Inside’s Stagwell’s AI media curation marketplace

[MUSIC] >> Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Digital Day Podcast, a show for anyone who is just absolutely dying to know what curation looks like when AI agents are handling the advice. I'm Camilla McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter here at Digital Day. >> I'm Tom Peterson, Executive Editor of Video and Audio at Digital Day Media. Camilla, let's think about it. >> I think this is the first episode we've done on curation, which surprised me because curation has been such a big buzzword, and especially like 2024, was a huge buzzword. So the fact that it took us this long to do a curation episode, yeah, I just wasn't expecting that. Were you or were you like, God, if we could have gone a little bit longer, maybe? >> Well, I will say one late is better than never. So glad we did address it. But two, I guess it's app, right? Because when you talk about curation, this ties into this whole conversation of like the supply chain who owns it, who gets to do what? And we've had conversations kind of flicking at this. We talked about it with Ronin, Shields, and Subjulsive, and who gets to own the supply chain and how they show up. Curation is part of that. So I guess while late, still very apt. >> Yeah, long time coming, but pretty timely, especially because so for this week's episode, we had Matt Adams, who is the global CEO of Stagwell Media Platform, and Stagwell just launched its curation platform, Stagwell Curate. And so we wanted to have Matt on to talk about, okay, one, what is curation? Because if that feels like a bit of a Rorschach test, where everyone just kind of has different answers for it. But then also, why does an agency holding company like Stagwell need to launch its own curation platform? A lot of the curation platforms that have come out have been from AdTech companies. And then like you're saying, how does this fit into what's becoming a bit of a tug of war or a power shift in a way of who owns access to inventory? Historically, it's been the AdTech firms and that's largely been the supply side platforms. But now you have demand side platforms like Trade Desk with Open Path, getting direct access to inventory. And now you have an agency holding company as much as they're working with Stagwell's working with MagNight on Stagwell Curate. Matt also mentions they're going increasingly directly to publishers to source this inventory. So I thought it made for a really interesting question for Matt in terms of what's the trajectory here? And he actually didn't deflect that question either, which was nice. No, it's very interesting because nobody wants to step on one another's toes yet stepping on one another's toes. So I was really grateful to have Matt kind of break that down and also give kind of a future forward looking look forward facing look. That's a mouthful. And how this all shakes out. Yeah, it felt like a really candid conversation. We always appreciate candor here on the Trade Podcast. Absolutely. Shout out to Matt. So with no further ado. Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. I think you found me. Absolutely. Pleasure. Happy to have you because we get to talk about well, a whole collection of topics that all kind of wrap up into this prism, if you will. With something that you all at Stagwell recently launched, which is Stagwell curate. I think it was 2024 at our December, DigiPergmatic Marketing Summit, where kind of the running joke was that curation was the buzzword of the year, which I think was surprising because there were so many other buzzwords that could have been, but that was the one that kept coming up in conversation. And there were a number of launches of curation platforms. And everyone was just kind of talking about curation. And the thing that I struggled with and I remember talking to, this was brands and agency execs at this event was I've been covering programmatic advertising since 2011. And I was having a hard time understanding what curation was. Is this a new thing? Is it a new name for an existing thing and talking with folks? Some people are just like, oh, yeah, I think it's like white, labeled private market places, other people are like, I'm actually not sure I'm here to find out. Other people are like, it's kind of bullshit. You all now have your curation offering with Stagwell curate. Before we get into the specifics of Stagwell curate, what is curation? Yeah, for us, it's, well, it's a good question. It sounds like there's definitely many answers to this. I think we look at this as how we qualify, how we quantify and score inventory for clients. And I think that's in its simplest way. It's like how do we ensure that the ads that are being bought by clients are on the right sides with the right quality signals from the supply side that are going to meet the clients campaign objectives? And I'll probably say, in its broadest sense, that what is curating the right pool of inventory for your ads to run on? And as I said, there's a thousand different ways in which you can do that, like many, many good different ways and different paths can all lead to a strong answer. And that's why we built out the curate platform, which is to generally look at a sort of like pre-vetted inventory for an always on pool that we know is going to perform and meet the client's objectives, depending on their campaign and what they're trying to do as a brand. And so why does that need to be a product in Stagwell curate as opposed to just a standard practice? Yeah, I think that we have a supply team within the organization and that supply team's job is to ensure that we've got the right supply at the right time, at the right quality for the clients. I think what we're seeing within the sort of like, you know, kind of if you zoom out a little bit from curating inventory is that we generally believe that the quality of supply and the quality of inventory is one of the biggest differentiators and the biggest levers right now that you can pull within the programmatic ecosystem. So huge amount of focus within the sort of demand type platform, huge amount of focus within how much the executing the ads, the algorithm optimization that you might be doing against a campaign that's buying. We kind of felt there was less focus or an outsourced focus on the lens around actually where the ads are running and are we running at the right place at the right time and in a large organization, how do you make it easy, simple, and powerful for your traders and your buyers to access the inventory in a way that's specific to what they need it. So that's kind of why we chose to kind of take a little bit of my ownership of this than a lot of outsourcing in terms of the supply size. And that helps us be more transparent with clients, we kind of build that together, we kind of share the platform with them. So they have a really good understanding of where their ads are actually running and how we've curated that inventory for them. I'm curious, I want you to dig a little bit deeper into that, right? If you're looking at like a card dashboard, check engine light comes on and that's how you know it's time to go and have your oil change. What were the signals for you guys that Stagwell needed its own agency, own and operated curated marketplace here? What were some of the signals you guys were saying? Yeah, so we were looking at a variety of signals that come across this in terms of some of the technology partners that we use that we have in a trot to reinvent fire when it comes to the technology partners, when they can get the best in class tools. So some of them that we use, things like we built our own domain health check tool on top of some of the kind of sincerer data, for example. So we've got close polish at the trade desk and the open sensor are part of their stack in terms of utilizing their API. So for example, we'll look at factors that sit across this and we have sort of like three broad factors that we wait in terms of really understanding the kind of different domains and the different dimensions that exists across those domains and we factor across the score of a hundred. So we'll be looking at things like ad quality. The majority weigh the factor towards ad quality. So that's how we most directly sort of impact the user experience and by extension the kind of the outcome for the advertiser. And then we look at things like within the ad quality things like add to content ratio, average as in view at one time and refresh rate. There's a lot of publishers that might be like gaming refresh rate, for example, or overloading pages without ads that score poorly. So the ad quality kind of like feels as one of those three kind of really starts to drive the backbone of the kind of quality scoring on the domain health. We look at things like technical performance. So that's kind of as simple as looking at an additional layer of page way CPU usage. So the ads are actually loading in a clean, fast environment. So heavy slow pages are going to be degrading that effectiveness, even though you can serve a bit, even though that bit can be served. Like it's a really poor sub-ots well using experience. So we kind of even on sort of quite high quality site, you might have a low technical performance. So this starts the kind of big of match against things like ad quality that might be really high on a premium publisher side. And then we kind of like the third part of that is in what call up supply chain transparency. So we look at things like ID absorption rates, supply path diversity and reseller ratios. We want to look at how it works. like each by age ads coming through. So we try to make sure that each ad and the inventory is not passing through too many intermediaries or lacking proper identity signal. And those sort of three parts, ad quality, technical performance and supply chain transparency come together for us to start to build out the scores as part of the curation is actually starting to look at that domain health check. So really try and understand, okay, where's the ad actually running? A lot of that can be outsource, but we think we can change the weights of those depending on what the client wants to do. And we can create custom solutions for particular brands. So some will have more need to upweigh one of those three variables than the other, but we tend to have a very high percentage of the overall kind of index of a hundred put into the ad quality side. And are you sharing that scoring with the publishers? Like is the publisher able to see how they're scoring, especially at the different factors to understand how their inventory may or may not be merchandise and stable curate? Yeah, it's good question. It's not, it's not, um, uh, the answer is like, yes, and no, so you can. No, it's not a platform that they can kind of log into. There's kind of a source because this, this, this platform effectively holds on to the volume of tree, um, buying rates or something behind the rate in terms of fire or Australian teams can access it. Um, so the probably we wouldn't, it was kind of a publishing and other publishers rates and some of the so for from the, and the kind of deals we've got packaged in there. Um, but we will be working with this. There's like a publisher that we've been working a lot where that has, that has a, um, a good score and for whatever reason that the kind of combination of that index across those three facts of starts to shift will be talking to them about that. Some of those could be moment in time. So things like the technical side of things could be like a moment in time. It could be the scoring could be changing based on some challenges they're having in their site loan or some technical releases. They're doing something like that. So it was quite objective around this, but fundamentally will be quite out even a transparent. So here's the data that we're using. Here's how we're using that data. So we put our own view across the scene, Sarah waiting, so we kind of curate that again to try and this is specifically a domain health. And, and, uh, and yeah, so they won't get a log in. But if there's a, um, a publisher that we think is valuable and could do a good job to serve a clients campaigns, then we'll absolutely be having those come associated with this is what we're seeing. Like, how do you respond to that? And how can we fix this or not fix that together? Is it too early to talk about AI? Have we missed them? Are we, can we get into that? Um, right. It didn't come out. It didn't come out. It didn't come up in a, was it a 2024 conference that, uh, you know, you're saying you were standing on the top of the top of the record. We're talking about AI agents. Yeah, we can get as well. We thought at least 10 minutes without. So I think you're good. Okay. My, my AI checkpoint here. Um, I'm curious, right? When you guys mentioned that AI agents are kind of evaluating the Adam Torrentori and things like that and helping with the checks and balances. How were these agents built? And how are they kind of being? How are they monitoring, right? To ensure that the curation is correct. There's no hallucinations and things like this. Yeah, so think, think about it from, um, uh, getting to sort of technical guts of it. See, we're running on domain health checkers using that since so data process. Very else I just said, so we're starting to build out those lists. And there's obviously millions of these that are running up upstream. That are running at any potential time in terms of the URLs that an advertiser could advertise across. This is a global tool. So it was to cover all regions for us. Around the world, not just in North America, but, um, all the way into our kind of A pack region. And what we tend to do in terms of AI is we use a combination of AI, the predominant one in there. We use claw, but actually open AI. And so we use an open AI, API key. The traders will then tell the curate platform through the natural interface. Like what inventory they're looking for? We then take that prompt. We package that information. We can't just say, we're going to be able to do that. We're going to be able to do that. We take that prompt. We package that into a query. That prompt that they're using in terms of if I'm looking for, you know, this type of audience interested in these types of things that this particular moment in time will then be using the. The prompt and they package that into a query that goes into open API. And then that is effectively scoring and ranking all of the kind of big log file data that we have to a bit query data and then resurfacing what inventory we feel is right for them. And they can do that in one or two ways. So they can either do that in a, hey, here's a solution that's kind of right for you. If that makes sense. And here's something that we think is positive for you. And that will come back from the API. Always still have a very kind of white glove service internally for our traders that clients could get benefit from the supply team. So in this instance, the talk and either select existing deals. But match with the inventory. The trade is looking for. It can recommend inventory that we should put into a deal in a very bespoke way. So it's like, we've got that. We say, actually, we've got that. And we've also got this. Would you like to consider something else that we think is relevant? Or we can also say, well, the traders can still log into the curation platform and actually create the deals themselves. So the the AI is there to be a faster and smoother way of building a picture across so many different inventory sources across all of the publishers that we see. They can do that. Or you can say to the supply team, hey, I need you to build something very bespoke. I've got a very kind of niche way of doing it. Our clients got to the very, very specific parameters in terms of what wants to be recommended. The supply team can then build out in any place around the world. They can build that in and then the buyers can go straight in and pull those deal IDs after to put them in the DSP. So we have an MCP on the back end that we created with all of our existing deals, as well as domains, the apps, the CTV apps and their quality ratings and the contextual categories. And then we're using that open AI API key to be able to take the prompt from the traders, push it against that MCP data and then get the response back to that. So that's that's probably about as technical as I get in terms of the build on it. But we're using AI to just be able to analyze a lot of data and a lot of potential in a really, really fast way that I don't think you could do before. And I think when you use the parties to do this, they've got some of the questions at the top. You get bias and you generally get bias in some sort of monetization bias. There's a margin bias that comes back. So we are looking at how do we take more ownership of this ourselves? And we genuinely think that you know, you can have a great beard against a terrible ad experience. That's not great for the brand. So actually we think this is a real unlock in terms of it's not new news. Like you say, it was in, you know, it talked about for many years. But actually sort of taken some ownership of this and pretty slowing out there was saying this is what our buyers have to use. They have to go through the system until therefore in a global organization, we have a lot more control over that supply. We have a lot more influence to know that what we're buying for our clients is a great buy and there's so much imagery that's still terribly executed with the program to keep your system. We need to eradicate that out from our clients media spend. I appreciate. Can we go taking us to the bleeding edge of things with AI? I have a very much more basic rudimentary question. I'm curious how this works from a client perspective. Like if I think of curated marketplaces as being like you go into a jewelry store, a record store, there's kind of the stuff that's available to the Hoi Poloi and then maybe there's like a back room or a basement with a velvet rope where if you're a certain type of buyer, you have a certain level of budget, you get to see like the real good stuff. I think of that being that velvet rope back room being what curated marketplaces are. With Stagwell Curate, is this the default or even like the only inventory source for clients? Or is it an option? We use different partners to help how the inventory that comes in. So we might be using them like Magni, we use some of the free will creation hub as well in terms of bringing the inventory in and we can bring anything in that sits outside of those from like a supply perspective. So there's no, we think we've got most of the supply marketplace covered. I think the way I think about it is. How many publishers are available through Curate? Oh, I don't know the number of the top wire heads of your firm. I can probably find out if you guys, but like if there's too is thing about it. If it's not in there, the supply team will go and get it for you. Right. So if you're a trader, you've got a specific need for it. It's not a there's a there's a there's a team that managed that platform. So people know who they are. We've got a global head of supply across the group. So it's like I can pick up the phone. I can jump into the team and say, I'm looking for theirs. I can't find their. There's a specific show want to buy into you. There's a specific part of Disney night and easy into I can't find it. Can you help me? And that will be put into the platform for them. Bespeak. So if it's not in there, we can go and get it right in terms of the open market. What we're generally seeing is from an SSP perspective. Most people have the same access to most inventory now, but there's very, very little depreciation. And I think even over the course of the first several months of this year. The differentiation in terms of, hey, I've got to be spoke supply. I'm the only one who's got this right unless you're within some big walk audit inventory in the YouTube to the Amazon primes and so on in the world. Like everyone can access everything within 99% right? So actually the the the days of usually like they proliferating supply. I mean, some some are slightly different. Like the kind of Google and supply side will have access in certain inventory sources. But in general, you can find most things in a much smaller way. So we try to remove that out from a client side. So the answer I give to your question, like how do you get into the VIP area? Right? How do you get behind that very very? It's like, if I call a pull analogy forward, it's like the client shopping in every shop in the mall. Not just in the record store, right? And therefore what we said to clients is like, you've got access to all of this. You can go into the platform. Like we set those parameters together in terms of the quality, the technical and the supply chain. Like what do we believe together is the most important? You can see the results of that in terms of domain health. You can then see the list that we're pulling out in terms of the publishers. We've been using historical performance data outside of platform in order to help kind of. What's worked well and do we want to continue doing that? It's still scoring as a good and experienced. for the consumer and hitting their message. So fundamentally, they've got access to all the stores in the mall through one particular platform. Like, we have not experienced, and I don't believe that I will experience any issue of, oh, oh, oh, I give this, I couldn't access this particular publisher, I could access this particular streaming platform. All of the publishers have been helpful in terms of, like, move in every event you're in, and I just think that we'll continue to grow as this program builds out, particularly, as we scale faster and harder into other parts of the world, where we go into Asia Pacific, they're very, very, very unique, and very, very localized inventory sources. So like, this can have quite a different approach to how we might package inventory for mayor, than it will do in, say, Western Europe, and into North America, we've got a pretty, you've got a pretty same set of partners that we might use from a supply perspective. - Why do you, magnate and freewheel, need to be part of this? Like, why not just go to the publishers directly? - Well, we are doing more of that as well, so I think freewheel of kind of kind of too, too kind of buys the cherry from their technology, so they're not only from the curation hub, but also the bio-clouds, so the Albi's Wax technology that they bought, so we can then buy an IberSpeak work across that concast ecosystem, so we can buy for a client, we can be very specific at, like, ad-break in show. And we can kind of, like, laser in on those again, if that's really relevant to a client's message or a tactic that you want to deploy. So, all of this for us is kind of leading to, how do we become, how do we remove that middle layer? And I think that middle layer is a really interesting, like, broader conversation around, like, what is the value of that middle layer? - Well, it is the value of that middle layer, 'cause so you spoke with Sam Bradley, who covered the launch of Stagwell Curate, and in your interview with him, you, you know, described Stagwell Curate as an attempt to reduce the company's reliance on ubiquitous market-based solutions, like the trade-dust open path. - Yes, the issue with open path. - Well, I don't sure there's an issue with open path, but I think, you know, what you've got is, you've got a world at the moment, the way we're seeing the conversations we had, and I'm conscious I always do with salespeople, and salespeople are saying, "Hey, that solution's way better than everyone else is." - Right. - You need to have your brain in an agency. - So you need to have everything about everything, right? And I can't really expect you to know everything about everything. So it's a full-time job reading and researching, some of these things as well as the job you get paid today. I think the, we're seeing like a couple of things, you've got some SSPs that say, you don't need a DSP anymore, right? So if you take like, Pubmatic, like, very vocal from the top of the organization, it's bound to down like, we can execute straight through, they've built like a claw-challenge phase, very slick, it's very good. You can come find, you can execute all the way through here. Microsoft, through their system, where you've got the ad server on the back end. So obviously, Magnoire has Spring Server, Microsoft has their own ad server, that allows us to push closer to Publisher because we could use the ad server and that helps us all the way through to Billings. So that drives efficiency that we yield for clients within my organization and it drives efficiency for them. So where we have the ad server capability with the Sundays tech layers and Microsoft forces are publisher and Magnoire is an aggregator of supply, those things really interesting. So Freewill, Bioclows, exactly the same. That allows us to reduce that, that's a much more efficient way of working when it comes to getting closer and we will build our own publisher deals that we can put in to curate as well. So where we can negotiate direct for publisher, where we think that's the right thing to do, where we think there's a benefit to a client, we can go direct to Publisher and come in and we see more publishers are like, "Hey, actually, I'm paying this tech tax the other way." Right, in terms of having my supply access by multiple SSPs, how many front doors do I want, how many kind of ad control do I want within that environment, and some of the more premium publishers, like at the really high end that don't normally work in this way as though I'd have different conversations with us and I'm sure many agencies in this space. So I think for us, it's really about the future of the middleware is depending who you ask the question. SSPs will say DSPs don't exist, but what you're seeing now is the DSPs have their own supplier. So open-piles are a good example, right? Hairies to be very diagnostic, we're kind of like the antithesis to the walkardons, from the trade-s perspective, but we've kind of now got our own supply and that supply you've got all the firm favourites, and they can go a Disney inventory and that supply, okay? There's a natural question that everyone has asked, is that still a domestic, is that still unbiased, is there algorithmic bias within that game-shoot and supply, and that's we're working through that with the trade-shoot. We see positive steps in that direction to be clear. Do you have a recommendation against buying open-piles like some of the other agencies issued reportedly earlier this year? No, we don't have a recommendation against that to be fair. I think we take it on a case-by-case basis. I think where the trade-shoot has made big strides is about control layers. So I don't think it's any secret that when open-piles was launched at the beginning of this year, it was de-forted within the campaign ecosystem. And I think our buyers will always want our buyers to have control over supply. That's not saying it's not open-pile, but it's saying if you suddenly, in any DSP, if Google suddenly de-forted, you're into running everything on YouTube, you'd be raising questions around that, right? And I think buyers need to have supply diverse attempts to make sure we're accountable to our clients for that. Now, we've run some great tests with open-piles with some of our agencies in the group and it's performing really, really well. And in some other instances, it might not perform as well. That's just based on the client, their objectives, and what they're doing. If you compare that to the supply side of Google, where they've got all of that kind of our symmetry, if you're in a more performance oriented space, then that may or may not be the right path for you to take in terms of utilizing the trade-supply. There are different like ad-ex, for example, write books, incredibly well. When it comes to performance inventory, the unique areas of art is part of that kind of wider gam. GMP kind of ecosystem within the Google organization. So it's a case-by-case basis, but I think if I'm a middle layer at the moment that we're seeing some very aggressive moves, you've got, as I said, some of the SSPs saying, "Hey, you don't need a DSP, cut the whole thing out." Right? You've now saved, you know, I don't know, between depending on DSP, seven to 12%. Right? That's compelling. That's really, really compelling. Hey, and the publishers getting monetization. They're getting better, better level as monetization. We love that. We want to create this virtuous circle, not a vicious circle in terms of publisher monetization, particularly in some underloved areas, like news, for example, where we think massive opportunities to kind of increase spend within news for the benefit of the advertiser as a kind of a slightly underloved sector right now, particularly in the US market. So you've got these folks that say, "Hey, I don't think you need this part of tech stack." You've got the DSP, just one of us say, "Well, we've got unique inventory sources, you've got unique data sources." Like, "Vion has some amazing unique data sources that can really enhance the campaign." You can only access that by voting through the VINE DSP. So, you know, Google have access to their inventory, pours, Amazon, et cetera as well. So you've got this kind of like completely by furicated position where the DSPs are trying to build out some own supply. The SSB is there, we don't need the DSB anymore. You then get into all the other way to wonderful, on a weird, but probably that wonderful evolution is like, ad CP, ad X, agents region, how they're executing. There are no common standards at the moment across the industry, right? There's some great work for NID Tech Lab, it's coming out for the US. I wouldn't say it's fully formed yet. I'll say that's a, you know, like, getting to the finish line, but there are no common standards of how a publisher connects to a buyer. And whether that is direct or whether that's through a third party, and I think some of these will naturally drop by the wayside. And I think that lack of common standard for us is really difficult. Some publishers will put their eggs in one basket. Some publishers will say, no, no, no, I want to work on a custom basis with an agency crew, an individual advertiser, depending on how the midias being bought. And that makes our life really difficult. I don't want to have seven engineering tracks going on with the my organization. Utilizing AI, utilizing a genetic level of buying should make my buyer's life easier. We should have a, ideally, our North Star have a single point eventually for the whole of the publisher ecosystem. Like, that's the goal. We can't have five different agents. You have to ask them all the same thing because they're connected to different publishers that sort of defeats the purpose. And I think there's still a huge way to go in that. Curate just takes us one step closer to actually knowing that inventory and actually where we're running with garnish of the supply source that's feeding that platform. And so is the trajectory here eventually stagwell cutting out that ad tech middle layer entirely? I don't think so. I don't think that's the end game to be honest to you. I think there'd be a balanced approach to that. Like I said, like there are many, many amazing elements of a benefit to a client you can get within, let's take a DSP, for example. Like the traders have an incredible, I'm really well developed, omnichannel measurement loop that exists within their platform. We've done cross streaming, it was about a home, maybe you're buying in the kind of open market or you're buying in the display video CTV, for example. So if you're all in as an advertiser in the trade-esque and you're running a lot of your media for it, there's a really big benefits of that. You won't get that from a direct basis, you'd have to have another measurement model. So for some smaller clients, maybe there's a me space, that's a huge benefit. I'm sure it's a massive benefit for other large scale clients. With some of the other, like DSPs, which I would just take DB360, the way we can connect that back into what we're doing in the wider search ecosystem within that four-starving yield, incredibly powerful. And still probably the most used DSP. I would guess, I don't know the numbers out there. So I don't think you'd be cutting off your nose to spot your face if you said, right, all of this is out. And I think you'd have a real challenge with clients as well. Will there be some clients that say, "Look, if I've got a very, very unique and very pointed goal and outcome?" And now I can get it across the, it's Perator's Law, 20% of the publishers would drive 80% of the reach. So it's fine. If I could work closely with those 20% I can do a diet integration like why wouldn't I? The answer is, well it probably would work for you in that particular instance. So I think all agency groups, which in one of us starting, there's a kind of glide path here, but I don't think it's a cliff edge in terms of working with middle layers and accept vendors. I think over the next two to three years there'll be a consolidation and we're seeing that already, like you see in that, even Microsoft, deprecating some of their AppNex's kind of technology, we're seeing some of these partners and vendors, I think there'll be some acquisitions and mergers I'm just getting over the course, particularly on the supply side. And some of those are getting stronger and some of those are struggling a little bit as well and they're trying to find out, okay, like within this AI future when you just can go direct and you can connect an MCP or an API with, I wouldn't say it's a little difficult, because I think my engineering team is shooting me, but it's much easier than it used to be. You've got you've got vibe coding that can support like fast, iterative experimentation, that's a blessing and a curse, by the way, vibe coding is different conversation, but within larger organization, but I do think there'll be a glide path and a rebalancing of what goes direct, what goes through, a tech layer. Okay, yeah, because this reminds me of the conversation we had with our executive editor of News, Sub-Joseph and our senior ad tech reporter Ronan Shields earlier this year where we were talking about this inventory tug of war that's going on between ad tech companies, but then also agencies and the rise of the unified ad platform and how everyone's become in a unified ad platform, even the idea of, well, agencies become in unified ad platform. Yeah, that's an interesting concept, so I've not heard it express in that way. And I think when you define unified ad platforms, you see during an agency just almost playing the role of those middle layers and that tech side. It's kind of like if you have in the past you had a demand side platform, a supply side platform, you even had ad exchanges, there were all kinds of other layers to it, and now those are kind of blending into unified ad platforms, but then if you have agencies like Stagwell with Stagwell Curate where you have an inventory platform where you can you just source in the inventory through supply side platforms like Magnite and you're going through a free-wheeled buyer cloud, but you're also going to publish it directly. What's stopping you from just turning Stagwell Curate into a unified ad platform and that preamps a DSP here in SSP? Yeah, I think that's a good question, isn't it? I think the, I think, and everyone's different by the way, so I was sort of sort of couching in that because I think you can get to a good answer in this in many different ways. I also say it's like writing an English session, it was at school versus a math exam. A math exam is there's a quantity of how come and you can get an A in English with five different approaches to it, right? So I'm kind of trying to, the cross-analogist probably that. I think we have to be very careful around our lack of bias for our clients' recommendations. And I think from the years from past, if you think really back to, I don't know, Mark Richard from PNG when he was there starting this whole Transparency Supply J and a very valid and necessary conversation that's kicked up by them. There's still some distrust in that and there can be distrust in recommendation. And I think we've been solutions that enable us to use technology in a better and different way. So as an organization, we've got partnerships with what we think are the best-improved organizations at Stagwell that enable us to build solutions that are better for our clients. I don't think I'm going to build technology that's better than Google. And I don't think I'm going to build technologies better than Tradesk. I think that's a naive ambition because I don't have 3,000 engineers and I don't have the CapEx development that Metters got to build the lab platform. And I don't think I'm going to beat their recommendation in terms of the algorithmic power that you need in order to do that. That's not everyone's view, but that's our view. So what we will build, for example, our kind of a genticooperating system for enter a media called the Media Machine, which we'll also learn a bit months ago, has got direct integrations into all the platforms. So our buyers can go in and they have a natural language conversation talking directly into DV360 directly into the trade-est or directly into SNAP directly into Metter. So agents, they can talk to it and they can get either a, we can push data in or we can pull data out of our audiences. I don't think I'm going to build a kind of Metter-Las or unified that platform. So that's the question to execute better. We found a way that we can actually do across multiple platforms and we can have a measurement loop across that, which has been a challenge, a historical challenge, I think, for many years. But I don't think an agency group is going to have a better technology solution to buying Google's imagery than Google will. Do Google or anyone always make recommendations that are interested in the advertiser? Maybe, maybe not. There will be a discussion to see if you're interested in how you are going to do that. Yes, it's like you know, and that's our job to do solutions like your aid. So make sure that we're doing what we can to make sure that we're utilizing the right data that we can. Like when we, when we built our media machine, for example, we've built our own MCP. We found that when we did an MCP to MCP connection with some of the publishers, the MCP from the big publishers or ad tech businesses blocked some data coming out without naming names. So actually they were like, oh, like out of these variables, we can't pull them all out. So we've reverted and we put, we put it for APIs in the end, so we have to make sure we've got the right bandwidth in the API from their end because like handful of the variables have an API. So you've got to be quite careful. I was like, yeah, you can access my MCP, but maybe I'm not going to show you 10% of something because it's my interest not to. Or maybe I won't let you write data into my MCP to match an audience. I'm just going to push it to yourself. So we have to create this kind of unified layer, but I think the kind of neutrality of an agency is always really important to get behind us. When you work at the scout advertiser, they were like, hang on a minute, what are you making out of this? And why have you built this? And why am I getting charged or not getting charged for this? And where does that revenue set? And the sum instances, that makes sense for them. The sum instances, you know, you've got to be a little bit careful to walk the right line of that, I think. So the idea of the MCP being that opinionated is really just, but we could go out on a whole rabbit horse, save that conversation. You get that, that's probably about the level of audience I've got. I didn't see APIs to be clear. So you might find some kind of a, it's not always like this great divana like MCPs or solve all your, all your, all your own problems. I'm not entirely sure that's the case everywhere these days. I'm thinking of this, I think when we started this conversation, even the conversation that we had with Seb with Ronan that you mentioned, Tim, I was thinking of this, like, you know, the Western movies were like this town ain't big enough for the two of us. This isn't me having a conversation with DSPs and SSPs and agencies. It seems like based on the conversation that we're having here, Matt, that that may not necessarily be the case. I'm going to add the caveat for now, but I do appreciate you walking us through what that looks like for Stackwell. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, the town might not be big for 20, then I'm not sure that's the thing. Let's, let's hope there's more than one left at the end or, you know, my jobs can be a lot harder and yours will be a lot less interesting in terms of the people that you can talk to. So, I think, I think that it's going to be fascinating. I think it's fascinating in the next six months, not in the next two years to see where this middle layer, this, you know, like, the proliferation, the ease and the speed of development within AI platforms and technology using LLM models of coding your solutions will disincipiate. I think the cream will rise to the top and I think those that in the middle of the middle will maybe potentially sadly fall to the bottom. Let's see. I was already excited for our programmatic marketing summit in December. Now I'm even more excited. I'm also thinking about like setting the agenda and the theme for that event and trying to stick away from just throwing agent at AI at everything, maybe inventory control or inventory management should be the theme of that one. But Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah, definitely read that. Yeah. Well, Matt, thank you again. This was a really fascinating conversation, learned a lot and also helped me to make sense of other things that are going on in the industry. So thanks for joining me, Connor. I always like to ask you a pleasure if I keep having me. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the GJ podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Get more from Digit A with our daily newsletter sent out each weekday morning. Visit digit A.com/neasletters to sign up. [Music]