Jason Barnes (Pubmatic) - Media Tech Talk #018

(upbeat music) - G'day and welcome to Media Tech Talk. I'm David Richards. - And I'm Paul Luckett. When demand-side platforms are moving directly into offering sell-side functionality and artificial intelligence is opening the door to agent-led solutions, what role does an independent platform like Pubmatic play? And how do you stay ahead in a market that's changing this fast? Today's guest has spent his career navigating this exact shift. From shaping commercial strategy, inside major publisher organizations to now leading Asia-Pacific growth for one of the world's most influential, independent media technology platforms. Jason Barnes is Chief Revenue Officer for Asia-Pacific at Pubmatic. The infrastructure quietly powering premium digital and connected television monetization around the globe. - And as artificial intelligence reshapes how media is bought and sold and platforms race to control more of the value chain, Pubmatic is making it clear bet on independence, efficiency, and intelligent automation. So here's the question. Jason, welcome to the show. How are you? - I'm very good. How are you, David? How you doing? - How's Singapore today? - Very good hot and sweaty as usual, but good to be up here. - Yeah, good weather. I often get up there and I find a humidity almost a deal breaker for me. How do you cope with it? - Slightly. - Yeah, staying indoors is the advice. Staying air-con at all times, otherwise you can lose a couple of kilos as well, for sure. Walking around outdoors here, you tend to sweat it all out, but otherwise great place to be. I feel like we're on the thick of things here. So I love it. - Yeah, lovely. I've heard the price for car registration is quite high over there as well, limiting people from cars. - I have not owned a car in over 10 years in Singapore, really, the public transport's incredibly efficient here. So no real need for me to own a car. I cycle, I'm on the MRT and on buses. It's nice and cheap and efficient. So all good. - That's awesome. And just quickly question for you, whereabouts is Pubmatic located in Singapore itself? - We're riding a raffles place. So sort of riding the central part of the CBD, many of our partners are based all around here. So nice, easy, accessible and rather than the thick of things, all the agencies are around here. Straight off the list, they're gonna pop off to agency meeting, couple of minutes walk away. So nice and easy. - Yeah, love it. Now, let's take a look back. You've worked across both publishers and platforms during period of huge change in media technology. Where people ask what you focus on today, how do you describe your role? - Yeah, a couple of different things. So sort of at the highest level, it's about leading programmatic transformation across the APAC digital ecosystem. So I'm talking about publishers, buyers, our data partners and multiple other partners. And one of the key things I try and do is just make sure that they can transact really efficiently across our platform. APAC, you know, very diverse, culturally, economically, et cetera. So I also need to make sure everything that we build is then meets the local realities of all of our partners. So that's, I spend a lot of my time doing that. And then finally, I'd say, we are a very dispersed team across the whole region. So I spend a lot of time each week speaking to all of my direct reports. And then I spend a lot of time on the road, Changi Airport, very familiar with that. I spend a lot of time in market. I think it's important to be there to support the team that also be talking all the time to all of our partners. So there's a couple of the key areas that I focus on. - Just on your history, I'm curious because I've heard and corrected me if I'm wrong here. But so you worked at Newscore, Australia, previously in kind of the, I guess the progenitor of what eventually would become the digital revenue team under CAM King. Is that correct? - Yeah, I worked with CAM for like seven, eight years. So we were peers. He was more on the product side there. I was leading up the whole programmatic piece with Jason Denny as well. I was pretty early. He's maybe familiar name that you have in the market there. So I think we sort of really set up the whole programmatic piece at Newscore. So it was exciting times. - Yeah, it's kind of where I started at Newscore was under Jason building out the architect team there. So yeah, it was my whole seven year career there was taking that programmatic stack that you started with and just build on top of it. So I feel like we've had some shared common history. - Absolutely, exciting times. I'm glad that we got to look through that to be honest. That'll never be repeated again. It's changed the industry forever. So exciting to have been involved in that. Jason, how hard was it looking back at that time at Newscore when everything was brand new in the programmatic space? What were the challenges and insights that you had to lean on to get at where it is? - And so one of the biggest things really was around team structures. So giving the technology was super exciting. Many new vendors coming in a super innovative time. So many new products, critters was just really coming into the market and all the DMPs were being assessed. So it was part of the team assessing all of those DMPs. But a big area actually was the sort of conflict between the programmatic team and the direct sales team. And. - Is it wise? (laughing) - You'll be very familiar with that. And it still happens today as surprisingly across some teams. But as programmatic grew wisely, they decided to sort of break down the barriers between programmatic and the direct sales team. And that's when it really flourished. Then as opposed to me going out to all of the agencies and pitching programmatic, I was there in side by side going with the direct sales team, how targets were then aligned. And I think that really accelerated programmatic and was all the better for a new score overall to get that programmatic and digital fully integrated. - Yeah, I've done wonder, all of my background's obviously in DMPs for the last four or for eight years or so. Just experiencing the variety of change that went through the DMP space. And for it to so quickly disappear into the CDP space, it's almost, you do all this work and it ends up being almost for nothing. It sometimes feels, do you get that sometimes in the way that technology changes? - Yeah, I mean, it is pivoting so quickly here. Things that seemed absolutely critical and core a couple of years ago sometimes are just faded. But I think that is what has kept me excited and what's kept me in this industry for so long. News Corp seems like quite a long time ago. I've been a problematic enough over 10 years. But having started and crows nested at a publishing company in the early 2000s and then being in London working at the FT, et cetera. The amount of change, innovation, evolution that we've seen has been quite fascinating. And really one of the things that's kept me in the industry to be honest. So we've seen some companies that problematic just continue to flourish. But many others have come from nowhere. And then others that we thought were so critical to the infrastructure are now no longer around. Or perhaps have been consumed to some bigger organizations. - Yeah, I wanted to dig into a little bit about PubMedic and just a little bit about to give us a bit of context with those who may recognize and aim at not the mechanics. What was the problem that PubMedic originally built to solve? And how was that mission evolved over time? - Yeah. So it was established in 2006 founded by the brothers Amar and Rajiv Gowel. And I think the key goal back then was to have our publishers with the way to monetize the digital assets. So there was no real time decision making, no real deadly decision making on how they could cross the inventory. So they said about building out those tools. And that then there were pioneers obviously around the first open RTV transactions, around header bidding, and then ultimately to sort of where we are today, a cloud infrastructure organization when our NASDAQ limited, sorry, NASDAQ listed, we're an AI powered company at the moment, fully OmniChannel. So it has transformed itself significantly. And I think one of the biggest transformations that we've seen is the launch of our product will activate. So when we launched that, it gave buyers the ability to buy end-to-end across PubMedic all of the inventory without having to involve any third-party inventory. So from those early days, it was just purely yield optimization and now it's a fully AI OmniChannel Unified platform. So it's been an exciting ride. - Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different areas to dig into in terms of the evolution, technology and where things wrap right now. The comments, media, the side of things as well is fascinating. And what keep worries been working on over there. I don't know where to start really. Like what would you say is kind of the biggest focus for the PubMedic right now in 2026? My biggest focus, I think CTV is huge. It will continue to grow. I think there's multi-billions of dollars still in linear TV. And I think that migration is happening pretty fast. I think it is in all of our interest to ensure that doesn't all go to within a very concentrated few global players. I think we need to support all of the local broadcasters as best as we can and ensure that the investment coming from the agencies is spread out to all of this locally produced high quality inventory. And so we have a very high focus around that, especially on live as well, a very highly complex and innovative area to support broadcasters around live. So I think that's critical. We continue to focus on the buyers as well around AI, agentic is huge. And I think we'll probably touch on that a couple of times. So we've laid a couple of big bets around agentic. And I think that's going to transform the industry for the better. From an eight-pack perspective, we continue to focus a lot on mobile. about. app is a significant proportion of the revenue that we derive in APAC. And that is not mobile app, maybe as far as sort of gaming and casual gaming, a lot of us think about that. But in countries like India, people are watching the broadcast on their mobile phones. Unlike Australia, it's largely on your big Samsung LG at home, but in many other countries in the world, it's really watching on their phones. So that mobile app experience is vitally important to us as well. Yeah. And then commerce, sorry, you did mention commerce, so that's critical as well. I think that whole intersection of commerce and CTV I think is going to be super exciting as well. So big focus. Yeah, it's definitely a space that I'm watching as well. I mean, you've mentioned a lot of things there and obviously, you've seen media technology kind of evolve so much over the years. And we mentioned earlier, kind of the from you moving from direct sales to programmatic and now into real time kind of global transactions and all these other areas that have evolved as well. From your perspective, what do you think has been in all of those different shifts and evolutions along the way? Is there something that you could kind of describe as something that's most misunderstood in terms of all that evolution or something that you wish people would ask more about or yeah. Yeah, yeah. I would have said a while ago that possibly it's the fact that programmatic is premium. But I think that's fairly well understood now in Australia. Many of the countries I think we all know that some of the best inventory available is available programmatic. So I think that's understood. I'll say another one that is continues to be misunderstood or has been misunderstood is the fact that programmatic advertising didn't just automate media buying. I think it actually fundamentally changed what the product is. And what I mean by that is traditionally, we've been really selling inventory itself. So, you know, beautiful half page on NICK or it might be the first ad slog off the channel 7 news that is the most valuable. And then that negotiation that is happening is really about scarcity and it's about the context as well that that appears within. So that's really where the value was. And programmatic came in and it did make that whole process far more efficient. So I bought a whole lot of value around that. But the key thing that I also did is it made audience signals become more valuable than context. So that that 35 to 44 year old male could now be seen in all-bought and multiple different. So I mean to restart the question. So yeah, so that 35 to 44 year old male could be not bought in real time multiple different locations. So what happened there's a transfer that pricing power through from the supply side, through to the buy side. And I think that is a key change that we saw happening. And those companies that had the most audience signals, they were the ones that won out and those were the world gardens. So sadly to this day, those traditional media companies have continued to suffer a little bit because of that fundamental change in what the product actually is and that was around audience signals. But we're starting to see a move back to the supply side that's happening. There's a huge amount of valuable first-party data that all of these premium publishers have. They're starting to make that available and they're starting to move the targeting as well through to the supply side. So that is starting to bring that power back. Some of that pricing power was coming back. And this is especially because of the privacy-centric world that we're living and I think the ability to start making valuable first-party data available to third-party technology is going to become more and more difficult. So I'm really pleased that that's happening to be honest. I think it's starting to make it a slightly more even playing field and I think it's better overall for the health of the digital media industry. There's a lot obviously I'm sort of hearing a lot about direct supply paths with DSPs moving into the supply areas as well. What's your view on that? Publety. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of change happening full stop to be honest. I think the amount of change seems to almost be accelerating and I think it's smooching quite a lot of people in the industry. I think there are be it individuals and be it organizations and I think a lot of companies sort of want to scare of being left behind at the moment. But this consolidation of the supply chain overall says a good thing. I'm pretty happy that it's happened. There's just been a huge amount of intermediaries that have gotten that have jumped in into the middle between the the brand and the publisher over the years and I think that's reduced the amount of working media which I think has been negative. So overall I'll say I'm quite pleased with this change that's happening. But I think you know I think the problematic role on my view on this is that we've become essentially more critical in this in this whole market where these changes have been happening as the lines have been blurring between demand science supply side who exactly is doing what? I think that the need for a transparent independent third party in order for these organizations to run this infrastructure that we can provide. I would say it's become even more valuable in the last couple of years. So the way I would sort of describe our roles as a trusted advisor and a innovative technology provider for all of these organizations. So I think that is a key part. But yeah so overall I think the change is being good. I would say we're being disrupted now and I think digital media talking you know back to our days at news court. It's just been disrupted continually under the last couple of years. Again one of the reasons I find it quite exciting. But I think in a industry that's been disrupted the one thing you can't do is be reactive. And so I think what you need to do is start placing a couple of long term calculated bets. And I think we've been part successful in doing that from maybe supply path optimization through you know header betting or maybe cloud infrastructure. And so the next big bet we're going to be laying us around artificial intelligence. And I think that's where a lot of it's going to be happening and you might have heard about some of the partnerships that we've had recently in video, big long term partnership we've had there getting the GPUs into our data centers. We've also been a founding part of our of ACP which we can talk a little bit more about as well. And then we've recently launched our authentic OS platform which is really an automated and agent to agent lead transformation across our whole product and platform. So those are all bets that we laid a couple of years ago when we saw this inflection point happening in the industry. So we are super excited about everything that's happening and that's both. Agent agent piece is really fascinating. I'm hearing a lot of that at the moment. I think with the ability of with the agentic ability to make decisions without necessarily having people involved in making those decisions will be part of that process. Is that when we start connecting platforms and start scaling the data and insights that they have access to. How does the people in the human elope concept work with PubMedic and your vision? I think we need to have humans in the loop. So I'll give you an example of a story that I read just recently and this is sort of thing we want to avoid. So AWS has an in-house agent called Cairo. So it's an AI coding agent called Cairo and it can make autonomous decision making across the AWS platform and fix issues and just recently about two weeks ago it's sore problem and one of the cost analytics modules that happens within AWS and it deleted the entire module and rewrote all of it. I took this one down for 13 hours. When done for 13 hours. So it did not have the guard rails in place. It was a major problem for a huge organization like AWS and so there obviously had to put some more guard rails in place for Cairo. So that is the sort of thing that we certainly want to avoid and then the platforms that we've built so we've built out agentic across our platform. We want to make sure that it brings in the automation that it brings in the efficiency and that it can make autonomous decision making. I think that is definitely where we are moving towards. But we need the flexibility as well to have that human creativity still be part of the process and do that checking especially around critical infrastructure or critical points along the supply chain. And so that's the way we've built it to be transparent and be flexible. Signal loss is a topic that pops up quite frequently as well. Obviously making sure that we've got the right data points connecting to the similar data points on the other side. Is that part of the focus with PubMedic as well to remove that or to limit or reduce it? So when you say data points, you mean? Oh, it's just the same. Yeah, well, anywhere basically from platform to platform with the signal loss concepts that we've got at the moment that we're running around programming. Yeah, absolutely. I mean things like cross-device graphs are just absolutely critical. As I said, it's about a mobile app. We have browser, we have CTV, so we have multiple different platforms. Signal loss is one of the biggest challenges that we're having a look at. I think having this unified platform and activate that I spoke about is one of the ways that we've had a look at trying to mitigate against that. So having everything on the same platform, certainly there's no discrepancy, there's no signal loss. But we have to work really closely with our partners. I think the IAB has come up with things like content signals, TDDs come up with a couple of different initiatives that they have as well. So we work with all of our partners again. We're not bringing out something unique and independent, but we're trying to work across a whole industry to try and bring all of those signals together, just to try and make that end-to-end buying as efficient as it is. And this is where the world gardens are very, very good at doing that huge scale, and the signal loss is fairly minimal. And we try to replicate, if not, and make that better with the sort of quality first-party data that we have, and then the no loss of signal ideally. - Yeah, it's interesting. - Not easy though. - No, definitely not. And I think, you know, David raises a good point. I think, you know, over the years we talked a lot about, obviously signal loss being a big thing that we talked about when I was at Newscorp. There was a coin, a term that got coined at some point. I believe it was Paul Blackburn who said this the first time I heard it, so I'll give him credit for it. But moving from, reframing things from signal loss to signal fidelity, and I guess what was being meant there is that, you know, with the removal of cookies and things like that, there is a certain level of signal loss that is happening as a result of that. But what's happening is a result of all the technological advancement that's happening within the media text base to overcome that challenge is you've seen kind of like a shortening of the gap between the both sides of the coin in terms of how far that data has to travel to be matched on both sides of the fence. Is that, would you agree with that kind of idea? And also, is that something that, today, it's point agentic is really going to help kind of advance and really push forwards? - Yeah, I think, I think, a gender can certainly play a part in that, I think one of the great things that a gender does is that with this, with its ability to be able to tap into all of the data that a platform has. So we have a number of, we have five to six different agents at the moment that sit across problematic. And they are across every small bit of data that we have across our platform. And I can surface that data within milliseconds. And if it's dealing with another agent, it can then match up that data or signal loss or have a look at trying to troubleshoot what's happening within a deal or whatever the situation is, within microseconds and so much faster than humans. So it is starting to bring together, I think, the two sides in a far more efficient and far, faster way around surfacing signal, understanding where issues are, and then also even post campaign analysis and various things like that. So I think that this is where agentic is really going to make a significant difference. As I said, we need to have those guard rails in place. But I think just around discovery and around trying to identify where the issues or where there might be gaps. I think this is where agents can come and really play a significant part in improving the whole supply chain. I guess just to double click on that area a little bit around agentic and not so much as a role, but it's impact, I guess. You know, there's been a lot of talk around the growth in data centers and the massive future growth that needs to happen around data centers to kind of key pace with the AI development that's happening. And with the push towards agentic in the media industry, in the advertising industry, rather marketing industry, and the additional pressure that puts on the ecosystem from a data center perspective, we already kind of know that within the programmatic space in particular, that you know, QPS and the increase, bid duplication on all these types of things have become a massive challenge over the years. Are you able to understand kind of, we spoke to Brian and Kelly about this particular topic and he was his way of framing it. Is agentic may have a temporary kind of increase on data center usage, but it's the efficiency gains it can bring overall massively offset that in the kind of medium term, which I think is a great point to make. But I think it's your take on kind of, you know, concepts like traffic shaping and the QPS issues and bid duplication and what paramedics approach is on that. Yeah, so I think the data center capacity and the growth in data centers, I think, is an environmental issue that we're all aware of. I think the water usage as well as another key factor behind that, and I know they need water to cool them down. For stories about Elon Musk having a look at putting data centers out in space, which is interesting. Also putting data centers in the ocean to try and cool them down. So I think this is a huge potential impact environmentally for our industry. I think I'll agree that the long term, the efficiency that they will bring will certainly outweigh all of that, but I think it's something that we have to have a careful look at. But yeah, I think the industry has been fairly wasteful in awareness, bid duplication and reduction of that, I think is critically important. I think every bit of response and bit of requests and the way that we have to process all of those impressions certainly choose on energy every time we do that. So we have about seven different data centers across the world. We have three here in A-PAC Align. We have one in Tokyo and two in Singapore. So we need those data centers and they're expanding constantly. But I think one of the things, one of the ways we're having a look at doing this is by bringing in more efficiency and that's through this Nvidia partnership that we have. So the efficiency that they bring in and processing impressions actually can lead to a reduction in the energy that's used. 'Cause it is far more efficient way of actually processing all of those impressions. But it is a necessity. I think that we know that traffic shaping does happen. There's no way that almost any SSP in the world can manage all of those bit requests and bit responses that come in that is inefficient for us to try and process all of those. So we need to use the AI, the algorithm to be able to identify those impressions that the buyers really want and only start processing those. And I think that's one of the things that we work on really, really hard as well. Is there's just so many impressions out there that actually aren't worth us processing and having a look and getting all the details around that. So there's efficiency in reducing bit duplication and just traffic shaping and making sure that our buyers are only getting access to those impressions that are most meaningful to them. - Yeah, I think that's one thing I'm kind of most hopeful for in the agentic evolution within a programmatic space. This is something that I may end up doing a much deeper piece on at some point myself. 'Cause it's something that I've seen as I've moved into launching a consulting business and working with a lot of publishers on optimizing their commercial technology stacks. I've seen some of the smaller publishers have issues with a programmatic revenue because their inventories may not be getting surfaced or analyzed the right way because they may not have the scale. And so like you say, I guess I'm most hopeful that agentic is gonna be able to really, even though some of these guys may have smaller scale, they still got high quality audiences and high quality Victorian and it should be easier for those guys to transact or not transact with kind of surface inventory. - I agree, I think it was critical that I think you're absolutely right. And this is the same with small brands as well. I can have a look at them that way. I think what's critical is that they do get on board with things like MCP and ad CP. So Model Context Protocol and ad CP, which I think most people are aware of is a sort of subset of MCP and very specific to digital advertising. So what I would encourage those smaller publishers to do is to make sure that they're partnering with someone will make sure that the inventory can be discovered through ad CP and MCP and then you get compliant with those protocols so that when one agent is speaking to another agent, so it might be a big bias ad CP or MCP talking to us at Pubmatic and it's asking for a specific audience. I want in a high net worth males in this region, et cetera. And that's small financial publication. That is inventory is in the right format that when those agents speak to each other, that inventory is one of the first that comes up. It's not just the largest, doesn't this come up with F2 Unique or the AFR? That's coming up with that small publisher that really has value audience, but it needs to be in the right format in order for this agent to be able to surface it. And then the same thing we said that for brands as well. In I think commerce, we touched on a little earlier. Brands are potentially highly challenged in the whole agentic buying in the sense that they've been put out of the loop. You go to an LLM, you do a search for a nice leather weekend bag that I want. And they just, all those agents do is they just go to a bunch of websites and descriptors, websites and just bring that information back to me and say, hey, based on everything I know about you and that you've told me, I think that this is the right bag for you. Now the brand hasn't gotten involved in that conversation at all. I could go click and go and buy that leather bag. But with MCP, where the power of it is is that if a brand has all of the data within an MCP on their side, when that agent goes and to read that website, it's not to scrape what's on the website. But it goes straight away to the MCP and all of the data that's held within that MCP all about that brand. So it could have reviews, it could have price points, it could have availability. And so that LLM actually accesses the data that's within the MCP. It doesn't just scrape what's on the site. So that then enables that brand to be part of that conversation. So when that LLM is doing the scrape and having a look at that site, it has a look at far deeper information within the MCP and brings that back. So that brand is then able to start influencing that purchase decision by presenting the information to me in a far more deeper and more relevant way. So yeah, I think on both sides, that is super exciting. But they need to invest and they need to lean into it. I've saw Interquantia at the beginning of Feb, an article that was talking about Amazon moving into content licensing, Microsoft, and something similar where publishers can drop their content or make it available for those platforms to then commercialize for the building of LLMs to better inform AI, generative environments. Where does that play for you guys in that space if publishers are finding it. another revenue source from licensing content. - Thank you. - I'm paying that area as well. - Yeah, so in my view, anything that can help support the Fourth of State, I think is good. I think if they have valuable content, it is very expensive to produce that content. And I think if there's a way for them to monetize that better, I think that's fantastic. As I said, putting that highly valued content, making it available in an e-commerce environment or some sort of a purchase environment, I think it's fantastic for the publisher. I think it's really good for the consumer as well. Typically, those are quite independent. I think we all love our reviews from five thousand different people. We've had a look at this and everyone has their say on it. But I think high quality independent journalism, I think should not be underrepresented. So I think that's a really good thing. - Yeah, I'm kind of liking that opportunity. I think we were seeing Google and Meta under fire for not really giving back at the beginning of COVID. I think it was at that start that they were going to supply or pay publishers for accessing the content Meta Facebook pulled out of that. I think this is a nice way that that comes back into the floor again. - I think we're going to be a commercial model. That's fair for everyone. We weren't quite sure how that was going to play out. But AI's obviously pushed that button and made it a relevant topic and accessible now for a solution to, I like this. These are ideas in the AI space that we've talked about for a while, but not quite sure where AI is going to go. What opportunities are going to be produced as a result. And I think this is a really good one. A really good case starting on that one. So I just want to check in as well with regards to, I suppose, PubMedic and its mission and outcomes. Can you share a moment where you saw PubMedic's technology make a real difference for a publisher or a partner? Not just in revenue, but in confidence or clarity? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Absolutely, I'll keep along this AI theme and give you one example there. And I can give you one or two others. So we, and this is very much around, I think, the clarity at part and that are confidence as well. We recently in APAC launched the APAC Agente Acceleration Program. And what we did there is we reached out to about 30, 40 of our top buyers, just a small cohort of our top buyers and top publishers across APAC. And said, we want to hold a webinar in a couple of weeks. We're going to talk to you about what is happening, the agenteic space globally, what we're doing at PubMedic and how you can participate as a publisher or a buyer. I have never got such a large response to sending out an email to a base of our customers. It was huge. We got like, in a 50, 60% came back saying, we want to be involved. We said great, we set up the webinar. This was just a couple of weeks ago. We thought there'd be 30, 40 people on the call. And it'd be 130 people that attended this webinar that we held across the region, publishers and buyers. So it was fantastic. It showed the hunger, I think, to understand what is happening in this agenteic space. How can I get involved as well? So I said a little earlier about the amount of disruption happening, companies and individuals are afraid about getting left behind. So it was a great opportunity, bonus. We have now shared with them exactly what is happening. Over a whole bunch of them, then put their hands up and said, we want to be involved in a proof of concept. We want to start building out agents together with PubMedic. So we are now progressing that and I'm sure we'll be hearing a bit more about it, but it's super exciting. So that's one area where I think we've made a significant difference around clarity. That's another one is live sport. We're working a lot of production that we're doing around live sport at the moment. So I think you know, especially in Australia, love watching sport. Very, very hard to manage campaigns around sport because of those huge viewership spikes that we get. So there can be a massive event that happens, that can blow through budgets, blow through frequency caps. So really difficult to manage that as a buyer. So we've launched a product called Live Moments and it enables buyers to target based on periods of emotional engagement, of high emotional engagement and also do it within a very small window. So they can really-- So just high emotional engagement is, what is that? How is that work? So we know that that's during parts of a game. I can't tell you all of the secret sauce, but there's obviously parts of matches where we know, it could be the end of an over, it could be a match, a goal, whatever the case is. Those are the higher emotional moments. And we are able to start inserting ads into those moments in a very short time frame. Press release coming out soon, I really hope there will be done prior, but we're happening in Australia as it happens with one of the key players in that market. So that's one of the products that we're having look at around live and that's going to make, I think, a significant difference to our partners. So that's that. And then the third example I'll just give is around bringing new and diversified demand through some of our broadcast partners. So Nipon TV in Japan, the biggest broadcast there, Geohotsdhan India, which used to be Disney, but it was brought up our alliance, so they're the biggest broadcasted by far. So we've gotten partnerships with them to bring global brands buying into those markets into their domestic IPs. So buyers, you know, sitting in New York, London, Singapore, I'm always aware of who the biggest broadcasts are in these markets, or feel I can't really engage with them. So we've been the bridge that we've built between those brands and those local quality broadcasts to bring new and fresh demand to them. And as you know, there's nothing a publisher loves more than some incremental demand. So that's been a great success story for us as well. I think you-- I'd love to-- since we're still on a "Agentic" thread, let's keep rolling with it, I'd love to hear about Asian OS, "Agentic OS" sorry, and then also seeing some of the news around the campaign with Butler Till, the buyer with Butler Till, and what that was about and what the outcomes were of there. And also kind of more broadly, Pubmatics involvement and contribution with that CP. Yeah. So "Agentic OS" was launched in January this year. It was essentially us bringing together the series of products that we have to increase the level of automation that we have across the platform of what a big part of us was-- part of it was introducing "Agentic". So we have about six, seven different agents at the moment, both in the buyer's supply side, everything from deal setup through to deal optimization, through the inventory discovery. So we have a whole set of these agents. And "Agentic OS" was the way we bought those to market, along with just some other general sort of increases in an automation across the platform, but it was really "Agentic" driven hence the name. So that's now really become an integral part of the entire platform that's built into it for all of our publishers, as well as our buyers. So the Butler Till was just to move on to that. That was really the first "Agentic" campaign that was done for us globally. So they got an agent that they built out on their side. And it was the first campaign that we ran into, and as far as the planning, the discovery, and the full end to end "Agentic" campaign. As I said, an APAC, we've got six customers that have put their hands up to do that in this region. And we're moving pretty fast. We're going to have that completed before the end of the quarter. So you should see something coming out pretty soon around the first end to end "Agentic" campaigns done in APAC. So that's really exciting. All of that is based on adCP, as well. So they get to the other party of question on adCP. I think we're a foundational partner of that. We really like adCP. So MCP, as you know, is developed by an FOC that is really away for the LLMs to be interacting with the rest of the internet, being SSPs, DSPs, brands, or publishers. So they built out this protocol. It wasn't really fit for purpose for digital advertising. So adCP was formed in order to put all of this different flags and different information pieces that we have in digital advertising. It's not to replace OpenRTB. There are a lot of these available on OpenRTB. So it won't replace OpenRTB, but it's just an additional platform that will sit on top of that. So we need to now build this out. So the part that we're playing on a mental little earlier about the "Agentic Acceleration Program" is we need to now build out this ecosystem. So we need DSPs. We need agencies, and we need brands to be building adCP agents so that those can start now engaging and interacting with the Pubmatic agents that we have. So that is the whole ecosystem. And that is what we're trying to lead globally along with the rest of our adCP partners is to now start building that entire ecosystem. And yeah, so we've got skin in the game. We're spending a lot of time with product, a lot of calls that we're on at the moment with all these partners to explain to them. We've got all of it up on GitHub as well. So anyone can go and have a look at all of the code. It's all open source. It's very transparent. And that's where we point out partners to. And then we start building with them. We have proof concepts. And hopefully in a moment, media will have a lot of campaigns running agentically. That's amazing. Interesting. Yeah. I'm going back to conversation with Pete Barry for probably 10 years ago. We were talking about how the scale of acronyms were scaling out quite quickly. At some point, the team of about 15 of us were sitting there trying to put them all together. We came up with about 15. At least. I don't even know if we can keep track of them now. They'll just keep popping up. It's a very good nation. They just have got-- [LAUGHTER] Do you have me? I just saw a lot of us are looking to the end of the show. I just want to have a quick look into your vision as far as leadership goes. Looking ahead, what do you think is the best media technology leaders doing right? And-- and that's not just in the technical but culturally as well. Which of you and there? Yes, so what do we need to do right, I guess? Looking ahead, AI and automation is going to be happening one more frequently. I think it's going to be really become part of the fiber. And I think we need to very carefully balance between that automation and the amount of human strategic control and input. I think that is something we need to be watching. As I said, a lot of people are fairly concerned with the direction we're going in personally and for the organisations. I don't have any fear. I think it's all going to be a lot of it's going to be very positive. Don't get me wrong. There are jobs that are being lost and there are some roles that are being threatened. So I don't want to be too flippant about that. That is happening. And our specific industry, I'm far more excited about it and see there's too much of a threat. I think in computers first came out, everyone was like, oh my god, computers are humans are going away. This will be rooms full of computers. All it's done is it's made us incredibly more efficient and more productive. And I think the same thing with AI. It's going to make us way more productive. But we do need to have a good balance in place. And I think one of the things when we built our platform, we have the transparency in place and we have the controls in place as well. So as I was mentioning a little earlier, we can have autonomous decision making that is available and that is where we're moving towards. And I think that needs that is needed in certain circumstances. But we also do need human creativity to be able to be important. So I think as digital leaders, we need to be able to navigate that very carefully with our teams, ensure that they stay confident, ensure that they're empowered as well and that AI is really helping them do their jobs more efficiently. So I'd say that's one of the key things that we need to be having a look at balancing, but also encouraging as leaders. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think on a computer front, we're looking back decades back in the old channel, seven news room days when I was there back in the early 90s. You know, the whole TV station itself is probably no more than 150 people. Then you stack on top of that, the seven digital platform and what we've got obviously over in digital publisher world and technology solutions, there's thousands of people that are employed to deliver content now. So if it's based on a similar model, I'd suggest that we're looking at growth rather than a retraction. There will be a shift and obviously it's a different opportunity, but yeah, I think that's a good model to look at. I want to just quickly, I heard this the other day and I just quickly want to read this out. I'm hoping I'm going to pronounce this correct, but I heard of something called the Yevon's paradox or Jevon's paradox. And it is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resources use lead to a rise rather than a fall in total consumption of that resource. So basically the thinking being that the more, if technology makes things more efficient, then you know, you less jobs right in the market or in an economy, whereas actually the increased efficiency leads to a growth or an expansion rather. See, and I see. Yeah, I heard that I thought that was really cool. I'm very relevant right now. No, absolutely. I think that's exactly what I'm saying. I think there will be some impacts in certain part for sure, but I think it could lead to overall growth. It's going to lead to job creation as well. I think there'll be a lot of job creation, a lot of jobs, new types of jobs that will be appearing off the back of AI that I think will be very positive for everyone. I'm looking forward to the quantum integral bit phase with Elon Musk getting his data from the top to the moon. Yeah, let's see what happens as fast and I never at dull moment as there. Yeah, there's some pretty vast ideas, let's say, and he's got the money to back it up as well, doesn't he? And he's obviously a highly intelligent individual. So, yeah, I think when you combine your link, one of his other projects that he's working on, the ability to bring thought to computers is going, and that's actually already in human testing phase as well in the US. And that we've got a guest coming on soon to talk about their version of that in a similar, you know, in a similar vein in the media industry and how that's affecting their world, which would be quite interesting to see how that plays out. I'll wait to hear on that. Jason, thanks for joining us on the show. It's been a great having you chat with you and obviously really enjoyed listening and hearing everything that you've got around the problematic space and a big call out to the team here in Australia, especially in the work that they do to bring published solutions to the market. Absolutely, thank you very much. Thanks Paul, thanks David, great chatting and yeah, look forward to hearing the rest of your shows. Thanks for inviting me on. Thanks very much. And to everybody else watching and listening to the show, thank you very much. We look forward to you joining us next time here on Media Tech Talk. I'm Jack Marshall, head of News@DoubleVerifier. 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