# S1 E19 - Matt Krepsik, CEO MediaRadar

Episode 19 - Matt Krepsik, CEO MediaRadar 

[00:00:00] 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  

[00:00:19] Tom: So today we are going to talk with Matt Krepsik. Matt is someone that I worked with at Quotient. He came in as the CTO, quickly became the CEO. And it was great working with him. He was , Easily able to grapple with all the different parts of what quotient was because it was a lot of different parts. 

[00:00:39] Tom: And he was great at explaining the vision for that. So it'd be interesting to hear his view on his new company, Media Radar. So he is now the CEO of Media Radar, which is a company that has both buy and sell side assets for basically advertising intelligence. 

[00:00:55] Tom: And it's a part of the market that probably gets missed a lot [00:01:00] in the space that we're in, the very performance heavy space. So I think it'd be really interesting discussion. 

[00:01:05] Todd: I think one of the stories that continues to live on is quotient. We're all going to look back and go, how the hell wasn't that a huge success given the people and the talent, right? You've got Matt, you've got so many people touch that business and have gone off to do some really amazing things. 

[00:01:20] Todd: And, Joe Dressler came from there. You came from there and now Matt it's amazing to see the talent that emerged from that company. Quotient had a great vision for retail media and being early is still wrong as well. 

[00:01:36] Todd: We will likely touch on and talk about. So many people of that business are really contributing to meaningful ways to where the Online ad business is going and a big part of that is retail media and the rise of retail media. And I think Matt's story is and where he's going and media radar in terms of what it is and what it's becoming in terms of some of the acquisitions we all get introduced to media radar from a sell side support standpoint over the years, but it's quickly [00:02:00] evolving in some cool ways. 

[00:02:01] Tom: I think what was true of Matt Krepsik has been that he's always looking at the underlying data assets and. saying not specifically that the data has the value, but what you do with that data. He did that specifically with grace note back in the early days when, audio content recognition on TVs was , a nascent industry. 

[00:02:22] Tom: And now you see the vizios of the world becoming, the focus of the retail media industry. So I think it'll be interesting to see with media radar, what are the data assets that they have and how does he look at that as a way to drive a business. 

[00:02:33]  

[00:02:34] Tom: Hello, we are here with Matt Krepsik somebody who I worked with at Quotient back in from 2021 on. But before we get into business and where you are now, I wanted to figure out, Are you still running a hundred mile races? 

[00:02:49] Matt Krepsik: I am still running a hundred mile races. I still run ultra marathons. I do about four or five a year only 100 a year. That's, it's a hard on the body, but I'll do maybe a couple [00:03:00] 50 Ks, a hundred K and then a hundred mile race. I've also still. 

[00:03:04] Todd: you're insane. That like you and Brett, it's funny. It's because in the ad tech world or, MarTech ad tech world, more at Brian Morrissey is also an ultramarathon. I think there's some other ones too. Do you guys like have a club and hang out together and like plan racing together? 

[00:03:18] Matt Krepsik: You have to have a few screws loose, to run 100 miles. It's a number one, it's an eating competition to fuel. 

[00:03:25] Tom: Oh yeah. 

[00:03:26] Matt Krepsik: Number two it's a mental competition because you're stuck with yourself in your own brain for 24 hours. And then the third part is that you do actually have to make it. Over a hundred miles of terrain in 

[00:03:38] Tom: So is there, there's a CPG component to this? What is it? Liquid IV? What are you putting in, what are you feeling with? 

[00:03:44] Matt Krepsik: It's a good question. I, so I love gnarly nutrition out of Salt Lake City and then Sour Patch Kids can be really good. 

[00:03:51] Tom: There you go. 

[00:03:53] Matt Krepsik: Jelly Belly, Jelly Beans can be really good. There's been some dark moments like [00:04:00] Mile 70, 3am and like you're just like housing a bunch of like Reese Cups. And they're so good. The things that you, your body just craves. It's just, it's unreal. And it's a, yeah, it's fantastic. It's fun. 

[00:04:16] Tom: Yeah. You wouldn't think you'd get to talk about junk food with somebody with, as with a, as high metabolism as you, I guess it's okay. 

[00:04:23] Todd: My, yeah, my athletic endeavors playing ice hockey. And I thought goalies and hockey were nuts and they are, they're certified insane generally, cause they're getting beat on and you're on an island as a goalie. And now I actually think. You all ultramarathoners might be even crazier, like it's a whole nother category of 

[00:04:40] Tom: So yeah we break you down so that we can build you up. So you came in as the CTO of quotient and say 21, you quickly became the CEO and yeah, you had a, you had something difficult to deal with, we had a really high traction in retail media. 

[00:04:53] Tom: Yeah. But then, we're, bundled with a lot of acquisitions and managed service. So you needed to do something there. So [00:05:00] tell us a little bit about that story. 

[00:05:02] Matt Krepsik: Yeah. I think quotient, was a combination of like a lot of really cool assets that had been brought together. It operated in a very interesting space in the marketplace. It probably was early to the game on retail media before retailers were even ready for it. I think what made Quotient really candidly a great company and great business was actually its promotions network, I think the secret about Quotient was like it had this amazing kind of like coupons. 

[00:05:30] Matt Krepsik: com Kind of promotion network, and it was really excellent and solid at building out that idea of being a network operator, driving offers and promotions to different consumers across any retailer that they shopped at. And in many ways, when you think about the world of retail media, unless you're a Walmart or, amazon and maybe a Kroger, you really don't have a lot of scale to be successful in the world of retail media. And I think the lesson that you know that I learned it took away from quotient. It [00:06:00] was just the power and benefit of that network. You can have good technology. You have interesting software. 

[00:06:06] Matt Krepsik: You can have a robust services business or managed service business and your run on relationships. But really thinking about how do you build out and scale that network model? Is really the way to unlock, in my view, like the opportunity in that space. 

[00:06:23] Todd: It's fascinating. We keep going back to the story of quotient and I like always like to talk about the idea that being early is still wrong. And right. It is this thing. And I think quotient is one of those examples of you look where retail media is today and 24 quotient. Fast forward three to five years, you got to think quotient would be one of the darlings of the space, given where they were, and it's one of these tragedies, oh, they were so close to making it, but by being early, you were still wrong, and I look at that business and the rise of retail media, there's other players out there, and then the flip side of that is you look at other players who've done well in retail [00:07:00] media more recently, Kevel is a great example of a platform now focused on retail media, originally built for native advertising started, I think, 2011, right? 

[00:07:08] Todd: It's not this new thing that suddenly got there, but they happened to it. They focused on native advertising and then suddenly, as they tell the story, 2018, 2019 starts happening. The beginnings of retail media start happening and they realize, Oh, it's actually built on native advertising, like promoted listings or sponsored listings and sponsored recommendations are native ads and suddenly you're there. 

[00:07:29] Todd: And it's one of these things and Criteo, started retargeting and got, which is, had a big focus on native advertising that allowed them to transition and Quotient was ahead of both of them and is the one dead in the grave on the side of the road and those two live on today. 

[00:07:43] Tom: Matt actually worked very closely with Megan Clarkin, who is running the ship over at Criteo. So you might actually have some better insights there. 

[00:07:53] Matt Krepsik: Yeah. I don't have any deep dark secrets, but I think if, as I think about the space, it's there, it's a [00:08:00] combination of things that you have to get right to be successful. And I think, you hit on one of them, which is like Todd, you talk about this, like, how do you be strong at native advertising? 

[00:08:07] Matt Krepsik: Like, how do you build the ad unit? And that's something if I were to say like the dirty secret of retail media is there is no media. And so one of the things that. Things that you have to bring to the table is like how do you actually execute and build ad inventory and native media? 

[00:08:22] Matt Krepsik: And if you think about some of the successful companies today in even Criteo, it's helping the retailers build out their onsite or their native ad inventory. And how do you have the tools and technologies to do that? But equally, how do you also scale out that business and find incremental inventory in the open web to deliver and drive more traffic to the stores or drive more traffic to the websites and really better monetize that intelligence and that audience that retail media brings? 

[00:08:52] Todd: I think one of the fascinating things about, where retail media is going and we've talked about this to exactly your point of [00:09:00] they don't have traditional ad assets. And publishers do, but they have first party data, which is fascinating and it turns out to be incredibly valuable, which is why retail media is taking off. 

[00:09:12] Todd: And so one of the arguments, we're making and right. We've talked with the founder of Best Buy Media. We've talked to others and we see the future is retailers should be buying publishers and then they can extend their first party data easily to any property they own, because it's all first party. 

[00:09:27] Todd: And I think that's one of the interesting things. And it begins to look like they're going to have to end up in traditional media like publishing. Suddenly are we all back to building ad networks again, from the ground up, like what was hot in 20, 2006 is suddenly going to be hot in 2026. 

[00:09:41] Matt Krepsik: What's old is new again. 

[00:09:43] Todd: the new ad network. 

[00:09:44] Matt Krepsik: Oh, yeah, I'm a 100 percent believe in that view because the challenge that retail media networks have today is like, how do I drive traffic? And if you think about this it's hard for a small retailer in the Northeast to drive enough traffic to monetize their [00:10:00] audiences, right? 

[00:10:00] Matt Krepsik: So you think about retail media networks, they're a function of data, as native assets, and inventory, and then traffic, right? And so if you think about the role that ad networks played, ad networks were great at curating traffic, right? They're great at curating and overall advertising experience.  

[00:10:19] Matt Krepsik: And so 

[00:10:20] Tom: Well, What happened? So, 

[00:10:25] Matt Krepsik: Yeah. We created one giant ad network called Google and the GDN display network. And so in many ways, if you think about the future of retail media, the future of recent media is like, how do you build a, an ad network at scale that really delivers a curated audience and a curated native ad asset. 

[00:10:43] Matt Krepsik: Now, some of that might be retailers acquiring publishers. So that also might be saying, Hey, there's there a need in the marketplace for a true ad network that can really link together a lot of these high quality assets and audiences and build a very [00:11:00] curated ecosystem at scale, right? That compete with GDN to compete with the Amazons and Walmarts of the world 

[00:11:07] Todd: I think that's fascinating. And as we look to the, like things that were that like triad, let's 

[00:11:12] Matt Krepsik: giant. Yeah. 

[00:11:12] Todd: That idea today would be, you're 

[00:11:14] Tom: yeah, we weren't the earlier, 

[00:11:15] Todd: Oh  

[00:11:16] Tom: actually one thing we didn't mention from your background, which I think is probably important is that you worked for a while, you really came up at Nielsen and you really were on the analytics side of the business. How does that sort of, we want to get to where you are today. 

[00:11:29] Tom: How does, how did that sort of color the way you look at a lot of this? And is that the reason why you're at Meteor Radar today? 

[00:11:36] Matt Krepsik: It's a good question. Media radar is a, is an interesting one, but I would say, I'll get to that. The thing that I always loved about the world of like information services and data and analytics, I love data. I think data in many ways gives us insight in terms of what decisions to take, what actions we make. 

[00:11:51] Matt Krepsik: But I always found that a lot of data sets are just, they're just that. They're just data. And what I love about analytics and predictive models is like, how do you put that data in [00:12:00] motion? How do you have data tell a story? How do you have data inform an action or something we do? And if you think about even like today, the world of the buzzwords machine learning, a lot of what AI machine learning really is training on data and putting that into motion, right? 

[00:12:16] Matt Krepsik: Telling something convincing or telling an interesting story and leveraging our knowledge to inform an action we take. Yeah. And for me, when I, what got attracted me to media radar is probably one, one simple thing. Like I've spent a couple, uh, you know, a good chunk of my career in the advertising and media space. 

[00:12:34] Matt Krepsik: And I remember always going to Cannes Lions, in the South of France every summer. But what I loved about going to Cannes wasn't so much the meetings or all the events that occur there, but going into the basement. That's it. And watching ads every morning put on a headphone, sit down there. 

[00:12:51] Matt Krepsik: They buy their, they have the computers and just looking at all the amazing creatives that were out there and how in many ways that [00:13:00] creative tells a story of how you link a brand to a consumer, right? And if I think about all of my work in the advertising and measurement space, we've always known, and we've always seen that like 50 percent of the performance of every ad unit actually driven by the creative. 

[00:13:15] Matt Krepsik: Not the audience, not the publisher or the inventory or even the format. It's, was it a compelling creative that delivered a message that captivate consumers? And so when I had the opportunity to come to media radar, What got me really excited was the fact that media radar has, probably the largest metadata base around creative assets in the U S media radar is actually a combination of a few different companies that we pulled together. 

[00:13:43] Matt Krepsik: One of them is media radar, which had a lot of great experience and was built up on the sell side, supporting ad sales reps who are looking to go figure out like who is executing this amazing, McDonald's creative on Facebook or TikTok or Pinterest, right? [00:14:00] And so the nice thing about the media radar side of the world is you support ad sales reps, and we're able to say, Hey, here's where the advertiser is spending money on which platforms and which websites and what formats and how much they're spending. 

[00:14:12] Matt Krepsik: And by the way, here's who you go reach out to in terms of here's the brand manager or the agency or the creative who's actually executing that. And so that's how media radar came up. The print space is where it really started looking at magazines and understanding what that share voice was. 

[00:14:27] Matt Krepsik: And how do you go find the next advertiser and get them to spend, if they're in in a Conde Nast magazine, how do we get them in the economist? whatever the magazine out you're thinking about and reading. And then we brought that together with some of the numerator assets that for a long time I've been tracking creative and then some of the Kantar media ad intelligence assets. 

[00:14:47] Matt Krepsik: And so if you think about, media radar in its current incarnation, we really have three major kind of data sets that underpin our product base. One of those is what I mentioned earlier, which got me [00:15:00] so excited to come here, which is our creative asset library, right? We. Classify thousands and thousands of ad units every day. 

[00:15:08] Matt Krepsik: with 300 plus attributes for every ad unit. So we really can look at ads and classify them 15 to 20 different ways to help brands and creatives and agencies and publishers understand what the current kind of approach is for advertising today in the creative space. We marry that with a view of ad intelligence or spend. 

[00:15:28] Matt Krepsik: So how much are brands spending across which channels? What is our share of voice in the marketplace? And we do that from an omni channel view. So it's across almost every major kind of media channel in the U. S. And the third piece we overlay that is our our contacts database, which is it tells us our information around who are the movers and shakers and spenders in the industry. 

[00:15:49] Matt Krepsik: And so when you want to know Hey, who built this ad campaign at PepsiCo or who's executing this plan at WPP, we actually can start to connect the dots with not [00:16:00] just the creative and the spend and the channel, but the actual buyers and movers and shakers of the industry. And so that gives us a really great opportunity to support the overall ecosystem of advertising from the moment you're selling a campaign as a publisher to the moment you're buying a campaign, planning that campaign, and even tracking your creative and understanding your performance in the marketplace. 

[00:16:23] Tom: That's really cool. I think for me, the most interesting thing there as you were talking was is there a product vision for this as well? Because, I think what you first started talking about in terms of having numerators, creative assets, that sort of reminded me of back in the day when we were trying to basically be like an in house creative agency for these retailers, we would go to moat and find the creative and, moat. 

[00:16:47] Tom: com. Cause they allowed you to just search their whole creative database. And then Facebook and Google started to have their own creative databases. But I feel like nobody's really gotten to the level of creative intelligence to use that in any programmatic way. Is [00:17:00] that sort of where you guys are 

[00:17:00] Matt Krepsik: Oh, 100%. If I think about where we're at today, like we are probably call it nine months into bringing together these companies. And so as we bring them onto a common platform instead of looking at linear TV ad in isolation of a social media ad in isolation of A YouTube OTT type of ad unit. 

[00:17:20] Matt Krepsik: We actually now are saying, Hey, we've now said a can of Coke on all those different platforms is still the same. A humorous ad on all those different platforms is still the same definition of humor. And so the first thing we've done is actually start to bring together a common definition of products and categories. 

[00:17:38] Matt Krepsik: Sounds really boring, but that common taxonomy allows us to make that holistic comparison, regardless of the format. And then on top of that, it now starts to say we can start building more dynamic ads based on that information that we have there. If you think about this, we were messing around with our database couple of weeks [00:18:00] ago before the holidays of saying wait a second. 

[00:18:01] Matt Krepsik: What if I want to build a BMW ad for the winter And we were able to say within just a very simple query using DALL-E build me a BMW ad for the winter based on all of our ad units and metadata. And we, I think we built like a print ad or something. 

[00:18:18] Tom: You should have done Jaguar. That might've gone a little 

[00:18:20] Matt Krepsik: Oh if we would have done Jaguar, we would have probably been ahead of the curve there and reached out to them, said, Hey, maybe we want to rethink this brand design. But what was beautiful about that or was great about that is it allowed us to actually very quickly pull together our knowledge of the time of the year, the industry, the category, and produce a dynamic ad within seconds. 

[00:18:39] Matt Krepsik: Does that mean it's going to be the final ad that goes to air? No, but at least in many ways it becomes that assisted intelligence that supports The creative agencies out there. It also allows us to identify like late bait breaking creative. So if you're a Tim Hortons and you want to keep pace with what's going on the breakfast menu, we actually understand pretty quickly [00:19:00] in real time or in your real time in the morning. 

[00:19:01] Matt Krepsik: Hey, Wendy's just launched a brand new breakfast menu campaign or Burger King has a new value messaging and how do we actually respond to that and stay ahead of the curve in terms of our, advertising in the ecosystem? So that idea of really understanding how things are changing In the ecosystem is incredibly valuable as well. 

[00:19:21] Todd: you actually jumped to the answer. I was going to say with your data set, it's pretty obvious that it could be a great training data set for gen AI. 

[00:19:28] Matt Krepsik: Oh yeah, 

[00:19:28] Todd: right? And you're like, yeah, we were doing that, or you could be licensing that data out as a basis for training, because I think one of the fascinating things that we're going to see also in terms of the space is and you're seeing buzz about this. 

[00:19:41] Todd: All the models have crawled the web. And publicly available information. And once you crawl the information, there's not really a whole bunch else you can do unless you start getting access to private data sets and right. Your example of one is a good example of okay, that's to me going to be where a lot of this next.[00:20:00]  

[00:20:00] Todd: Version of A. I. Goes, which is as they start getting access to or licensing access to special training data and creating sub models or vertical models. If you have a creative data set, like media radar, which is an example of something you guys could be doing, but also I think across the ad industry, I think we're gonna be looking at what is audience data and how does that inform A. 

[00:20:20] Todd: I. And we start going back to what is the next generation of ad networks look like and what is curate? Is curation just another way of describing that? And it's again, it's like 2006 all over again. All of us from the gen one ad net days are going to suddenly become popular and interesting again. 

[00:20:35] Todd: Instead of like stuck in the corner at every ad conference. So I think that's an interesting aspect to where, where did some of these assets and ideas go? And what's old is new again. I think we're going to see this big push over the next couple of years. 

[00:20:45] Matt Krepsik: A hundred percent. You think about the idea of curation, like we're approaching a time moment in time where we can curate the audience. We can curate the inventory and we can curate the actual ad asset itself. And you think about that Holy grail of bringing all three together, that's an amazing performance and [00:21:00] ROI for brands. 

[00:21:01] Todd: I think one of the other interesting aspects that I've run into in the past, which is with the rise of programmatic creative really got pushed to the side was like how, being about fast and cheap and so forth. Like I have a lot of acquaintances in the creative agency side, and I was really astounded to learn, like, why are these creative so off or so bad at times? 

[00:21:22] Todd: And they're like, Todd, you have no idea. We were never told the media plan, never told the media budget. It's like we're pulled in 72 

[00:21:28] Todd: need these assets. Why aren't 

[00:21:29] Todd: No one ever told us, right?  

[00:21:30] Todd: As part of the media planning around that. 

[00:21:33] Todd: Like the creative plan was like this afterthought in a lot of ways. And I think this is going to be one of the interesting aspects of your comment. To me, one of the interesting things is 50 percent of the performance of ads can be tied to the creative, I think like you just. Made the day of every creative who's going to be watching this in terms of you're going to see that slide. 

[00:21:50] Todd: That'll be now a quote in every one of their presentations to their clients of 50 percent of the value of your campaign is going to be the creative. 

[00:21:57] Matt Krepsik: Yeah, but when CPMs and RT, [00:22:00] RTBs are pennies on the dollar, it doesn't matter. But I think as the price of like digital inventory rises and we start to really, truly understand the value of that audience and it starts to become, and you can think about a tradable currency there, you realize okay, yes, cheap eyeballs is what drove RTB. 

[00:22:19] Matt Krepsik: But as prices start to normalize now, it's how do I differentiate? It's not just about race to the bottom on the cheapest kind of eyeball. It's now, how do I actually have meaningful communication at that moment? 

[00:22:30] Todd: You even see the retail media that there is no such thing as commodity audiences are different and have different values. 

[00:22:36] Todd: And one of the fascinating things where retail media, which maybe helps that, which is the closed loop attribution and something you can say, these audiences are actually really valuable. And therefore you should, you, you need to pay more for them because they are invaluable and you can tie it to an actual funnel in action. 

[00:22:52] Todd: I think that's one of the things that start to change is our ability to value the audiences and media and actually to the creative to, You can help start to [00:23:00] value creatives in a way that hasn't really been done, and therefore why it was de emphasized, and last minute, and cheapest, and whatever, versus trying to figure out what was good, and what was valuable. 

[00:23:10] Matt Krepsik: And realize too, that I can curate a different creative for, Tom versus, or a creative for Matt or a creative for Todd that all motivates us to go make a purchase. 

[00:23:19] Tom: mean, I think where I was trying to butt in before was like, Oh, like when we were at quotient, we had, we bought a sponsored search capability. But what we really wanted was what Criteo bought was Storetail. And Storetail at the time, They had sponsored product listings with a cool display ad connected to it. 

[00:23:40] Tom: And I think that was early. I don't think that the infrastructure was there to be able to pair a creative with that because nobody had those assets. They didn't have assets that would fit that product. And so now you need to be in a gen AI world or whatever, where you could just bring that in and it doesn't even have to be a flat image. 

[00:23:56] Tom: It could be slightly emotive or whatever, like [00:24:00] that. It just wasn't ready. And, I think to your point, Todd, on how are we looking at the creative brief, wasn't a creative brief. It was like males, 18 to 35. It was, the TV ads got creative briefs, but the digital ads didn't have anything. 

[00:24:15] Tom: It was just what's the targeting.  

[00:24:16] Matt Krepsik: Yeah. The one thing I think about with retail media, we talk about the idea of curating audiences. I think the one thing we haven't truly tackled though, or come to grips with is that most audiences are highly promiscuous. Do you know what I mean?  

[00:24:30] Tom: You talking about the fact that your, what is it, your mom has many loyalty cards? Is that what you're talking 

[00:24:37] Matt Krepsik: Oh, I'm talking about the fact that when you think about a consumer, None of us only shop at Walmart. None of us only shop at Amazon. Like we actually shop at Duane Reade. We go to Walgreens, we go to Target, we actually spend money across many different retail outlets. And 

[00:24:57] Tom: and Stop and Chop has no idea that I have a dog, [00:25:00] because I would never buy dog food in a store. I would always get it delivered 

[00:25:04] Matt Krepsik: you always get delivered. And so I think one of the, one of the things that we have to start to grapple with in the world of retail media is how do we deal with an account for highly promiscuous shoppers that are willing to go shop at a different store because there's a better price or I'm only getting my dog food from chewy. 

[00:25:25] Matt Krepsik: com because it shows up on my front doorstep. And so if you think about that multimodal kind of behavior that audiences have, and I'm a brand, I want to make sure, I reach Tom the best way I can and the most effective way. And also the most affordable way. And I don't want to have to pay for you twice. 

[00:25:44] Matt Krepsik: I don't want to go to Walmart's media network to reach Tom and then go to target 

[00:25:50] Tom: yeah. Let's talk about Walmart's media network. So if I'm a media radar customer, and a lot of brands are looking at how do I [00:26:00] work with retail media, network by network through a full ad network, like whatever that approach ends up being. I think they feel like they're at a loss because they don't have either the data or the data science. 

[00:26:11] Tom: Resources to actually come to the right decisions fast enough is media radar. Somebody that helps somebody with, their approach towards retail media networks, like a Walmart connector. 

[00:26:23] Matt Krepsik: Yeah. We certainly provide a lot of the advertising intelligence on those channels and on those formats, if anything, if you think about the emergence of co creatives. So when you have, I might have a, an ad campaign for people. A new Huffy bicycle. I don't know if Huffy is making bicycle bikes anymore, but I remember like being a young kid going to a Hills department store. 

[00:26:45] Matt Krepsik: Yeah. I remember I got my first Huffy bike at Hills. And I remember that I don't know why I remember this, but I remember they had the print circular guys remember that like the paper circular and I remember it came into the mailbox, I lived in Pittsburgh and it came into our [00:27:00] mailbox and it was like a, an ad on the front that was for Hills department store. 

[00:27:04] Matt Krepsik: And they had a Huffy bike on sale for I can't remember the price. It was nowhere close today. It was like 15 or 20 bucks.  

[00:27:10] Tom: You're not that old. 

[00:27:11] Matt Krepsik: I'm not that old, but it was like 

[00:27:12] Todd: 50, it was probably 50 

[00:27:14] Tom: Yeah.  

[00:27:14] Matt Krepsik: Probably 50 bucks. Let's try to get some facts into the story. Or at least approximate truth. But but I remember seeing that and that in many ways, if you think about that ad, what motivated me was like, I want to go get a Huffy bike and I need to go buy it at Hills. 

[00:27:27] Matt Krepsik: And so if you think about how creative and retail media has evolved today, We're not doing the same thing, but in a digital format that says not only is this a an ad to go buy Coca Cola or Tide or whatever it might be, it's actually go buy it at Walmart, right? And understanding how that, that retail logo and that co branding drives an action and how, what the rise in the percentage of ad units that are actually starting to call out retailers and their ads is certainly an interesting part of understanding like, Does it actually improve the effectiveness and the performance of [00:28:00] the ad and the campaign? 

[00:28:01] Todd: I you also speak to one of the interesting things, again, what is old is new again. You just described co op. Right. That's, That's what, coupons were the original form of the Sunday circulars, original form of co op advertising. And, it's turned into direct mail as that took off in the eighties. 

[00:28:17] Todd: It's as the original, one of the original databases, my father in law wrote mailing list management software for a living, which was about mailing catalogs by retailers and circulars and things like that. Yeah. That was what a, like a, Tell stories about printer drivers and how bad they are. 

[00:28:34] Todd: And the bane of his existence is hilarious in a really geeky, really specific way. Anyway, complete aside. I think when you look at that, that old is new, it's right. Ad networks are coming back because they serve a purpose around curation and advertising and reach and scale, which second and third tier retailers don't have the idea of co op advertising, right? 

[00:28:52] Todd: Retailer plus. Brand and the ability to do that. And again, I think it's going to make that a lot easier and a lot better and doable, whereas I [00:29:00] think that was one of the challenges with online media. If the CPMs are so low, it's hard to justify investing in creative. And then suddenly this co op stuff becomes hard. 

[00:29:08] Todd: And so I think that's helpful in that regard. 

[00:29:11] Matt Krepsik: Yeah. We see it in our data at media radar that we see the growth and emergence of like just more complex cooperative ad units, right? Where we see more of those taglines of Hey one example is like, Hey, come purchase at our store and use Venmo. That's a form of cooperative advertising. 

[00:29:25] Todd: Right. 

[00:29:26] Matt Krepsik: And you're seeing much more of that show up in the advertising ecosystem, where it really is this like ecosystem of parties and players that are trying to say, Hey, how do we bundle together that cooperative view of I have a vested interest in driving this messaging. You have a vested interest in driving this messaging and how do we collaborate at scale? 

[00:29:44] Tom: So actually that brings up a really interesting one that was very vexing to the retail media networks back in the day because it would seem like this awesome opportunity, but it's like that meme where you're being pulled back by reality is the sort of non endemic. Travel advertisers, [00:30:00] financial advertisers, is that something that media radar is potentially better positioned to help out with? 

[00:30:05] Tom: Because the endemics, it's really they've had those JVPs with the retailers forever, are the guys who are the outside trying to look in on the retail data world, is that where media radar might be a player? 

[00:30:19] Matt Krepsik: We certainly would have a lot of the intelligence around what the non endemic players, where they're spending. In many ways, I like to say our job is to provide the intelligence for advertising and where spending is moving and what the movers and shakers in the industry are and how trends are shifting. 

[00:30:35] Matt Krepsik: But we're not in the business of making recommendations of saying go spend here, go spend there. That's the world of the measurement providers who want to do attribution and and lift. They often use a lot of our data to go out and say, here's what it was worth. But our business is being the experts and building the datasets and building the metadata. 

[00:30:53] Matt Krepsik: Making metadata sexy around advertising. 

[00:30:57] Tom: very cool. Is there anything else [00:31:00] we can help you get out into the ether? Now, your new CEO over at Meteor Radar. Is there anything else you want to tell him? 

[00:31:06] Matt Krepsik: No, we're gonna continue to invest and involve, evolve our business. We really look at ourselves as being that, omni channel kind of leader in advertising intelligence, really demystifying Ad spend across any format, any channel, and as many attributes as we can start to classify. 

[00:31:25] Matt Krepsik: So we really think that advertising kind of metadatabase really is a really important part of the ecosystem to help us all become more effective, more efficient, more programmatic and really bring back the value and demonstrate the value of creatives and why they're so critical at driving sales and driving ultimately performance. 

[00:31:45] Tom: Great. Thanks, Matt. It was great. Great catching up. 

[00:31:48] Matt Krepsik: Yeah. Likewise. Appreciate it. 

[00:31:50]