I've Tried Everything But AdTech Therapy

0:12Jana Meron: Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you. Today's episode is sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous advertising. Its enterprise AI solution transforms campaign briefs into strategies and media plans that integrate directly into omnichannel activation. You can learn more at basis.com.

0:50Scott Messer: It's a crazy time for the open web. Between generative AI search limiting referral traffic and increase pressure on media owners to prove their quality, it's enough to send any digital publisher running to the therapist's couch. But boy, do we have the right guests for this moment. Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks. I'm Anthony Vargas, Managing Editor for Ad Exchanger, filling in for our usual host, Alison Schiff. And I'm joined today by Jana Marin and Scott Messer of Ad Tech Therapy. Thanks to you both for joining us.

1:19Jana Meron: Thanks for having us, Anthony.

1:21Scott Messer: Great to see you, Anthony. both of our guests today spent at least a decade working in publisher monetization before launching their own consultancies and eventually teaming up for this joint venture and they also answer the publishing community's most pressing questions on their ad tech therapy podcast which you can find on your podcasting platform choice in this episode we're going to be diving into the issues ailing the publisher community and it just so happens this is the 500th episode of Ad Exchanger Talks. Hey! Right? And since the ad industry prides itself on keeping the open web open for business, I thought what better topic to focus on than publisher monetization.

2:00But before we dig in, I have to tease Programmatic I.O.

2:04Scott Messer: New York taking place later this month on September 28th and 29th. Media and advertising thought leaders will be gathering at the Marriott Marquis in New York City to discuss the biggest growth opportunities in the industry today, the latest on agentic ai and the ever-evolving state of the open web make sure to register if you haven't already and a reminder our podcast listeners can use the code pod 10 that's pod 10 for a nice discount now jen and scott let's get to it so uh we usually like to start ad exchanger talks off with a fun question or by discussing a little known fact about our guests and scott this is something i learned about you recently um you told me that uh you and your wife for one time frequent attendees of Burning Man.

2:48Scott Messer: So I have to ask, what is it about the burner lifestyle that appeals to you and what lessons can the ad tech industry learn from Burning Man? Great question. And it's actually Burning Man week right now. Everyone is out in the desert. I am not now that I have two small children in my house, but we are big fans of it. The lesson that I take from it is participation and creativity. just consuming art is not enough, but to make it and to give it away is really special. And so I think that's sort of what drives part of my philosophy of sharing information and tips and helping people and trying to build things that are beautiful, like publisher websites and communities, is that I want to participate in this world and I want to be an active participant.

3:40Scott Messer: So that's my little takeaway from there. I certainly have a lot more stories if you want to find me somewhere else. Yeah, I'm sure. Jenna, have you ever attended Burning Man? I have not. Yeah. Would you ever consider going?

3:58Jana Meron: Maybe when I was younger, but I did spend a like solid year every time I was on break from college following the dead. Yeah, excellent. So little known. Look, I even surprised Scott.

4:19Scott Messer: Yeah, you see, this is such a good way to, like, you know, learn, learn new things about people in the industry that we have conversations with all the time. But, you know, I never would have guessed that. What are some takeaways from following the dead around that you think might be applicable to the ad tech industry? it?

4:37Jana Meron: Being open, right? And being willing to be flexible, or Scott and I like to say, being comfortable being uncomfortable. And, you know, embracing the moment, right? Like, right now, it's a pretty stressful moment. But instead of freaking out about it, this is our opportunity to find solutions and you know following the dead you know it's it's an open

5:03Scott Messer: environment where you can explore various things to say the least so yeah um you know now that we've kind of talked about you know your guys uh past uh you know festival and uh and uh concert endeavors um let's dig in on what you're doing uh recently um so tell us a little bit about uh you know launching this joint podcast together, you know, the EdTech therapy mission, and also just, you know, whatever else you guys are up to. So, Jenna, let's start with you.

5:35Jana Meron: So Scott and I started doing this together several years ago, almost as a, hey, you want to be accountability partners? And then we started talking about what it was like, not necessarily the details, but what it felt like. And I, you know, in passing was like, it's sort of like ad tech therapy. And we were like, that's it. And now we've been talking about this podcast for three years, at least. So, you know, we finally got it done. But from that perspective, we are able to work very closely together, both on projects, but also separately. And, And we have similar and sometimes competing views on things.

6:21Jana Meron: So it makes for a really interesting chemistry between the two of us.

6:27Scott Messer: Yeah, Scott, what would you add there? It's a great journey. I think the mission of Ad Tech Therapy to help and to heal for publishers and those in ad operations and revenue is incredibly important because it is a tough life out there. just in ad ops alone and then publishing itself is undergoing its own world of of pain at the moment so we like to be a place to shed some light and some help on that and we're having a lot of fun doing it i think we're about 15 episodes in now and we've got a lot ahead of us there's always there's always problems in ad tech land i'll tell you that i'd say the other thing is that

7:09Jana Meron: we also want to make sure people don't feel alone. Every time I get on the phone with a customer, they're like, you won't believe it. And I'm like, bet you I will. And I can tell you five other people who've said the same thing. And that's part of the therapy. It's like, you're not alone. We're here together. And that's the beauty of the ad tech community is that we are really all in it together.

7:33Scott Messer: Yeah, I love that. And yeah, I mean, you know, that also kind of speaks to like, what we kind of teed up the podcast talking about, like the importance of community and being involved in the industry. And yeah, to shift to, I guess, another fun topic, antitrust enforcement. So the news broke earlier today, as we're recording this episode, that Google will not be forced to divest any part of its ad business, despite being found by the federal government to be operating a monopoly in the SSP and ad server markets. So what's your immediate reaction to those news and the implications for publishers?

8:12Scott Messer: Scott, why don't you start on this one?

8:17Scott Messer: This is sort of a big nothing that we thought was coming. If you were hopeful that there would be an entire restructuring of ad tech, well, today we found out that there won't be one. and ultimately though I just don't think there's going to be a lot of change even if all the behavioral remedies are adopted Google still has its way to operate and they still control the the demand ultimately and the publishers go where the demand flows like the lock-in doesn't matter as much as it used to the structural elements are there and nobody's there to break up the structure at the moment. So not much changes.

8:59Scott Messer: And Jenna, what would you say on that topic?

9:04Jana Meron: I agree. I think that there is the potential at some point for there to be some unification in the stack in some way. But as Scott and I were talking about it, he pointed out very rightly so that at any given time, Google can pull the Google Display Network and Google AdWords, at which point AdX is really small. And so, you know, and they always have that power. Additionally, this is all for open web display. Yeah. So it doesn't include all of your deals. It doesn't include video. It doesn't include, I mean, so it just, it's little. It feels little.

9:45Scott Messer: So, yeah, I guess the potential for the game changer wasn't ever really there, I suppose. And now it definitively is not. So if anybody was hoping to be saved by the courts, the relief isn't coming necessarily, right? But this is not a big deal. Yeah. I don't think. And Google has a lot of ways that they can operate within the remedies or within the behavioral changes that doesn't materially change their business. And remember, this is still like a small part of the Google business. And they can also use it to say, hey, you said we weren't allowed to do something, so we've moved our business elsewhere.

10:26Scott Messer: I think you can see this coming with Agentic and BuyerDirect. You could also imagine where Google really just starts to ignore some of this business and they let everybody else fight over it because it's not that important anymore.

10:44Jana Meron: mm-hmm yeah i think your point there about buyer direct and agentic you know it's almost like and we talked about this the other day on our podcast like it's a separate stack that isn't doesn't replace the existing it sits alongside the existing which just makes it even more complicated this. And here we go making the same mistakes over and over again. Right.

11:12Scott Messer: So if the point was to increase competition across the industry in the market, I think there might be there might be some flourishes of that. And certainly vendors and middlemen will have their opportunity to bring their new opportunities that are unlocked with whatever behavioral changes come. If the point of this was to help publishers make more money, which I don't think it was. I don't think this moves the needle materially for publishers because the structural elements are still there. Google may even like pick up their ball and go home and it may make less money for publishers, but I don't think that's because of the remedies.

11:51Scott Messer: I think that's just the reality of where we've always been. And so publishers aren't better off or they aren't worse off from this. Maybe now we'll have the data to show us like when we're getting sideways by Google, but that doesn't make you more money just because you know. Right.

12:11Jana Meron: I think that the power of knowing is very important. And that data being available to use in a way that people can read it is very important. Because I do remember the times when we went to get the log files and they weren't readable. So that is very important. The question is, do the publishers know what to do when once they've got them?

12:36Scott Messer: Yeah. Right.

12:38Jana Meron: Where is the power in those log files? And if you aren't going to do anything with it, it doesn't matter that you can now have them for free.

12:47Scott Messer: And yeah, you know, speaking of, I guess, like alternate routes that Google is pursuing and I guess distractions from the ad tech business or maybe not distractions, but more promising, I guess, avenues. One of the biggest publisher facing stories over the past year has been the impacts publishers are seeing from the rise of generative AI search and products like Google's AI overviews and AI mode. What are you guys hearing from the publisher community about how AI is impacting their business? Just how much doom and gloom is out there right now? Well, first let's separate like pieces of AI, right?

13:24Scott Messer: Like AI, when you talk about the doom and gloom, you're talking about AI overviews, crawlers, the replacements of LLMs and sort of the replacement of traffic. But there are other places which we'll talk about where it is helping them. So from the doom and gloom side, it's bad, right? I don't think any publisher has said like, oh man, my traffic is way up right now. And I am super benefiting from this. I think at best you're hearing like, oh, these checks that we got were nice. And you're hearing a lot of people who said we didn't get any checks from the LLNs. And then traffic is just drying up and it's slowly crumbling the businesses.

14:06Scott Messer: but what's critical for those businesses the choice that you make about what your future is if you don't turn the ship and you don't make a decision you're going down with the ship but this is a good time to figure out a new plan and we're seeing new publishers pop up jenna you've seen a bunch coming and what are you seeing yeah so i'm right now working with a bunch

14:31Jana Meron: of newsletter first publishers where they are building their communities and they're almost starting from a different place than where we started from 30 years ago. And that place is, I'm building community, I'm building engagement, I'm building my brand, and then I'm going to bring these people together. And the last thing that they're building is the website. They're building the surfaces where they know their readers, listeners, watchers are, and then they're driving them, they're finding ways to driving them. And it's a really great opportunity for them to build the business so that you can get to the revenue per user session or revenue per visit, whatever the metric North Star metric is.

15:19Jana Meron: It'll be a lot easier for these publishers because you're starting from scratch, right? And you have the benefit of the expertise of the past several years to say, this is really how we can be most efficient and understand the best ways to monetize our audiences. But it isn't necessarily about the website. It's about the community and the engagement. And that is 10 times more important. And if you go back to when we were talking about the death of the cookie 10 years ago, it was all about getting to understand and know your audience. The thing that I have been saying about to publishers for the last, I guess, almost 15 years is like, it's about your audience.

16:04Jana Meron: It's about really getting to know what they're interested in, what they want to read about, what they want to watch. And then the ads become beneficial as part of the experience instead of something that takes their way. Yeah.

16:19Scott Messer: And I mean, you know, I love the point about like, you know, publishers are like new publishers are coming into the marketplace. They're looking at those touch points where like they can really, you know, get that deep community engagement and then, you know, turn that, you know, into the maximum benefit for their business. And like related to that, like we're hearing, you know, because we also think about like how can publishers use AI to their benefit? And we're hearing about like new ways that publishers are experimenting with, like, you know, integrating their own chatbot interfaces into their owned and operated properties, particularly like in app, you know, using AI to turn some of their existing content into video or to like repackage like, you know, certain video formats into vertical video for more social media engagement.

17:05Scott Messer: in. You know, we're even seeing like some like AI widgets hit the market that are like promising to help publishers find the perfect place to put ads on their pages that are going to generate the most like, you know, ad revenue or like the most attention from readers. So like what are some like positive publisher facing uses of AI technology that you've heard about or like, you know, maybe like, you know, the top like one or two things that like you would point publishers to that they should really be aware of that their peers are experimenting with when it comes to AI. Well, you just listed a bunch of them, Anthony.

17:41Scott Messer: Sorry to blur the momentum. The key part here is where you don't want to go first. You don't want to be like an AI content factory in a slop factory. So never just say like we're agentically writing articles and we're going to pump out more content. Like that is not the solution that your consumers need. It's not what the industry needs. I'm sure Jounce wouldn't like it very much if that's what you were doing. So it's how do you use these tools to help the humans do their jobs better, which is to create engaging content? One of the companies that I work with, the Arena Group, which recently rebranded to Paradium, announced sort of their AI pivot.

18:25Scott Messer: And it's not just the Allbirds pivot that's here. It's actually rooted in their history of helping creators. If you go all the way back to, say, Media and Maven and Hubpages, the tools that they've built along the way, Tempest, to help creators create content and get it to the community is what this company has been all about. And so now like their two acquisitions that they announced with InfoSentience and Cutter Studios are both about helping creators bring their, well, they're sort of separate. So InfoSentience is really about statistics and data and helping get more information into the articles and also allowing you to go deeper into communities and local reporting, sort of niche sports level reporting.

19:15Scott Messer: And then Cutter Studios, which they're talking about, is bringing in podcasts and videos that live in the social worlds from creators that don't have web presences and cutting up those videos and bringing them into a web format, vertical video being a large part of it, so that they can be monetized across the open web and you can bring that information to them. So it's really neat to see a company like that sort of double down on their creator tools, but it's also part of what's going to help save their business because they're going to run this content across their own sites and probably across other people.

19:53Scott Messer: So it opens up new channels. And those are the kinds of decisions that CEOs need to make about how to save their business. Because doing the same thing over and over again is how we got in this mess in the first place. That's for sure. And we're seeing a lot of these AI enabled companies right now come out and say, like, hook us into your game, hook us into your demand sources, and we will blow your socks off. Jana and I have seen several of these and I wouldn't call them like blowing our socks off, but they're going in the right direction. And so for anyone out there that's building one of these, I really encourage you to get past like, oh, we connected the APIs and now you can see some reporting and get really deep into finding problems, solving problems and making publishers go faster, finding the needle in the haystacks, which is really what an ad ops person's job is.

20:49Scott Messer: When something breaks, you rarely ever know where it is. So speed that part up.

20:56Scott Messer: yeah i think that's a that's a good place to uh take a break uh when we come back we're going to be taking a page from the ad tech therapy podcast and answer a few uh crowdsource questions from its patient portal and there's plenty more to discuss about what's keeping publishers up at night and how they're tackling these challenges stay with us you won't want to miss it

21:23Jana Meron: I'm Sarah Sluis, Editorial Director of Ad Exchanger, and I'm here with Mark McEachran, VP of Product at Basis, which is supporting our podcast this month. Hello, Mark. Hello.

21:34Scott Messer: How are you doing?

21:35Jana Meron: I'm good, especially because we're going to talk about three-letter acronyms, which I think is one of ad tech's favorite things, although this goes beyond just ad tech. So help explain this to our listeners. What is an MCP server and how are advertisers using it?

21:53Scott Messer: I do love a good TLA. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Anthropic built it, open-sourced it in late 2024, and then handed it to the Linux Foundation. It's plumbing that connects the systems to agents. It lets an AI model reach into a piece of software, see what's available, and pull the right lever instead of hand-developing of the spoke integration for every tool that the model touches. And over the past year, Google, Meta, Amazon, and others have rolled out their own ad platform and MCP servers, as have DSPs and SSPs. A buyer can now say, pull my campaign report or build this audience in plain language and have that request land correctly inside whichever platform is listening without building a custom connector for every combination.

22:48Scott Messer: And eventually those instruction sets, they begin to look like standard adapters. Okay.

22:55Jana Meron: So MCPs are taking off like wildfire, I would say, and with good reason because they're very useful. So tell us a little bit more about what advertisers are able to control when platforms have an MCP server.

23:09Scott Messer: So control depends on who built the server. An agent can pull reporting, diagnose a stalled campaign, or explain a CPC spike. But in most cases, a human still has to make the change. Some folks like Meta have enabled agents to create audience, set budget, and launch a campaign all by itself. But where it's furthest along, advertisers can do all that. They can let the agent read performance data, build and activate audiences, adjust the budget, launch campaigns, and even generate creative variations all through natural language. Letting one agent shift budget across platforms on its own is where the industry says it's heading.

23:47Scott Messer: but that's not the standard practice yet. The industry direction is obvious, though. Fewer read-only endpoints, more agents with their hands actually on the wheel. And at that point, governance and guardrails become the real conversation, not the pipes themselves.

24:04Jana Meron: So you're talking about a lot of new ways that people can connect and companies can connect to each other. So does that mean we're going to be solving for media fragmentation?

24:17Scott Messer: Marketers run dozens of platforms to get to all that media. DSPs, walled gardens with the clean rooms, measurements, they're all bolted together with their own quirks and logins. Each of them historically needed their own bespoke API integration, its own authorization, and some team member who knew how it all fit together. MCP doesn't unify the stack, but it has the potential to unify the interface to the stack. One agent could sit on top of all of them. As an example at Basis, we have Compass, our proprietary strategy and planning agent. It has direct integrations with buying platforms, including our own DSP.

24:59Scott Messer: Advertisers use it to upload briefs along with their research, performance history, which is then synthesized into a proposed media mix, audience personas, and creative strategy. initiating an omni-channel planning conversation through one interface.

25:15Jana Meron: Okay, so if I'm thinking about MCP servers as a shorthand, it might help unify my interfaces if I'm a buyer, but the platforms themselves remain fragmented.

25:25Scott Messer: Indeed. There's a lot of room for innovation under the hood. MCP is the unifying layer that is the command and control on top of it.

25:32Jana Meron: Well, thank you, Mark, for helping explain MCP servers. I know I understand them a bit better after these few minutes, And thanks to Basis for supporting our podcast. Thank you.

25:51Scott Messer: All right, we're back. So let's pick it up with some fresh questions from the EdTech Therapy Patient Portal. Our first question comes from Auctioning in Alabama. Amazon's being sued by the FTC, and my boss asked me for a POV, but I don't really understand the complaint. why are they being sued and how does that impact me as a publisher? Excellent question.

26:15Jana Meron: It is a great question. And the reality is as a publisher, it probably doesn't impact you at all. Right. It's basically the same kind of scheme that Google was running that got them into monopoly trouble. If you think about it, you know, years ago when there were two bids and they got first look and last look, that was essentially setting a price. So Amazon is basically being told you're setting a fake price. Scott, you want to chime in?

26:46Scott Messer: Yeah, it's a little bit more like soft floors that publishers used to put in. And then also like, you know, and what that does to an auction, right? So the alleged complaint is that Amazon was running a second price auction, which is good for them. And, you know, it's good for buyers because it removes some of the risk in overpaying and you're already paying Amazon a lot of money. So you bid a dollar and the next one's 50 cents. Your bid comes in at 51 cents, the smallest increment above the last bid. That's classic second price auction. But what Google realized and Amazon apparently has realized is that the buyer never knows if it should have been 51 cents or 52 cents or 55 cents because really they bid a dollar to begin with.

27:33Scott Messer: So what happens if you just slide in another bid at 51 cents and your buyer wins at 52 cents? Well, your buyer paid an extra penny. That doesn't sound like a lot of money, but when your annual revenues are in the billions, that's probably a big chunk. So I think they said advertisers overpaid by, was it 8 billion or 20 billion? but it doesn't affect publishers. This is largely on amazon.com sort of surfaces where they're bidding on sponsored products. And like, there is a, there's a lot of problems with, I think, the way Amazon runs that, that business and the ability for conquesting as a consumer, you just see it, but none of that's illegal or untoward.

28:19Scott Messer: And it's just the program that they run. I don't even know. It depends like where did these other bids come from? right? And in retail media, you're adding in relevancy to all of these things, which is the ability to drive another click and understanding the value of that impression that wants to be served. If nobody's going to click on it, it's really a valueless ad to be shown. So should you show something that is worth less money, but has a higher click-through rate? And how does that affect the auction. So Amazon might have a decent way of explaining their way out of this one, but it's not going to be fun for them.

29:01Yeah.

29:04Scott Messer: From one big tech platform to another, our next one is from Co-Opted in Cooperstown, who wants to know, I looked in GAM the other day and saw a new toggle for the Google Publisher data co-op. What is that? And should we turn it on?

29:19Jana Meron: I did like data co-ops, but I like data co-ops when I got paid for providing some of the data in there. And I don't see anything in this toggle that says I'm going to get paid more. And don't tell me that it's going to show up in my CPM, Scott.

29:35Scott Messer: You know, the CPMs go up. What is a data co-op, Gina? I know.

29:40Jana Meron: A data co-op is where multiple publishers or companies pool their data together to be used. It's basically allowable second-party data across multiple companies.

29:55Scott Messer: And so then they pool all of their data together, and somebody sells it, and when your data gets used, you get paid or compensated for it in some way. it's good to be the publishers who themselves get to use the data publishers themselves might be able to use the data somebody's probably selling it on their behalf right yes for sure

30:17Jana Meron: and then um what's really nice about it is that the publisher can also use that data to in their own targeting at a discount and so it gives them added benefit of you know if somebody has declarative first party uh first party data and i don't but it's in the kit it's in the co-op anonymized etc now i have the benefit of that as a publisher which is very valuable and i'm happy to pay whatever amount goes to that publisher for being able to do that i i probably made more money so it always worked out really well so when i saw that toggle i was like wait but what that's not how that works.

31:00Scott Messer: But that's it. Google's, what does Google say? Google, what do you mean? What do they say? Publishers will get for it.

31:09Jana Meron: Oh, publishers, you're going to make more money and advertisers are going to come flocking to you because we've shown them all this beautiful data, which is no, they don't. And no, it doesn't. And, you know, it's another one of those toggles. I encourage everybody to go through your Google Ad Manager account and make sure you understand what all of these toggles do. Some of them are very good. Some of them are very bad. And in some cases, they might be confusing. So don't get confused. Write into the patient portal if you don't know what a toggle does in Google Ad Manager. Because that's one of the things that, like, we are responsible.

31:52Jana Meron: they tell us oh we're gonna do all of these things and so it's on us to make sure we know what that means even if it means that we have to you know knock down their door a million times to

32:04Scott Messer: get them to tell us yeah i love the immediacy of the feedback you get here it's it's such a it's such like a valuable thing to for publishers to have such a like a direct line to to you guys and your expertise here. Let's take one more question from the patient portal. And it's another Google question from Rendering in Redondo. Google sent an email saying that they're about to update their impression counting methodology from downloaded to begin to render. Why are they doing this? And what should I expect in my business?

32:38Scott Messer: This is a really interesting one that's kind of a snooze for news, but it is historically significant, I would say. So what they're talking about is currently Google counts an impression in your ad server as when a creative is downloaded into the browser, that counts as the impression. The next step in the lifecycle of an ad, which is it's requested, it's downloaded, it becomes, it's rendered onto the page or it's painted if you want to use some CLS terms. That's the next step. What's really fascinating about this is actually the MRC's definition and the IAB's definition of an impression is a downloaded and rendered advertisement.

33:25And that spec is not new.

33:28Scott Messer: That was the 2017 definition that has been in place since 2017 of what is an impression, which means that Google has been, what they're selling and what they're buying are different things. So a buyer is expecting an impression that rendered, but the people selling it only say that the impression downloaded. And there is a gap between those. And I've seen them as high as 25 % on certain publishers. So this is kind of a big change from that standpoint. But when we look at the data inside a publisher's universe, if an impression doesn't render, it doesn't always monetize and it can get clawed back through Google's regular sort of practices.

34:23Scott Messer: And ultimately it might degrade your monetization of it. You might see less impressions year over year when you see the same traffic, you might see fewer impressions per page view, impressions per visit. So some of those metrics might change, but fundamentally what's happening inside your ad server is really the same thing.

34:43Jana Meron: It's accounting thing and it's not immaterial by any stretch, but it's really accounting thing. And it's really a, how am I going to go and explain to my boss that we projected to have 20 ,000, you know, 20 million impressions and we're only going to have 18 million. And, but we said that we were going to have 20 million and at a certain CPM. And so now I'm short. Right. And so my CPMs have to go up or I need to create more inventory. Like that's the way yield works. The good thing is that with the changes inside of the ad server with the unified pricing rules and that you can get very granular now, you can use that to your benefit as you understand the different buyers and their behaviors.

35:39Jana Meron: But that's also a lot of work. And I don't know that a lot of publishers have the staff left to manage that. Mm-hmm.

35:49Scott Messer: And my favorite question in here is like, well, why is Google doing this? If they've been doing it for nine years this way, what changed? And I think our popular opinion between Jenna and I is, well, they're getting ready for remedies and they're trying to be the best that they can be. And this is probably one of those big nagging issues that the MRC and the IAB have had with Google and saying like, how are you running a different definition on the sell side than you are on the buy side and you're causing all these problems for us? And Google probably finally said, okay, sure, we'll do it. Now, if we're wrong, we would love to have someone from Google come onto this podcast and tell us exactly why they're doing it.

36:33Scott Messer: But that's pretty much the reasons that they gave in their email. And well, you know, nine years is about right in Google time sometimes. So thanks. That's ad tech therapy for you. That's, that's the patient portal. You can always come over to ad tech therapy.com slash patient portal and drop your questions in to talk to us. Perfectly said. And yeah, let's turn to another industry obsession, which is media quality. So we've got new solutions like the trade desks, open sincera scoring publishers on their ad to content ratio and other aspects of the on-page experience. Meanwhile, you know, we've got companies like Johnson, Deepsea, who have long been leading the charge on supply path quality in various different ways.

37:21Scott Messer: And there have been countless efforts to cut out undesirable supply like MFA, resold inventory, you name it. So we're looking at these kinds of like media quality efforts. Have these been a benefit to real premium publishers or is it more of a net negative to the publisher side i think it is aspirational the really big publishers assume that they're there

37:45Jana Meron: and they're not they're not it's it's important but like they've got it right it's for the it's for the lower tiers that want to get to the upper tiers this is a great tool these are great tools to be able to understand what you need to do to get there.

38:09Scott Messer: And it holds up a mirror to the sell side of the industry. And don't forget Gamera, of which I'm an advisor to the company, and Gareth Glazer is a friend of the pod, so don't forget about them in this. But it holds up a mirror to the sell side, and it finally gives publishers something to evaluate themselves against. When Chris Kane put together his data sets for Jounce, That was the first time publishers started to see inside the bid stream and understand what was happening and be able to put names and labels onto their practices, which ultimately became Cheap Breach, MFA, and the other pieces.

38:44Scott Messer: and Sincera took that like a whole step further, ultimately becoming OpenSincera and what they're building out there inside the deal desk and the other pieces of OpenSincera are really incredible for publishers to understand how what they do on their sites affects the way that the buy side considers them. And that I think is a positive. And even the big publishers, Jan, I think you're right but even the big publishers have used these tools to improve what they're doing so like you can assume that you're good but these things are really finding stuff and they find it quickly and fast um and it's impressive i i agree with you here jan i'm not i'm not arguing with you i'm oh no i think publishers are using them it's just not like it's not top of mind necessarily all the

39:36Jana Meron: time. It's top of mind when something isn't going right. That's for sure. Right. But revenue starts to drop checks and Sarah check downs check. Right.

39:48Scott Messer: Like, and as you said earlier in the podcast, Jana, about knowing what to do with the data, what do you do when you read these signals and you get classified as something or you're seeing a high ads to content ratio? What steps do you take next, right? The diagnosis is one thing, but the prescription and the remedy are a whole different thing. That's a ad tech therapy joke, not a Google antitrust joke for those keeping score. And that's the part that pubs need help with, right? How do we fix these things? How do we make them better? And the biggest mental leap that a publisher has to make is how much money will this cost me?

40:31Scott Messer: And how long will it take? Can I afford to bring down my impressions per session, cut off some of the reseller SSPs, improve page speed, do these things? Because that's going to cost me material revenue right now, today, as soon as I do it. But how long is that going to last? And then how much bigger will it be? That's the hardest question that a publisher answers when facing this stuff. And frankly, I think more than half of publishers look at it and they say, we just can't do it. We just can't take that risk. And they get stuck and it just gets harder and harder and harder to pull yourselves back up to that quality level.

41:11Scott Messer: And remember the penalties are going to become higher and higher and higher for publishers that aren't operating in sort of the elite tiers of signal quality.

41:23Jana Meron: Which I don't think is necessarily the worst thing because for years, right? Publishers who had the highest signal quality were, you know, demand was routed around them because they could get, get it cheap somewhere else. And so, but cheap, as we know, cheap is expensive, right? And so it's taken some time for people to figure out that just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's good. Right. And so I think this is a huge benefit for publishers, you know, to be able to say like, direct your spend here because we're high quality, which means we have a high quality audience, which means we have high quality content, which means that, you know, frankly, we're less likely to be throttled where, you know, I mean, you can, you can, the downward impacts of all of that are very big.

42:19Scott Messer: And then, yeah, another topic that's kind of related to like the media quality question and that all three of us have talked extensively about is deal curation and sell side decisioning. And I know, you know, if we really dug in on curation, the three of us could probably do another entire podcast just on that topic. So I wanted to keep this a little bit more focused because, you know, we're like two or three years into the curation craze um there's been a lot of different solutions out there in market for a while now uh we've seen like you know what the impacts can be for publishers so i think you know let's just focus on like what's like the one piece of advice you have for publishers when it comes to curation or like the one question that they should make sure to ask their curation partners

43:08Jana Meron: what is being curated

43:10Scott Messer: Mm-hmm. Very, very important thing to have documented, right? And have control over. Correct.

43:21Jana Meron: And where are you getting the data? Who says?

43:28Scott Messer: I think a lot of that to that point is curators are packaging up everyday stuff and applying a little bit of magic to it and then having a great three martini lunch, as we like to say. And that's how these deals get sold and made. And they're able to liquidate inventory across markets that way. But it's not far off from what publishers can do. We package inventory. we add data, we give it a magic story, we have martini lunches. So publishers should be, you know, one, the first part was like the questions you ask of your curators. But the first part you asked Anthony was like, what should publishers be doing themselves?

44:13Scott Messer: And it's like, think about forming more co-ops. Think about bringing your data together so that you can sell these things together. Don't just give all your toys away and wonder why you have nothing left to play with, start reclaiming them and putting them on your side. Start pulling things back from the auction, right? Don't put all your inventory there. Jen and I had a fascinating conversation and it comes out in about two weeks about what buyers think of publishers and like what's in the bid stream. So tune into that episode. But I still think there is a really promising world where publishers can lead curation efforts, where we're really talking about packaging media and data for buyers.

44:56Scott Messer: You don't need the curation houses in the middle. You don't need DSPs. You don't need agencies necessarily. You just need to do good packaging and help drive results and have a really sharp buyer that understands what quality inventory is and what quality targeting is. Love that answer. And then, you know, this is another one that we could probably do a full podcast on, but I feel like, you know, we kind of have to talk about something related to agentic AI here. So I guess, you know, at this early stage that we're in with like these emerging agentic AI sales tools, what's like the, what's the big piece of advice you have for publishers about either evaluating, you know, people who are pitching them on these kinds of tools or even like whether they need to be involved in that kind of, in testing that kind of thing at this stage of the game?

45:49Scott Messer: Well, Janet, go ahead.

45:53Jana Meron: So this is where I would say it depends. So it depends on where you are in your journey. If you think that your foundation is set up in such a way that it's very clean, easy to read for other computers, then by all means, give it a go, see what you've got. But my big concern is that we will go back to the days of set up my clean room and I'll bring you demand. And then it sat there for a year. Right. And and we always have this challenge. So and I have been one of those people who signed up for stuff that never came. And I've been one of those people who signed up for stuff and it came. So like, I'm not saying one is better than the other.

46:43Jana Meron: What I am saying is you have to decide whether or not you're willing to take the gamble and wait.

46:48Scott Messer: Yeah. This morning I heard, I was on an SSP call with a client and the SSP said, we have a Gentic pipe set up and we'd love to be your Gentic seller. Can we, can we do a test or something like that? And publisher said, sure. How much money are we going to make? and the SSP responded with, we were hoping you could bring the demand.

47:12Jana Meron: At which point that was sort of

47:14Scott Messer: the end of the phone call right there. And that's the point. Like, where is the money? I don't think there's nearly as much money inside a Gentic as anyone thinks there is at the moment. But if you're in a position, as Jana says, to play with a Gentic and do test budgets and find those things, like you should. Because there is oil somewhere out there for you. But for most pubs, keep your eye on the prize, focus on Q4, which is just a few days away from us. And so be hopeful, but use it to your advantage. Use it where you can today because the fast follows will be really fast. You won't be behind the curve, I promise you.

47:59Scott Messer: And then to wrap things up for this episode, I was wondering, And, you know, because I feel like we keep having the same conversations about publisher challenges lately. But, you know, I just imagine because you guys are talking to publishers all the time, you must be privy to all kinds of stuff that AdExchanger might not be hearing about yet. So, you know, for the benefit of our publisher audience, are there any topics that are flying under the radar right now or any trends publishers should watch if they aren't already? well anthony while jana thinks about that let me ask you what does it feel like to think that you're hearing the same story over and over again it feels like you know it's like there's just these intractable problems in the industry that you know people talk about and they don't ever actually get solved and like you know it feels like as you know we we look at what we do at ad exchanger is like service journalism like helping the industry like make a better version of itself.

48:51Scott Messer: And it feels like, you know, sometimes it's like, is that even landing? Like can you really drive change by pointing to the problems or, you know, how do you really drive change? It doesn't, you know, that's the big question. Why do you think, why do you think we get stuck in that loop? What everyone tells me, it's all, it's all the, the, the tangled incentives in the marketplace. And, you know, this person has this reason for pushing this and this person has this reason for pushing that. Structural problems within the industry, right? But Anthony, what we just did was a moment of ad tech therapy with you.

49:29Scott Messer: And this is what publishers feel. That frustration is real. And clearly it's so real that even the journalists, the wonderful journalists who cover this industry feel it as well. It's really hard. Momentum is difficult, especially when there's a myriad forces that are intentionally fragmenting the publisher effort. So it's really good to see anytime that publishers get together, they can band together and set initiatives like Ozone Across the Pond, Beeler Tech, Market Texture, Ad Exchange or Programmatic I.O., like all these things that give publishers an opportunity to convene and operate together are incredibly helpful.

50:10And I don't think publishers should ever be afraid of collusion because frankly, to

50:15Scott Messer: collude, you have to be a dominant player in the market. And I think we understand that publishers are just not the dominant players in the market. So we should work more closely together.

50:27Jana Meron: Really good point on that, Scott. And one thing about collusion, though, is that it doesn't come from the operators. It comes from the legal teams who are, in some cases, still very worried about things that happened a long time ago Mm hmm. And don't necessarily apply now. And God forbid somebody says, oh, well, you know, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Fox News are all banding together to be able to do something for digital ads. Somebody would get that. Mm hmm.

51:01Scott Messer: Yeah. But, you know, as we've kind of seen, at least I guess if you're if you're Google, you don't have to worry about being broken up. Maybe publishers have less leverage there. um but you know nothing left to break in the publishers yeah and i love the i love the sentiment of more and more you know publisher co-ops more just like bringing some of that bargaining power back uh through collective action uh that's a call that i've heard several times before and i think it would be very wise for the publisher industry to heed um so i think that's it you know that's a great place to leave it uh i'll once again you know plug the ad tech ad tech therapy podcast definitely check it out, like I said, on your platform of choice.

51:43Scott Messer: Plenty of, you know, as we've seen during this episode, there's going to be a lot of really great insights and expertise being shared there. And you can get your questions answered directly by experts who are in the know and connected on this stuff. And I just want to thank you guys, as always, for sharing your insights here. Thanks so much, Anthony. Thanks, AdExchanger. Appreciate it.

52:04Jana Meron: Congratulations on 500. Yep.

52:06Scott Messer: And we'll see you next time till 501. Take care, everybody.

52:35Thank you.