Why B2B Marketers Should Be Running CTV Ads with Amit Sharan (SVP Marketing at Tatari)

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

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1:32So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

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3:02All right, check this out. You can run TV ads for 50 bucks a day. Most B2B marketers have no idea that's even possible. You hear TV and you think Super Bowl and I can't possibly afford that or go and do it. Look, my guest in this episode is Amit Charan. He's SVP of marketing at Tatari. They're an ad tech platform that lets you buy and measure TV the same way you buy Google and LinkedIn. Before this, he was the first marketing hired for startups, including LiveRail, which sold to Facebook for$450 million. We get into everything you need to know about CTV heading into 2026, why programmatic ad buying only touches about 15 % of TV inventory, the move he says every B2B marketer should be running right now with TV.

3:42how and why to retarget your website visitors on connected TV and the halo effect that lifts every other channel after your first campaign. He left me with a bunch of notes and making me feel like, man, we need to be running TV ads for exit five. So if you're tired of dumping more budget into AdWords and looking for new channels right now, this one's for you. Enjoy my conversation with Amit. Okay. So you've been first marketing hire at four startups, including LiveRail, which sold to Facebook, aka Meta for 450 million. Now you're at Tatari. You're kind of this like early stage marketing guy and you grow things, but Tartari has been a good little run for you.

4:18Can you just replay that? Let's use that to set the stage of like, you literally said, I'm not going to talk about Tartari. I need you to because it sets the stage for this. So you're SVP of marketing there, TV advertising platform for brands and agencies. When did you get there? Like, just tell me about your run at Tartari and like what you've been doing and just to set the stage for our conversation. Yeah. So been in ad tech now for probably 10 plus years. I was at a early stage company called LiveRail. It was basically a video SSP to use some industry jargon to break down what that means is when you go watch a video online, you press play, you see that pre-roll ad or that mid-roll ad.

4:56We were early in that game and 25 % of like all online video flew through our platform. Meta at the time known as Facebook was, they called it preparing for winter. I said, winter's coming. And that meant that the, what year was this? This was 2014. So the inventory and newsfeed was running out. They were literally running out of inventory. They needed to create new services. They need to be able to get their ads, be able to deliver their ads off of Facebook proper. And so they acquired LiveRail and we could spend a whole episode talking about what it's like because I'll accommodate it to Facebook.

5:34Got some juicy, fun stories. But what that also morphed into is the Facebook audience network. So I also ran marketing for that billion-dollar business unit. How long did you stick around after that deal? About four and a half years. Okay, wow. So you were a Facebook employee, technically, for four-plus years? Yeah, and so I did that. I ran marketing in the ad tech part for LiveRail and audience network for about half that time. And they were essentially trying to build double click, right? Everything that Google acquired and put together into what, you know, what was, what's known as their ad suite today.

6:09And, you know, kind of, again, to maybe share some of the juicy bits of what happens after an acquisition, I think that would actually be a good podcast theme for you. If like all the people have had exits, go talk about what happens after the exit. Yeah. I mean, my brain, so I don't always say these things out loud, but my brain instantly went to, I wonder how much money he made in that deal. Like that's, that's only because I finally had, I had two companies get acquired in the same year while I was, so I had left one and I was at the other and both of them in 2021 had liquidity events happen.

6:40And I thought I was the richest man in America. You know, I'm not, but it was like the most amazing thing to see money come into your bank account. And, you know, I spent 15 years before that talking to everybody. You just don't actually know. I don't know if you know Sam Parr, he runs Hampton. It's a like founder community. He has a podcast, which I think is a great idea called Money Wise, where you just bring on people who are willing to talk about things financially because, man, there's so much that I learned through that process. I got screwed on this tax thing and I should have done this thing and this thing didn't happen.

7:11And it's like, you only know what you know now. So yes, absolutely, that would be a great podcast. I mean, that should be a thing in our CMO council. It's like, we had somebody a couple of months ago, it was like, yeah, I've been in my job for four and a half years. I'm fully vested. I think the company is going to sell, but I kind of want to leave. You know, like stuff like that is just, that's the real stuff beyond the like, is CTV a good channel? So yeah, there's a lot there for sure, but we'll do that another time separate. That's a after hours pod. So the back half of that, that time spent there was actually moving over to product marketing org and the, what they call global business marketing.

7:46And I got to join a team that was called media monetization is newly formed team. And I was just like, Hey, we need to create all these new ad services and we need a team that can, can bring this stuff to market. And so there would be consumer services that would be launched, which stuff like Facebook live, if you remember that, or Facebook watch or Instagram TV. And then there was stuff with, um, I would do, I was so into the, all those social channels because my, one of my first jobs in right around this time, like the 20, 2010 to 2014, I was working in PR at this company, constant contact or email, email provider.

8:22and they had made a bunch of, they were trying to like expand beyond email into social. And my job was the PR, I was a PR guy, had a full head of hair, fresh out of college. I was the PR guy on their social media products. And so my job was to read TechCrunch every day. And this was like, you know, buddy media, wildfire, like all these, there's so much social newsfeed. You know, Facebook used to have to have to like, likes the Facebook page, like get access to the feed. And that was like my whole life for the longest time. And then I worked at HubSpot and HubSpot was very like, trying to just trying to do new stuff.

8:51And remember like Meerkat, you know, it's like Vine and Meerkat and like all these random little social apps would come out on ProductCon and people would use it. That was, that was a time, man. Now, now I just, you're just in Claude all day and there's nothing exciting. I lose a lot of hours to Claude. Yeah. So I got to work on some cool stuff. Um, and again, marketing to marketers, you know, uh, I I'd have to, and this get kind of getting back to how I landed at Tataari. I would have to show up at what we call executive briefing center or partner center meetings. And it was kind of a dog and pony show thing where you bring in the largest Facebook advertisers and you'd share the roadmap of like, here's all the cool things we're building.

9:31And I'd get to go in there and talk about all these new services that are coming and how there's going to be new ad formats against them. And as I started to kind of think about what's next for me personally, I was like, you know, I kind of want to get back to building. And if there's, you know, there's a time and a place to go build a company and sell it again, it's definitely in the Bay Area. And so when I came across Tatari, I talked to our founder, Philippe, and I said to him, hey, I've been spending the last four years kind of spreading the propaganda that TV's dead and mobile's king. I literally wrote the global pitch deck for Facebook and TV.

10:07And I was like, tell me why brands are coming to TV. And he kind of listed off everything I was hearing in those partner-centered meetings without knowing it. And it kind of goes back to like newsfeed slowing and people hitting the same audience over and over and just kind of hitting a general plateau on social and needing to find a new channel at scale. And the more I poked at the roadmap with Tatari and the vision, I was like, you got something here. Hold on. Didn't you tell me, I feel like you told me that the founder was the guy who created Shazam. Is that true? Yeah, that's true. That's a fun fact.

10:40Is that Philippe? Is that what you say? Yeah. So how did you meet this guy? Believe it or not, this was, I feel like this was like a, I don't know if you remember the website. I don't know if it's still around. I think it's AngelList. Like it was more. Oh, yeah. What do you mean? Of course. I'm a big investor, man. I got$5 ,000 in a bunch of different companies, my guy. Don't you worry. Early stage start. I mean, like the website had a picture of AngelList. Oh, dude. AngelList, like if you were looking for like a real good job in like tech and SaaS and marketing, you'd go find AngelList because AngelList was all like the kind of venture back companies, the YC type of company.

11:17So you're saying that's how you found you were just browsing AngelList for jobs. Yeah, you got to be like, that's where that like, if you're the tech, the tech forward founder who's looking for a marketing person, you post that thing on AngelList for sure. Yeah. And they weren't looking for someone of my seniority at the time. I reached out. I just said, hey, I'd love to talk to you. I've been at Facebook. I've been in online video and ad tech. And we eventually we saw this would be a good fit. And he likes to say that he probably hired me a little too early in terms of, you know, bringing on a senior marketer.

11:49But I think it was the right move. Okay. So that was, what year was that? That was 2018. We were about, I think I was employee number 28 when I joined. We're currently around a little over 300 people. Profitable. Can you give me a revenue taste? I can't just because we're a private company. I do think I put Philippe on TVPN and he said, you know, we're well over 100 million in net. I think there's a lot of founders out there like to talk about gross, which is a much bigger 100 million net flex, which is a much bigger number on the gross side. But look, to give people an example of just kind of the scale of stuff that we're doing, because I think there's a lot of companies out there that are, you know, they'll take your 500 bucks and they'll run a TV campaign for you.

12:32We put four brands on the Super Bowl in February of this year. Right. So we definitely have a bigger spectrum of the types of clients that we work with. And this is kind of where it gets into B2B marketing, right? We've got your kind of SMB, we've got your mid-market, we've got your enterprise. So can someone give you 500 bucks? It's like, if you have a big budget, are you focused on those four brands that are going to do Super Bowl ads? No, like I said, we've got brands across the spectrum, but to just point blank answers, no, we're not going to take your 500 bucks because you're not going to learn.

13:05You're my podcast, which means I get to ask any questions that come across my desk. So over a hundred million in profit of some kind. That's what that means. That's the net. So you do your math on that. That's a good one. You said I put Philippe on a TBPN. How did you get him on TBPN? That actually just ended up being, yeah, I tried the PR channels. I tried personal outreach and it just ended up having to be like, you know, someone who knows someone. Did you try to like reach out to John and Jordy directly or producer Ben or he tried everybody? Yeah, yeah. Tried it that way. And then it just happened to be someone at the company knew someone.

13:36Again, I think it was their dad knew someone there. Okay. And was there any marketing spike from being on TBPN or is it more of a who's who influencer crowd, you know, Silicon Valley crowd? Yeah, no, I can't say leads started flowing in from that. But look, I think of marketing as three buckets where one is the typical demand gen that everyone kind of thinks of when they think of marketing. I think of product marketing, product marketing team reports into me. But then there's a corporate marketing bucket. And I think it's part of your job as CMO, head of marketing, to also build the valuation of a company and stuff like that.

14:13TBPN, And I'm leaving for Cannes tomorrow. That's a huge industry tentpole. But yes, there's CMOs walking around. Yes, there's a little bit of demand gen component. But part of that is definitely industry leading kind of evaluation. But don't you think those things anyway, don't those end up helping in the demand gen side any? Like if I've always had this argument, it's like if more people know who you are and you're just out there more, like your baseline of inbound is going to be higher. Well, I mean, I have this conversation about TV all the time, right? If I said you could save 15 % on your car insurance, you already know what brand I'm talking about and you're not in market for car insurance, right?

14:53My son is home today. He's six. He would know that. He would tell you that's Geico. He would know the lizard, you know? So, I mean, this is kind of getting into the brand and performance type of conversation, but absolutely. I mean, part of corporate marketing is building your brand. Yeah. But on the brand, we'll have some other stuff I want to come back to, but just because we're talking about right now on the brand and performance thing, though, people that are listening to this, they often like to, you know, they like to bucket thing. Okay, well, tell me how much of my budget should be spent here or there or time there?

15:22Is there something you think about? Is it like when brand things happen, you go and do them? Like the demand gen stuff is like, we have a budget, we need this much traffic, we need this many leads, we need this much conversion rate. Some of the other stuff is harder to account for. How do you plan for that? How do you make sure you're doing it? Yeah. So number one, you should be doing all of it, right? It's not an either or. And I think where it gets into the it depends territory, right, is absolutely your budget. It's absolutely your goals. It's your stage of company. But I don't think it's ever too early to be building your brand and you don't have to be spending a ton to do that.

15:56I like to think about it in terms of my own personal marketing for Tatari and B2B marketing as sometimes just even air cover for sales outreach. You want people to have heard of you when someone's reaching out or when they see you and they're comparing you against a competitive set. The other thing that kind of falls in this territory that we're talking about is I've heard some of our clients say, hey, our ad ran during that college football game and my CEO's phone lit up from investors, from friends, from their just general network. And that we want to do that again solely for that reason. The other 99 % of their campaign, they're absolutely looking at cost per acquisition, right?

16:40But there are some things that are just good for building brand reputation. And how do you measure those things? How do you know? How can you tell Philippe that the reputation is improving? I mean, look, there's your classic share There are voice metrics. There's brand sentiment. There's stuff I think most of the listeners here know about how to measure your brand. Are you doing all those things now? Those are just part of your marketing machine? Yeah, I definitely look at like share a voice a little bit more. I think there's a lot, especially in this space where people are, yeah, it's a shiny new object, CTV.

17:15Everyone's talking about it. There's like a lot of analysts that kind of go around and we get results of some of these reports where people are talking about what companies are top of the list. I would say that the interesting part that's happening in my world as it relates to just brand awareness is that, and I think a lot of people can relate to this, is that all of a sudden everyone has flooded the market with a CTV solution. And so it used to be, at least when I first joined Tatari, it was one of three companies you would think about working with if you were going to do TV advertising. Now it seems like everyone, whether you're a direct mail company, a mobile DSP, everyone says they can get you on CTV.

17:55And so there's like a lot of nuance to that statement. I mean, you can get sushi at a gas station, right? It doesn't mean you should do it. I find myself having to actually educate people on TV in my marketing before I ever talk about a feature or a benefit of working with Tatari. And I have to remind my team a lot. I've always said, that's the best B2B marketing playbook, at least in my opinion, is to be the number one source of knowledge, regardless of if someone's going to buy for you or not. How can my brand be the resource people turn to and learn from? And then even if they decide to buy somewhere else, and I think it's a very old school way of like, no, we're not helping you.

18:37We're only going to help the people who are going to buy our thing. I use the example of HubSpot for me as a junior marketer all the time. I had to present a budget plan or a marketing plan for the first time. I had no idea what I was doing. I'm like 24 years old, like Google, you know, this, I find a HubSpot, you know, thing, I copy it exactly, put our stuff in. And my boss was like, you little genius. And I'm like, yeah, you know, no big deal. Yeah. I look the other part to this angle of like competition and kind of maybe getting back to like marketing to marketers. I feel like marketing is kind of a distant cousin to sales in ways where when you take a sales call, you know what's happening, right?

19:14You know, they're qualifying you, you know, that they're like trying to hit on your pain points. Like, you know, there's a formula to what's happening in that sales call. I think it's the same thing in marketing where it's like marketers respect good marketing. And if you're doing stuff for like, you know, optimizing an open rate or whatever, you know, you've probably sat yourself at a conference and saw like, just like a bad slide and thought about that. Like, man, it's bad. I could have done that better, right? Like, we're just wired to think that way. So I think what that what I'm really trying to articulate here is like, there's a sniff test with marketers, and you have to be extremely authentic and honest.

19:48And in my world, I'm up against a competitor who's got Ryan Reynolds as a spokesperson, what I maybe up until six months ago, and it's kind of semi canceled, but was like the most likable guy on the planet. He was canceled. I hear I hear some things. I'll ask Claude after this. Claude, let me know. Did Ryan Reynolds get canceled? Come back to me. Look, I'm up against other CEOs that are trying to be influencers and go viral and stuff. And so when I look at our marketing, I go, hey, how do we stand out amongst this sea of all these new competitors? I think it's actually making marketers the star.

20:26And so testimonials is not a new concept, But I actually use marketers in my ads because I feel like if every month you're seeing Brian Reynolds in an ad, whether that's on TV or digitally, but then you see me showing a different brand every month and their head of marketing talking about Tatari. And we as marketers know how hard it is to get a case study. I feel like this is what's making us stand out. So I will, well, it just feels realer. It just, it just feels realer. And I think anybody that's listening, whether you market to marketers, not, or, you know, sell to cybersecurity or whatever, you know, if you see the, the CISO of this company uses this product, you're more likely to be like, oh, that seems legit.

21:09I should go check this out. The marketing person at this company, that that's a real person. That's you're, you're just competing with it. The Ryan Reynolds angle is they're competing on like entertainment or funny. I think you have like many different plays that you can run and decide, okay, we're going to win on the like ingredients and facts. And we're going to, you know, I think that's a good approach. I like that. Yeah, proof points. I mean, this is not revolutionary by any means, but I will go in. I will send a camera crew to your office because I want it to feel like your brand. I will, we will do an interview with you.

21:40I will cut that up into a three minute case study, but then I'll cut it up into a 15 second and a 30 second and I will run it on TV. I will do that through linear, through streaming, through... Well, the whole thing is like how legit that seems. So part of our community, we run on this company called Circle, and they wanted to do... We're one of their top communities, and they wanted to do a video shoot. And they said, hey, Dave, can you give us an hour in Vermont? We will fly to you. We'll bring the whole people, bring everybody there. And I was like, yeah, how am I going to say no that? I don't really have anything they're going to do it.

22:13And it was amazing. It was so high-end. it, even though I was doing them a favor by being in the video is like, if you curate that whole thing and you make it feel super legit, I ended up like posting a bunch of the clips after I looked really nice that day. They gave me a bunch of the photos. Like I didn't care that I'm basically just being in an ad for them. It was like, they made it easy for me as opposed to, Hey, can you send us a video like that? That's a great way to do that. Especially your, you know, your level of marketing. Oh yeah. I'll involve our CS team. They will, you know, Hey, here's the story.

22:43Here's the thing that really stands out. Here's like a prep doc and, you know, make it super easy for them to just show up and be the talent. All right. Tell me about TV. Let's, let's teach these marketers. So one of the things people like about our content and our stuff is we teach them how to do something new, how to get better at something. You're an expert in CTV. Let's start at the top. What is this? Explain this channel for people in the, in the simplest terms. So the average person listening to this is, you know, director of marketing at a B2B manufacturing company in Ohio doing, you know,$68 million in revenue.

23:16They're doing all the other channels, but they need new ideas. They need new channels. They want to do something else other than spend more money on AdWords. I'll start at the top here. And like, I'm going to explain just the landscape of what there is. And the truth is there is probably something different for everybody. But if you think about this in terms of a pie chart, all right, and we're just going to talk viewership right now. And then we'll talk about of like where the actual money goes for ad spend. Imagine a pie chart and it's split in half. Half of the country is actually still watching, you commonly refer to as cable, right?

23:52And that's linear or broadcast. And the other half is watching streaming. And so a lot of people refer to that as, you know, CTV. And so that's one thing to just kind of understand that those are the two buckets. By the way, is there any data? I'm just curious, like where would you, if I go to my parents' house, even they, they're on all the streaming, you know, they're on the Roku, we're on the YouTube TV. Do you have any like market sizing, you know, guardrails? Like, should I worry about traditional TV or just worry about CTV? Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely.

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26:39Well, this is kind of where you get into like, where are the ad dollars going? So I'm going to maybe come back to that, Dave, but just to kind of explain a little bit about, so the viewership side, there's linear and they're streaming. Now I may ask you, hey, if I'm watching a football game on Sunday through YouTube TV, is that broadcast cable, what we call linear? Or is that streaming? Well, before you answer, we're all watching the same thing at the same time, seeing the same ads, and it's being pumped through ABC, Fox, CBS. I think I've just given you the answer. It's actually linear, but it's delivered through an IP app, right?

27:22So same thing goes for like Thursday Night Football and Amazon Prime, right? But don't I see local ads, though, during those commercials too, though? like you're going to see Bay Area commercials. I'm going to see, you know, skiing commercials out here. Sometimes, but most of the time, and you're probably just not maybe remembering this, but this might trigger your memory when you see like a moment of Zen brought to you by YouTube. Oh yeah. YouTube, right? Like they're covering up the actual local pod. Oh, that's what that is. I'm like watching the, I'm watching the golf and it's like five, you know, two minutes of Zen.

27:54I'm like, what is, this is a wasted opportunity. Yeah, yeah. And so my point to this little anecdote is that the lines between linear and streaming are blurring because of how it's delivered. Now, as we start to get into this ads part of this conversation, just to double down on this, we had like nine brands that were in the Major League Baseball World Series. All right. Even though you could watch that on streaming, those brands couldn't get in with a streaming or CTV buy. You actually had to buy that through the linear rep through the network. Right. So there is a difference between viewership and ads.

28:37And then when you just as we get into ads here, you think about the total time of ad inventory. it would actually be very surprising to you, right? Where you're going, well, Netflix, everyone watches Netflix. How much ad inventory is on Netflix? Same thing with Amazon Prime. So that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just means don't put all your eggs in one basket, one network, one streaming app. If you approach this just like any other channel, you would say, I'm trying to maximize all of it. An example I often give people, and this relates to programmatic CTP, which I think a lot of providers are out there If I said to you, hey, we just started this company, here's a million dollars,$10 million, whatever, we need a paid social strategy.

29:22And you talked to an agency and they said, we can only buy Instagram reels. You'd be like, well, I want Snap and I want TikTok and I want X, I don't know, right? Like I want all of social media. I don't want just one sliver of it. That's kind of what happens when you're buying CTV programmatically. It's about 15 % of what TV is in terms of total ad inventory. And so again, just kind of explaining that there's a really wide landscape if you're trying to reach the entire TV audience. Now, B2B marketers, it's going to depend on what type of company you are. There's absolutely B2B brands running on the Super Bowl and reaching 120 million people all at once.

30:03There's also brands, which I think is a no-brainer. every listener should be doing this, retargeting your site visitors on TV and specifically CTV. That is very cheap to do. These are people who are potentially already familiar with their brand because they've been to your website. They may not have converted. You may have segments on your website. Like I have a segment for brands. I have a segment for agencies. I might deliver a different message to those. And that's something you can apply to your own website. What makes it a no brainer? Is it just because I see you in multiple places and my brain thinks you're everywhere or is there like something else to it?

30:40I mean, I think where else can you get 15 to 30 uninterrupted seconds to tell your story, your product benefits, have someone, you know, a testimonial. For me, I spent years telling advertisers, you got to make a creative that gets them to stop scrolling. It's thumb stopping creative. You got to have an offer or something in the first three seconds, right? Like this is kind of what you're dealing with in the digital world. you can be watching you know love island you know at home i'm a summer house guy myself actually yeah okay there you go you probably got you know a 60 inch tv on your wall and now you've got to get a really relevant message that you can't skip and is it also the economics of like retargeting those people is going to be pretty cost effective oh yeah it's extremely cheap this is stuff that you can do which where you know we're talking like 50 50 a day why is that what is it i'm an idiot.

31:39People leave me comments all the time. What is it about like retargeting a website visitor that's cheaper than if I just wanted to like, you know, shotgun reach a bunch of people through TV? I mean, I think that's actually it, right? It's the reach. It is. I am targeting a very specific pool of visitors. Oh, got it. So because you're niching down to like, I only want to show this to these people that visited my site. And is there some number that that's meaningful there? Does it have to be enough? I'd say 10 ,000 unique monthly visitors. Oh, wow. It's probably like, like where you want to be at.

32:09Dude, we got to put exit five on TVs. We have like 13 ,000 monthly visits. Okay. I like it. People are listening to this. Let's just say you're having an event in September that you're trying to drive attendance to. You want to share creative about... That's actually so true. I'm sending it to Allison after this. Retarget. And that's a good example because we already have the creative. But my next question was going to be, okay, so yeah, cool. We can retarget through CTV. And I guess I'm sure I'm sure this is why you're talking about this. Like, I'm sure you can do this in Tatari, but I don't have any experience here.

32:42So correct me if I'm, but it seems like you can do this within LinkedIn now, like, you know, just that platform on its own, you can do it. LinkedIn's great. I mean, I feel like it's kind of gold standard for B2B marketers in terms of the first party data, right? The fact that you can do campaigns based on like title, revenue size, stuff like that. So I'm not sure if they have a retargeting solution. I think they might be a little bit more on the prospecting side, but yes, to answer your question, like there are a number of providers that can do retargeting for CTV. But what about the creative, right?

33:08We have a hard enough time picking like compelling creative for static LinkedIn stuff. We just do these super on-brand things that don't really convert well, don't perform really, just look like ads. Don't I have to then, your point, you have to make a compelling, if I have 15, how am I going to make a 15 to 30 second video that is compelling? Like what, any guidance on the creative there? I think we can give lots of guidance. I think it always comes back to your brand, your message, stuff like that. I would say in general, right? some of the advice we give, and this is also applies to B2C brands as well.

33:40First of all, don't discount your story. You know, why you exist. Some of the highest performing type of format ads we have are just what we call founder ads. It is the founder saying why you exist, the problem that you encountered, why you're solving it, why you're different. Looking straight at camera. We have a Tatari founder ad featuring Philippe that does that same exact thing. But as shop them up into 15, 30 second ads. So while I have a creative version that actually features one specific brand, I also do mashups, right? So it'll be like four or five brands talking about one specific thing, like maybe measurement and four or five credible people talking about my product and something very specific that differentiates us.

34:25I would say a lot of people for some reason, not that it's crazy, but they figure out what really resonates with people on social and then come to TV and for some reason assume they have got to do something completely different. It's like, I got to put my big boy pants on because I'm going to TV. And sometimes that is warranted. And it's like, yeah, we're going to be doing college football placements, you know, or NFL or something, you know, I want to be in the NBA finals and I want to show up a different way. Go for it. But you found what works, you know, take that to TV as well. Hopefully. Yeah.

34:57If you have organic or just even just in that example, I just made this know for ourselves, we actually have a bunch of video content from drive. It would be pretty easy to come up with like a 30 second little highlight reel. And that could be a V1 of what we would use to retarget. You know, I would, if I'm really going to do it though, I want to like, I want to go for it. I want to like, remember like the will it blend video, like videos or like, you need something like a sham. Wow. I want to get you. If I'm going to get you on TV, I want to like put a handgun in a blender and, you know, see if that works type of thing.

35:30I mean, but that's also the beauty of kind of where TV has gone from, you know, over the past decade is you can test creatives in the same way you would on digital. You can, you know, run through four or five of them and you should always be trying to beat your best performing creative. And do you have a school of thought around like having an offer and, you know, cause if you listen to podcasts, you watch shows, it's like, there's always, you know, the OGs was like, you know, stamps.com and there's a promo code and a discount, but I'm just trying to use a B2B example to be related. Okay. You mentioned a Superbowl commercial, right?

36:04Nobody runs, none of the B2B brands, like not none of them, but most of them don't have an offer. It's usually just a brand thing. Or I had the VP of marketing, Ryan from Rippling. That's a, they sell to HR. They had a Superbowl ad. I don't think it was like save 10 % on Rippling today, but without an offer, does it make it harder to track? How do you think about having an offer and then what you're trying to drive? Is it direct response? Is it show them lots of ads over time and then look at it after? How do you think about it? I think you're thinking about this the right way. It's like, what is our goal here?

36:34Are we building brand? Are we trying to drive direct response? I think you can have a call to action and it doesn't need to be an offer. You know, on our end cards, I think it's tatari.tv slash growth. And we land you on our other case studies. We want you to see the proof points or watch the full case study that I just gave you 15 seconds of. And that still is driving the behavior we want. We are driving you to our site. We're driving you to proof points. We can obviously drive you to just a landing page where we want you to schedule a demo. So I don't think you have to have an offer in there.

37:08Is there a way to like plot all of the touch points? Because I also figure like we see with our podcast sponsors who sponsor our podcast and do so over months. It's not direct response, but then people feel like they're hearing about them through us more. I wonder if there is there some element of TV also where it's just another touch point, like to your point about retargeting website visitors. I mean, we call it the halo effect, surround sound. Yeah, we see, making this number up, but it feels like 90 % of our clients will turn around and say after their first TV campaign that all of their other channels are doing better.

37:40Their quality scores are better, their click-throughs, conversions are better, and they bring us the data. That is in our case studies where it's like a 25 % increase in branded search. Over the time that you're running, yeah, That makes sense. Okay. What else do people listening to this need, want to know? If I'm in the car right now, I'm like, hey, have you got to ask him this about TV and what we should be doing? Well, I think when I was thinking about this podcast and looking at the previous episodes, Claude told me that I think maybe the past four or five episodes were all about AI. And we probably deserve an award for getting this far in this without saying.

38:16I mentioned Claude like three times. Oh, yeah, you're right. You're right. Well, no, my new thing is now is like, remember how in COVID it was like in these unprecedented times, you know, now it's like in the world of AI and we're trying to like, we do two webinars a month and we're always like writing the copy for them. And they've all been recently like, see how you learn about, learn how to do demand gen in the world of AI, learn how to do product marketing in the world of AI. I'm like, we got to stop that. We were on the topic of creative. And I think this is usually where people's mind floats when you were saying like, how do I make a commercial and video?

38:51And naturally, I think people start thinking about AI generated video and maybe the cost of production and time of producing some of this creative has changed. And we have had clients who have had 100 % AI creative. And so, you know, examples might be like Greenlight, the kid's debit card or Falicious, which is like a Vietnamese pho. Kalshi, I think is probably one most people know of, you know, like the betting app. And I can't say that, oh, this is AI generated creative performs significantly better or significantly worse. It's just too real early, right? To like have some sort of determination on that.

39:37What I would say is affecting the industry and helping marketers is that production time. So like in the case of Greenlight, it was, hey, this shoot would have cost millions of dollars if we wanted to like build a set that did this concept. We could do parts of this with AI. And in the Felicia's case, like he's running a sequential story and like kind of tying into parts of the year. I think he had a kind of Halloween-themed creative and just kind of continues the story. So I do think it's real. I do think it's part of it. But then you've got to now think about the consumer sentiment side of this.

40:18We actually ran a survey to our own clients and asked them, do you plan on doing AI creative? Or if you have, are you doing more? I think the jury's still out on how people are reacting to it. And back to what I said earlier, right? When you're marketing to marketers and they appreciate good marketing, I think there's sentiment like that with consumers as well. Yeah, there's a weird thing. Like, you know, the Puerto Rico song that's gone viral. You know that one? I don't think so. I'll have to play it. I don't know if I, I don't want to get this taken down, but I'll drop it to you. But it's like this TikTok trend and the song is about Puerto Rico and it's gone completely viral.

40:56And it's very catchy. It's insanely catchy, but I played it for my wife and she's like, oh my God, what type of, it sounds like an 80s like bop, right? But then I'm like, and it was made by AI. And she's like, no. And it's like, it's this weird thing with humans I think that we're navigating right now. It's not, it's like sometimes you can't tell a difference, but once you know, it changes how you feel about it for some reason, which I think is an interesting thing to explore. Like, what if I found out like Drake's Iceman was actually not actually him, is 100 % AI generated? I'd be pissed. Yeah, I think.

41:30I think the jury's still out. I think it helps you move faster. I think you should try it. But I also don't think you need to be intimidated with like, I need to do$100 ,000 shoot. And B2B, I think it can help you, especially if you're doing product shots and trying to swap things out. Yeah, let's be honest. Your job as a marketer, your job is to drive revenue for the company. You have to do a lot of things and you don't always have actors and designers. I think Like however you feel about AI, like I'm separating that. As a marketer, give me that. I can like write, I mean, we did a webinar a couple months ago and with the team at 11 Labs and they just showed some of the cool stuff that you can do with video and voice and creative and tap into, you know, other markets without having to get translations done.

42:14And it's like, that's an amazing tool. It's like having the internet, but forcing yourself to do a, you know, be in person or something. I don't know. The other thing just on the landscape side of things, if you're going to think about TV, look, You have to think about measurement. I would say you want to look for partners that focus on incrementality. I think view through as a metric is kind of the standard. And I think that's in TV, that's almost the version that's very close to last click. And I think most marketers don't think last click is very effective. So I just want everyone to know that that's possible.

42:47Like you can track, it's typically using an IP address, it's closed loop. you know that the person saw your ad and then they took an action because of TV, not because it was the last thing that they saw. You can be running other campaigns alongside that. Okay, a personal question for you. You've done well, you've done, you know, this is your fourth or fifth marketing job. You got a good thing going. What keeps you motivated and interested and engaged now as a SVP of marketing? Like what gets you fired up to go into work every day? I still get to try cool things, you know? Like your whole job isn't people management?

43:24No, definitely. There is a good chunk spent on that. I think we all know spending time in one-on-ones and removing blockers and, you know, making sure people are set up for success. Building bench strength is all an important part of leading a marketing team. But I think at least in the situation that I'm in now, we get to try new things all the time. And I think that's what still makes marketing exciting. I'm going to go back to an old school tactic here right now, but like, I've never done a billboard. I'm doing a billboard in Cannes and I'm so weird. Oh, I was going to ask you what's your plan for Cannes.

43:57Do you have a hat? Do you have one of those hats? Do you have like a nice like hat, like a South to France hat? No, now you're, now you're making me feel like I should have had one. Could you know what I'm talking about? Can you picture that? Yeah. But you know, like I have never done something like that. We're going to like kind of be fun and what's on the billboard. So when I was talking earlier about how a lot of our competitors can really only access 15 % of the entire TV market. I'm showing up with a fun way to say that. And actually, and so I'm doing it in a bunch of cool ways and physical ways, and a bunch of different spaces, you know, at age space, at Digiday space.

44:33Oh, cool. So this is a whole thing. It's not just like you're going, there's a big campaign you guys are doing there. Is it hard to get spots for creative? Cause it's just like everyone who's spending money in the space is there. Yes, it's hard and it's expensive, but kind of just depends on what your goals are, right? And I said, this is definitely a little bit more corporate marketing, but I do think it's going to turn some heads for some CMOS that are there too. Yeah, I get to try new things. I feel like marketing is constantly changing. I mean, you cover it all the time on your podcast, and so it definitely keeps it interesting.

45:04I feel like one of the areas I didn't focus on that I think is coming back to bite me now is SEO. and, you know, early days, like I mentioned, it was probably one of three companies you'd go to if you're going to try TV advertising. A search ad or a search result where someone's got millions of dollars on the line, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars on the line to do TV advertising was probably not what was going to win, you know, if you're the first person on the search result. Now, the way people are searching, right, is through LLMs and you got to be mentioned. And so I feel like kind of having to go back and figure all that out.

45:39Yeah, but I keep, I mean, I have a cool job because I talk to, my job now is just like talking to people like you. And it is, it's like, there's two tracks. It's like, yes, things are moving fast and things are changing a lot, which is interesting. But then also, if I look at the macro, I'm like, well, that's actually never changed. It's always been about standing out and being interesting. And I try to sprinkle that as the through line in all of our content. Don't let how fast things are moving take away from like, oh, yeah, what are the principles of how people make buying decisions? My existential crisis, the fear is as long as we have jobs, the only thing I'm worried about is if it's like the company's AI agent is talking to the buyer's AI agent and like a human doesn't matter.

46:26As long as humans are involved, as long as you're trying to sell to marketers who want to like spend their TV budget, I think I know the right place to, you know, win their hearts and minds. But if that goes away, I think I'm going to be driving like I'm going to I already have a plan. I'm going to buy a fleet. Yeah, I'm going to buy a fleet of like robo taxis here in Vermont. And I'll own like, you know, seven autonomous taxis and that'll be my new job. There you go. Leading into what the new future looks like. Who's going a bunch of team. There's a team going to Canada or just you? Uh, yeah.

46:57Most of the executive team. I mean, Canada is an interesting place because it just feels like it's mostly strategic meetings that you're spending your time doing. There is a lot of content and stuff going on, but it's, it's, there's so much to compete with, man. Like, I don't, I don't want to put someone on stage and then like Paris Hilton is DJing at Meta Beach and like, or the Kelsey brothers are, you know, on stage somewhere. It's just like, no one's showing up to your thing. It's tough. Yeah, it's tough. All right. Well, it's good to see you. I hope you have a good time over there. Safe travels.

47:28Thanks for doing this. And look, send us a note so you can, you know, we'll link Tom, it's LinkedIn and everything, but send us a note. Any more questions about CTV advertising on TV, we could, we could cover that in a follow up, a follow up session. I think there's this, there's a huge appetite. I'll leave you on this. There's a huge appetite, I feel, of people investigating the kind of non-core channels. I guess TV's been a core channel, but everyone's kind of like, I mean, you've seen it in our CMO group. So many people right now are questioning, should I be spending all this money on AdWords when search is changing?

48:00And so I think this is an interesting topic to explore where people are going to spend money in the future of marketing. All right. Check him out, Tatari. Even though he didn't plug it, I will because he's a good guy. Oh, last thing, put you on the spot. Do you have any lessons from B2B? Did anything about coaching high school lacrosse teach you anything about B2B sales? This sounds like the worst cringe LinkedIn post ever. That's why I said it. That's why I said it. Oh man, absolutely nothing. Okay, all right, we'll end it. Goodbye. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, you know, you're going to can, you can't be answering low class questions like that on your way out.

48:35Appreciate it.

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