# S2 E32 T52 - Bridg Rippl

S2 E32 T52 - Bridg Rippl 

[00:00:00] Introduction and Weather Talk 

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[00:00:07] Tom: Hey Todd, how's it going? 

[00:00:11] Todd: Hello. It's, it's a, um, interesting post Thanksgiving window of time um, especially as we look towards CES, which is coming fast and furiously only a month away, CES 2026. Um, and I think it's an interesting, you know, time, uh, ignoring the weather. 

[00:00:27] Todd: 'cause I know like the Northeast is getting a, a cold blast. My kids are in college in upstate New York. The low overnight in upstate New York was gonna be minus seven this morning. 

[00:00:38] Tom: Yeah, I walk to school with my daughter every morning, so I'm feeling it. 

[00:00:41] Todd: oh, I it's Seattle. We're, we're going through the other, we're, um, in the midst of the Seattle rainy season and we're getting blasted with an atmospheric river. 

[00:00:50] Todd: Uh, technical term 

[00:00:52] Tom: Yeah. Love those. 

[00:00:53] Todd: We're gonna have 50 trillion gallons of rain fall on the Pacific Northwest. We're gonna get [00:01:00] blasted with, with rain, like rivers flooding, major rainfall, um, sort of stuff. 

[00:01:05] Todd: Um, but I also think, you know, there, there, there's some interesting stuff going on in the world of, of retail media.  

[00:01:11] Retail Media Insights with Ari Paparo 

[00:01:11] Todd: I mean, your conversation that you and, and Scott Messer just had with Ari Paparo of Marketecture I think is an interesting point in time here for our conversation today. 

[00:01:21] Tom: , I, I said to Ari in the beginning of the episode, you know, I'm a podcaster because I started listening to Marketecture and I wanted to talk about the retail media stuff. And so I had him on and I had a feeling from some of the times that he. Is talked about, uh, retail media and the ad serving that he was gonna maybe rant, and he, he did, he did not, uh, leave us hanging. 

[00:01:41] Tom: As you said in the episode, ran a bus over PLA ads or product listing ads, uh, backwards and forwards. Um, 

[00:01:48] Todd: And I think we're, we're well for the, our listeners and watchers. We're gonna play the clip, so We'll, you know, it might be a good time to go. Let's roll the 

[00:01:54] Tom: let's play that clip now. 

[00:01:55] Ari Paparo: I I guess what I would say is like the, the PLA market is so, [00:02:00] um, dumb, right? I mean, like, think about it, it's like, like I have a list. I have a list of SKUs. Each SKU has a budget and then the page loads and has a SKU in it. That's a pretty easy technical problem. Right? Um, so why do we think that the same systems that are built around PLAs are gonna be good at personalized top of funnel advertising?  

[00:02:27] Tom: After listening to that clip, you could say, well, what the hell are you doing here, guys? There's nothing new under the sun. Why do we care about ad serving in the retail media world? 

[00:02:36] Todd: Well, and I 

[00:02:36] Tom: us back to our first 

[00:02:38] Introducing Praveen Menon and Rippl 

[00:02:38] Todd: it is, and, and I think, you know, today we're talking to, um, Praveen, who is the head of product for, um, Rippl and Bridg. And uh, what's great is he's building ad tech right. For retail media right now and, and, um, he'll, I think describe what Bridg and Rippl is, um, inside the world of Cardlytics . 

[00:02:58] Todd: For traditional ad tech guy, I [00:03:00] was like, what a, what's Cardlytics? I kind of heard of it. Familiar, 

[00:03:02] Tom: complicated, but 

[00:03:03] Todd: complicated. But I think what's interesting is as a, as a product leader, um, his response I think is relevant. And it goes back to, to, again, we've talked to people who've been building this tech. 

[00:03:13] Todd: We talked to, to, to Xavier who had, , at the time was at Nielsen and helping with their retail media products. Um, we've talked to James Avery, the founder of Kevel, one of the platforms that I think is the core ad serving platforms within the retail media world, um, and many others along the way. 

[00:03:28] Todd: And I think one of the theses that we've had around retail media this whole time has been that it's not novel. Ad tech is required. Ad serving, I think has been a problem that's been relatively well solved for 15 years. But I think what's unique about this is, and it's been our thesis for a long time, and given my background in ad tech, um, has been what we're really doing is applying tried and true tech to a new vertical, meaning retail media. 

[00:03:54] Todd: And that's really what's, I think, making retail media explode is it's not a problem from a product [00:04:00] standpoint to a large degree. But there are some novel things that, that have had to have, um, solved, which is how do you connect these platforms to retailers and their systems to solve? I think the two biggest gaping holes with online advertising, historically speaking, especially with the rise of programmatic or the last, let's say 10 years, which is audience identification and conversion attribution, and those were when your third party identity and your third party conversions, it was an ugly mess. 

[00:04:30] Todd: I think it's always been the two biggest holes and problems with online advertising has been the fact that identification, identity and conversions have been third party and what retailers and the integration with retailers solve for is that I think Re's gonna talk about that and the, and, and as the, if you can solve for that, you really bring something meaningful to the ecosystem. 

[00:04:53] Todd: And so hearing his perspective on it and, and he talks to that which. I think is what's novel [00:05:00] and really valuable and important. And I think this is why retail media is really the key to that next evolution or continued growth of online advertising. 

[00:05:09] Todd: 'cause it solves it in a privacy first way. 'cause it's first party data and therefore it is future proof. And so I think that's really exciting. For what's coming for retail media and why it's so important. 

[00:05:24] Tom: Yeah, I mean obviously you're preaching to the choir with me on that, but I think, um, that's reason wanted to call it the middlemen, um, was that you, how do you connect these enormously large organizations, , and bring their data together, you know, the large brands, the large retailers. 

[00:05:41] Tom: How do you bring all that together? You need really good foundational tech. And you know, it even brings up the episode we have at Prabhath at Snowflake. Um, what we'll hear in this episode is about the need for the infrastructure, those pipes to be built out in a bulletproof way where you're not moving data around. 

[00:05:56] Tom: So a lot of the core things that we've talked about over the [00:06:00] last couple years are, are, you know, front and center in this episode. And so I hope you enjoy. 

[00:06:05] Tom: Welcome to the Middlemen. We are here with Praveen Menon. Um, he is, uh, somebody who's serially working in the, uh, retail tech space, and he's at Cardlytics Bridg. So Bridg is a company within Cardlytics. Many people may not have heard of that. Why don't you tell us your history as a product guy. 

[00:06:27] Praveen Menon: Yeah. Uh, absolutely Tom. Happy to be here. My background as a product guy is, I've been in data, uh, for my whole career. I started at places like Bloomberg and Fox. Uh, you know, back in the TV days, you couldn't really do measurement. That kind of led me into the retail media space and, you know, I've spent the past several years in product roles, specifically around measurement and audience. 

[00:06:50] Praveen Menon: At places such as CVS, media Exchange, Walmart Connect, and now at Bridg and Rippl, which is a new retail media network. 

[00:06:58] Todd: And as a longtime [00:07:00] ad tech guy myself, it's, you know, cardlytics are, are things that I'm like, what the hell's that? Where does it fit in? And Bridg and Rippl. And I think it's helpful to understand, you know, sort of, of where it fits into the retail media tech. Landscape and so that the folks who are just traditional ad techers or online media people would understand like, oh, I've, I've maybe heard of Cardlytics, I've maybe 

[00:07:22] Tom: What was the reason we wanted you on the middlemen? , My experience when we were working with Dollar General at Quotient, , Bridg was brought in as an identity solution, um, to deal with the fact that Dollar General had a low ID transaction, issue where, you know, not having a really strong loyalty program means it may be very difficult to ID all of the consumers that come to the store. 

[00:07:43] Tom: Um, and so since you, since you build out that capability at dg. Where else have you gone? What else have you been doing? Well. 

[00:07:51] Praveen Menon: Yeah. Um, I think that's a great question.  

[00:07:53] Bridg and Rippl: Identity and Media Network 

[00:07:58] Praveen Menon: Um, so let me start with the basics because there's a number of different, uh, companies here. And so [00:08:00] for us at Bridg, we have Bridg and we have Rippl. And those are two different things that work together. Bridg is the identity infrastructure. So we figure out who the shoppers are at the person level. 

[00:08:14] Praveen Menon: Rippl is a retail media network, and that's where brands can actually measure and activate campaigns. And so the way to think about it is Bridg solves the identity problem at the data layer. And then with Rippl, we've brought together 12 different retailers, a bunch of convenience stores that aggregates up to 140 million shoppers, and we've created one place for brands to access them. 

[00:08:41] Praveen Menon: And so the broader question is, you know, why does that matter? The reason it matters is because.  

[00:08:47] Retail Media's Unique Value Proposition 

[00:08:47] Praveen Menon: Most retail doesn't look like Amazon or Walmart. You've got retailers with thousands of stores, but maybe only 20 to 30% of those transactions are tied to known customers. And these retailers don't have in-house teams to build identity systems. 

[00:09:05] Praveen Menon: And so with Rippl, what retailers get is infrastructure that they can't build themselves. And for media buyers. It's one access point, right? Instead of having all these fragmented relationships with retailers. And so that's a lot of addressable scale that's just been sitting there and basically invisible to national advertisers. 

[00:09:26] Praveen Menon: And so that's what we've been able to do is to bring that to a much wider swath of retailers. 

[00:09:32] Todd: What's the relationship? Um, so Rippl as, as a retail media network. And, and sounds like a, almost like a traditional ad network, right? Working with multiple publishers. And so does Rippl represent those brands and is in fact the sort of the named sellers and operators? So I know we, you mentioned, uh, in sort of the prep companies who are involved in Rippl are like Wegmans and Hy-Vee and so forth. 

[00:09:55] Todd: Does Rippl act as, as the sales arm and Wegmans would refer people to [00:10:00] them? Or is it you're sort of behind the scenes supporting kind of like a, almost like an Epsilon like model? You're sort of a white labeled full service team that Wegmans would, you would be, you know, representing Wegmans, not necessarily representing Rippl. 

[00:10:15] Todd: What's the sort of the business model for Rippl? Is it more like Epsilon or is it more like a traditional ad network? 

[00:10:20] Praveen Menon: Yeah. Um, so the way to think about it, and maybe the easy way to distinguish it is we are the offsite retail media arm for them, right? And so in the way that we would kind of represent them and package those audiences for all offsite activations, that would be a. And so the way to think about it is we are basically a consortium of regional retailers, liquor stores, convenience stores that kind of creates this kind of 140 million, um, you know, network, if you will. 

[00:10:49] Praveen Menon: And what's kind of powerful about what we offer to them is that kind of works. Kind of quite in harmony with, you know, Wegmans or Hy-Vee's, existing [00:11:00] owned media. So they may have, you know, kind of existing media offerings such as in-store displays. They may have email and SMS programs, coupons, onsite placements. 

[00:11:10] Praveen Menon: We are kind of offering that offsite extensions so that it's a full funnel approach for brands, right? And really what that. Allows them to do, in terms of a scaled approach, is that they can participate in national media budgets while keeping their data secure. Um, because as an individual retailer, you're pretty much playing in the trade budget space. 

[00:11:32] Praveen Menon: And our ability to kind of integrate all of that and offer that national scale is what unlocks those national budgets for these guys. 

[00:11:40] Todd: Uh, I will say 140 million uniques is a lot. And what's interesting, you mentioned another stat about how with a lot of these regional retailers or specialty retailers, like convenience stores only being able to identify 20, 30% of the shoppers, um, it, it's like some grocery chains, like we, we had Brian Monahan on from [00:12:00] Albertsons and they, they something like 94, 90 5% identified transactions. 

[00:12:04] Challenges and Solutions in Retail Media 

[00:12:04] Todd: And so I think that's interesting in terms of what you're helping retailers do is identify go from 20 to whatever, but the other thing is 140 million. If you were a publisher, that puts you in a top 10, top 20 level. And I think one of the things that's been interesting is as retailers try to punch through into national budgets, into brand campaigns, I think the question has been around scale. I think one of the things that central about Rippl is like you have scale, and I think that's what's been missing from the conversation is people think, oh, Amazon and Walmart capture 85% of retail need to budgets. There must not be much scale beyond them. And the reality is I think there's tons of scale. 

[00:12:45] Todd: 140 million is a lot, and so from that standpoint. I think that's part of the story here is there's more reach and opportunity out there than I think media buyers realize. And what's been missing are some of these consortiums, and what's been missing is someone going, no, no, no. [00:13:00] Look, we have scale and we know how to work with you, and we know how to sell to you and we know how to service you. 

[00:13:03] Todd: So I think that's part of the, the story of Rippl is it took this technology of Bridg, which has its roots in Cardlytics, which is credit card identification. Um, and analytics and really is applying it to some really interesting use cases on the edge because we, in the media space, could only dream of having access to the, the really specific data that emerges out of the retail and, and credit card spaces. 

[00:13:26] Praveen Menon: Yeah. Uh, that's right Todd. And, and I think, you know, some of the unsexy, really difficult part to do is that foundational layer of identity, right? Because once you have that identity in place, then everything opens up, right? You can actually measure campaigns. At a deterministic person level. So for example, a brand runs a campaign. 

[00:13:46] Praveen Menon: We can tie ad exposure to actual purchases, right? So this is real closed loop measurement, not modeled guesses, and that's a closed loop everybody talks about, but most can't [00:14:00] actually deliver. Um, you can then build audiences based on actual purchase behavior. So now we're talking about not just taking a panel and modeling that out for people who look like the buyers of your product, but actual buyers. 

[00:14:13] Praveen Menon: So, for example, a CPG brand can come to us and target their actual competitors' purchasers. They can. Actually reactivate lapsed buyers, right? And all of this in a deterministic, privacy safe way. And the most important thing is when you start with that foundation. The interoperability makes it much easier, right? 

[00:14:34] Praveen Menon: Because we can then translate this identity into common currencies in ad tech, like a RampID like a UID2, which then improves the match rates and kind of reduces waste. So what really kind of matters in our kind of approach is we're moving from kind of household proxies to person level measurement and measuring real incrementality, right? 

[00:14:55] Praveen Menon: So we're talking about real purchases tied to real people and not proxies in. [00:15:00] I, I listened to kind of the Dollar General episode that you guys did recently. You guys talked about investment grade. That's when the brands trust, right? The numbers enough to invest, and you need that kind of solid technology and grounding to be able to do that well. 

[00:15:14] Todd: I think this brings up, uh, you know, a, a, an opportunity to bring up, uh, you know, Tom and, and, uh, Scott Messer on their, uh, edition of, of the middlemen had a interview with Ari Paparo, and Ari ran over retail media with, with a bus backwards and forwards and ran it to death. In terms of criticizing, does retail media really doing something unique? 

[00:15:37] Todd: And I think the comments you just made are interesting in terms of the problems that retail media really solves in a way that, uh, you know, people coming from traditional AdTech like myself are just, we're always chasing identity resolution attribution. Like what I, I think that's a real important piece in terms of what brands really want. 

[00:15:56] Todd: And so it'd be interesting to get your perspective on Ari's comments and, and, you know, I think it [00:16:00] lends to what you were just describing in terms of the value of what Rippl and Bridg are, are bringing to the market. 

[00:16:05] Praveen Menon: Yeah. I know that, you know, some takes are a little controversial in nature, but what I'll say is I was at a conference recently where, you know, in kind of a closed room setting, we were talking to a lot of. You know, major agency investment leaders as well as publishers. And the interesting thing about ad Tech is, you know, when you think about media cycles. 

[00:16:26] Praveen Menon: Measurement is a big part of what drives digital cycles, right? So for example, if you think about how programmatic took off where they were, like nine to 10% of, you know, digital ad spend, and then over 10 years that became like 90% of digital ad spend. Or you think about mobile, a lot of that was driven by online attribution, right? 

[00:16:45] Praveen Menon: So clicks, impressions of things. Google and Meta are really good at. What retail media unlocks is the next phase of that measurement, because we are going from online attribution to including offline attribution. At the end of the day, [00:17:00] 85% of retail sales are in store, right? And if you're only talking about online attribution, you're missing 85% of what that value is. 

[00:17:08] Praveen Menon: So that's the first thing that Retail media unlocks. The second thing is, I think while programmatic display and ad tech overall has enabled, you know, somewhat a difference in precision and your ability to reach people where they're at. When you think about a lot of the identity solutions, those are all based on digital identifiers, right? 

[00:17:27] Praveen Menon: You're talking about things like ips and, you know, various location data and things like that. What retail media does is when you combine terrestrial identity, right? So think about actually knowing who the person is, what their household address is, how they actually interact in their day-to-day lives. 

[00:17:45] Praveen Menon: And when you combine that offline identity together with online identity. That's when you unlock the best of both worlds. So both from a measurement standpoint as well as reducing media waste with terrestrial identity. That's where retail media unlocks in a way [00:18:00] that I think other, you know, previous digital ad formats haven't been able to crack. 

[00:18:05] Praveen Menon: And even when you think about things like CTV today, retail and that retail data and identity is a big piece of what they're looking to solve for. 

[00:18:16] Tom: Yeah, and I think it would've been fun to have you, uh, head to head with Ari when he talked about, you know, the simplicity of product listing ads, um, or the. The undesirability of, audience extension. I think I tried my best to, to explain that this is not just simple retargeting.  

[00:18:38] Ari Paparo: you're basically, you're expecting the user to see a banner ad for like some mayonnaise and click on it and then go back to the retailer that where they abandoned mayonnaise from the shopping cart and then buy some mayonnaise 

[00:18:50] Tom: You have a situation where, um, you don't need a click, you just have the ad exposure and then bringing that back to the transaction log. To your point, if [00:19:00] you're able to identify the user and measure one-to-one, that is a different proposition than the old. Sort of e-commerce proxies of, , the crit era, um, or the, the early retargeting era.  

[00:19:13] Tom: You are definitely in the right position to explain why audience extension is something that is a good idea for, for brands to do in conjunction with retailers. So, any more thoughts? If we had to have this conversation, with Ari, what would be the sort of main, uh, tenets of the discussion on offsite audience extension? 

[00:19:35] Praveen Menon: Yeah. Um, I think the way to think about it is I think based on different. Categories and different based on different path to purchase. I think a lot of time retail media is. Really compared to lower funnel conversion activities, right? So think about very much kind of direct response type of thing. At the end of the day, when you look at different retailers, if you look at a Dollar General or a CVS versus a Walmart or versus [00:20:00] Amazon. 

[00:20:00] Praveen Menon: I think the consumer's mindset is very different in terms of how they think about each of those categories. How much urgency is there? What is the frequency of purchase, right? Because I mean, J just think about you and I and how we shop, shop around for things, right? So for example, you know, with something like CVS, like, I'm gonna think about going and buying a beauty product. 

[00:20:21] Praveen Menon: It's 11:00 PM at night. You know, I have an event tomorrow. You know, my wife needs something, I'm just gonna go there. Right? I'm not gonna go to a Google PLA ad and search for something when I know that CVS is what's open, right? At the end of the day, what you want to know is that if there's a hot new product in market, is it available at CVS? 

[00:20:39] Praveen Menon: So when I see that in a CTV ad, and I know that those products are available. I know that it's top of mind and that CVS carries that product. So at the end of the day, when you think about things like television or some of those traditional ad formats, I think retail media does offer a full funnel approach. 

[00:20:56] Praveen Menon: I think it depends on the product category and what that extension is, [00:21:00] but. But the main thing is that you can measure that at multiple levels. You can measure that down to a last click level in terms of, okay, did this sponsored at placement actually drive that conversion within the, within the past 30 days? 

[00:21:14] Praveen Menon: But most importantly, in terms of a brand, you can think about it. At a more broader perspective in terms of long-term value, right? So you have the online attribution of like, okay, did you drive an e-commerce sale? Did the person go into the store and purchase it within the next kind of 30 or 45 days? 

[00:21:30] Praveen Menon: Beyond that, right? Did it drive kind of long-term value? So for example, I've seen some recent studies where with retail media and the fact that you have this resilient identity, you can actually see whether Tom, who was exposed to this ad. What is their behavior and their brand loyalty with a certain product, not just over the attribution window, but over a three month period, a six month period, a 12 month period. 

[00:21:56] Praveen Menon: And when you actually look at it like that, the long-term value of [00:22:00] retail media just kind of continues to multiply. Right? And the one other thing that I'll say is. You know, there's a lot of discussion around ROAS, right? And that was driven as a metric by the online attribution. Guys, think about Google and Meta because that's what they can measure. 

[00:22:17] Praveen Menon: But what brands keep talking about today is incrementality, which is iROAS, right? When you actually look at iROAS for retail media, it averages at around $2. If you look at some of the social platforms in Google, they're in the pennies. Right. And so if you wanna talk about real incrementality in terms of what's driving purchases, that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. 

[00:22:41] Praveen Menon: I think retail media is clearly showing that it can outperform, um, some of these other formats. So, you know, I think it completely depends what a brand is trying to do. Um, you know, if you just want to have that apples to apples comparison of roas, that may not be the best way to think about it. If you really wanna drive incrementality [00:23:00] and you want ROI for your media investment. 

[00:23:02] Praveen Menon: Then I think retail media offers a real ability to measure incrementality in a way that I think other, uh, channels are not able to do. 

[00:23:11] Tom: I, I like where you're going with the full funnel thinking because I think, when we had the discussion with Dollar General, um, you know, Todd asked Austin, do media buyers care about trips? And I think Austin launched into Yeah, trips are, the trips are the best. And like talked about all the reasons why, uh, I would imagine trips are talked about in JBPs with. 

[00:23:32] Tom: Dollar General brands all the time. Um, but I think what it's saying is we need to expand our minds a little bit and media buyers need to think about, you know, trips in store in the same way that they would talk about consumer journeys online. We could fight over, you know, whether or not I'm gonna go on goPuff, uh, to get that thing or go into CVS in person. 

[00:23:51] Tom: Um, and I just think that there are multiple paths and I think retail media is sort of set up for more paths. 

[00:23:58] Retail Media and CTV: A Perfect Match 

[00:23:58] Todd: Other thing to, to jump in [00:24:00] and go, go back. Step to CTV, , with retail media, you are identifying an individual and you have the ability to, through lots of, you know, cardlytics, Bridg products. Pull in and use credit cards as a link beyond just loyalty programs, which I think is, is really important. 

[00:24:18] Todd: And the specificity of, of user targeting is so different than what we're used to with Ad Tech. And what I think, you know, Tom loves CTV and its potential. And I think what, what's interesting is retail media with CTV can identify individual viewers, right? The email to credit card and other identification and. 

[00:24:42] Todd: Tv never could even dream about that. And I think that's one of the interesting things is that retail media can really unlock CTV in a way and make it incredibly valuable inventory because you have to log into streaming platforms so you know who's watching what and your ability to tie that record [00:25:00] and all the, the details and purchase history about that. 

[00:25:02] Todd: Like this is just, if I'm a brand ad buyer, like holy cow, this is the holy grail. This is what I've been dreaming of. Since the rise of, of digital and, you know, going back interactive TV discussions 30 plus years ago with John Malone, formerly of, of Liberty tv. I think that's just one of the fascinating things here is, is just we've dreamed about this for digital and retail media can really make it happen. 

[00:25:24] Praveen Menon: Exactly, and, and you know, you won't believe, I mean there's, I think, so much interest from some of the largest platforms. Uh, think about DSPs identity platforms within the CTV space that are really interested in, in what we're doing, right? But I think at the end of the day, for us to be able to do this at scale, we needed to kind of build this consortium, right? 

[00:25:45] Praveen Menon: We needed to show that we can actually stitch all this together. I mean, I've worked at. Several large retailers. I'll tell you that being able to have clean data and to be able to build that identity foundation at a single retailer [00:26:00] is really hard to do. Right? And our ability to kind of do this across multiple retailers where, you know, more and more retailers are kind of coming and joining the Rippl program just allows us to kind of build the network effects of that. 

[00:26:13] Praveen Menon: And I think. You know, finally I think CTVs at a stage where they're willing to look at things and they wanna move beyond just guaranteeing delivery. I think brands and agencies are wanting to see that incrementality, they're wanting to see the real ROI in their investments, and I think that's what, that's where we're kind of seeing that move over. 

[00:26:33] Praveen Menon: And I think that inflection point of, you know, where kind of 50% of TV viewing is now CTV and where it's addressable. Is really kind of forcing that shift. So, lots of interesting conversations and, uh, you know, partnership opportunities in the space for us to, again, really drive what I would say is the next phase of, um, digital media. 

[00:26:52] Audience Enablement vs. Audience Extension 

[00:26:52] Todd: Maybe we need to change the term from audience extension back to Ari to audience enablement and, right, so [00:27:00] CTV, the IT is, is it really extension? I think in the way that you're thinking and describing it, I don't think it's extension anymore. It's audience enablement, right? You're just, you're not, it's, to Tom's point, it's not a click that's enabling you to go target these people in these other offsite platforms, CTV and others. 

[00:27:15] Todd: And I think most of the offsite interest isn't around programmatic retargeting. I think it's about audience enablement in platforms like CTV and you're really giving them an identity and, and targeting layer that they wouldn't otherwise have. Like great, someone's watches these five shows, that doesn't tell me crap about what they're interested in. 

[00:27:32] Todd: But you're bringing in a whole layer of targeting ability. And so I think maybe that's part of it is we have to, let's change the name from audience extension to audience enablement, because I think as a long as, again, as a long time ad techer, the visions I have of what you're talking are like really fascinating and saying, yeah, Todd, I can model out across these retailers in just incredibly prescriptive segment. 

[00:27:57] Todd: Really allow a brand to get in [00:28:00] front of users. Different stages of the funnel, different ways we can measure, you know, iROAS, we can do it over very long timescales like this is the holy grail of what we've been talking about for digital advertising for 30 years. Like this is cool stuff. Like to say, you can walk in and like, look, I can bring all this purchase data, I can bring all these segments. 

[00:28:15] Todd: I can find you the 1, 5, 10, 20 million people you need to target. And that's an incredibly powerful 

[00:28:22] Tom: brand name, the brand name Bridg actually goes a long way. Right. I think I like the enablement concept, but that was really the idea was that there's certain audiences that need to be unlocked. Um, but that, you know, there's, it's, it just needs a tiny Bridg back to the point of sale. 

[00:28:38] Todd: As you think about this, obviously I get geeked out around just the fact you, you're gonna be able to target audiences in ways that we only dreamed about. 30 years ago.  

[00:28:46] The Future of Retail Media 

[00:28:46] Todd: What are you most excited about in terms of the direction of retail media, you know, the, the rise of CTV, these other areas you think about the Rippl roadmap. 

[00:28:54] Todd: What are the things that, that you're geeked out about as you look to see where, where the space is [00:29:00] going, what's the future of retail media look like from your seat as a, as like a, you know, leading product guy in the space. 

[00:29:06] Praveen Menon: Yeah, Todd. Um. I mean, I think it's a very dynamic space, right? When I think about retail media and what we're doing at Rippl, I think the models kind of evolving in a few important ways. 

[00:29:19] Praveen Menon: I think firstly, we're moving to a model where kind of identity resolution, activation and measurement all happen without data movement, right? Where everything stays in a secure environment. So I think we're moving to a place where instead of dictating how the measurement is delivered or what reporting looks like. 

[00:29:41] Praveen Menon: We will provide the deterministic identity layer and kind of clean data foundation, and then a brand or an agency or a retailer can bring your own toolkit. Right? Like that is, I think, extremely powerful. And so think about it as infrastructure. It's not a wall garden, right? So [00:30:00] you want to use your preferred measurement partner, your own attribution model. 

[00:30:04] Praveen Menon: Your agency has its own kind of reporting dashboard. Like, go ahead, right? It's the same clean data. Um, you just kind of choose how you wanna work with it. I think the second thing is that. This kind of identity and data governance layer enables Agentic workflows, right? When you have a foundation that's kind of deterministic and clean, you can build AI driven optimization on top of it, you can automate your audience refinement. 

[00:30:34] Praveen Menon: You can do intelligent kind of budget allocation. Like, you know, if you guys have seen some of the recent announcements from the trade desk and other DSPs, that's where the industry is going, right? But these efficiencies only work when the underlying data is solid. Right. And I think the third thing that I'm excited about is we're enabling more collaboration, right? 

[00:30:56] Praveen Menon: And this is not just about clean rooms, but true [00:31:00] interoperability. So multiple parties can work with the same data in a privacy safe way, right? And so, you know, some of our partners such as Snowflake are enabling that across brands, agencies, DSPs, and folks like ourselves. And so I think what we're seeing is that the industry is realizing. 

[00:31:19] Praveen Menon: That shared infrastructure is a sustainable path, right? Like that's the shift that matters. And so, you know, for me, the vision is that we solve the really hard identity problem so that the ecosystem can innovate on top of it, right? 

[00:31:33] Clean Rooms and Identity Resolution 

[00:31:33] Tom: Yeah, I really like the, the continuation we had, , Prabhath from Snowflake on probably a year ago now, and he talked about not moving data and to me that, was an unlock for me in terms of understanding how things could go. Um, but then probably six months later we heard. Amazon came out with the ability to offer clean rooms at very low rates based on using their infrastructure. 

[00:31:55] Tom: So when a, a brand is going to work with you and the Rippl [00:32:00] network, is that a, a much lower cost base for doing clean rooms? Are clean rooms really being used? Like, can you talk a little bit more about how that has rolled out and where the market is with that? Because when I was doing things, clean rooms were prohibitively expensive. 

[00:32:15] Tom: It was like a million dollars to start. You know, only the top brands would use it. Like, are a lot of brands using clean rooms via your, your pipes. 

[00:32:23] Praveen Menon: Yeah. Um, that's a good question. Um, again, at, at Rippl we don't operate clean rooms, but I do have experience in the, in that space with, um, other retail retailers that I've been at. I think clean rooms are important, but they're solving a. Specific problem, and I think it's worth being precise about what the problem is, right? 

[00:32:45] Praveen Menon: And so what Clean Rooms really allow brands to do is to bring their own first party data. Match it against a retailer's data in a privacy safe environment. And that's valuable for measurement. It's useful for [00:33:00] validating audiences and for incrementality testing, right? So for example, if it's, if I'm a brand, I can see the overlap of a retailer's data with my own kind of CRM data, right? 

[00:33:10] Praveen Menon: Without exposing my raw kind of customer information. And so. From a retailer standpoint, I think clean rooms serve kind of a few different purposes. Um, the first thing is that they build trust, right? Like brands wanna validate that the audiences that they're buying actually exist, right? They wanna make sure that the media spend properly. 

[00:33:30] Praveen Menon: I think the second thing that it enables is, you know, kind of activation and planning. So a retailer can. Share their audiences to A DSP through a clean room, and then they can kind of model reach and frequency across retailers. Understand, overlap, like, you know, those kind of things all without moving data. 

[00:33:46] Praveen Menon: But here's what's important, right? Clean rooms do not solve the identity problem. Right. They assume that you already have clean deterministic identity on both sides. So if a [00:34:00] retailer's identity layer is weak, let's say they have a lot of unknown shoppers or poor match rates, the clean room's not gonna fix that. 

[00:34:07] Praveen Menon: It just makes the gaps more visible, right? And that's what I've seen. And so a lot of times what you see is you'll see POCs on the clean room site, but those things don't scale, right? So for me. Clean rooms are part of the infrastructure, but they're not a substitute for solving identity first. And you know, this is the hard thing to solve. 

[00:34:30] Todd: I think it's, it's, that's an interesting comment. I built a DSP and, and it lives on inside of, uh. A company called Teads now, and to me, I, I think people have overstated the value of brand first party data.  

[00:34:45] Retailer Data vs. Brand Data 

[00:34:45] Todd: I think what's been way more valuable are the retailer first party data, right? 'cause that's where the transactions occur. 

[00:34:50] Todd: Consumers have multiple purchases with a retailer and the clean room solves a certain point, but it isn't the end all be all. I think enabling retailer data [00:35:00] has been one of the really important things and unlocks here across the ecosystem. 

[00:35:05] Todd: 'cause it's what solves attribution. It brings at a much more scale. To your point, there's longstanding identity resolution infrastructure. Like again, the, the roots of cardlytics as a, as the parent company and that, right. The credit card identification goes back decades. It's a well established approach to identity resolution and bringing this now to another layer, extending this identity, understanding to a new use case, right, with retail and or retail media and targeting, I think is incredibly valuable. 

[00:35:36] Todd: So yes, clean rooms don't solve it. I agree with you and the retailer's identity, resolution is what's really valuable here. Without that, you don't get attribution. And I think, you know, Bridg and Rippl unlocking that is the important feature here. 

[00:35:50] Todd: And making it as easy as possible for the brand buyers and other advertisers to buy and transact is another important aspect, right. That's, one of the unlocks here is we [00:36:00] try to push into national and brand budgets is how do you make it as easy as possible for those buyers to take advantage of your offerings? 

[00:36:06] Todd: And I think Rippl solves that in, in, in an important way. It'd be hard for Wegmans or Hy-Vee or DG or these, some of these others, but as part of Rippl. You're able to make that as easy as possible to buy at scale across whomever in the me in the way that that's meaningful for those buyers. 

[00:36:22] Praveen Menon: Exactly, and I think that's what kind of takes you out of being a closed beta and being in several programs that shut down after six months. Right? Because when we have scale of 140 million shoppers, we're able to have partnerships and work with ecosystem partners like DSPs in ways where we have real scale. 

[00:36:42] Praveen Menon: Right where we can kind of test a number of different programs, a number of different campaigns, and it's not this kind of limited test that never scales and so. Uh, I think a very conscious decision that we made was to kind of continue to build out our supply side and build enough scale where we can [00:37:00] actually put these things, um, into fruition. 

[00:37:02] Praveen Menon: Right? And I think that's where kind of our ability to then kind of construct these audiences and kind of have them in certain marketplaces and things like that have really helped us build those customer stories because, you know, we actually see. Those audiences be truly incremental. We're able to deliver that true incrementality and at the end of the day, like you said, right, be able to actually make all those systems work. 

[00:37:25] Praveen Menon: So, you know, it's a lot of hard work has gone into this 

[00:37:28] Todd: For sure. No, no. The business Rippl has become, is nontrivial for absolute certain. It's been great to see solutions like that mer relatively quickly just over the last couple of years and reach a scale working with multiple regional retailers and specialty retailers. And so it's, it's really an impressive business to see it and, and to quickly get to that level of scale and, and I think opportunity. 

[00:37:51] Praveen Menon: Yeah. 

[00:37:51] Conclusion and Final Thoughts 

[00:37:51] Tom: I guess we're gonna need to keep in touch and hear how your federated network goes, because I think the the market is rooting for you. So thank [00:38:00] you for joining the Middlemen podcast and we'll be in touch. 

[00:38:03] Praveen Menon: Yeah. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Todd. Pleasure to be here.  

[00:38:07] ​