Buying CTV In The WarnerMount World

0:08Welcome to The Big Story, a roundtable featuring members of the AdExchanger editorial team. Every week, we bring you an in-depth discussion of key developments in digital marketing and media.

0:23Today'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 omni-channel activation. You can learn more at basis.com.

0:44On what would normally be a sleepy September Friday, we covered two acquisitions last week. Infileon bought Foursquare and Taboola bought Dianomi. We always love a good exit here at AdExchanger, and we have our editor-in-chief, Alison Schiff, here to talk about these two deals and what they say about the ad tech market overall. Then everyone who expected a long, tortured and contentious Paramount and Warner Brothers merger saga to play out over the next year will now be disappointed because the merger is moving forward. Paramount threatened to move out and up and leave the state of California altogether.

1:25That threat worked because immediately after California and 11 other states settled the antitrust lawsuit against the merger. So it's now going to move forward and we're going to have Paramount, Warner Brothers, Discovery as one big mega, mega company. Victoria will take us through what happens now and walk us through some of the twists and turns of this particularly litigious merger. Now, next week, September 28th and 29th, the whole gang here and more will be in New York City for Programmatic I.O. It's at the Marriott Marquis and you're not too late. There are definitely people still buying tickets and you can be one of them.

2:03I'm personally very excited to be talking to a panel of agency heavyweights. We've got Sir Martin Sorrell of S4 Capital, Bob Ward, head of Horizon Media. We've got Shane, who's the head of data for WPP. Maggie, the head of experience for Dentsu. I was talking to some of them earlier this week. It's going to get spicy and really interesting as we talk about the future of agencies and how they're handling new tech. Allison's going to be interviewing OpenAI about its ad platform. Victoria will be talking about the AI accountability gap. So definitely join us and you can still use the code POT10 for a bit of an extra discount.

2:38See some of you next week. So Allison, let's dive in. We had two ad tech deals that dropped on Friday. Taboola made an offer to buy Dynomi, which is an ad network. Basically, it's like the Taboola for finance. So Taboola bought the Taboola for finance. And Infileon bought Foursquare, which is a blast from the past. So what are the basics about each of these deals that people need to know? I mean, first of all, I just have to say it was a very weird experience because my phone is my alarm, of course. So my alarm goes off. I rolled over. I opened my phone. I'm like, oh, my God, acquisitions was like 8 or 830 in the morning.

3:17So immediately story time. And then I had a relatively chill middle of the day. And then like 4 p.m., the Infilion news breaks. I'm like, guys, can everyone just stop? Although don't stop because it's super interesting. So Taboola First, they've been on a journey to reinvent themselves. They want to be a performance advertising platform, get away from the whole chumbox label. They launched this, I guess you can call it a platform, Realize. Last year, they want to position themselves as like an alternative to search and social before the open web. And like you said, Dianomi, Dianomi, however one says it, It extends the supply that they have access to and into a vertical that I think they want to own because it's considered brand safe, finance, premium publishers are in there.

4:04They've got some of the biggies that they work with in their network. They have the Journal, Reuters, CNN Business, The Times of London, not our Times, because they're based in the UK. So that really makes sense. They want these high intent audiences, all the stuff advertisers like, and that means the CPMs are high. Um, so that was my morning. Uh, then in the afternoon, Infileon had other plans. I just wanted to slide into the weekend and that acquisition, um, it made my eyes bug out a little bit. Um, Infileon has been buying lots of stuff over the past few years. I, I didn't really expect that one.

4:41Um, but I'll stop there cause I, I talked for a while. Well, and I think just for, for Dianomi or when I'm thinking about Taboola, I definitely see a lot of those content recommendation ads that are like, you know, here's how to lower your mortgage rate or like this personal finance tip. Like I definitely see a lot of that content. Maybe that's my own, you know, self. And then I remember talking about talking to DiNomi many years ago, and they definitely had this kind of premium content rec angle back then. And I believe it was both finance content sites, as well as the type of content circulating was usually finance related.

5:18it. I saw that story that you wrote, Sarah. It was in 2017. It was a little profile of Dianomi, and it came across it when I was searching for their name in our archives. I'm like, we must have written about them if Taboola's buying them. And indeed, we had. Sarah Sluice had written a story about them. Nine years ago, yeah. That example of, you know, here are X number of tips, you know, to help you with your mortgage or whatever. I know finance is considered more premium, but with that kind of tone, you're not really beating the chum box allegations, right? Yeah, I think I think it depends on how how helpful the personal finance content is.

5:54Like, I think, I think for me, let me just ref here, Allison, for me, the chump box would be like, here's the secret that seniors don't know about lowering their, you know, homeowners taxes, like anything that involves like senior targeted content. I'm like, especially as like a parent of, you know, uh parent of seniors up here yeah she's gonna keep Benjamin button babies in your Freudian slip no like as as as a daughter to two senior boomers who I love and hopefully my mom's not listening to this episode right like I feel more and more protective as you see some content that can be a little bit more like just just wondering like what is the agenda behind this this content like seniors save blah blah you're like there's not a catch yeah um so yeah i think so i feel like a straight up personal finance tip like sure and like the affiliate space for finance is strong too like if you have some kind of link that has people open an account or something like that like that's a very um you have to write really high quality content i think in order to get those links and then they pay off well.

7:05I mean, it seems like more of a process though. Someone will need a piece of content and then they'll move on to a next step and then a next step. But yeah, I mean, if Taboola can claim some credit for being involved in that transaction, that's important for them and it's important for their repositioning for sure. And so speaking of repositioning, Foursquare, remember them back in the day, probably even longer ago than 2017, that they were really having their moment with all of the check-ins. They were like pre-app you and they were like a text text to check in thing back in the day. Then they were a location company and they bought other location companies and now Infilion is buying them.

7:44So what what even is like I'm imagining some kind of like hot wired car under the hood here that Infilion's assembly. Before we get into it, I have to share this anecdote because writing about Foursquare surfaced this memory for me. back in the day it was like 2010 2011 I had a boss who made their office into a four square location or venue or whatever you call it and then she made herself the mayor and then people around the office would try and unseat her it's just so funny oh my gosh yeah all the badges all the gamification oh yeah you're bringing me back first really was just pokemon go before that was Yeah.

8:24And as you were kind of alluding to, Sarah, Foursquare never really went away. It just slipped out of the zeitgeist and it stopped being something that regular people talked about. And it quietly became this source of data, like infrastructure, all those check-ins and the verified locations, barring my boss's old office from like well over a decade ago. all of that data about where people actually go in the physical world, it's very valuable information, but for B2B purposes, not so much as a consumer app with longevity. And it kind of feels like it's one of those companies that became more important as it became less famous, if you know what I mean, because it's underpinning something with more of a B2B focus.

9:06And Infilion, which has been very acquisitive, they also bought this other company called Catalina James Hercher our own James Hercher wrote about it earlier this year. Catalina is a provider of retail purchase data and I think the idea is to combine those two things right like what you bought with location data about where you where you went and the pitch clearly is attribution in that case like whether some someone actually made a purchase or did something in the real world based on what they engage with online based on an ad. And that's a super hard problem to solve. And if you were to zoom out one more level or layer, what else is Infileon stitching together?

9:52It's a staggering list of stuff. So before they were called Infileon, they were called the mobile majority. And I spoke to their CEO, Rob Emmerich, way back in the day. So under that name, they bought Truex, CTV ad platform, Physical, spelled with an F, which is a location data company. Then they bought Gimbal, which is also a location data company. They changed their name from the mobile majority to Gimbal, acquired InStadium, which is an out-of-home platform, Uber Media, which does like managed services for media. And then they just bought the media business from Drawbridge, the cross-device company that LinkedIn bought the rest of the year after.

10:32And then after Gimbal became Infilion, like they went for broke literally, like they bought Medium Math out of bankruptcy for just 22 million little dollars. And then, like I said, they bought Catalina, that was in February. So there's a pattern there. And they're not the only company that does this. Zeta Interactive does it too. But they buy up distressed assets or companies that maybe weren't fetching super great valuations so Infilion could get them for a steal, but then assemble every layer of the stack that a marketer needs. In theory, this is the pitch for running a campaign and proving that it worked.

11:11So we got an ad tech quilt here, Alison. Is it keeping everyone warm? I mean, everyone knows how hard integrations are. I mean, I'd have to be a technologist to answer whether all this stuff is coming together under the hood properly. But the idea is to make this composable platform that ties the whole shebang together. That's a technical term, shebang. So supply, data, creative, and it totally makes sense, right? But the tech debt of stitching like MediaMap together with Catalina and then Foursquare and whatever other of that stuff that I mentioned that they're still taking advantage of together.

11:54I mean, that feels like a challenge. Okay. And do you think that there's more coming here? I think whenever there's a couple acquisitions where three is a trend, what else could be snapped up? Is there a group of companies that might be next on the list? I mean, it's also possible that Infileon will be buying some of them because rob their ceo uh said in his interview with axios because they got the exclusive um that he's planning to remain acquisitive but um but yeah i mean ai native companies so if you look at what's getting funded right now and where the venture money is flowing it's going to i mean more than three things but three main things like automated workflows agentic media buying like with guardrails where the agents execute but the humans are in charge and then all that um geo snake oil so i mean these are companies they didn't exist five years ago and they're already replacing some of the functions that used to require entire teams and i mean that's a very different kind of acquisition target than foursquare or media math which were valuable because of the data or the infrastructure that they'd amassed over this long time horizon um but yeah i'd give it like two or three years the market will start to shake out and when it's clear who the winners are once the big hold co's like decide that it's cheaper to to buy rather than build everything i think we're going to see this whole new wave of of m &a and it'll be a very different lumascape in 2029 2030 oh my gosh that's the first time i've heard someone say 2029 out loud for some reason that's that's a lot still exists all that you know um okay anything else that we need to know about these acquisitions before we go on to our next segment um no No, other than, hey, guys, like you can tell us first.

13:46That's totally OK. My DMs are open. Well, OK, we're going to take a quick break and talk about Paramount and Warner Brothers and also what this means for the CTV advertising market. So stay with us.

14:05I'm Sarah Sluis, Editorial Director of Ad Exchanger, and I'm here with Mark McEachern, 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? 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.

14:48It'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. And eventually those instruction sets, they begin to look like standard adapters.

15:36Okay. 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 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.

16:24Letting 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.

17:03DSPs, 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. 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.

17:52initiating an omni-channel planning conversation through one interface. 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. 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. 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.

18:30And we're back. So I'm sure we've got a lot of streaming fans here, a lot of people who are buying streaming apps. So we know the merger is clear between Paramount and Warner Brothers. So tell us what this combined company will look like. And then we'll kind of back up to what happened all before. Sure, yeah. Well, so it's funny because CEO David Ellison has already talked about wanting to close the merger two weeks from now. But ironically, it's still a little too soon to tell what the combined company is going to look like. What we do know is there were no structural remedies or changes that were made to the company as part of the settlement deal, which practically means that they're not going to have to divest any of their cable channels or their movie studios.

19:12Like, everything's coming in there. There's going to be an editorial independence board for CBS and CNN. So I don't know, maybe that creates jobs. But as far as which streaming apps they currently own, they have Paramount Plus, they have Pluto, they have HBO Max, they have Discovery Plus. They're going to have CNN All Access now. There might be a few others. I think BET has their own. But those are the big players for sure. Okay. And I think with HBO Max, I think we saw that they kind of combined the content. I know now when I log in, I see a lot of the Discovery content, the reality shows next to my, you know, White Lotus.

19:48So do we think there might be kind of an Uber app, a mega app in the cards? That is a great question, especially because even though there is a lot of Discovery content on HBO Max, there is still also Discovery Plus. They made a big show of trying to combine them and then found that there actually wasn't as much of an overlap in consumers as they would have liked. and the Discovery Plus app was a lot cheaper, so they kept it as is. Ellison has talked about wanting to combine Paramount and HBO similarly into one big unified app. Interestingly, one of the elements that I've seen discussed about this deal is the idea that carriage negotiations for Paramount and WBD's cable businesses will be done separately.

20:31So all of the cable channels that WBD owns, like Comedy Central, or no, Comedy Central is Paramount. This is going to trip me up. They own, you know, Discovery, obviously, and they own CNN. Those will be negotiated separately with cable companies as opposed to Comedy Central and BET and MTV and all the ones that Paramount owns. I do not know if that's going to extend to the app. Maybe not, just because that's sort of a separate side of the business. But if it does, that might change things for them wanting to combine stuff. They also might do the exact same thing that combined WBD did and realize that, oh, our audiences are actually more separate than we think.

21:13So maybe we should keep them separate because, you know, so much of these merger, especially the huge ones, are kind of just new CEOs realizing why business was structured the way it was before and just reinventing the wheel. Oh, that that is quite the burn. That's so true. And I feel like there's yeah, there's always this kind of like synergies. Oh, wait, actually not as much synergy. And like it kind of is a pendulum swinging. Well, that's TV now, right? Like, yeah. And I like, though, you know how when like someone in your vicinity is trying to do something like open a jar or like fix something and they're like not doing it right.

21:49You're like, let me try it. Let me do it. Like, give it to me. Like, I can do it. And then you realize like, oh, I cannot open this jar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, I mean, anecdotally, right. Like, I'm definitely more of a max person. That said, there was there was one Discovery show, Neighborhood Watch. It's like America's Funniest Home Videos, but with ring cameras. Yeah, exactly. Borderline dystopian, Sarah. I do also want to push back. They're not Max anymore. They're HBO Max. They changed it to Max when they were going to combine and then realized that their branding was better at HBO.

22:25And so they just went back to HBO. I think that was last year. So I have an important question, by the way. speaking of discovery if this whole saga with banta and paramount skydance and ellison was a reality show what would we call it oh i don't see it as a reality show i see it as like a prestige legal drama um but like in a silicon valley style where everybody's uh a little weird and yelling at each other um yeah uh the real housewives of yeah the real housewives of the california there's an HBO show about all this right uh succession succession there we go I I'm imagining succession but with like sailboats I always think of Allison's and the uh the America's Cup and just kind of all the the stuff that goes along with that um that's nice for them okay okay I think I think that we should see this produced I think that that would be that would be excellent um so you know one thing with a combined scale victoria i feel like there can be a lot of pros and cons for buyers because the pro is that they always want a lot of scale it's kind of a hassle to buy into all these small apps so if they have you know quamera warner brothers discovery is like oh we now have like 120 million uniques or something that kind of would put it more on a a must buy list um so i'm kind of wondering like but then also maybe prices might be a little bit higher because they've got a little more leveraging power so what do you think this might look like in terms of size or how they're going to go to market as far as size goes i've seen a lot of interesting stats about border brothers and paramount together will have a lot of content hours that are available.

24:16So like I think twice what Netflix has because they've got, you know, like I said before, they've got CNN, they've got CBS, they've got MTV, they've got Showtime, they've got Nickelodeon, you know, all that. But there was a stat that Ellison dropped earlier in the merger timeline that there's about 200 million streaming subscribers across both Paramount Plus and HBO, which is way less than Netflix. Netflix, I think, has 325 million global at last count um so clearly like one of the big arguments that they made in favor of the merger was that it will allow them to complete with uh compete with netflix more um i i guess technically like the larger size will help them do that as far as ads go um paramount has made a big show recently of trying to unify everything that they currently have and add a whole bunch of ad tech into their stack um wbd has their own ad sales thing as well called neo because of course it is because they own the matrix um arguably they are the matrix at a certain point um so it'll be interesting to see how those two are combined um obviously it has to close first and they have to like know that it's gonna happen because there's still a little part of it that's like, well, maybe someone else will sue.

25:38I don't know. Something else will go wrong. A last minute hero. So a lot of content hours kind of able to compete with Netflix. And having a merger under the context of like, oh, our true competition isn't the other companies that have content businesses, as well as distribution businesses where there's carriage fees and so forth. And this is our true competitor, like it definitely rings a bell to me in terms of other types of media mergers we've seen over the years. But yeah, like the whole carriage fee is definitely a wrinkle. Sometime we're going to have Amy McLean and our sister publication CFX on because they cover all of the carriage deals and all of the complexities there.

26:27There's a lot of federal regulation involved with carriage fees. So it's interesting to have that business maybe either tacked on or perhaps even being the foundation of this business where there's then also this streamer competition. It's just very, very complex. All I want to do now, by the way, is make an ad exchanger comic about carriage deals, and it has to involve a horse and carriage. Totally unbaked idea, but I'll take suggestions and share them with our comic artists. So to talk about the streaming apps again, because I think that is kind of the core of where people are buying these days.

27:07You know, when I think of the market, right, like I'm paying for however many apps and I'm paying for some, my husband's paying for some, I don't know where the money goes every month. I just know we're paying for like all of them. And but yeah, it seems like there's going to be a change. Another piece of news that we covered this week was that Forrester is predicting that three of the top streaming services, I was into the specificity there, it almost feels like a tip, will move from paid subscription plans to free plans. So I'm kind of thinking through what this looks like. are the ad loads different?

27:48I'm already paying for Hulu and then also have ads in addition to the content I'm seeing. So I'm wondering what your take is on that, Victoria. And then I don't know, is there a second Pluto that's part of this portfolio post-merger? Yeah, the Forrester prediction was really interesting. I had to reread it because at first when I heard other people talking about it, I was like, they can't mean replacing paid stuff with free stuff like that that feels strange like i could definitely see streaming services adding free tiers i i'm a little skeptical of how willing they'd be to give up subscriptions entirely um there was a story that dropped over the weekend uh about disney clarifying the language in its tier plans and a lot of people took it to mean that they would be adding ads to its ad free tier um technically they're all already some ads you know like if you're watching live stuff there's typically ads um so they had to kind of clarify that a bit but everybody flipped out at least on my social feeds like everybody was like oh there's gonna be ads and the stuff that i'm paying not to have ads well then why am i even paying like and maybe if they introduced their free tier first and got people hooked and then like or if they kept raising the prices on their subscription tiers which they've been doing i think today they just announced um hikes on both hulu and disney so because they're trying to incentivize people for the bundle because i think if you pay for them both individually it's like twice as much now.

29:14But yeah, I mean, what makes the most sense to me, because I know this is a really common like pricing model, is you make the subscription tier really expensive and you make the free tier, you know, free, but like a lot more ads, like worse in every way, basically. And so then that middle of like the basic paid ad tier seems more reasonable in comparison. That's a really common thing with three-tier pricing models. The high-cost one is not really worth it, and the low-cost one is awful, and so you go for the one in the middle all the time. It's like when you don't buy the most expensive wine on the list, and you don't buy the cheapest wine on the list.

29:56Exactly. You buy the$30. Yeah, that's normal. There's been a lot of... I think it might also speak to the maturation of the industry, because I think maybe on the other end of the spectrum, I'm currently enjoying a free year of Apple TV, slow horses and now. And it's because Apple was like kind of later, you know, quieter, and then now it just won all these Emmys. And at this point, I'm like, oh, yeah, like I would renew next year before I didn't feel like paying. But now that I got the free year, maybe I'll stick around. I mean, it's total just the way marketing works, right? And And then I feel like that's what you saw the more mature streamers like Disney, Paramount, Warner Brothers.

30:39They were doing all of that years ago, like tons of like collabs. Even now it's like, oh, thanks for buying something at Target. Here's three months of free Apple TV. Like it's just the amount of crossover subscription stuff is kind of bananas. But it's more on these newer platforms, less the more mature ones. And so it's interesting wrinkle to think that maybe they're going to move back to maybe like, I don't know, like, I was envisioning maybe is there a fast channel that just has older content and that's the free part or is it a higher ad load, you know, but I certainly as a consumer, what I want is choice because I have some services where I pay for the SVOD or the ad free service, whether it's because it's content primarily.

31:28viewed by young children or because it's like really immersive. And then there's like stuff that like, I don't care if there's a few ads when I watch some dumb reality show. Like I kind of, that's, that's my personal rubric and everyone has a different one. Yeah. I'll say another thing that doesn't get talked about as much as like a lot of the companies that have both broadcast and streaming elements, they'll take some of their older broadcast archival stuff and turn those into fast channels. Like, you know, there's a law order channel there's a channel that's just in cis there's a channel that's probably just real housewives like uh you know like so i don't know why i'm well ncis might be cbs but that's a lot of nbc shows i don't know what that says about me um but like i could definitely see a combined paramount wbd leveraging some of the the word leveraging i know we hate um

32:21i could see them using some of the stuff from their content library and turning them into fast channels i think taking some of the more premium stuff that is specifically done for uh their their streaming services i don't know about that as much maybe depending on what it is like i know there's a bunch of star trek channels maybe eventually they'll put discovery or strange new worlds on it but like i don't know that there's going to be a free hbo channel no because with hbo especially like they've been premium pay tv from the very beginning so i but then again like they also changed their name from hbo to max for a while so like maybe they just don't know what to do with their brand generally i don't know yeah it's um yeah it's complicated and i think i think also part of what in in our conversation victoria i'm thinking too about the experiences that i've had like you know i remember paying for peacock to watch the Olympics and then like I think they still you know at that point this is maybe two or three Olympics ago where like it just would kind of like go to black or like have some like stock image of the Olympics and I was like I actually my expectation is that I would be seeing ads like while watching something live but then there was also weird stuff going on with like the commentators I was like do they not have rights to street it's like I don't even know that I peeled off all the layers of the onion there when it comes to still also this linear versus streaming conflict that exists for companies at the scale of Warner Brothers Discovery.

33:57I think that also might be par for the course with live streaming content because I had a similar experience watching the Emmys where every once in a while there would be a 10 second interstitial where it wasn't black, but they would cut to basically just like a slow pan of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and be like, we're coming back to the Emmys soon which was very weird because the Emmys are shot in LA um but the first couple of times I was like what did they not fill the ad time and then I realized like oh no it's because they haven't come back from commercial on the live feed yet and they only have like 10 seconds and that's not enough to put an ad into I okay well maybe they need some more six second ads you know enough time it's more than enough time YouTube has taught us anything it's more than enough time that's also just making my head spin when you think about the people producing the live show and like how they're doing like 10 9 8 and like when you talk about like the technical complexities of live like this whole ad slot issue is like oh my gosh even even more people talked about that a lot with regard to streaming again it's it's that same thing of like reinventing the wheel where i've seen people complain about the netflix football games because they don't seem as well produced as the broadcast ones and i think they're starting to get better but yeah if you if you're starting from scratch and you don't have the institutional knowledge of having done this for you know 70 years or however long football's been on tv like it gets tougher respect for the ogs who know what they're doing yeah so let's let's close things out Victoria, tell us kind of what to expect for people who are looking at this primarily from like an ad point of view and ad tech and how there's going to be ad tech that's combined now across all the platforms.

35:51And then there's going to be just a new larger company that they can buy. What's the future? Could it look like? What could it look like? Yeah, I meant to caveat out this at the beginning i feel like i've mostly been covering this story from the synopsis perspective now that um my colleague elisa boyle and i are working on synopsis and streamlined which if you aren't subscribed to you should subscribe um but obviously that's much more of a focus on the tv production the business angles and less on the ad sales um i will say i think most of the people on the ad side that i've talked to aren't as concerned about consolidation as people on the business side which makes a lot of sense.

36:29To your point earlier, you know, a lot of people like having a unified app where they can, you know, buy ads across a bunch of different platforms and make it easier that way. It's not quite the same as like worrying that you're not going to make as much money producing movies as you used to or get as many roles because there's fewer of them because a big company is making less content, you know, that kind of thing. So obviously, it's a different conversation um yeah i mean i i know that paramount has been really focused on beefing up their ads and um we've covered some of their uh stuff in the past related to um they had i think during yellowstone like fixed ad spots that you could put at the beginning of like the first week of a new show um so you're you know school mentality everything old is new again brought to you now they have the tech in place to be able to do that but then convert it to more programmatic after that window where everybody's watching it effort like it's meant to be a water cooler kind of thing um i think they they put that out last year and that was i if i remember correctly that was before the merger actually closed so if anything now that they're now that it's paramount Skydance, they're much more focused on consolidating everything and like combining Paramount and Pluto, adding HBO Max to the mix and Discovery Plus and all of those other streaming capabilities feels like a foregone conclusion, especially if it's not interrupted by whatever carriage negotiations there are, which makes a lot of sense.

38:08You know, there aren't as many federal regulations on streaming as there are on cable channels, so it's probably coming. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting distillation of everything that's ahead. And I know when I think about, too, some of the stats around something like a typical 80-20 rule or, you know, even less where like maybe 80 % of the viewing is like the top 10 streaming apps. And do you even need, like, what do you need the DSP for? What is the value of the DSP and CTV when there's really only a handful of apps? So that's something that I'm keeping an eye on. I think they're, you know, spoiler alert for some people, it's frequency capping.

38:53But there's, I think there's more there that everyone in ad tech should be keeping their eye on. And that's going to be, yeah. Yeah, there's already been a big trend of people sort of trying to foster more direct relationships with publishers, both DSPs and SSPs. And then also like sometimes people just buying direct, you know, through upfronts or stuff like that. So that would make a lot of sense that that became much more prominent as a result of there being fewer companies to have to negotiate with. Yeah. And I think more connection points into an ad server versus an SSP, which has some nuances.

39:24I'm going to be talking to Magnite about that on our stage as well. So lots to come there. We're going to leave it there. And thank you, Victoria, for your coverage across Ad Exchange and Synopsys in our streamlined newsletters, which again, you should subscribe to and can do so on our website if you're not already. See you next week at Programmatic I.O. We're going to be recording the big story live on day two. So we hope to see you there.

39:55This 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.