Brett House (00:00)
Welcome to Signal & Noise. My name is Brett House. I'm joined with my co-host Rio Longacre. And this is officially series one, episode one of a new podcast that we're really excited to launch. And wanted to start off before we introduce ourselves formally to tell you what we're thinking this podcast is going to be how it's going to be different than other podcasts on the market the marketing, advertising

data and tech sort of transformation topics that you all love like to listen to and learn about. Our goal with Signal & Noise, and Rio and I talked about this a bunch, is really to cut through some of the hype and the buzzwords to really cut, to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to some of the biggest, most disruptive marketing and advertising transformation topics, data strategy and technology topics.

Stuff that we've been involved in for 30 years, to 30 years, across a number of different organizations, and the industry, the marketing and advertising industry in general. know, Rio, did I sum that up correctly in terms of how we're thinking about Signal & Noise going forward? What's your opinion?

Rio (01:09)
I thought you, I thought you did a good job, Brett. Ultimately, we really want to tackle some topics. I mean, look, there lots of great podcasts out there. I think there's specifically in ad tech, there's some really good ones, but we wanted to make it a little broader. We're to be covering more of the world of advertising and marketing, maybe even going into popular culture a little bit. Sometimes getting more into tech. We're going to have some amazing speakers on this. We already have a really incredible list of people who've raised their hands and are going to be on subsequent episodes.

It's called Signal & Noise for no reason. We're going to be distilling the signal from the noise, figuring out what the difference is. We're going to be maybe sometimes be even being a little controversial, right? I think that's going to be, we're going to have lot of fun with this. And as you mentioned, pulling on, what is it? 50 plus years of combined experience that for those of you who don't know it, Brett and I actually started working together at a, was, was it actually in an illegal apartment in StuyTown, like a startup, a tech startup way back in the day, right? So we got a little history, right?

Brett House (02:03)
Yeah, it was

in an apartment, that somebody was renting from, that our partner was renting from his cousin, right? He was living in this apartment ⁓ that was under her name. Yeah, and so he started an ad tech company before ad tech was even a word. In 1999, 2000.

Rio (02:15)
Something like that, ⁓

Yeah, this is way back. Yeah,

I remember we were crazy. insertion orders were like a new thing. I remember we would fax them over and I just file cabinet. I store them after a while. It was kind of wild. So yeah, good times. Lots of shared histories I mentioned. So I think you summed it up well,

Brett House (02:38)
Yeah, I was gonna say we're so old that when we started in the advertising and marketing ecosystem and tech ecosystem, the internet was still being sent via disks to your mailbox. So snail mail delivered AOL. That's how you connected to the internet.

Rio (02:54)
Hey, some people apparently

as kind of making a comeback. It's right here.

Brett House (02:58)
I think I had a Juno

email address, right? So very early days, I mean, not to age ourselves, right? But I think you made a good point. I I think for us, I always say this, it sounds a little ⁓ silly or stilted, but the Socratic Method is always something I always fell back on whenever I speak at events, rather than just jump into a topic not knowing what people's assumptions are,

what their core beliefs are, what the topics that you're gonna be talking. Like you gotta be talking apples to apples with your hosts or with ⁓ the people that are joining you on stage, for example. And oftentimes people are talking past one another. And so I think, me, focus challenging assumptions. You clarify what people are actually saying or thinking or believing, right? That's pretty important. You expose contradictions. I mean, you and I are gonna be the first to expose one another's contradictions, which we've done

a lot in the past with, you we've known each other for a very long time and just really critical thinking, right? Cause at the end of the day, you want people to actually come away with some actionable insights from what we're talking about with some of these very smart and sometimes very wonky guests that will get down to a level of subject matter expertise that maybe the general public isn't particularly comfortable with.

Rio (04:16)
Socratic

method, I like that. Did you study philosophy in college, Brett? I can't remember, but anyway.

Brett House (04:21)
yeah, I do remember

comparative literature. So so Rio, introduce yourself. Tell everybody a little bit about your background.

Rio (04:25)
Okay, close enough. let's...

Okay.

Okay. So Rio Longacre, been in kind of advertising, marketing, technology. I guess I consider myself that AdTech, MarTech kind of industry evangelists been doing this for, I think I started in 2000. So it's 25 years and career spanning management consulting, data, media. I actually started as a media planner and buyer as we talked about before. I've worked within AdTech

as well as within MarTech. ultimately, I look at the main thing I do a lot of these days is help organizations solve some of their toughest advertising marketing challenges, pick the right tech, make sure they're using it correctly, et cetera. So that's a little bit about me.

Brett House (05:13)
And

you're most recently you're most recently the managing director of what advertising and marketing transformation is that did I say that in the right order at Slalom consulting.

Rio (05:19)
Correct, you had a big consulting firm called Slalom. ⁓

I was there for a long time I was a Capgemini before that, before that worked in tech and way before I started agency. So yeah, it's kind of spanning. Actually, the only place I've never worked is client side, funny enough, but obviously work with many clients and brands. So that's a little bit about me. so I guess you've been at...

Brett House (05:37)
Yeah.

and,

Rio (05:39)
You've got a MediaRadar for it, the less... Okay. But before that you were, I remember you were, you were Nielsen for a while, you were, I know there was the Neustar right?

Brett House (05:39)
MediaRadar for about a year now.

Yeah. Neustar. Yeah, I was at Nielsen.

Yep. And I mean at Rio and I sort of took different trajectories when we left that Stuyvesantown apartment startup in the beginning of direct response digital marketing and AdTech And he went down the consulting path. I went down the kind of SaaS startup path. I was in the rich media industry for a little while with Unicast,

⁓ but basically ended up at eXelate, which was an early data management platform. They were really a data marketplace that became transformed into a data management platform and led that through with Mark Zagorski and Damian Garbaccio and Ameneh Atai, and bunch of those folks, through acquisition by Nielsen, launched the marketing cloud at Nielsen, and then decided I wanted to do it all over again. So I found a similar

kind of a mechanism for doing that with a company called Neustar, they're a marketing solutions business unit. And the one thing that we had that Nielsen didn't have was identity data. So I thought, ooh, this is the golden goose. Let me run with this. And so ran with that at basically a longer pre-acquisition period. So I was there for about two and a half years before we were acquired by TransUnion. And then was at TransUnion for a couple of years. So that was about a five-year stint.

You know, I've been going through this cycle for the last 10 to 15 years of my career of getting into kind of a mature startup, helping to bring them to kind of a scaled level of scale and sort of maturity. And then going through the acquisition and then realizing I kind of want to do that all over again I love the super enthusiastic about building things and you get into these sort of more mature startups and it's a fun process without having to necessarily herd the cats, so to speak.

⁓ We've both come a long way since working in an apartment in Stuyvesant Town to say the least. And Rio has built a huge following ⁓ in the AdTech and MarTech ecosystems. If you've ever seen them at RampUp, you were most recently at Possible, right? We were at RampUp together. And I think that's a good launch pad for talking about some of the topics that we're gonna get into with our first guest for episode number one, which is Stephanie Layser.

Rio (07:30)
Yeah, it's funny.

I was.

Brett House (07:52)
who lot of you know, she's the Global Head of Publisher Ad Tech Solutions at AWS. And Rio, I thought, yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you experienced at Possible and what were the key takeaways before we get into our interview with Stephanie.

Rio (07:53)
Stuff's great.

Sure.

Well, yeah, I'm really excited for the interview with Stephanie. I mean, for those who don't know her, she's like, I don't know anyone who's really deeper on kind of supply and sell and anything publisher, PubTech. I mean, she's just awesome. She's ⁓ was at News Corp for a long time and she's currently now at AWS where she heads up publisher tech right there. So she's going to be an amazing guest. I'm really excited to talk to her, hear what she has to say. I've been in a few panels with her and she always, she never fails to impress, put it that way. But getting back to Possible.

Brett House (08:33)
never fails to share her

strong perspectives. Yeah.

Rio (08:37)
That's true. Yes. Well, sometimes she has to when she's on the stand testifying against Google, right? For example, so, right. So, but yeah, Steph's great. Looking forward to that. But, but getting back to Possible. Possible was the recent conference that was down in Miami Beach. This was Possible's third year. And this was run by the same group of people who had, you know, the DMEXCO conference, which is in Germany every year. I've been to that a few times. That's good. I mean, that's, it's a different conference. It's kind of in this big ⁓ cavernous like

Brett House (08:39)
Yeah, very strong point of view, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Rio (09:06)
trade show hall and like just lots lots of vendors are there it's it's a trade show right and Cologne's, cool city you know they've got good beer those little Kölsch right yeah those are good right yeah

Brett House (09:08)
Yep, in Cologne, Germany.

Those Kölschs, yeah, you got to order two of those at a time, right? Yeah, and I'm not sure Cologne can

handle DMEX because there are so many people and the town is relatively small. It always seemed to get overwhelmed and it just, couldn't handle the volume of people.

Rio (09:27)
Yeah, the train, the

trains were completely packed. I had to let one train go by at one point, couldn't even get in. But, you know, but was, that was good. So it's run by the same, the same organizer. This is the third year. I went last year. That was my first year. The first year was great. It was super fun. It was kind of smaller than other events. So wasn't really a trade show it was more like just a traditional conference. And this year was structured the same way. It was at the Fountain Blue in Miami, which is just a 

beautiful hotel right on my like northern part of Miami Beach. This year was busy. It was busier than last year. There's been a lot of writings about this. I wrote my summary which I published last week on LinkedIn about it. Yep, I did that. Yeah, so you could check out my LinkedIn profile and find that. I talked a little bit about this, hit on some of the same points. It was, yeah, it was, I think 5,400 attendees, which is a lot and that's almost a 40% increase from the previous year.

Brett House (10:06)
Your recap on LinkedIn, right? Yeah.

I heard it was packed.

Rio (10:23)
It was interesting Brett is that it was very brand heavy and this was intentional the organizers were offering a travel reimbursement up to around 750 plus well to do that they had to agree to eight 15 minute meetings kind of like speed dating during the conference as long as they did this it would get the reimbursement so

It worked. mean, we was super brand type. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett House (10:45)
That's how you get the brands to come, right? You pay for their air travel, right? Because a lot of these industry

events are just vendor fests. It's all of us kind of talking to one another. And you're like, what about the people that are buying our solutions? Yeah, yeah. for sure.

Rio (10:53)
Which is kind of fun. It's good to see the usual suspects, but yeah, you want to go there to generate. Most of

us go there to like, you have to justify it. Or eventually the CFO says, how many meetings did you generate? Pipeline, let me see how many deals. So eventually, you know, so.

Brett House (11:06)
Yeah, outside

of the partnership conversations, yeah. Totally.

Rio (11:10)
Yep.

So, but it worked. was great. Lots of brands were there. What's interesting too is like they didn't really focus on CMOs. They focused on kind of a click or two down from that, which was interesting. Cause you know, I mean, look, go to Cannes CMOs, but you can't talk to them unless you do one like the brand innovator event and they sponsor a table or something for lunch. Otherwise, I mean, they're, they're just mobbed by people. Most of them have security. These are big global CMOs, but this is like senior directors, VPs, directors, even some senior managers. That was a lot of the attendees, which is great. I mean, these are people who

These are the future marketing leaders. many of them will be CMOs, VP, marketings in the future. Um, they were easy to talk to. They were, it was cool. I really liked, it was a good vibe. It was easy to talk to people. It was crowded. like, if you went to the Fountain Blue lobby, it was a lot of people talked about, including me on a, on the recaps of how freaking loud it was. I mean, you could like, you, you know, if you stay in the bar,

Brett House (12:01)
You could barely hear the person

next to you.

Rio (12:03)
Yeah, you can barely hear people. Like your ears are hurt later. So I was really loud, it was, but you know, just good sign. There's a lot of people there. A lot of people crashed it. I know at least four or five people who hit me up in LinkedIn said, I want to meet up. And I didn't notice, didn't have badges. Right. So they were just kind of coming to hang out and they said it was well worth their time. So kudos to the organizers. Awesome time. Great networking. And because it was like contained, Brett, it wasn't like you didn't have to like run down La Croisette like meeting to meeting. I'm always late to every meeting.

⁓ CES, you you're running for like, you can't get anywhere in Vegas.

Brett House (12:32)
Yeah, when it's 90- it's 94 degrees and dry, it's... Yeah.

Rio (12:35)
Yeah, waiting for an Uber could take 15 minutes in Vegas, right? Or if you walk, it's two miles. Like one day I walked 27,000 steps or something crazy like that in Vegas. At CES, just running to meetings. it's like, you've got one further down the strip and a one up the strip, it can be real pain in the ass. But this was great. It was easy to meet with people. I'm one of those people who prefers to set up a few meetings and then I know the rest of my calendar will fill up. Well, it was full. Even between meetings, I kept running into people. I think every year,

walking through the Fountain Blue, I'd see four or five people every time. And a lot of spontaneous, like impromptu meetings came up like that that were great. So it was really good, brand centric, crowded, great networking. There's a lot of talk about going... It's funny, I'm guilty of not going into any sessions. I had a couple of marked, but then I just ended up getting great meetings. People were like, let's meet now. was like, crap, I was gonna go to the sessions. Okay, well, I'd rather meet with you anyway. So I ended up...

Brett House (13:19)
How was the content?

Yeah, yeah.

Rio (13:32)
not going to, I feel kind of guilty, but you know, I shouldn't I go to the conference to like meet people, network, create opportunities for business. So it was great for that. So, but I mean, the, you know, the, what I saw about the content, there was a lot about Beyond Cookies, which is kind of cool. Okay. Like deterministic versus probabilistic, huge topic there. just IDs, what's going to happen to IP addresses. And I think a lot of it now that the Google thing is behind us or like we're past that.

Brett House (13:41)
Yeah.

Rio (13:58)
What's the industry going to do now that like we that, that big waste of time is over. Right. So there's a lot of talk about, you know, kind of post. I could not post cookie, but post Google cookie deprecation saga. What happens next? There's a lot of, think, healthy talk about that. Um, and then.

Brett House (14:17)
Which is kind of interesting because they deterministic versus probabilistic. And we've been talking about that for well over a decade. Right. So it's interesting how these conversations, they never get old. We can, we still haven't solved a lot of these core problems. Right. And when it comes to sort of unifying customer data across business silos and functions and tech stacks for, you know, multiple use cases, like you need to do that stuff. And it still hasn't, we still haven't cracked the code. It seems like as an industry, ⁓ even with, even with the Google.

Rio (14:45)
No, was,

Brett House (14:46)
news.

Rio (14:47)
yeah, surprisingly we haven't. Yeah, it just goes on forever. But I think there's some good discussions about that now that we have some kind of finality. And then the other thing I thought was interesting too is that there was talk about AI, of course, but it wasn't like the central theme. And maybe that was on purpose, right? And I mean, look, working with marketers, that's most of what I do, right? Like, I think people in tech, we're, everything's AI, like we're subsumed by it, right? And it's making a huge difference.

Engineers are using it constantly. I mean, I use it all the time at my job. It speeds things up a lot. So I think people on the tech side, wow, everything's AI all day long. This pivot to agentic AI, now that the technology has improved. I mean, it's making a massive difference, right? But I think for marketers, they're like, okay, this is cool. I'm using it to like speed up creative brief ratings or whatever, right? Or something...

Brett House (15:36)
versioning versioning creative. I

mean, you think that's just you think that that's indicative of a lack of adoption or just ⁓ people are getting their feet wet. Especially on the brand market or side, they're getting their feet wet, but they're not really jumping in to kind of advanced use cases at this point.

Rio (15:45)
Well, I just think...

Yeah getting your feet wet. I think it's accelerating some tasks that they're doing, but I don't think it's like wholesale, like changing their jobs yet. I think some of it is just inertia. I'll give you an example. One SaaS company I've been working with, they rolled out a couple really cool agents that do specific like audience creation, a journey mapper, right? And pretty good, right? But they work, but not too many marketers using them. Now you could argue that maybe it's because

Like we haven't figured out what the agentic UI experience will look like. I mean, that's, I, don't disagree with that argument by the way. I don't think anyone knows what like the, like the user experience for agentic AI sitting, let's say on top of some kind of SaaS platform will look like, but they're not using it, maybe because they've been trained in the old way. I don't know how much of it is just people are like habit inertia, but I don't think marketers using it as much. And especially senior marketers. I don't, I don't think many CMOs are using much AI. Maybe I'm wrong. So I think that there was, it was not as AI focused as

I thought it might be, and which is, one hand was kind of nice, but I also think it's kind of missing the, this is, this is an earthquake that's gonna, that's hitting, that's gonna hit like.

Brett House (16:55)
Yeah, and

you need to start talking about it now, right? And just for our listeners, we're and Rio, I gotta give you credit for this, is Rio met and talked with guy named Ben Wilde, who's the Head of Innovation at Georgian, which is a VC firm that's focused on investing in AI and automation. And they've done a ton of really cool, super deep research. We've had some pre-calls with them. That's our next episode. And he is a wealth of AI knowledge.

Rio (16:58)
Totally.

Brett House (17:22)
that I think is going to be really exciting for the audience to hear about.

Rio (17:26)
Will AI kill SAS? I mean, that's actually episode number two. your student, if you're interested in this topic, definitely stick with us. This one's going to be great with Steph. Number two is going to be digging into the, you know, it's kind of like, video kill the radio star? Right? Did AI kill SAS? So I think that's going to be fun getting into that. I think we all have some strong opinions. That's all they are at this point is opinions, right? Because this is all new. So, but I didn't think it Possible, really dove in too much. In fact, the best conversation about AI had, I called us out in that article was,

sitting at the bar, talking to Dave Eisenberg from, from LiveRamp Brian O'Kelley walks in 30 minutes, like incredible conversation. I guess you're always going to have with two people like that. You're always going to have great conversation. That was the best AI conversation I had at Possible, really digging into agentic and what it's going to meet, how it's going to redefine things. But I think this is like an earthquake or tsunami that's going to really hit the industry. It's going to rethink how we, like how people interact with software

in a really big way, it's gonna change things. It's kind of creating this even playing field, right? Where startups and big incumbents are kind of at the same place. And you could even maybe argue that the startups have an edge, Brett, right? So.

Brett House (18:31)
Yeah, and I'm

certainly thinking about it from our own company's perspective and how do we actually scale our own capabilities, my own GTM team's capabilities, without needing to hire a small army of people to do it, right? So it is a, it has a compounding effect if implemented and used right, but to your point, it's how do you get started? Like it's crawl, walk, run type scenario, but most people are barely walking.

or barely crawling, I should say, right, in this area, especially the higher level marketers that don't have to get into the weeds of this stuff. They've got tech people and data people, data science people that are involved in all of that stuff more deeply.

Rio (19:10)
I think they will though, that's

the thing, right? Because like roles are changing. I saw a good buddy of mine, he's a great designer, right? So I mean, design was one of the earliest indus, I think professions hit by this. Cause you know, lot of the studio creative resizing banners, just changing colors and stuff, that can be done by AI now, right?

So a lot of production work got taken away from designers. I think it impacted them early, which is interesting. But I talked to Drew, who's like, he's a great designer. He said that he feels he's been empowering, right? He says that as a designer, I can now vibe code apps. I don't need engineers or maybe I need one engineer just to kind of proof it, right? So he's like...

As a designer, I'm incredibly empowered. I think CMOs and marketing leaders are going to see the same things. Some of the limitations

without having AI, so AI is gonna release them and enable them and smaller teams to do really amazing things that are maybe faster, more tech heavy, just by normal business people. I think this is gonna be huge unlock for them that they kinda haven't seen yet, that's my opinion.

Brett House (20:04)
Yeah, didn't OpenAI come out with a creative generator? Was it OpenAI or was it Microsoft? And they were talking about, I'll put that in the notes, into the session notes, but they were talking about how it's gonna have an exponential impact on your ability to scale. Meaning we're talking 10, 100 X of the creatives that you would ordinarily need to hire in order to version the campaign in a thousand different ways based on product mix, messaging strategy.

All of this sort of stuff that ordinarily takes people time to do, ⁓ you can do that and apply it to some of the open exchange and programmatic ecosystem so that you're, you the decisioning engines are picking the right thing and mapping it correctly. But the idea is how do you build the right thing when there's so many iterations of audiences and engagement behaviors and all that stuff. So certainly interesting. I'm pretty bullish on that creative use case that it sounds, it sounds like you are too.

Was there any conversation? I mean, so you talked to you obviously talk to Brian O'Kelley. He's doing some really interesting things from, you know, the pivot of big of Scope3 Right. obviously an emerging threat to DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. Any of that. you did you?

ping him on any of that sort of topic or was it purely about AI and the agentic future we're facing?

Rio (21:23)
It came up a little bit. Yeah. I mean, it's, he's doesn't try to hide the fact that this is definitely is competitive in some respects, competitive scope. What scope that he's doing is competitive to, you know, the duopoly, the cartel of brand safety ad verification. Right. So yeah, so for sure. ⁓ but you know, to their credit, I mean, I got to give, especially IAS has been pretty quiet, but DV's been, their PR team has been out there, ⁓ with countering the narrative, right?

Brett House (21:39)
of friends.

Rio (21:53)
Putting out a lot of good content. I think they've been doing a pretty good job. They've made some good acquisitions. and you know, I think the CEO, he was on another podcast recently talked about kind of what they're doing. So it seems like they're not sitting back and just being attacked. I mean, I think it's still a race. You know, they're the incumbents, but there's some really good innovation that AI is helping facilitate, which is cool. That's the way it should be, right? You want startups who coming in, trying new things, disrupting, changing the game and...

you know, the incumbents that adjust and they pivot and they pivot successfully will be great. But I think AI it's hard though, because it is in a lot of respects, this is new. It's a level playing field. I think smaller firms, despite having sometimes fewer resources can move quicker. So I'm bullish on some of the tech I saw there that's emerging is really cool. lot of it is AI or at least AI driven or AI first. Totally.

Brett House (22:45)
AI powered. Yep.

Rio (22:48)
So I'm bullish on it. There's gonna be a lot of, it's gonna be a fun next couple of years, I think because of this.

Brett House (22:53)
And for this episode, you know, we're going to be interviewing, as I mentioned before, Stephanie Layser, the Global Head of Publisher Ad Tech Solutions at AWS. ⁓ Season one, episode one. Do we have seasons in podcast, podcast world? I don't think so, but it sounds good. ⁓ It's called Revenge of the Publishers, the Great Replatforming. And it was sort of a topic that Rio and I started discussing at RampUp this year.

⁓ and started talking with a lot of big data vendors like Databricks and Snowflake. We had some really interesting conversations on that topic. And some of the themes that came out that I think we're going to cover are the implications of the Google antitrust decision, how publishers are reimagining themselves as DTC brands, automating the direct sales workflow with generative AI, right? So there's a big focus, I think, in the publisher world of

of direct sales and the value of that to drive up the value of their inventory, which has been sort of demonetized. Is that a good way to say it? Rio has been decreased by programmatic in the open exchange, right? Would you say less than a dollar CPM on average for a lot of these big publishers for most of their inventory?

Rio (23:55)
CPMs are low and on top of that,

CPMs are low and they're keeping a small share of the actual media, right? So they're keeping, I think it's like for open exchange around 39 cents on the dollar they're keeping. Obviously for PMPs and PG deals, could be higher, but they're still not keeping a hundred percent. You compare that to subscription or when they're selling a space ad back in the day, they keep it all, right? So digital is very different and then, we mentioned DV and IAS, how like...

through keyword blocking, a lot of traffic just has not been sent to them. That's, that's punished them monetization. You go all the way back to even like Craigslist, like eviscerating the classified ads business. So it's been, I think it's been a tough couple of decades for pubs. We're to get into that. We're going to get into strategies for monetization and kind of like strategies for pub tech, right? Is this the renaissance? Is this, we do a renaissance in pub tech in order for them to, you know, like counter these, I guess, pretty bad bunch of years to figure out how to monetize and

and save their businesses really because it's been tough for them.

Brett House (24:54)
it comes down to like on that topic, consumer data, like a unified consumer data strategy, which is, which ties closely to that re-platforming. Can they do it themselves if they need to go to a big cloud vendor, like a Snowflake to better manage and connect their data to the people, to the buy side of the business.

Rio (25:12)
It's a good buyer build topic there. think we'll be getting into that with Steph. And also, I mean, the last thing is, you you can't talk about the world of publishers and news publishers now monetization without looking AI search. I mean, is is referral traffic, how much is going to fall? It's going to fall. Will it fall? I've heard 96% will have fall 25% will fall 50%, whatever it, but it's going to fall. And how, how is that going to impact them and what do they do to counter that? So these are all super important topics that

really, I mean, if you argue our democracy needs news publishers, right? We need a healthy press. This should be a topic that's important to you if you believe in that.

Brett House (25:48)
Yeah, it's not just the pipes and the engine behind it that makes this work and it's all interconnected and we talk, you that's a super fruitful conversation. And it's a lot of topics and a lot of themes, but with somebody like Stephanie with ⁓ her intellectual horsepower, we'll cover a lot of that in great depth. So we'll go to interview now ⁓

and then we'll see you in the next episode, everybody.

Brett House (26:09)
Welcome Stephanie Layser to Signal & Noise. Great to have you.

Stephanie Layser (26:15)
Thank you for having me.

Brett House (26:17)
So Stephanie is the Global Head of Publisher Ad Tech Solutions at AWS. She is a veteran of the publishing industry's digital business among other places has spent about five years at News Corp where she ran ad tech and operations. And she's also known in some AdTech circles as the Google Slayer. So we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But before we really go letting Stephanie talk a little bit about herself and her

background. I wanted to let my co-host Rio Longacre, give a little idea of what we're talking about on this episode. What are the key themes behind Revenge of the Publishers, the Great Replatforming. So Rio, what's this all about?

Stephanie Layser (26:52)
So. ⁓

Rio Longacre (26:58)
Thanks, House. So the reason why I wanted to have Stephanie on this is, I mean, there's a lot of talk about publishers now, obviously a lot of stuff in the news. And when you really look at the past 25 years, it's been tough, right? I mean,

digital has risen. And with that, the fortunes of many of the traditional news publishers have really have flagged quite a bit, right? It's been tough. I mean, you can go all the way back to when Craigslist started, right? Craigslist wiped out around 40% of the revenue for...

for many news publishers, right, from classified ads, gone. How do you adjust to that, right? And Meta and Google rose, and as they rose, I mean, you could argue that they've been siphoning money away from publishers, right? I mean, some estimates I've seen, maybe up to $10 billion a year, because they take the content publishers are publishing, they use that to pull people into the walled gardens, right? Once they're there, they use their algorithms, right, to keep them engaged with user-generated content. it's...

Stephanie Layser (27:42)
Thank you.

Rio Longacre (27:51)
I think 13.9 or 14 billion was an estimate I read, which is a lot, and it's not over, right? I mean, signal loss has been challenging. Obviously, cookies are kind of here to stay, right? Third-party cookies, but we still have seen a lot of signal loss in different places with Apple's ATT making ID-less traffic, the way DSPs

work. It's certainly driving down yields for a lot of pubs, right? And then recently enter AI search, right?

I saw one study that blew my mind. 96% of referred traffic is gone. I mean, maybe that's a little high, but whether it's 25 or 50 or 80, whatever, that's going to be another challenge for pubs. So it's a pretty bleary, depressing picture, right? And with that, we wanted to get Stephanie on here to talk a little bit about it. We know she's been working in the space a long time and Stephanie, we have a bunch of questions, but seeing as...

The recent news with Google, maybe we just start there. Love to hear thoughts on Google, thoughts on the decision. Floor is yours.

Stephanie Layser (28:52)
Yeah, so obviously I am excited by the decision. I think I've been fairly public in my opinion of Google Ad Manager and the way that it hinders innovation in the publisher ad tech community.

So I would say that justice was served. It's a hard subject to teach an outsider about, right? So it's very difficult to have a judge with no experience at all in ad tech, and it's ⁓ a complicated, tricky subject. And I'm very happy with the fact that...

The Department of Justice had the facts. They laid out the facts. They were able to make their case, and they were able to win.

Rio Longacre (29:41)
The judge probably has some really good clerks working too, because that was a very sophisticated case. You have to really be an ad tech nerd to even appreciate it. I don't think even I appreciated it. I don't understand all of it, but it was, yeah it's wild. What do you think happens? You like GAM and DFP gets spun off? What happens to Chrome? I know it's hard to make predictions, but those are pretty big changes, right?

Stephanie Layser (29:43)
Thank you.

Yeah, it's hard to make predictions, but they ended just being found guilty in GAM and ADEX. So because of that, it will be mostly focused on the sell side ad tech. And I think that the request will be a spin out. I think that's what the original complaint from the DOJ requested. And so I think...

that makes the most sense. How that actually looks from a technical perspective and how it looks from a remedy for the different publishers is also, will also be interesting. And I think there will be a bit of disruption, but ultimately, in the long term, it will vastly benefit, you know, high quality content providers.

Rio Longacre (30:53)
How will do that? Will it be just, I mean, I know that think AdEx was charging higher take rate than let's say others and they're using their dominant position. in theory that could be, I think better yields for publishers. It would be a huge difference to be something like what other ways could this potentially help pubs?

Stephanie Layser (31:01)
Thank

Yeah, so I remember being publishers and talking about enhanced dynamic allocation as a decisioning mechanism inside GAM where Google's advertising business was at a level playing field with the publishers' advertising business. And oftentimes, the non-transparent decisioning mechanism of GAM made it very difficult for publishers to actually

prioritize their owned and operated media, right? And hold back certain types and certain pieces of inventory from Google. And so, you know, a more transparent decisioning mechanism and possibly a modifiable decisioning mechanism in this regard can really help publishers to maximize lifetime value for advertisers and maximize

you know, better monetization experiences for consumers. think, GAM is a, you know, 20 year old, piece of technology. It's slow, it's clunky. There were a lot of benefits that buyers got to see from the rise of programmatic advertising that publishers just never got to see because this idea of real time price was something that could never be pulled out of.

the model if that was Google Ad Manager. So I think there's...

Rio Longacre (32:33)
Wasn't that, I remember

Brett House (32:34)
And

Rio Longacre (32:34)
reading.

Brett House (32:34)
so they weren't really forced to innovate, right? Because they had a total monopoly business and so it never really improved.

Stephanie Layser (32:37)
absolutely not. mean, that's like kind of the, yeah.

Yeah, that's the...

Rio Longacre (32:43)
Wasn't it the

Operation Poirot too Stephanie? Like there was some diabolical shit, right?  I remember reading about that? Like.

Stephanie Layser (32:47)
Yeah,

it's distressing. You know, I was rereading the other day, was, I think it was an AdExchanger article that broke down each of the different projects that they had internally. And I mean, it's, ⁓ you know, I, we all, we always kind of knew something was up. Like in publisher circles, we talked about it. We were like, something is weird. Like it just doesn't, this doesn't make sense. Or that doesn't make sense. It was like a puzzle that no one could ever like fully nail down. Right.

And so, you you talk about bid behavior that, you know, ad ex would only respond to a penny or two above your head or bidding line items, you're like, why exactly is this like this? Right? And you couldn't get access to your log level data in such a way that you could really deep dive into it, right? And you needed to be able to understand and when you read,

the internal documentation, you just realize how much Google saw publishers as just supply, right? It didn't matter who was a high quality publisher, who was a low, just commoditized supply. And also just like the price control that they had over the entirety of the ecosystem is really sad. part of the reason I'm so vocal about this is because...

Brett House (33:54)
commoditized supply.

Stephanie Layser (34:12)
when you commoditize content across the internet, you prop up bad actors and bad players and you ⁓ denigrate, yeah, you incentivize low quality content. That's what you do. You incentivize low quality content at its best and at its worst, you incentivize misinformation and fraud.

Brett House (34:23)
the rise of MFAs.

And it's not just

Rio Longacre (34:38)
I'll here.

Brett House (34:38)
bad actors, it's Forbes, www.forbes, right? Was ⁓ a tier one publisher that might have been, to your point, forced down that path in order to drive, It was not considered a ton of revenue. At least that's what they've said. So I'm not sure it had any.

Rio Longacre (34:44)
they had a whole like separate web MFA set up in the background, right? Yeah.

Maybe

for Google, it wasn't right. was like 9 billion out of like 250, right? So like, you know, like.

Brett House (35:00)
Well, for Forbes

too, Forbes apparently was a real minor drop in the bucket. And that's what they've sort of claimed, we're not that guilty. But I think it encouraged that behavior to your point, Stephanie.

Rio Longacre (35:07)
So they say, right.

Stephanie Layser (35:11)
The thing that is oftentimes missing that like people really understand when they work at publishers, especially high quality publishers, is that like news and information and high quality content takes investment, right? It takes investment. It takes energy. It takes time. It takes all these different things that once

You commod– and listen, maybe the programmatic ecosystem commoditizes that content because matching audiences rather than matching contextual signals or contextual value. Fine, right? But then when you on top of that take a end decisioning system, in which you make those two things equal and you take the control out of the hands of

the high quality content provider so that they no longer have the option of prioritizing their own sales motions and their own direct sales motions. That is inherently, that is something that you've done to the way that publishers make money, right? You've made it so that they no longer have control. And that was my biggest, you know this control and transparency and ability to innovate.

That is what drives me every single day in everything that I do. And something that that GAM really took the hands of, like really took from us.

Brett House (36:35)
And

Rio Longacre (36:40)
it's interesting to you mentioned revenue, right? So I think that one thing that's lost in lot of people, this is not just an esoteric discussion about some random like cooking.com being demonetized. This is like affecting all of our major news publishers, right? Their ability as we switch from traditional revenue and that's slowly going down, slowly dying and eventually it'll be zero, but might not be for 50 years, but I think a little less than that. But at some point it does, but digital has been growing, right? So if...

Stephanie Layser (36:50)
out.

Rio Longacre (37:04)
If entities are siphoning off a good portion of that and rigging the game, right? So CPMs are lower than they should be with using these kind of tactics. I mean, it impacts these news organizations that we trust to provide accurate information, right? So think this is an important discussion. I think that's lost a lot of times.

Stephanie Layser (37:06)
Thank you.

Thank you.

to make this more sustainable.

Wall Street Journal resisted enhanced dynamic allocation for a long time. They were like one of the last publishers to fall on it because they knew that it would make it harder for them to sell directly and that is where revenue is made. I listen to publishers every single day talk about, well,

what's your split between direct and programmatic? And they say, ⁓ it's like, it's the most of our inventory goes programmatic, but largely by far and away, revenue is direct, right? That conversation happens to us. Correct. Now the exciting part for me is this idea that maybe generative AI can help with the ability to sell direct at scale in a way that

Brett House (38:00)
Yeah, it's like the 80-20 or the 90-10 rule, yeah.

Stephanie Layser (38:15)
⁓ Maybe in a few years, we can start to regain some of the revenue that was lost and some of the control that was lost in the way that things existed.

Rio Longacre (38:24)
And it's interesting, I mean, direct sold, you know, CPMs are higher. You're able to kind of control it, whether you're selling through a PMP or for programmatic guarantees, still programmatic or even some direct sold stuff, right? So it's like, this is one thing I guess they would understand, like publishers, their whole business for decades was selling advertising, In a traditional way, classified, space ads, you name it, right? And then suddenly it switches to digital. It all goes programmatic and every pub I talk to, the fastest growing sector of

Stephanie Layser (38:33)
Yeah.

Rio Longacre (38:52)
of types of deals they're selling are direct sold. So why did that happen? Like, did like, why, why did they avoid that for so many years? I mean, I think seems like they're discovering it, rediscovering it now and they're excited about it.

Stephanie Layser (39:02)
You know, ⁓ programmatic is about pipes, right? It's about like automation. How you use those and how you decide whether you use the open exchange or whether you use

private deals or whether you use programmatic guaranteed should be in the hands of the publisher, right? And I would say that the excitement comes from probably this ability to know that you can automate more of your workflow or automate more of your operations while still being able to maintain the prices that you need to continue to create high quality content.

Yeah.

Brett House (39:47)
Yeah, maintain your margins, right? Tight

margins, it's a people-driven business, yeah.

Stephanie Layser (39:52)
Yeah.

Rio Longacre (39:52)
Because I talked to Joe Root from Permutive a

couple of weeks ago, and he was just showing me some stats that are amazing, like how low CPMs are for many big pubs. I mean, it's under $1 a lot of times. And open exchange, some of them when you factor in all the other costs they have, they're actually losing money, like, just sounds, I mean, it's like it is the race to the bottom, right? I I get it. You have Remna, you look at like.

linear, right? I mean, they would sell a lot through up-fronts and then they'd have the scatter market for whatever remnant inventory is left over. It seems like it's almost the reverse for digital, right? Where they're the bulk through programmatic and they're selling the remnant through, you through direct sold deals. It's interesting.

Stephanie Layser (40:22)
you need to.

Well, so it's like, it's interesting, you know, I came from News Corp and I spent a lot of time in the display ecosystem and thinking about web publishing, right? And now in my role at AWS, I spend a lot more time with CTV publishers and folks who are moving from linear to digital, right? And that same... that same...

The same thing is happening, I'm watching it. I'm basically watching what had happened to display and the movement, print is going away, newspapers were going away, that was where they were driving most of their revenue. Now they have to concentrate on digital and CTV publishers, same thing, which is like lion's share of the money was coming in from linear, now they're investing in these streaming platforms and they're trying to grow these streaming platforms.

Where they are different. And I'm very proud of a lot of these streaming TV companies because of this, is they acknowledge they, you know, they're not blind. And the overlap between people who've went between just, you know, web publishing and ⁓ CTV publishing is, is fairly large, those two digital mediums. And you know that a lot of them, and I've heard this like out, out of their mouth is like, don't want to see what happened in display and what happened in web

to happen to us, right? And so they're taking more control of their ad decisioning. They're building their own ad platforms, they're building their own ad servers, they are building their own customer data lakes, they are picking the pieces of infrastructure that are most important for them to have and for them to control, and they are resisting commoditization from third parties, and

they're locking their data up in ways that they're protecting it in a way that is a lesson that had been learned from web, right? And so, I don't think that this is, I don't think that web doesn't have a chance of coming back, right? I do think they have a chance of coming back, especially in light of winds, like last Thursday, last Thursdays, or last week's. ⁓

I just, I'm really, the control of the programmatic pipes in streaming TV and the thoughtfulness that they're putting forward in making sure that they can maintain control really gives a lot of hope that programmatic can continue to grow, but can continue to grow and maintain CPMs from a direct perspective for those companies.

Brett House (43:06)
Yeah, one thing I'm thinking about when

Rio Longacre (43:06)
So you think CTV will be

Stephanie Layser (43:08)
Yes, CTV will absolutely be different.

Brett House (43:11)
Yeah. So when you say control, I kept thinking as you were talking about, there's control of the pipes and the monetization, but it has these downstream impacts on publishers in terms of control of the content that they produce. Like what happened in the news industry is because of keyword blacklisting, because of a lot that was being done to...

prevent advertisers from being aligned to what they thought was ⁓ brand unsafe news content, right? They started to drive more traffic to lifestyle content, right? It actually changed their content development cycles because everybody was so afraid of news and then it was sort of built into the pipes, right? That now we've got these keyword lists, Lou Paskalis talks about this all the time, that are just stagnant

aren't being optimized over time, and you're blocking out legitimate news content with legitimate audiences from advertising revenues, which has caused a huge loss, right? You're from News Corp, I you've seen a lot of this, right? So it's changed their content production approach on the web. And so we get a lot of crappy content that's all meant to really drive ad impressions, right?

Stephanie Layser (44:21)
I would argue most premium news publishers, don't modify. They're not modifying their content strategy whatsoever for monetization. There is like, especially at big high quality news publications, like there is pretty much a wall between the two of them. we, yeah, I mean, you can't really, you gotta,

Brett House (44:35)
Yeah.

Rio Longacre (44:45)
It probably should be,

Stephanie Layser (44:50)
You gotta, what is it? You gotta print, you gotta have the news that's fit to print, right? You have to write the things that are important for consumers. The news industry is, ⁓ should not always just be what people wanna read, it's what also people wanna know, or should know, what people should know.

Rio Longacre (45:11)
Yeah, but the thing is what's like, I read recently, think DV and IAS are, there's between 10 and 30% right of legitimate news stories are being blocked, right? Like, which is kind of outrageous. It's like, okay, well, you know, allow people to advertise on meta next to who knows what, like garbage, right? But God forbid you go next to a news story of an earthquake because like someone died in the article, right? It's crazy to me that, and like, it doesn't seem fair, right? And I talk to publishers, Steph and like they say,

Stephanie Layser (45:21)
Yeah.

Rio Longacre (45:39)
Oh, we contact the agency, we try to get the brand, the brand says all the eight, we require brand safety. It's baked into the media plan. It's coming out of your budget. It's coming out of the advertiser budget. Advertisers want it non-negotiable too bad. I mean, so it doesn't seem fair, does it?

Stephanie Layser (45:55)
So no, I mean, when I think about brand safety, there's like a few different things that I oftentimes think about. One is that oftentimes advertisers look at user generated content and content created by ⁓ journalistic entities with the same.

viewpoint in terms of brand safety and that is not, it's not the same, right? I think you don't really respect your consumer if you think that running your ad in front of a piece of content that was put up on YouTube from a terrorist organization is the same as a well-written, well-researched, investigated journalistic piece.

Brett House (46:48)
investigative journalist piece.

Stephanie Layser (46:52)
on a terrorist organization that runs in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. I think that is... And the keyword blocking will block both. Right, absolutely. I am so excited by the advancements in LLMs and the advancements in AI to be able to do brand suitability much, much, much better than it has been before.

Brett House (46:57)
Yeah. And the keyword blocking could block both of those.

Yeah.

Well, that brings us to, so you don't

think the DVs and the IASs have the arguably legacy technology to do this work, right? And the analytics, I Kristoff put off that analytics report that, know, Mark Zagorski responded to, know, they've, yeah, IAS has responded. They all have statements on their website about basically suggesting that they, you know, with the CSAM content that they're just not catching.

Rio Longacre (47:34)
And now they're suing him, right? That's the way out.

Brett House (47:47)
Right, end.

Rio Longacre (47:47)
Or they're claiming these brands are

paying for these clicks, I mean, these views, these impressions. Maybe DV's not charging them for them, but I mean, they're still paying someone for them, right? I mean, unless they're getting that information and going back to like Google and saying like, we don't want to pay for this, but you'd have to negotiate that within the buy. I don't understand. What do you think?

Stephanie Layser (47:52)
That's it.

Thank

Thank

When you sell a brand safety and brand suitability tool, you become liable for what happens to advertisers ads, right? And it's a lot of responsibility.

Brett House (48:24)
lot of responsibility.

Stephanie Layser (48:29)
You have to do it well. And you have to continue to innovate in this area, whether it is financially, like whether it is financially important or not, right? Whether you have a good place in the market or not, you have to continue to innovate in this area. I do not believe that the brand safety companies, like this might be the push they need, right?

Publishers have been talking about this, complaining about this, yelling about this for a very long time. And you know what pushes people the most? I mean, going back to like what we were talking about, no innovation in ad, yeah, no innovation in ad serving, no innovation, right? No, what actually pushes is competition, right? Emerging threats, competition, right? So like, we start to talk about like, brands have spent a long time.

Rio Longacre (49:07)
lawsuits.

Brett House (49:15)
emerging threats and we know who we know where you're going with this, right?

Rio Longacre (49:18)
Yeah, I like that.

Stephanie Layser (49:27)
claiming that they cared about high quality journalism, claiming that they cared about news. And now it looks like new players are emerging that are hopefully, we'll see, like I can't predict the future, that are hopefully going to be better in terms of brand suitability. And I believe that that gives the legacy companies a chance to continue to innovate in this area.

Brett House (49:52)
So think Brian

O'Kelley is going to save the day? Is that what you're suggesting? With Scope3?

Stephanie Layser (49:55)
I mean, doesn't Brian

O'Kelley always save the day?

Brett House (49:59)
Yeah, didn't he invent programmatic advertising? ⁓ Yeah, no, because that was a big pivot for them.

Rio Longacre (50:00)
Get that man a cape.

Stephanie Layser (50:04)
Bye.

Rio Longacre (50:04)
Well, but I think it also, gets,

but I think it gets like,

Stephanie Layser (50:08)
No, I mean, I

love it. I love it. I mean, I love this pivot. I love this. You should have seen me when all like the news dropped. What was this like two, three weeks ago or whatever? All the news dropped about the new stuff that's Scope3 because like, you know, yes, I believe sustainability is very important. I understand why it's needed in our ecosystem, right? All of those things. But I'm like, at some point, there's gonna be something that's real ad techy that Brian's gonna come out with, right?

And so then when I started reading the announcements, and I kind of got my hands around them, I was like, this is cool. These things all fit in with kind of the story. These things are cool. I'm excited to see what it nets out. I love innovation in ad tech. I've always loved innovation in ad tech. I think that's part of the reason I'm so ⁓ obsessed with like trying to make sure publishers have it, trying to make sure ad tech has it, trying to make sure data is democratized, all that kind of stuff like that.

And so I think that this is the push that the industry needs. I think when people continue to innovate, it moves all the companies along, it moves everybody in the right direction. let's see where it goes man.

Rio Longacre (51:14)
Yeah, maybe it actually changes the nature of of like brand safety, right? It's almost like.

Stephanie Layser (51:17)
Yeah, I

would love that. We've been talking about it. Like, publishers have been talking about it for years and, hey, we need help. need to... Man, if something better comes out, like, it could be better for everybody, right?

Brett House (51:29)
Yeah. Well,

Rio Longacre (51:29)
because it's almost

Brett House (51:30)
like, you keep seeing these things happen and they're like, what is going on here? Right?

Rio Longacre (51:34)
Well, it's almost like brand

Stephanie Layser (51:34)
You hear that?

Rio Longacre (51:35)
plausible deniability, right? Like we put this thing in, we paid for it. So like we can point our finger to someone else if it goes wrong, right? It's kind of what it is right now. So maybe it actually changes,

Brett House (51:39)
Yeah.

Stephanie Layser (51:41)
Thank

Brett House (51:43)
Yeah, it's

like a risk avoidance in a, in a sort of, yeah, it is plausible deniability.

Stephanie Layser (51:49)
Well, people use ⁓ safety and compliance systems all the time, right? In all different kinds of ways, right? In advertising and whatever. So, it makes sense, they assume a lot of risk. By being the vendors that do brand safety, do brand suitability, they assume a lot of risk in there and they assume a lot of responsibility. ⁓

⁓ I empathize with the fact that like, well, I

I both empathize, but I also am enraged that we've let ourselves monetize content like this, right? And so, it's like you just have to do better. You just have to go and do better because we've all got to be better and we've all got to try to be better, right? So.

Brett House (52:42)
So you've talked a lot about ⁓ AI and AI's ability on the brand safety side of things which will automate certain things and hopefully be better at detecting some of these these bad actors out there. What about its impact on on traffic on referral traffic? So we've seen you know, Rio and I were talking about this ahead of time. There's been a 96 % decrease in referral traffic due to basically direct answers to your questions being provided in Google search or other search vendors, right? Because you're getting the answer versus

Stephanie Layser (53:08)
Yeah.

Brett House (53:10)
being driven to a link where you'll find the answer. It's got a negative side to it in terms of, you know, a lot of publishers, I was at Gannett for a few years, and a lot of publishers rely on that referral traffic. It could be 80 % of their total traffic versus direct through the homepage. So how do you accommodate for that? What do you think about that?

Stephanie Layser (53:31)
The erosion of distribution channels via AI stresses me out. And I do think that...

We need to be thoughtful about how this is going to affect.

the way that information flows. there's like two things that I would say to a publisher that I've been saying for years, but like, and now in this very moment is like incredibly important I heard this from actually the used to report to the chief product officer, her name is Jenny Baird. She's amazing ⁓ at News Corp. And she said, ⁓

publishers need to act like D to C brands, right? They need to think through, right? What their brand positioning is, they need to think through what their, you know, we're not doing scale anymore, guys. We should stop thinking about scale and we should start thinking about quality. The programmatic ecosystem in the open exchange incentivized scale, right? And net...

Rio Longacre (54:46)
scale and automation,

yeah.

Stephanie Layser (54:48)
scale for automation and then clicks and add revenue. Boom, like that's how this happened, right? Now with AI, the content is now more centered again, right? If you're asking for quick answers, AI is probably going to deliver those out, right? the things where that diverges, ⁓ long form, high quality content, right?

a trusted source, a almost ⁓ problem that is nuanced, AI out what answer, right? If you're looking for inspiration or you're looking for more of a better, deeper understanding, publishers are going to get you there. But the content actually very much needs to be unique.

the content needs to be quality and you need to land an opinion of you as a publisher in the mind of a consumer. That's it. And so, you know, I was talking about taking control of your data, taking control of your ad decision, taking control of all of those things.

a very important investment for publishers at this moment in time is your customer data, your customer 360 to be able to take control of that brand. And we're often seeing people have their first party data asset that they use for advertising, and then they have their first party data asset that they use for marketing, and they don't share the data between these two SaaS platforms, right? And combining that data,

Brett House (56:20)
No. Taking control of your brand.

Stephanie Layser (56:41)
and allowing it to help drive advertiser outcomes and allowing it to help drive engagement on your platforms, it makes it more powerful. So democratizing that access around your organization is incredibly important at this moment. If we're going to be D2C brands, which publishers need to be, where you are selling your content, essentially, and you are selling attention, the attention for what you create.

we need to be able to understand, personalize, not only the product experience, but the monetization experience. And so these two things are hand in hand are going to be incredibly important for the future.

Brett House (57:24)
I

I wonder with editorial content if there's some research that's been done around sort generational sort of...

interaction, engagement with editorial content versus CTV. And the reason why I'm making that distinction is that I think most people, especially younger generations, don't do a whole lot of reading, see it in my own 15 and 17 year olds. There's just not, there's a lot of video. They don't read, people don't read anymore. And I wonder on the editorial side, if you're the Wall Street Journal, yeah, certainly Rio and I probably have the app, all of us probably have the app. So we are kind of brand loyalists with certain publishers that produce really solid content that we like, right? Versus going through a Google News

Stephanie Layser (57:46)
Yeah.

Brett House (58:02)
or a Facebook news feed or an AI answer, right? CTV, I think, relatively safe from a content perspective because I think people want to, they know certain television shows are on certain platforms, so they're going to subscribe to that, whether they are old enough to do it or not. But do you think there's some sort of generational divide in terms of younger folks, do they really care?

Are they really just happy enough with getting the answers that they're looking for? They don't really care if it's the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, whoever the publisher is. So that D to C relationship sort of breaks down, which could create a big problem going forward. That's my estimation, right? That the Gen Z just may not really adopt that brand ⁓ affability for these big editorial-oriented pubs and news pubs.

Stephanie Layser (58:41)
⁓

I don't know if that's always true, right? So I think it depends. I have, there's studies and then there's anecdotal evidence, right? So like, so anecdotal. Yeah, so I mean, think studies do show that ⁓ the younger generation Gen Z provides, like prefers user generated content, right? It's hard to say though.

Brett House (59:06)
Yeah, this was totally anecdotal, so...

Stephanie Layser (59:23)
how much of that is age and how you spend your time and how much of that is like an actual real thing to stay, right? Because, know, I, at one point when I was younger, I spent a lot more time looking at YouTube or looking at, man, what was that like six second, the Vines, looking at Vines, like all that kind of stuff. but also, ⁓

Brett House (59:31)
Yeah.

vines,  now it's TikTok. TikTok's like the new vines in a

Rio Longacre (59:44)
Bye. Yeah.

Brett House (59:50)
You kind

of phased out of that.

Stephanie Layser (59:51)
I kind of phased out of that and I also phased out of it in a time period where I had to really prioritize my time and the content that I watched and prioritized. so I started to be like, I want a story. I want something that either helps my brain turn off. I also started to feel like my brain was melting from social media I'm seeing like, also, yeah. I read The Anxious Generation.

Brett House (1:00:12)
I wish my 18 year old would feel that. I'm not sure he's fully self aware of the fact that his brain is built.

Stephanie Layser (1:00:20)
recently. Yeah, I don't know if like, it's a huge I have I have small children. Oh it scares the crap. Yeah. And but I also see it in. I have two small children and there's a teenager who lives down the hall. She did like just entered college and her and her friends come and help me with the kids. And so I meet a lot of her her friends and we I love having conversations with them about about

Rio Longacre (1:00:22)
That's a good one.

scares the crap out of you when you read it as a parent.

Stephanie Layser (1:00:49)
media consumption, about what they believe, about what they think, like all that kind of stuff like that. And they're very thoughtful and they actually have really good media literacy skills and also very good skills. And maybe this is just another anecdotal evidence, right? They also have really good skills in like being able to, what they trust and what they don't trust on social media, right?

And maybe they're just in that sweet spot of coming out of teenage hood and going into college and having that kind of open their mind and learning more and interacting with more and all that kind of stuff like that. you know, I choose to look at positives, right? So, you know, I read The Anxious Generation and I'm like, I'm never letting my children look at social media ever, ever, ever, ever. But I also, yeah, like just like I did, know, sending them through.

Brett House (1:01:40)
Yeah, yeah.

Rio Longacre (1:01:42)
When you're sending them to the mall by themselves, they can run around and heal. Yeah.

Brett House (1:01:47)
So there's a positive

future to editorial investigative journalism.

Stephanie Layser (1:01:49)
Yeah,

I don't know. I do believe that ⁓ people expect, they don't just expect like an editorial stance. They do expect a person, right? They like the personal, like the influencer thing kind of bleeds over a little bit into the editorial publications. So there almost becomes this like, ⁓

if you are under this umbrella of editorial, but you are a person, right? I feel like Sarah Fischer has hit this really well. She's at Axios, right? Yeah, it's like you're the person, right, who's part of this brand. So the brand gives you a stance and a platform, but you are ultimately the brand. I think more of that is happening and going to continue to happen.

Brett House (1:02:34)
platform.

Yeah, that's a good

Rio Longacre (1:02:42)
I can see that.

Brett House (1:02:43)
point. Yeah, because it really does connect to the social media influencer concept, Where there is a direct connective tissue between, you know, read Paul Krugman and you, ⁓ you know, you're whatever, yeah, Jake Paul, right? Yeah.

Stephanie Layser (1:02:49)
Mm-hmm.

Rio Longacre (1:02:58)
The people are the brands too, right? mean, whether

it's on social or wherever they happen to go, right? It's interesting, Stephanie, too. You mentioned before about the first party data the pubs have, which is a huge advantage. I think they haven't really unlocked as much as they probably could. And a lot of times we're talking to pubs, you're looking, OK, what data do you have? What measurement do you have? Because you have to have that. mean, advertisers are going to ask for it, right? And then I think the third component that often gets overlooked is just ad sales, right?

Stephanie Layser (1:03:08)
speaking.

Rio Longacre (1:03:27)
How important do you think that is? what do pub, I mean, is that a place a pub should be investing in? like comments on that.

Stephanie Layser (1:03:34)
Yes, so, you know, part of being able to maintain your pricing of your inventory is having direct ad sales, right? And part of being able to scale that direct ad sales is being able to automate more of those processes internally so that you can take yourself from pitch all the way to pay and make it as seamless and easy as possible for you internally and fast, right?

so that this becomes a white glove service, right? One of the things that the platforms have done really well is made everything kind of self-serve, made everything really, really easy, but make this white glove service attached to speed, driving outcomes, right? Being able to do all the things that you want to do, but being able to do them faster, right? And have... Yeah, no.

Brett House (1:04:26)
Yeah, it's sort of like marrying the two worlds, right? It's like we're selling our audience, we're selling our content,

we're selling all of this editorial sort of horsepower, content horsepower, but we're also being able to do this really quickly just like the changes do and the DSPs do and the SSPs do.

Stephanie Layser (1:04:41)
Yeah,

correct. mean, so I'll give you tactically like something like that is I for a very long time, know, media planning, right, was very campaign planning was very manual, right? You had to take the Excel spreadsheet, you had to read the Excel spreadsheet, you had to match it with your forecasting, you had to match it with all of those different pieces, right? Yeah, right, exactly. Now, we're seeing more of that workflow go like be very agentic, right?

Rio Longacre (1:05:01)
which is why it was rarely updated.

Stephanie Layser (1:05:11)
That's exciting for me. This idea of being able to take the direct sales process and make it faster and make it driven by generative AI and making you be able to service 10 times more customers, right? Because there's often totally, and then you can start getting into the small to medium sized businesses. Then you can start getting into it. Like there's all different kinds of.

Brett House (1:05:27)
Yep, because the setup and administration is so much faster, right?

Stephanie Layser (1:05:38)
vision of like one to one that brands can now have with publishers if we automate more of that workflow. We start to...

Brett House (1:05:46)
Yep.

And they can focus on what matters, right? With news content. then, you know, I've talked to Lou Paskalis a ton about this is just the audience argument behind, like investigative journalism is just incredibly compelling, but there's all these other blockers, right? But it's like, let the ad sales team focus on that. And everything else is relatively quick and automated and easy to set up so that they can scale.

Stephanie Layser (1:06:00)
Yes.

Yep.

Yep. So they can scale. The ad sales process needs to be as fast and as quick and as easy as possible if you want to take more of those advertising dollars direct.

Rio Longacre (1:06:21)
I think a lot of that's gonna require re-platforming, Cause you can't have linear here, digital here, CT, like everything, like, cause I've seen the process when, like you just to get a quote for an advertiser about, like, let me find out. They're hitting several systems. It's super manual. I mean, it's, it's gotta be, I mean, I think the future will be easier, hopefully, right?

Stephanie Layser (1:06:33)
So I'll just go. ⁓

So part of that is that a lot of the data, the operational data that drives your business is very much locked in platforms. It's locked in platforms, right? And being able to architect that in a way where it moves very seamlessly and it moves very easily can be tricky, right? And being able to make sure all of the right people around your organization have access to that data and know and understand it, that is also incredibly tricky.

You know, we've done a really good job at AWS being able to help our customers make sense of that data, right? Being able to have data assets that we can translate from something that ⁓ data scientists use to something that business users can use. And the growth of generative AI for us is so exciting in so many different ways because

Brett House (1:07:27)
Yeah.

Stephanie Layser (1:07:36)
these processes can like, we can really put in the hands of an ad operations person, a tool that can make them do things so much faster. And I mean, I see it in my day to day work. Like, are you guys adopting any kind of generative AI workflows? Are there things that you're doing regularly with it that are changing the way that you work?

Brett House (1:07:55)
Yeah, you don't have to be so reliant on sort of static taxonomies. Brian O'Kelley's written about that, about the death of taxonomies, because you can mine this data without being a SQL query expert through generative AI, through those agents. It's unstructured data, yeah.

Stephanie Layser (1:08:00)
Yeah?

Yeah.

Rio Longacre (1:08:14)
Even like what I've noticed is for sales,

having proposals written immediately, you have the conversation, you're talking about it. It's incredible, right?

Brett House (1:08:18)
yeah. Proposals with insights

Stephanie Layser (1:08:18)
Guys,

like blowing my mind. Like we have this very cool tool that does like intelligent document processing. And we were like, you can just like dump any unstructured requests for like RFP into it, right? And if you have it connected to all of your data, you can literally just create a media plan almost like almost. Yes.

Brett House (1:08:21)
that are automatically injected. Yep.

Yeah, it's like audience alignment, content alignment,

even bespoke sort of setups for a specific client for seasonal purposes or otherwise. All that stuff becomes a lot more instant. you know, when I was at USA / Gannett, we used to, we had a whole team that was working in the backend, building this stuff out manually, right? And then developing packages that you would then bring to market and all that stuff just took tons of manpower. And...

Stephanie Layser (1:08:51)
guys.

like

Tons of manpower, tons of time, you end up saying no to campaigns because it's so manual for you to be able to do this kind of stuff. I'm telling you, the direct ad sales process is going to be a lot more seamless, it's going to be a lot easier. And the companies that invest in making that process faster and easier for their teams are the ones who are going to generate more revenue faster.

Brett House (1:09:23)
you

This is, I think that is a good conclusion. think we've come full circle. That is the rise of the publisher and the replatforming, which you just spoke to, Ria.

Rio Longacre (1:09:41)
I guess one final thought, what would be your advice to publishers, like things to work on, things to look at? I if you could just summarize it maybe, like, you know, before we go, I'd love to hear kind of, or is there anything we didn't cover, Stephanie, that you thought we missed?

Stephanie Layser (1:09:42)
what?

Yeah.

Yeah, so I think like to recap some of the stuff that like I had mentioned, but I think is important to understand is like, start thinking about yourself as a like as a DTC company, who are you? What are you? How do you interact with your consumers? ⁓ Two making sure that you are unifying your customer data across all of your different business silos, so that you can use that.

customer data to activate, like the best publishers are doing this right now, using it to activate for martech use cases to acquire new users and keep them engaged, but also using it for your audience data for selling advertising. Another is being able to use your advertising transaction data like that comes out of your ad server. So you can say this is a high value user or a low value user in advertising, balancing it against your subscription data. So you can also personalize the monetization experience. And ⁓ then automate that workflow, right? What are you doing that's manual? Like spend every single week, every single day, all of management should be talking, what are we doing that's taking too much time? What are we doing that we can make faster using things like generative AI? And just like really circling your product and your product experiences around data, and making decisions that are best for the consumers and considering your content as very like multimodal, like, you know, meeting your consumer where they are.

Brett House (1:11:28)
Drum roll, that was awesome. Thank you, Stephanie.

Stephanie Layser (1:11:28)
Cool. That's it guys. That's all I got for you.

Rio Longacre (1:11:30)
Yeah, it's fantastic.

Stephanie, thank you for coming on. It's great to have you here and this is our first and I it'll be a great episode and I think it's gonna draw a lot of interest. always a pleasure. And I guess I'll probably...

Stephanie Layser (1:11:40)
If it doesn't, you can blame me, I'm sorry.

Brett House (1:11:42)
Yeah, before you