Want AI Agents That Work? You've Gotta Do The 'Unsexy' Stuff First

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.

0:50I'm Alison Schiff, Editor-in-Chief of AdExchanger, and you're listening to AdExchanger talks. So let's talk about some stuff. My guest this week is Abby Klassen, a Holdco vet and former journalist who recently took over as CEO of independent performance agency Tenuity. There's a lot of excitement about AI agents, but Abby says an agent is only as good as the data behind it, and the real edge comes from the unsexy stuff, cleaning up data and building workflows. We'll also get into the hidden cost of juggling too many vendors, measuring brand and performance together, agency issues, they have many, and why creativity could be at risk in the age of AI.

1:27But first, I'm going to do a quick plug for 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, CTV, and more. So join us. Hey, Abby, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Excited to be here. So you know the drill. What is one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know?

2:05And it can't be something that I could easily find out by looking at your LinkedIn or just Googling you. So I guess, okay, technically, you could find this out by looking at my LinkedIn, but I decided this would be kind of a fun one because I saw that you studied university in Dublin for a bit. You got your master's there. I did. I also studied in Dublin in my undergraduate for six months at University College Dublin. So different university, same city. I also went to UCD for my semester abroad when I was undergraduate. No way. I did. What if we were there at the same time? It's possible. I don't remember my own life, so I can't remember what year I was there.

2:46I think it was, what the heck year was it? 2003, 2000? Okay. I was a couple, I was 2000s, a little bit before you, but, but I remember they had a pub on campus and they had a, like a special they would always run where if you had, if you drank three Murphy's Irish stout, you got a fourth one free. And I always look back. Murphy's Irish stout. I know. I look back on that and I'm like, how did a university get away with this kind of a promotion? It is Ireland.

3:22I also saw, and you can find this out by Googling you, I just think it's really cool. So I'm going to plug you for it, but that you ran the New York City Marathon twice. Yes, I did do that. So I, it was, I never actually really thought of myself as a runner, but I ran a few half marathons, like kind of got into that as an adult. And then a friend of mine and I had, we trained for a couple of halves and we both decided we were going to give this a shot. So we raised money for a school called Community Roots in Brooklyn. Her kids go there and we ran one in our thirties. We ran a second one in our forties.

4:02And we always say, maybe we'll run one in our fifties. I don't know we got a little time you know i mean i just i'm just running to catch the subway abby well that's me too today you know i'm like winded walking up the stairs uh so i want to do a little resume rewind for you um because we have other things in common beyond just studying abroad in ireland because you started your career as a journalist specifically as a reporter covering the ad industry you worked your way up to editor-in-chief of ad age And then you, so you left for Dentsu right around when I was first joining Ad Exchanger. So it was 2014, right?

4:43Yep, that was right. But you spent a decade writing about this crazy industry that we're both in, in a way, before you joined it. So what made you want to, I don't know if this is the right way to even put it, like cross over? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I was super lucky to cover this industry. Listen, I think this right now is a fabulous time to cover this industry. I covered kind of the first wave of all of this digital transformation from 2005 to 2014, when, as you say, I left to cross over to Dentsu. And it was just an incredible, just every day there was, I remember like meeting with the MySpace founders before News Corp bought MySpace.

5:31I mean, it was, and that just kicked off this whole wave of Web2O and ad tech, you know, programmatic, the dawn of programmatic advertising. And I was a digital editor before I became the editor of Adage. So I was right in the, you know, right in the middle of all of this and loved my time doing that, loved it. And I think it gave me a really interesting perspective on the marketing industry. And Dentsu at the time was pretty acquisitive back then. It had just acquired Aegis a few years earlier. Oh, Merkle. Merkle, right? Merkle came after I joined Densu, actually. Merkle, Gyro, Cardinal Path.

6:13There was a whole swath of acquisitions that happened after that. But I joined in more of a corporate strategy role. And I thought at the time, you know, I don't have an MBA. I'm a journalist. I'm really, I'm pretty good at asking questions, analyzing a lot of information, synthesizing it, that sort of thing. But I thought this could be like kind of a working MBA type role. I was being brought in, in sort of a corporate strategy role. Again, at a time they were doing a lot of acquisitions, being asked to help analyze some of that, not from a financial standpoint, but from a strategic standpoint.

6:49And it was super interesting. I ended up moving into 360I maybe 10 months after I joined Dentsu. So I didn't do that corporate strategy role long, but I moved into 360I as their CMO, a terrific woman named Amanda Melko, who now has a podcast as well. she had been the CMO, she was moving on. And that encompassed both marketing, which I felt like I kind of understood because I was on the receiving end of a lot of agency marketing and communications as a journalist, but it also covered new business. And so I was just like thrown into the den, you know, into agency life, you know, running pitches and being part of new business.

7:34So that sort of was my indoctrination into agencies. I think the journalist brain is a very interesting brain because we're exposed to a lot of things. I'm thinking of trade journalists in particular. And it's all also kind of uncomfortable, though, to be at the one answering the questions, right? Like now you're on the other side. Every once in a while, someone will ask me for my opinion on something. The imposter syndrome kicks in. I'm like, I don't know. I ask the questions. Then I realize I have opinions on all of these things because we talk to so, so many people and people love telling journalists things.

8:12They love bragging. Oh, yes, yes, yes. And, you know, I always think, man, there's still some off the record things that I will take to my grave. But I think, you know, I feel interestingly, having been on the other side now for over a decade, I still feel that way, Allison, sometimes, you know, I am very comfortable asking the questions. I tell people, especially coming into a new role as I have at Tenuity, I'm going to ask a lot of questions. It's not because I am doubting anything, but I am naturally curious. I really want to understand. I think I'm a fast learner. I think most journalists are.

9:00You know, you have to be able to kind of grasp a subject relatively quickly and synthesize it into something that's interesting to your audience. So, you know, there is part of me that like you can take the girl out of journalism, but you can't take certain elements of that role out of me. So. But your switch over to Tenuity is it's interesting to me because you spent so much time at a big holding company. It's not the biggest of the holding companies, but Dentsu is big. And you were global brand president of Dentsu Creative. It's a huge creative network, more than a thousand people working with some of the world's biggest clients.

9:39And you left that to run Tenuity. It's just a very different animal, independent agency, very performance focused, very data driven, not that Dentsu isn't data driven. What pulled you in that direction more toward performance than brand? And that's a fair way to characterize it. You know, it's interesting. I would actually, I would maybe push back slightly on the premise of the question because I'll tell you what I've found since I've been here. So I'm 114 days in as of today. I asked Claude that in prep for this. I was like, how long have I actually been here? And I think Tenuity was born answering two pretty straightforward questions.

10:22What worked and could it work better? And that is really a performance mentality. and every dollar has to answer for itself. And we're really good at that. But when I take a step back and I look at what marketers are dealing with today, the job has gotten bigger and Tenuity has evolved pretty dramatically to answer that call. So today, for example, marketers need an agency that can find the hard business outcomes that are inside brand building, for example, things people said couldn't be measured. And they need an agency partner who can hand them proof that they can use to go make bigger, more ambitious moves.

11:02And that's really what Tenuity has grown into. And, you know, I do think we have an opportunity in front of us to tell a story that is more reflective of our reality today. You know, we have 25 plus clients for whom we are the media agency of record. And if I think about what I'm really good at, it is, you know, looking at what our clients needing today and how can we be the right partner for them with their biggest challenges and where they're going. So that's really what appealed to me about this opportunity. And then we can get into all the things like what independence provides and stuff like that.

11:43Well, speaking of being a partner, a growth partner for your clients, one of Tenuity's taglines that I came across that I like is love growth, hate waste. So how do you put that ethos into practice? Because, I mean, there's a lot of waste in this industry. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think, first of all, I love that notion of loving growth and hating waste. I think it's sort of a core tenant that we live by. And, you know, I will say, I think it's all in service of something bigger, which is how, again, do we help, you know, use that accountability of loving growth and hating waste to help our clients achieve kind of ever bigger ambitions.

12:30And I think the building blocks of it, if I look at, you know, measurement, for example, is one of our core foundations. We're really good at it. You know, we recently introduced something we call holistic ROAS. which is all about, you know, not just measuring, you know, incrementality on a channel basis, but how do we bring multiple MMMs together along with brand equity modeling and create this like total deduplicated look at the enterprise value that your media is delivering. So when we talk about growth, we're talking about it at a big level. You know, waste is about optimization, but it's not just about that.

13:07I mean, I think about wasting time, you know, we're in a world where you have to move fast and learn faster. And, you know, I think our independence is a strategic advantage there, especially, you know, right now when that speed and the ability to kind of pilot things and, and learn and, and, you know, kind of adopt the next big thing will separate the leaders from the laggards. And I think you see that in the way we work with partners, you see it in, you know, how we, you know, we come up with a product innovation and, you know, we can make it happen pretty quickly, roll it out. So, you know, I do think that whole mindset of how are we driving growth and how are we not just not wasting our clients' dollars, but not wasting time is really important.

13:59There's also this issue of, I don't know, because things are done the way they've always been done, that leads to waste. I mean, if you don't spend X number of dollars, then you don't get those dollars the following year. So you're disincentivized to look too closely. That's not a technology problem. It's just a perennial issue that everyone has talked about, and yet it still happens. Yeah, it's something that I have been just internally even saying to the teams as I've started is that notion of how do we embrace day one thinking, you know, just because we've always done something one way, like what is the best way to do it today?

14:42Almost a first principles kind of approach. And we're living through so much dramatic change. And I think that that is the ability to kind of step back and on a regular basis say, is this like, should we just rinse and repeat or take every decision and analyze it for kind of what it is moving forward? It's something we've been, I've been talking a lot about with the teams and, and, you know, we've been trying to exercise internally as well as obviously with our clients. I want to touch on a bliss point, which is Tenuity's proprietary tech stack. First of all, I think it's cool that you, you have one, but I want to talk about what's in there.

15:24So I'm just going to read what it says on the tin. It's described as a marketing operating system, connecting audience data, creative media and measurement into one shebang. Shebang. I love it. That was my flourish. Perfect. What does that actually mean for a client, though, in practice? Like I'm a CMO. I work with Tenuity. What does your tech offering do for me on a day to day campaign creation and management basis that maybe I'm not getting from a larger agency or from one of your competitors? There's a couple of things that are really important when it comes to what we're doing with Bliss Point.

16:04Let me start with just kind of the higher level, higher value opportunity. We know that measurement continues to be a massive challenge for clients. I was actually just reading this piece of research. There's a group called the Institute for real growth. And I was super struck by this. It's a group of hundreds of marketers and they found more than eight in 10 senior leaders across the C-suite say that marketing has a potential to create more value for the business, but only about one in five say that the value it actually creates gets captured and understood. And I know it's so depressing on one hand, but on the other hand, what an opportunity.

16:48And to me, in some ways, that's, you know, that's not a marketing problem. It's actually a measurement problem. And it's exactly why we built Bliss Point and, you know, the measurement capability that exists within Bliss Point, whether it is incrementality testing or brand equity modeling or MMMs, you know, GO MMMs or DTC MMMs or Commerce MMMs to make sure that we are capturing that value and making it visible instead of just assumed. And, you know, I think it's super critical to measure outcomes and results against the client's actual business and not just take, you know, platform reported numbers at face value.

17:31And so Bliss Point is that independent holistic measurement that combines online, in-store and brand equity. You know, it does all of that in one app, in one point of view. And what's interesting is because you referenced it as an operating system. So let's point really deep strength in measurement and in data. And we are moving from what I would say is like a set of dashboards to more of, think of it like a governed agent enabled orchestration system where, you know, the right parties. So us, our people, Tenuity's people who are working on behalf of clients, the clients themselves directly, you know, other partners where it makes sense have direct data access to, you know, clean data.

18:21We have a very robust ETL process that we employ to be able to pull raw data from source systems, clean, standardize that data, and then ultimately, you know, present it into ways that are useful, that can be queried. And Bliss Point does all of that. And I think that that's really powerful as we enter an AI enabled, an agentic enabled era. So, you know, you can see how it started as a data measurement foundation. And now we've moved into an era where it is the foundation for so much of how this industry is going to be evolving. Segway on a platter to the question I wanted to ask you before we take a quick break.

19:05And I think I have to ask about AI or they just take away my advertising journalist card. From outside, it feels like AI is simultaneously, and I feel like these two things can be true at the same time. Simultaneously, the biggest opportunity that agencies have seen in decades and also this giant threat to the labor model that makes agencies work because historically agencies sell their expertise, but they also sell their time. And if AI compresses the time it takes to do things, the question is what happens to how agencies charge for their work and you have to charge for your work to eat and to survive and to live to pitch another day.

19:47Well, we could spend the whole second half talking about the necessity to evolve agency compensation, agency client fee models. I think what I will say just about AI is, you know, so much of the focus on AI has been about almost like human replacement and efficiency gains. And listen, it should deliver some efficiency gains for sure. But I think, and this is not a hot take, but I do think that there's a world in which we need to just reframe the whole conversation around how does it augment us? I read a really interesting op-ed piece that a woman named Ruba Borno, who's I think worldwide VP of something or other at AWS.

20:41Anyway, it was titled, No AI is Not Your Employee. And the whole premise of it was, you know, it's kind of like, imagine when you switch, when the, I don't know if you play tennis, but like, you know, they used to play with like these old fashioned wooden rackets. You innovated with a graphite racket and suddenly people were hitting the ball so much harder. I mean, it was like almost like a different sport, but it still required people to play it. So one of the ways we're really looking at this is it is technology that, you know, lets your people kind of reach a level of performance that they couldn't have gotten before.

21:20And I love in the article, she essentially says, you know, the companies that are going to win are not asking like, how do we do the same thing with fewer people? They're asking, what can our people accomplish now that they couldn't before? And like, where is the bar today? and how do we set it higher than anyone else can reach? And so that to me is the inspiration for how I would like us to be using AI. I want it to raise our talent density. I want people doing higher order work, judgment moving up, not out. You know, it should make every decision and recommendation better. And that will be great for the quality of our work.

21:59It'll be great for our clients. It'll be great for our talent and ultimately for our business as well. I mean, that feels like a rallying cry, and I'll take it because, yes, humans, of course, are critical to this whole endeavor because otherwise, what are we doing here? Exactly. We talk a lot about just the human kind of premium and this idea of almost like agentic deference. Agents can source options, they can accelerate decisions, they can execute very manual things, but we require still explicit human sign-off before you make any action. And AI needs to operate within, you know, a trust threshold.

22:44And that autonomy for AI can only go up if results are proven, you know, and human review has to be built into that. So we don't want to remove the humans. We just want to augment. Hear, hear. So we're going to take a quick break. And when we're back, we'll obviously talk a little bit more about AI. I'm going to bring up fragmentation and lots of other good stuff. So stick with us.

23:17i'm sarah sluice editorial director of ad exchanger and i'm here with mark mckechran vp of product at basis which is supporting our podcast this month hello mark hello how are you doing 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?

23:47Abbey Klaassen: I do love a good TLA. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Anthropic built it, open source 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 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.

24:42Abbey Klaassen: And eventually those instruction sets, they begin to look like standard adapters. Okay. 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. So control depends on who built the server. An agent can pull reporting, diagnose a stall 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.

25:26Abbey Klaassen: You 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, 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 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 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.

26:22Abbey Klaassen: 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, basis, we have Compass, our proprietary strategy and planning agent. It has direct integrations with buying platforms, including our own DSP. 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.

27:08Okay, 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.

27:19Abbey Klaassen: Indeed. There's a lot of room for innovation under the hood. MCP is the unifying layer. There's a command and control on top of it. 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.

27:44All right, we're back. And I want to pick up sort of where we left off talking about AI. Every, well, everyone, but every agency says they're using it, that they're investing in it, that they're transforming around it, lots of words like that. But from the outside, and I am on the outside, you're on the inside now, it's hard to tell like what's real and what's just something people say during a panel in Cannes or whatever. Or at ProGio, which is coming up. Plug for Program at Go. Plug for ProGio. However, this episode is going to air on the Tuesday of our event. So whatever. All right. Plug for reading all the stuff that comes out of ProGio.

28:25That's right. Read our stories. Thank you, you're a wonderful hype woman. Concretely, tell me what Tenuity actually does differently today because of AI and how you staff and how you work, how you charge clients and how you keep humans like really at the center. And I'm avoiding the term humans in a loop because it just kind of gives me, I don't know, it gives me the willies. It just feels way too buzzwordy. Yeah. We like the term human as judge. So a little bit, slightly different, but, you know, I think we're, we're well suited to this AI era because of that data and measurement foundation we've built that I mentioned before.

29:06it's such a critical input to anything you want to do agentically. So I think, you know, there's so much hype right now, so much buzz in the market. Everybody wants to talk about the agent. That's the exciting part. But an agent is only as good as what it is reading and the direction that it's getting from data inputs. And so for two plus years, you know, long before I got here, Tenuity was doing the very unglamorous work of cleaning and reconciling and, you know, connecting client platform commerce data before agentic was the centerpiece of the conversation. And it turns out that's exactly, you know, the foundation that trustworthy AI needs.

29:50So I think for us, what separates kind of the hype from the reality is everyone's talking about agentic buying and fully agentic handoffs. 12 months from now, I don't think agents are going to be that hard to build and execute, but the differentiator will be the quote unquote boring stuff in some ways. And that's why, you know, that's why this evolution of BlistPoint from a measurement app to, you know, more of this governed agent enabled data foundation orchestration system is so important. You know, it is, it's like the boring but important part. But because it's boring, we never talk about it.

30:32So that's a huge advantage. The unsexy stuff that is really, really critical because you can't, you can't do anything really cool unless you invest the time to make sure that you have a foundation. I mean, workflow is maybe a boring word to some people, but I think it's really interesting because you have to be a doer and you have to have foresight and you have to really put the time aside to think about the cool things you can do in the future. And if you try to do it too quickly, then maybe actually you'll end up failing or it won't work and you'll have a false read on how these things actually work and then you'll discard them before they really have an impact for you.

31:23Absolutely. I mean, you know, I think about, I covered, by the way, I covered the year of mobile, like 10 years in a row. The year of mobile? Exactly. The one born on day one of the year of mobile was like in the seventh grade by the time the year of mobile actually happened. That's so funny. Yeah. You know, I think how we work with clients, I do think we're entering a bit of a new era where the winning model isn't like one agent replacing any one thing, but it's brands, agencies, platform agents, agents of all of these constituents increasingly operating in a shared sandbox. Filled with a client's own intelligence, our technology, platform capabilities, you know, that ideally all interoperate instead of being walled off from each other.

32:23And it's a big part of why we have built the foundation the way that we have and what our vision for Bliss Point as, you know, this operating system slash orchestration system will be in the future. The word sandbox is triggering for me. Is it? Bad experiences as a child. No, I spent so much time writing about the privacy sandbox. Okay, we won't talk about the privacy. The end of third party goodies. So called. We'll strike that from this podcast. But there is still this fragmentation challenge, a structural problem under underneath that better workflows will, I guess, help with. But there's also the fact that CMOs are drowning in vendor relationships.

33:11They've got a measurement partner or two. They've got a creative shop. They have maybe a search agency. They might be working with a few retail media specialists. Maybe they're even directly logging into multiple RMNs themselves. And then the list goes on and on. So one, is there a cost to all of this fragmentation? Like are CMOs wasting money just by having too many cooks in the kitchen? And other than seek therapy, like what can CMOs do to deal with that? Yeah, it's, and it's, it's on a kind of an agency and partner standpoint, but it's also obviously happened in the media landscape. As much as there is consolidation, there's always new channels that are cropping up.

33:50I think, you know, influencer is a big one these days and creators. From a client perspective, there is, there is a cost to, you know, having, I think too many partners. You said too many cooks in the kitchen. And I think that cost, it reflects in hard numbers sometimes when you've got multiple agencies and you're paying a fee to each of them. And invariably like there's some hard cost savings if you had kind of one person overseeing it, one, I hate the phrase throat to choke, but you know, um, I, and then I think there's a couple of like hidden costs and I don't know a single client who feels like they have enough resources or people on their team to do everything they want to do.

34:33And, you know, every partner you have to manage is time and effort. And so, you know, I do think that's a place where, you know, if you have a partner who can be more of an integrator for you, an orchestrator, that's a real savings. And then I think there is a complexity tax too, to having all of those different partners. And so it is really, it's the reason an agency like ours matters and the evolution we've made matters. You know, today it's not just measurement, it is that complexity. And any one channel on its own isn't that hard, but what's hard is holding them all at once and understanding how a dollar in retail media affects your CTD performance or how creative fatigue in social shows up three weeks later in your incrementality numbers.

35:30And those are the kinds of problems where, you know, that we have designed ourselves to be able to answer. And it is the reason why tenuities evolution is so important. And going back to something you said during the first half, holistic ROAS, that's a really important maturation and way of thinking when it comes to measurement. And there are other providers, I think it's Albertsons that has a version of that, which is incremental ROAS, just ROAS on its own being not very reflective of reality and actually potentially not good to just focus on that because it doesn't tell you the whole story. And then you spend based on something that isn't real.

36:12But I like this evolution, thinking about measurement in like a really nerdy way. It needs to get very nerdy to get better. It does. And I think, you know, one of the things I love, there's, I guess, a couple angles here that, you know, I talk a lot internally with our teams, with our chief product officer about. And one is, you know, the way he and I talk about holistic ROAS is it is how do you get to the true enterprise value of the media that you're spending? And so not just what is that returning in terms of sales today on different channels, but also how is it manifesting in future demand?

36:56You know, how do you think about this brand equity that you're building as part of that investment and what that's going to do for you in the future? And I think that's the piece that, you know, especially it's been hard to measure historically, but in more, in agencies that maybe grew up in a performance era hasn't been as appreciated. And so I think it's a real signal of our maturation as an agency, as Tenuity, and how we are showing up as a different type of agency to help an enterprise CMO be able to do the job they need to do and have credibility in the C-suite. So we can agree that measurement needs to get better, that we have to think about it in a more holistic and sophisticated way, that it's time to move away from fragmentation, and everything is complex.

37:46But how do you deal with that world? Like from a practical point of view, like if a CMO comes to you and says, help me figure out where to put my next incremental dollar, like what do you do for them? What's the first step? What's the process? Well, the first thing is to make sure that we have a clear understanding of what their media is doing today. And so that comes back to, do we have the proper data foundation set up? You know, it is our, again, our kind of, I guess, you know, how are we extracting raw data from source systems and then making sure that we are cleaning and standardizing that and applying the right business logic to it.

38:28Then we can create, you know, we can consolidate that data from all these different scattered sources into something usable for reporting and analytics. Then we might talk to them about, okay, we need to measure things on both a macro and a micro level. More of a, I don't micro maybe being slightly the wrong word, but it's more of a real time, like how do we understand what's working and more of an incrementality mindset and MTA understanding versus just last click. But then let's also introduce MMMs and different types of MMMs or different combinations of MMMs for different types of businesses.

39:09So, you know, if you're selling in commerce, we have a commerce MMM. If you are selling in bricks and mortar, we have a geo MMM that we might, you know, use. And then holistic ROAS is really the marriage of those different MMMs with that brand equity modeling so that we can understand, you know, what are we driving with our media, both in terms of today's returns and tomorrow's growth. So it's not easy. You have to make the effort, but it is doable. You can do this. It is doable. It is doable. But I think the thing, you know, one of the things that we see a lot is everybody wants like a quick fix and a quick answer.

39:47And so when you start to dig in and you say, okay, if this is what we're trying to achieve from a measurement standpoint, you do have, there's some basic like, you know, fundamental work that has to be done that it's again, falls into kind of the important but unsexy category. And that's the stuff that a A lot of times, you know, our clients don't have their data well organized. And so really it is about how do we kind of hold hands along that process to make sure that we can get that, you know, get that foundation laid. I think I have the headline to the write-up that we're going to post on AdExchanger to accompany this episode.

40:24Something like, Tenuity's CEO says you have to do the important but unsexy stuff first. Oh my God. I think I'm going to go with that. I think, listen, we have a huge opportunity in front of us as Tenuity. I am super excited about where we're heading because I think there is a compounding value of integration. And, you know, we are shifting the conversation from optimizing pieces of the media investment to really maximizing the value of the whole. and you know while the industry and over time agencies like us have gotten incredibly good at optimizing individual channels the CMO doesn't have a Google problem or a meta problem or a TV problem they have a business problem they're trying to solve so our job is how are we connecting you know all of those audience creative media and measurement around that business outcome and answer to your point much more useful question like where is the next dollar of investment going to create the greatest incremental value for this business?

41:32It's a penultimate question. And I didn't mention this before, but until recently, you were chair of the board for the four A's, which is the main trade org representing agencies in the US. And while you were chair, you had visibility across the whole industry. So holdcos and indies like Tenuity, boutique shops, all of them. So don't answer measurement to this question. So putting measurement aside, what else are agencies most worried about? Like, what are their real main concerns when they're just in a room together? Maybe they've had a couple of drinks. Maybe they had a couple of Murphy's. What keeps coming up?

42:06A couple of agencies having some drinks? Never heard of it, you know? So talent tends to be still one of the top concerns for agencies because I think the type of talent that we are recruiting for kind of the next chapter of this industry's evolution is distinct and it's different. And so how do you screen for that? And importantly, how do you bring that along? And I think, you know, as we've had this conversation about AI and, you know, we talk about replacing low-level talent, it's like the historical systems for finding and training and onboarding and growing talent in this industry, you know, they're very challenged.

42:50And so that's an area that continues to come up. You know, the value of creativity. I came from a creative agency and, you know, you want to talk about what is ultimately probably the hardest thing to measure. It's that. It's, you know, everybody knows it's important, but it's really, really hard to isolate, you know, how you quantify that. And I think, you know, there is a huge risk in this industry, especially with AI kind of regressing things to a norm, that you lose some of the magic of that creativity and how important that is to creating memorability and the mental shortcuts that we know, you know, are how people make decisions, how people buy.

43:43And I do, I do worry about that. I think it's never been more important. And I say this now as a media agency CEO, I think creativity has never been more important. And yet, I think it's potentially, you know, at risk, because the conversation has become so focused on what can, what can the robots do? I do think that and I don't know if this is a Pollyanna point of view, but there will be a coterie of people and maybe this group will grow and grow that specifically seek human made things, almost like a made in USA seal, but made by humans. And even if, I don't know, even if it takes longer to make and it's more expensive, it might be worth it because there are some people who will only want that thing.

44:34I mean, books didn't die because Kindle came out. you're right books and I and and I think there is a little bit of a pendulum swing back toward how are we creating real community real connection with other people um real in real life experiences and tactile things and I'm excited to follow that just as a cultural um observer and um you know obviously there's some applicability to the work that I'm doing here at Tenuity. But I just, as a human, I hope that that continues because I think that's a good trend for humankind. As a human, I agree. All right. Last one. Please feel free to be as spicy and cynical and to just roll your eyes for the people who are watching the video version of this podcast.

45:25But what is the most overhyped thing in advertising right now that makes you just want to throw your laptop out the window when you hear people talking about it? Just let it out. Primal scream.

45:45Fully agentic end to end everything. That's a good one. I think, yeah. Like, you know, We have such a core belief of the importance of human as judge and agentic deference. I think it is, and it's so easy to think in headlines, but we like to operate in reality and what can we actually do for clients and where is the future actually heading? Well, thank you for this fully human end-to-end conversation. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Great chatting with you. Rays and Murphys, do you? Yes, likewise. Cheers. Sláinte. Sláinte.

46:37This 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.

46:59Thank you.