Value Over Volume, With NYT's Courtney Glaze

0:12Welcome 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.

0:48I'm Alison Schiff, editor-in-chief of AdExchanger, and I love the news. I love the people who write it and the people who help keep it alive and thriving. My guest this week, Courtney Glaze, is VP of Revenue Operations at The New York Times, and she knows a thing or two about that. We'll talk about making advertising work across a portfolio that spans journalism, games, cooking, and sports without losing sight of the reader experience, how The Times chooses its ad tech partners, why programmatic needs to be about value over volume, using AI to help revenue teams spend less time assembling reports and more time understanding them, plus lots of other good stuff.

1:26But first, I'd like to take a moment to tell you about our upcoming Top Women in Media and Ad Tech event. Join us on the evening of November 3rd in New York City as we celebrate the leaders, innovators, and builders moving advertising and media technology forward. The awards gala will take place at the Lighthouse at Chelsea Pierce, honoring an extraordinary group of women across AI, commerce media, privacy, programmatic, measurement, and CTV. See you there. Courtney, welcome to the podcast. Allison, thank you so much for having me. So what is one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know, and it could be anything?

2:07I am wildly competitive. You really see my competitive nature come out when I'm playing games or sports. I'm from Michigan. I come from a big tennis family. My siblings and I all played competitively growing up. But that's something people don't know because it's not really how I present at work. And certainly running a revenue operations function, it's like the definition of collaborative and supportive and a team player. So I'm kind of outing myself here as exposing my competitive nature. Right. When a board game comes out, it's like, I will decimate you. Exactly. Exactly. My husband is like that.

2:48He is also kind of like that in life. So it tracks. But when we play Mahjong, you need four people typically to play Mahjong, but you can play with two. And he's gotten very into it. My mom and I taught him. And he's absolutely vicious when we play Mahjong together. I get it. I get it. I've dabbled in Mahjong. It feels like it's taken off recently. Well, I want to say two things. One, I just feel compelled to say that I was playing it before it got really cool. Before it was cool, my mom spends time in Boca Raton. She has a condo there. She lives there half the year. And I learned from old Jewish ladies.

3:23So I just want that cred because it has gotten real trendy. You absolutely can have the cred for that. Yes. The other thing is, and I've talked about this with a few people, there are folks in ad tech who play Mahjong. I think that we should have some kind of ad tech Mahjong league or regular get together. If anyone's interested in that, drop me a line. I love that. One of the employee resource groups at the Times organizes a weekly game. So you'll have some interest from our building. If I promise to adhere to Chatham House rules, can I come? You're more than welcome. So I want to do a quick career rewind on you because you started at the Wall Street Journal.

4:09You did digital strategy and operations for four years, 2013 to 2017. Then you went to Vox Media, very different vibes for seven years. And you ended up as the SVP of Commercial Operations. And then September 2024, just around two years ago, you joined the Grey Lady, the New York Times, as VP of Revenue Operations with a focus on programmatic. And I will say the title VP of Revenue Operations dot dot dot with a focus on programmatic makes you like the perfect guest for ad exchanger talks because we love talking to publishers about their programmatic strategy. And we're going to get deeply into into the old weeds on that.

4:47But before we do, what is it about news brands that attracts you to them? Or is that just where your career path happened to take you? I will say myself, I didn't particularly love online advertising or know anything about it. I just happened to write about marketing at one job and then ended up at AdExchanger because that was something that I knew a bit about having gotten a job writing about it. And so you sort of end up unintentionally specializing. But I kind of feel like you might have a passion for media. Yeah. It's a little bit of both, I think, really. And actually, before The Wall Street Journal, I was at Federated Media.

5:25and that was really the like master class in revenue operations because Federated Media was small and nimble. My first job was a campaign manager. Then I started a planning team and that was before the journal. So really I have been in news and in publishing for my whole career. I really kept adding tools to my toolkit, kind of like you say. My, you know, roles have increasingly centered around kind of the intersection of revenue, technology, data, and operations. And revenue operations appeals to me because it brings all of those disciplines together, understanding the customer and the market, building the right systems and processes, helping teams execute more effectively.

6:16But it's also the mission. Really what led me to the times was kind of the mix of purpose and product. I've always been driven by high quality journalism. I think it's essential and being able to support that work is incredibly rewarding. But from a revenue operations perspective, the draws were also the scale and the diversity of the portfolio. So my experience at Vox was incredible. I kind of describe going to Vox from the Wall Street Journal as going to a teenager after being at more of a traditional, more legacy publisher. And throughout my time there, you know, between organic growth and acquisitions, it really felt like a few different companies.

7:05And so coming to the Times, I had a deep appreciation already for the complexities of a diverse portfolio. And so now operating with the Times across news, games, cooking, wire cutter, and the athletic, they now have this deeply engaged, logged in audience. It's increasingly complex operating environment, but it gives, it makes it fun. It gives us room to innovate and build smarter, more connected revenue strategies. So maybe a long winded way of saying it's really both. And I didn't want to imply in my question that I'm not interested in online advertising. As I was asking, I'm the editor-in-chief of AdExchanger.

7:47I actually, I've developed a passion over time because the more you know about something, the more you know how to poke and prod it and the more interesting it becomes to you and you just develop this expertise. But as someone who works at a storied news organization, what is your non-trade pub media diet? I'm assuming you read The Times, but what else do you read? Oh, I read everything. Of course, I read Ad Exchanger. Of course, I read Ad Age. Of course, I read Ad Week. I have a deep-seated love in my heart for the Vox Media brands and some of the acquisitions that we made while I was there. So I'm a very loyal NYMAG consumer.

8:30But I'll go anywhere. Yeah, I mean, there's good information all over in many different corners. There are a lot of newsletters that I get that I love. I will say I read CMO Today from Nat Ives every morning because I find it to be a very fun mix of not to promote someone else's newsletter. What am I doing? But I find it to be a very fun mix of culture and zeitgeist and the intersection with advertising. So it's kind of a best of both worlds. And it's okay. So programmatic. Let's dive into the Times' programmatic strategy because the arc is interesting. So in 2019, which I know is before you joined, the Times pulled open programmatic out of the mobile app entirely.

9:19because there were a bunch of reasons. The ads were slowing the app down. The reader experience wasn't so great necessarily because of latency. Subscriptions were the priority. I know subscriptions still are a priority. But then a few years later, the CFO is on an earnings call basically saying that we need some more programmatic in our lives of gotta get that revenue. So you bring it back, but you bring it back differently. More controlled, higher quality bar, a smaller set of partners that you really trust. Magnite became your preferred platform for PMP deals on the in-app side. You consolidated your SSP and DSP relationships down to a much smaller set.

10:05And then the whole shebang is anchored in first party data and subscriber data. So with all of that relatively recent history in mind, if you had to describe the Times' programmatic philosophy in a sentence or two, how would you do it? Yeah, definitely. And maybe first, can I ground us or maybe just give you a beat on just the broader business of the Times today? Of course. It's so relevant to where we are with our programmatic strategy. Yeah. Back in 2022, three years after the start of the time period that you're referencing, the time announced our essential subscription strategy with the goal of becoming the essential subscription for curious people everywhere.

10:52Fast forward to today, we're reaching the largest audience we've ever had with an incredible amount of opportunity still ahead. Right now, we have over 13.4 million subscribers and over 150 million registered users who are coming to the times for so much more than news. They come to us to, of course, understand the world, but also to play our games, to follow the teams they love, to figure out what to make for dinner, to shop smarter. And so having a portfolio of products this broad really lets us attract a massive, deeply engaged audience, which has significantly expanded our ad supply and opened up entirely new ways for us to collaborate with marketers.

11:38And so one of those ways, this expansion opened up the opportunity for also the ways that we transact with our clients, programmatic included. So our programmatic revenue contributed to the Times advertising growth last year, or this year in 2026, and it will continue to be a priority for us in 2027. The like one to two second direct answer, I think, is the Times is building a premium data informed deal led programmatic business. The strategy is not to maximize volume, it's to maximize the value of our audience and attention while remaining very precise or protecting the reader experience. That means expanding quality supply, using privacy forward first party signals, growing our programmatic deals business, like you mentioned, strengthening our technology and partnerships and really connecting programmatic more closely to sales and product.

12:52So we've expanded programmatic access across more of the portfolio beyond news to games, cooking, wire cutter, the athletic, to video, to newsletters and audio while still being really thoughtful about where and how ads appeared. The results we've driven over the last two years with this strategy have reinforced our opportunity to continue to focus on value and not just scale. So I'm going to use some corporate speak and double click on one of the points because I want to talk a little bit more about the partner, I don't know, rationalization side of this because it's something that a lot of publishers talk about wanting to do, but then they don't necessarily follow through.

13:38And there are reasons for that because every SSP you cut looks like demand that you're walking away from even though a lot of it is repetitive or noise, and then actually figuring out which partners are adding unique demand versus just duplicating it. It just requires real supply path analysis, and that takes time and expertise that not every team necessarily has. But you guys actually did it. So paint a picture for me. What changed when you went from working with a whole bunch of SSPs to working with a much smaller set? What did that do for you? When I started at the Times, we had a very short list of demand partners and an even smaller list of partners who had access to supply across our portfolio.

14:27So I have not, I was not at the times when, you know, pre-2019 when there was a long list and then it went to a shorter list. I entered at a time where the list was very short and the amount of access that partners had to supply across different platforms and different portfolio brands was very limited. so I can speak more to where we've come from there, which is over time, we've expanded that list actually to a few other strategic partners. You mentioned our announcement with Magnite being one of them and scale their access to our full portfolio. So this aligns with our strategy to meet buyers where they are.

15:19We're open to transacting through their preferred method. That's true for direct deals versus a programmatic deal. And it's also true for one demand partner versus another. We have a few strategic partners. I think the important revenue operations question is whether the stack is helping the business move with, of course, monetization, but also clarity and speed. We are evaluating if tools and demand are duplicative or incremental, if they integrate cleanly with the rest of our stack and whether the value justifies the tax, both the cost and the operational burden. Right. That makes sense. It's not that you have to keep the list under a certain number.

16:04It's about making sure that who you're working with, those are the right folks. What do you look for in an SSP partner? What supply side platform qualities allow it to make the cut. And SSPs have taken kind of a beating over the years, this idea that they're basically dumb pipes, interchangeable, like easily cut out as DSPs start going like direct to publishers. But you've basically said like, you're not going to treat SSPs that way. It's more like we want real partnerships, not a pile of pipes. So show us what you can do. So what are those qualities? We are really looking for partners rather than incremental transactions.

16:50It's not demand for demand's sake. It's looking for partners who will help support our programmatic strategy, which we think about in the context of the entire business, not just the incremental yield from an individual ad impression. The same inventory can have so many different forms of value. It can generate advertising revenue. It can support a subscription marketing objective, or it can help us build a longer term relationship with a reader or an advertiser. We're thinking about the expected ROI across the business. That includes advertising yield, of course, but also subscription acquisition or engagement, lifetime value, audience development, and user experience.

17:36Sometimes the best use of an impression is not the transaction with the highest short-term CPM. It's the use that creates the greatest total value for the times. And that doesn't mean we leave revenue on the table casually. It means we're just deliberate and thoughtful about where open market demand makes sense and where a more controlled use of inventory through a PMP, a direct package or subscription marketing initiative produces a better outcome. So we're thinking about optimizing the whole revenue ecosystem rather than maximizing one channel in isolation. And we're really looking for partners who understand that longer term outlook and can partner with us rather than, you know, fill open impressions.

18:25So one more before we take a quick break. And I know we touched on first party data a little bit, but The Times has an audience footprint that I think most publishers would kind of kill for. So 100 million registered users, more than 10 million paid subs. But like having data and then actually activating it for advertisers, those are two different things, especially for a famously subscription first business. And you've spoken about protecting your inventory value on this podcast, but also at ProgrammaticIO New York last year. So using a strict internal hierarchy, prioritizing direct deals first, premium PMP second, and then the open market last when it makes sense, as you were just explaining.

19:10So how do you operationally enforce that structure? So you aren't like leaving valuable audience data in, I don't know, just floating in the ether because I feel like there must be pressure. I know you were saying you don't casually leave revenue on the table, but you sort of have to stand strong because I feel like there must be pressures. We've been, the Times has been building our first party data strategy since 2019 with a real focus on performance, relevance, and privacy. The Times' real advantage is really the depth of engagement. It's, of course, the 13.4 million subscribers and 150 million registered users.

19:54Oh, my numbers are wrong. Well. My numbers were lower. Oh, you were very close. You were very close. depth of engagement really though. And, and the many people, the many reasons people come to the times. So we're, we're using those signals to create audience solutions across the portfolio, which at this point have real scale. So we're combining audience characteristics, contextual signals, identity solutions. Our goal is not just to identify bucket and target a user. again, it kind of goes back to that deep value versus the transaction. It's to help a brand connect with the right audience in the right editorial or product environment with purposeful messaging across our brands.

20:41And so I think we've moved from a place where first party data was a promising capability that we could deliver on in our direct business only to now being a core operating system for our advertising business. We've expanded from individual products and isolated signals to now a more portfolio-wide approach that connects those insights targeting and packaging. And we've become more sophisticated about privacy identity and context. Our emphasis is on that like durable signal that creates real value for marketers while still respecting the trust that our readers place in us. That evolution has helped us broaden targeting across the brands, news games, cooking, wire cutter, the athletic, and also audio, video, and newsletters.

21:36And so So I think we've really moved from, you know, a nugget of first party capability to a more expanded suite that allows us to really leverage it both for our direct business and for our programmatic deals business. So the expanded suite, there's brand match. You mentioned the portfolio. So we'll talk about both of those things and curation plus AI, obviously, when we're back. So stick with us.

22:15I'm Sarah Sluice, Editorial Director of AdExchanger. And with me today is Michael Olson, EVP of Client Development at Basis, which is supporting our podcast this month. We're going to talk about something that doesn't get enough attention, paying invoices. what is the cost of slow financial reconciliation and who is the most impacted? Hi, Sarah.

22:40Courtney Glaze: Thanks for having me. The cost is time, cash flow, and trust. When financial reconciliation takes too long, payments get held up and finance teams, whether they're in agencies or ad brands, are just chasing down numbers. People are spending a ridiculous amount of time and figuring out why two systems do not match. Agencies probably feel it the most because they're stuck in the middle carrying the float. They have the client asking questions on one side and media partners on the other. The longer it takes, the more time everyone spends fixing the past instead of focusing on performance and health and growth of the business.

23:19So you outlined a very frustrating problem. I would not want to be that person chasing down invoices. is this primarily a technology problem, a workflow problem, or a people problem?

23:32Courtney Glaze: It's all of the above, but I'd lean towards mostly a workflow problem. The industry definitely doesn't have a shortage of technology or data. We have a shortage of systems that actually work together. And when they don't, people end up filling in all the gaps manually. They end up Downloading spreadsheets, comparing reports, sending emails, chasing down discrepancies. It's a mess. Technology is obviously part of that answer, but another piece of software by itself just simply doesn't fix it. It's imperative for technology to actualize omni-channel data monthly and push to reconciliation systems.

24:12Courtney Glaze: As an industry, we have to connect the tech stacks interoperably, end-to-end, and then allow the technology to do the heavy lifting to align the data between the contracts, media plans, media transactions, and the payments. Okay, so it sounds like technology and workflow can make this just a bit easier. What does automated reconciliation look like? A lot of automation talk right now. And if I'm thinking about the future agentic state, ideally, reconciliation just happens. AI is constantly looking at delivery, spend, invoices, payments, and then flagging issues as they happen. Instead of somebody finding them three weeks later, and in a lot of cases, the AI should be able to fix those issues without a person ever touching them with the correct harnesses in place.

25:05Courtney Glaze: People should only have to get involved when something unusual happens, which is the human oversight. That gets away from this huge month-end exercise that costs a lot of time and resources and much closer to knowing where you stand financially at any given time. This is the ideal state basis is going towards for our connection with Prisma by MediaOcean, a platform used by numerous agencies for financial reconciliation. Okay, so it sounds like by connecting those two different platforms, we can and adding agentic AI, we can make it a lot easier and people won't have to chase down invoices all the time like they used to.

25:43So thank you so much for sharing with us what that would look like. And thanks to Basis for supporting our podcast.

25:49Courtney Glaze: Thanks for having us, Sarah.

25:59All right, we're back. And let's stick with first party data. So over the summer, right around the time that you joined the Times, I believe, you launched something called Brand Match, which I teased before the break. It's an AI powered contextual targeting tool. So instead of having advertisers select standard segments from like a menu, Brand Match ingests a buyer's brief, scans the Times' editorial content, and then builds custom targeting cohorts based on the specific themes of those articles. Is that a fair description? That is fair. Brand Match takes a brand brief and matches it with relevant content and interested audiences across the times.

26:42So we've had hundreds of campaigns running against this product since launch, and many have delivered clip-through rates above 1%. It's highly performant. We're thinking about, of course, where we go from here, and we're thinking about AI as a way to make our existing data and inventory more useful. And Brand Match was certainly a successful place for us to start. And I want to give our listeners a hypothetical example. So brand match is more real for them. So say like a car brand submits a brief about like weekend adventures and road trips, instead of dropping them into say like a generic auto or travel segment, brand match would go out and find readers who have engaged in the past with coverage about national parks or long distance driving routes or like the outdoors?

27:38Would that be like one way that it would work? That's exactly right. And that feels like that's a very lifestyle focused example. I have a brand safety question. So given how skittish advertisers can be around hard news and politics, which is such a shame because it's very important stuff and I don't understand that mentality at all. But anyway, does an AI driven approach like this, like you're doing with brand match, does it open up any revenue opportunities for hard news coverage? Because you can find like deeper thematic connections rather than just having to like avoid scary headlines or something, of course, putting scary in scare quotes, because it's not actually scary.

28:23Or are you finding that advertisers are sticking mostly to what they might consider safer lifestyle content like that car example? We could, we can use brand match as kind of like a filter or a steering mechanism for where advertisers are delivering based on what they care about. We see, you know, we could, we could have a whole podcast on brand safety and actually how valuable it can be to be news adjacent and how much attention and actually positive sentiment can exist in that alignment. We see those conversations often as very separate brand match. We really focus across the whole portfolio, which increasingly is lifestyle and culture.

29:22When we have conversations about news with our partners, it can be in the context of brand match. It can also be very different. And it can just be about the products and packages that make sense for them in the moment, depending on their messaging. So there was something else just moving along. And to quote you again from your appearance at Programmatic I.O. last year, but something else you said on stage that I want to bring up. You described curation as, and this is a sick burn, solving for volume without relevance. I mean, it counts as a sick burn in our world. But what's broken about curation?

30:05Like, is it the signal quality, the packaging, the incentive structure, and like what would make it better and actually have it deliver on the promise? I think that building direct, durable relationships, both with audiences and with marketers. The Times thinks about this all the time. The challenge around AI and the industry is very real. The time certainly isn't insulated from decisions being made by technology platforms. Search is changing. AI is changing how people discover information. And those shifts can affect how traffic flows to publishers. So just to draw a parallel, we're focused on building direct, durable relationships with our audiences through subscriptions, registered users, our apps, newsletters, podcasts, and really the broader portfolio of products that bring people back because they have a habit or a reason to engage.

31:04That direct relationship with our audience has been incredibly important and is increasingly important in a world where the rules of distribution can change quickly. I think you can draw that parallel with the relationship with marketers and with your partners. It really translates. Curation and advertising, I think, is if you can approach curation from a standpoint of you still want to have that direct relationship and you want to understand the value of the impression back to is it transactional or is it providing real value and you have the transparency around where your inventory is delivering, then I think curation can be great.

31:51And I think, you know, the industry will continue to evolve around even what the definition of curation is over time. There's, you know, there's been a lot of conversation around transparency. But I think if you're talking about a direct relationship, you're talking about transparency and you can do that while also working with a partner who's going to help you bring that supply, the valuable supply together. Then, you know, then we're getting getting to a place where we're delivering value for for everyone involved. So curation is a good idea. Just do it right. Then it'll work. You said it. You said it better than I did.

32:36Okay. Well, we've been talking kind of around the portfolio, but I want to dive into the portfolio because even though people talk about the athletic, they talk about games, the wire cutter, it gets underappreciated in conversations about the ad business, or at least from my perspective, because there is so much beyond NYTimes.com. So, yeah, I mean, sports, recipes, you know, I always carve out 10 minutes of my day to do Wordle and Spelling Bee, which I'm very, very into. I'm also into strands now. But there's definitely some overlap between these audiences, like, of course, but maybe there are also some differences in these audiences.

33:22is is there one programmatic playbook across all of them or is there different thinking depending on the property i just want to say that i am a pips player i don't know if you've spent much i haven't played pips yet uh i do really like connections but i sometimes get really like just stuck um and i don't know i know a lot about certain weird things and so my brain does work in that way. But sometimes I just, I hit a wall. I'm like, what the hell is the connection between these things? It's so frustrating. I totally hear it. I totally hear it. Pips is more of a logic based game. So if you're like more of a Sudoku brain, Pips is good for that.

34:05I'll try. I'll try it. Our portfolio allows us to really maximize commercial yield by leveraging kind of each verticals, unique audience behavior and engagement profile. You mentioned overlap. Of course, there's some overlap. Of course, there are some differences. We manage the portfolio as kind of a collection of distinct products with those different audience behaviors and different advertiser needs at times, but with shared technology, data and sales capabilities underneath. So we're looking at each product on its own terms while still creating the cross-portfolio opportunities that really allows us to have the option to scale programmatic uniformly across the brands or treat each brand distinctly.

35:03And I would say we kind of ebb and flow over time depending on the priorities of the brand. We can package, you know, the reach of news, the habitual engagement of games, the intent of Wirecutter, the passion of the athletic and the contextual relevance of cooking. And those kind of, you know, unique values help us drive direct demand, also help us drive programmatic demand. So operationally, we're focused on kind of improving supply and yield product by product, while also having that underlying capability to allow the advertising team to bring our portfolio together in kind of premium or cross-function or cross-platform, I guess, packages.

35:55One thing I'm curious about related to The Athletic is that it started completely ad-free, and that was part of the pitch, especially for sports fans who were sort of done with these cluttered sports media sites. They were just overloaded. And then a couple of years ago, which was roughly a year after The Times bought The Athletic, you introduced ads, which, of course, was like, it makes sense. But the transition to advertising, it's always kind of tricky when people and you described the readers of The Athletic as passionate. So passionate audiences will sometimes have strong reactions when they're used to not seeing ads and then suddenly they do.

36:32So the approach has to be delicate, I imagine. How like how has it been going? Has there been any pushback from the community and how do you make sure that you keep you keep the people happy? The athletic, the community is so, this is really interesting. On the athletic, one in two users don't visit competitor sites. So this is a community that's really deeply engaged. And so when the athletic introduced ads, they were so incredibly thoughtful about the user experience and not to disrupt it. And I think that the athletic community really, you know, appreciates that. They bring such a deep passion.

37:17And so the athletic is, you know, they have 500 journalists covering every team. 500. And they're publishing 100 stories a day. And so I think that the value that The Athletic is bringing to their audience, you know, is outsized and important. And as long as we're not disrupting that experience, we're able to maintain that, you know, super close relationship with The Athletic audience. 500 journalists, Courtney? 500. Globally. That's insane. Yes. I mean, of course, AdExchanger is just so different, but we're seven people. Wow. You cover a lot of ground for seven people. Thank you. Okay, so AI, it is the ultimate shiny object.

38:12Even though I kind of, I have this theory that we're about to slide right into the trough of disillusionment. We're just right on the edge. But I don't want to talk about anything flashy related to AI. I want to talk about the unglamorous and more useful uses in your day-to-day. So yield management, floor price, optimization, those are areas where I think machine learning has been quietly doing the real work in RevOps and not just recently, just long before generative AI took over every conference agenda, including ours. What does the Times have running in the background that most people wouldn't know about, but that's really useful to you?

38:58Like the boring stuff that's just actually making your life better. And for me, it's otter.ai. I don't know how I lived before AI transcription. I just truly. the um there's some like such practical um cases that just give you this like of course moment as with so many ai tools um just you talk about um transcription in news we have ai powered automated voice on most stories um in news and opinion that helps people so easily shift between text and audio. It's like that has, you know, it's just like one of those, of course, moments. And accessibility, right? Exactly. Another one is in cooking. We have AI powered metric conversion and recipe scaling on all of our New York time cooking recipes to help, you know, cook globally and easily convert ingredients from metric units to imperial and, you know, adjust recipes for different size groups.

40:05That's another one of those. That's a really good idea. Of course. Right. Of course. From a revenue operation standpoint, I really agree with you. It's the best examples are not necessarily the most exciting examples. I think something that I geek out over all the time is using agents to bring various reporting sources together. So our teams are just spending less time pulling data and more time understanding it. And we're working closely with our kind of our technology and system partners to automate and build into our existing process. So rather than recreating the wheel, we are reducing friction in our current model.

40:47I think we've gone recently from taking a workflow or process and deconstructing it to a point where you're automating bits and pieces that doesn't really give you meaningful time back within the process to now being able to string some of those together and feel like we're able to be a little bit more strategic and teams are able to pick their head up and think more about the why and the how. and spend more time strategic thinking. Penultimate question. And I know you can't talk about what I'm gonna just say right now, but just to set the scene, then I have a question I think you can answer. But the Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft a couple of years ago.

41:38It was over copyright infringement. And the argument is that ChatGPT was trained on your journalism without permission or compensation. And you aren't the only publisher that is suing these companies and other companies, too. And the case is very much still alive. Both sides were in front of a judge very recently, just this month. But that's really that's a scene setter. So putting that specific ongoing litigation aside and zooming out, what do you think fair looks like for publishers in the age of AI? It's like such a big question. But how do you monetize in that world? Because if people are reading AI summaries instead of visiting a site, and this is existential for publishers, we think about it too at AdExchanger, particularly because our content is so specialized.

42:26That's a problem when you monetize with ads. I mean, not to state the obvious. Yeah, I think a generic model is just not by itself a durable advertising advantage. I think, I mean, this is not a hot take, but the hype around treating AI as a substitute for strategy, judgment, or distinctive data is hype. I think the value comes from applying AI to a real business problem with trusted inputs, clear guardrails, and measurable outcomes, and not from trying to orchestrate it using LLMs. And the hope is that people will continue to come to your website and be exposed to advertising when they're there.

43:22But there have been traffic declines and it's just it's a very just across the board. It is a it's an interesting time to be alive. I guess I'll put it that way. It is an interesting time to be alive. So last question, and it's such a goofy one, but I don't know. This is how I want to end this podcast. It's about online advertising inspired band names, because I've been thinking about this for a while because I'm crazy and also because programmatic advertising terminology really does lend itself to this goofy exercise. But I've come up with this whole list of online advertising inspired band names.

44:01So dark social, invalid traffic, the opt outs, system of a downstream. I really like that one. The header bidder, bid vicious, mega bid, the hard floors, which would be like 90s alternative or the soft floors, which would be like a little shoegaze. The remnants, my chemical remarketing. I also really like that one. The paywall flowers. And then and this is my absolute piece de resistance, Alice in supply chains. So would would you go to see any of these in concert? Like I'm thinking one of our listeners might be in the wrong job. I probably should actually be doing my job and not coming up with these.

44:45Like I do have deadlines. Okay. How about Above the Fold? Above the Fold. Hell yeah. So I'm thinking one of our listeners should just take up the mantle and actually start an ad tech themed band. I mean, do you know any musicians? I am thinking, I don't think I know many musicians, but potentially we could have this band at our industry, Mahjong. I was just thinking that. All right, guys. Anyone who knows how to play an instrument and is an incredibly large nerd and loves Mahjong, Allison at AdExchanger.com. Drop me a line and I'll forward it to Courtney.

45:39This 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 omni-channel activation. Learn more at basis.com.

45:59Thank you.