which is, a lot of the trend this year is talking about how in store is going to be more interesting. 

[00:32:32] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And since you have an API driven platform, does that put you into a good place to try to connect those screens? Cause that's a harder thing to connect the dots and the data on, if you're just a normal ad serving capability, or  

[00:32:44] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: yeah, absolutely. So we power in store. We power some in store experiences for customers today. 

[00:32:50] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And I think there's gonna be more and more of that. And like you mentioned, it's funny, like in Europe, they're way ahead of us in Europe for in store. So we have a customer in Europe, we're and we did a tour of one [00:33:00] of their stores. And there were we were looking at like how many different like video units and screens they have. 

[00:33:05] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And you, even the, brands will put in their own video, end caps and you look at what we have today and it's there's a handful of people innovating in that space, but it's way less. And and I don't know, I don't know why, but I haven't figured out why either, but we knew, next week's guests, Xavier Ficcone. 

[00:33:21] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Is Belgian and he was the guy who was buying up all the companies that were in Europe and stuff. So yeah, for some reason Europe way ahead on a lot of this stuff.  

[00:33:30] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Yeah. And then maybe it's maybe it just has to do with the density of who's coming to the store. Their stores always seem a lot busier than my local grocery chain. 

[00:33:38] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: But I also know that there's a lot of companies out there who are doing a lot for in store and yeah we're talking to more and more retailers about how do we really help them power in store and really get back to that, doing the right way, not just like throwing a billboard up there. But it's funny because the what is it, Walmart with their e ink? Displays coming out as an in store unit in the world's Oh my God, they're going to target us in the stores [00:34:00] and you've united right with the in seat targeting coming out as a kind of a form of retail media. 

[00:34:05] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And honestly, I think retail media is going to stand for not retail as much as it'll be logged in media. That's the funny thing, right? Like Marriott, like I'm sitting in a Marriott right now and they said they're launching a retail media network. And I'm like, what's, I don't understand what the retail part of Marriott is. 

[00:34:18] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: There is none. It's just first party log in media. It really is. Make it easier for me to log into Netflix. there and then let's forget about the rest of it for a bit. Yeah. Watch an ad and you automatically log into Netflix. Exactly. I think that's a, a fascinating point of view. 

[00:34:33] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And it's interesting also, what I love about press around retail media, again, another rant, which is, it, Costco is rolling out in store. They had that announcement a month or two ago, people were like, Oh, Costco's launching retail media. I'm like, no, Costco's had retail media for years. 

[00:34:49] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: What they're launching is, what's new is this in store component to the Retail Media program. And I wish people would stop saying XYZ launches Retail Media. No, they're launching a feature within a larger Retail Media [00:35:00] strategy, which has existed for, to your point, since 2020 or 2018 or 2021. And so it's fascinating around that, which is even as a trade press, we're not covering quote unquote retail media correctly, like not realizing this is new and innovative. 

[00:35:15] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: We've seen announcements around Walmart. We've seen announcements around Costco. You look at what United's doing right with this in seat. Obviously, I think Uber and Instacart have components about, call it in environment. Ads, digital out of home might be, the DOH, D O H acronym is probably good rather than DOH. 

[00:35:33] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: We did a Homer Simpson little, right? We're gonna, we're gonna build, a bunch of Homer Simpson gifs around that. And and so I think that's, an interesting one to look at, I don't know if you've thought about, other news recently , Target partnering with Shopify, more hype than reality in terms of that connection, Target allowing Shopify merchants to be able to apply to, to be a Target plus seller. I don't know if you have [00:36:00] thoughts on that relationship and, in terms of Shopify's role in retail media or, and or targets, what they've done. And I don't know if you had any thoughts on where those two players are. 

[00:36:10] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Yeah. I think Shopify is really fascinating because they, one, there's such a big force in e commerce, but also so many of their customers are really like DTC. You don't need retail media. If you're, I don't know how many times you go by, I go buy some cool shoes I saw and I'm like, Oh, it's the Shopify site. 

[00:36:28] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Or I'm buying like something for my son's like baseball stuff. I'm like, Oh, of course it's a Shopify site. But like they're not multi brand retailers. So there's not really that like opportunity for retail media there. I think Shopify does have opportunities in the shop app. And I think they have a big opportunity. 

[00:36:41] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And like you said, that the target partnership, where if they're, if their customers are pushing their inventory to target, then Shopify could help facilitate them promoting those items on target. And so I think Shopify they represent a lot of the brand or they have customers are a lot of the brands who actually spend in retail media, [00:37:00] as opposed to the other way around. 

[00:37:02] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: It's they're almost like in the best position to be like the. The buy side, DSP, the buy side than they are to like the sell side. It's funny because I was gonna say Shiv from you of digital made a comment of oh, I think Shopify be this huge platform for retail media. And I'm like, Shiv. No, it, first of all they're a federation, right? They're every store is a unique instance, like Salesforce, two instances don't connect. They really should be. A buy side player, not a sell side. 

[00:37:29] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: I think everybody instinctively thinks of them as, Oh my God, there's this huge platform. They should be amazing for generating inventory. When actually your point about sell side play is an interesting one, right? They, cause those are your brand, you're the buyer of retail media and they have a lot of, so maybe they are 

[00:37:46] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: and it's and it's a great like flywheel for them, right? Because if they're, and they do this today, right? They have tools that help their customers buy on. On meta or on google, right? It's a great flywheel for them because they're helping their customers spend [00:38:00] Sell product that they make money when their customer sells product. 

[00:38:03] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And so it's just a very it's a very virtuous loop but I will say on the sell side of it they do have in the shop app, if you use shop pay you get shop cash that is driving, that is a form of retail media today just, not what we see traditionally. 

[00:38:17] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: I don't know how much traffic the shop app has. I'm not privy to that, but I think that's the part where there is like a sell side opportunity. But the buy side opportunity just works. Like, when you think about how much those brands would be willing to spend. If they have a good ROAS right, if they could deliver a 4x ROAS those brands can probably spend all day long. 

[00:38:36] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Yeah, I think that's an interesting, dynamic in terms of enabling spend right going back tom to your conversations about how do these brands evaluate retail media? And how do they think about it? I think you know The one thing that we hear constantly from our brand contacts is they're just getting inundated With retail media pitches and they're like, I do what Tom said. 

[00:38:55] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: I don't want to invest more. I don't want to spend more on retail. I've got my fixed budget [00:39:00] like I don't need an excuse and retailers are trying to produce incremental. So maybe, I think that might be one of the questions, which is, how should how do brands have the tools? Is there enough? 

[00:39:09] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: But maybe the missing thing here is the supply side has jumped. So you're a form of supply, right? You're enabling supply through capital. And there's been so many buy or sell side. Maybe what's lacking is there isn't DSPs for retail media. There isn't a lot of buy side help here. And I know, Tom, your comments between us, one on one is that the brands, the vendors are struggling. 

[00:39:35] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Yeah. To manage all these retail media proposals and buys and what have you. And maybe that's where there's where the opportunity is going in the near term. And is that sort of the types of things that you're working on with the IAB and Shamim, and I think you have a webinar tomorrow about that. 

[00:39:50] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Is that sort of how that breaks up and. Becomes an opportunity. Yeah. I think there's, and there are, today, like I think where it is like you have [00:40:00] PacVue Skai tools like that, where they're not what we think of as DSPs, right? Like they're really orchestration. 

[00:40:05] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Like they're literally talking to Amazon's API or talking to creditors API and setting up campaigns and changing the values. I think the natural evolution is like we always see this in ad tech, right? We've all been around long enough that you see it. It starts out. It's like ad networks, and then it slowly moves to the system that we're all used to of DSPs and supply side and automation. 

[00:40:25] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: So I think, the work we've done with the IAB and like the webinar we have tomorrow it's about how we're pushing that forward because I think they're going to want to spend just like they spend in other advertising, right? They're going to buy through the trade desk. Or I'm sure companies like PacVue and Skai are going to evolve to support real time bidding. 

[00:40:41] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: But it just, it's the natural evolution. I feel like we always see with every type of media, right? Like you saw mobile do it, CTV did it, every, everything goes through this kind of path. And retail is just a lot earlier and does have some different dynamics, right? Like it won't be exactly the same as CTV or Native or something like that. 

[00:40:58] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: But I think that's where we're headed, [00:41:00] right? It's like where can that buyer go in and buy based on ROAS And really target it to performance, just like they're buying from, Google or Facebook. We definitely see the SSPs from the programmatic world trying to get in there. We have Pubmatic working now with Instacart which is a little easier because that's already an aggregated play. 

[00:41:20] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: What do you see? There's that, there's Criteo now working with Microsoft. Moloco and topsort what does that news look like to you? Is that something where you're like this is still phase one or, what are you seeing there? Yeah, I think it's interesting to start to see that it's almost like a little bit of like consolidation around who's doing well, who's not doing well. 

[00:41:39] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: I think the promote the Microsoft Criteo news is really interesting, right? Cause PromoteIQ had been around forever, powered a lot of big brands. They had lost some of those bigger brands recently. And so it seems like Microsoft just said, Hey, it's better for us to partner with Criteo than to keep trying to maintain and compete with Promoter IQ. 

[00:41:55] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: So really, it's The first of those big legacy players to fold which I think is really [00:42:00] fascinating. I think when you look at like top sort and Maloko, it's like they're two smaller, new entrants trying to team up to, to make a difference. 

[00:42:07] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: And I think Criteo is really trying to solidify themselves as the retail media company. Some of us have other ideas, but all right I think we probably should leave it there. We're up at 40 minutes on this interview. I wanted to thank you, James for coming and listening to us both ask questions and rant and do all sorts of reminiscing in the middle. 

[00:42:26] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: So thank you. Absolutely. It was great. Any, anytime. Happy to come back anytime. Any last thoughts for James? No, it was great to catch up and reminisce a bit and, imagine the future being very similar to, I think, the past in this case. The other thing is, just a listener note, we will after this is being recorded On a Wednesday, there's a there's webinar on a Thursday. 

[00:42:49] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: We will drop a link to that. So for folks who look at this after the fact can look up the the webinar that you guys are doing. And James, it's on, obviously, what you guys are trying to do in terms of the programmatic side of retail media. [00:43:00] But if you want to give a little summary of the webinar, we'll make sure to include that link. 

[00:43:05] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. It's really going to be digging into the future of retail media and programmatic. And we have Shamim, who is one of the founders, co founders of Beeswax who has been working with us and the IAB to push this through. So I think it's we are it's going to be, it's going to be a good time. 

[00:43:21] james-avery_1_07-17-2024_101818: Cool. Great. Thanks so much.