Episode 42: Comscore's Jon Carpenter on the JIC and the future of measurement. Plus Scope3 and Sincera funding

Hello, everyone. And welcome to the Markitecture podcast. I'm Eric Franchi from Appirum Ventures. Joining us this week, we have John Carpenter, the CEO of Comscore and my co host Ari. Ari has been called a few things in his career. The ad tech influencer, I know him as the prince of programmatic. I've, I've heard him referred to as the count of CTV, but this week we've got a new name. Ari Papari. Welcome, Ari. Thank you, Eric. I I appreciate the new name, Ari Papari. It hasn't been hard enough to have this many vowels in my name my entire life. So for those of you who don't know what we're talking about there was an Ad Exchange article that referred to me that way, and they ironically called me the person who needed no introduction and then misspelled my name. So I'm being razzed by the entire community. We'll get into this more later. We'll get into this in a bit. We have a great show. So John's here to talk about the JIC and, and comScore and connected TV and all sorts of really interesting stuff around measurement. We have justify your existence with Adorize, which is a white labeled rich media service. That's very interesting. A bunch of former colleagues of ours. We also have sort of a call for advertisers. So I want to remind those who are listening that we are supported by advertising. You may have just heard an ad before you, before this podcast. And we've recently joined forces with ad tech God, which also has a very popular podcast and we're selling the ads for them. So like Eric Suford likes to say, everything is an ad network and so is market texture. So if you're interested in advertising on any of these podcasts, just give me an email, Ari at mark texture TV, or reach out to me on LinkedIn and I will set you up. Last thing, we're not gonna make some, a big political comment here. We're just going to say that, you know, our thoughts are with all of our Israeli friends. There's so many Israeli ad tech companies after the horrific attacks in Gaza. So we're feeling for you. And if there's anything we can do, please let us know. All right. With that, John, thank you for being here. You're the CEO of Comscore. I'm sure you have a lot to say. Well, thanks a lot for for having me this morning, guys. I really appreciate it. I look forward to. To the discussion I don't I don't profess to have the nicknames yet in the industry, but maybe someday. Maybe someday. So everyone knows Comscore, but does everyone know it? It's evolved so much from from back in the day where it was sort of the default measurement system for, for digital. So what is Comscore nowadays? Yeah, sure. It's a question we, we, we get a lot here, especially in my, my tenure over the last 15 months. Look, we're, we're, of course an audience measurement company. But we consider ourselves a bit more than that in terms of, you know, who we are as a data and technology platform. We, see ourselves fundamentally as really one of the few companies I'd argue that could and can help solve some of the complex problems that many of our clients in this industry is facing in terms of next gen, next gen measurement. I can say we're the second oldest here in terms of the true kind of measurement OGs over the years. We've been a trusted currency across digital and in a lot of ways, the traditional media business for gosh, well over 20 years now. And we, you know, under my watch, continue to build on that, that original digital lineage and the traditional TV lineage that came with the rent track acquisition here with a, with a set of set of data assets that that span now both digital and traditional. So should people think of you as measurement for digital and measurement for sort of TV and it's various offshoots, connected TV, et cetera? Is that the easiest way to get your arms around what your current product lines are? That's accurate. And, you know, I would echo the combination of those two things uniquely positions us for what the market is asking for in terms of cross platform audience measurement. Right. So what's your view of the future of measurement? Is it going to be ultimately a single currency, multi currency, hybrid currencies or something else? Yeah, that's a great question. I think we view this, at least my view is it'll be multi currency, right? The digital ecosystem has always operated on multi currencies. I think that's, that's fundamentally where TV is happening. But I think. TV is headed, but I think maybe to take a step back in order to really kind of wrap your arms around where this is all headed from my perspective, I think looking at what's taking place and in the industry in terms of the challenges that are spread across this industry, everything from the fact that we as consumers are a heck of a lot more connected than we've ever been before. We almost have unlimited optionality in terms of what we can, consume really across mobile CTV and, and traditional video, if you will. That's certainly one massive. Challenge that the industry is grappling with. I think the other big one that we're right in the middle of given our digital presence is that, you know, the deprecation of third party cookies and the and the proliferation of signal loss across the digital ecosystem that has impacted. Publishers, especially in the mid and long tail and some pretty significant ways especially those that that rely on open market programmatic for the bulk of their revenue. That signal loss problem is not insignificant. And the combination of signal loss plus the just the fragmentation of of consumer media behavior are a couple of big problems that we see ourselves as com score uniquely solving. Both of them create you know, themselves a tremendous amount of waste, but by any estimate somewhere, tens of billions. So we see this as multi currency, but I think that the future here has got to be based on one big data innovation. You hear a lot about that in the marketplace today, given the fragmentation, the notion that single source panels can, can continue to solve the complexities. In today's environment just doesn't hold up. So you've got to have, you've got to have big data. It's got to be unified and, and cross screen, right? Advertisers really need one unified view of, of audiences and outcomes across all devices. And that's got to span from local to national and local gets underplayed oftentimes in the, in the, in the narrative that's out there in the ecosystem. But, you know, from my perspective, really, since the pandemic our worlds have become more hyperlocal than they've ever been before. And the granularity and representativeness of, of the Comscore dataset is, is one that starts with kind of the local at the foundation coupled with that digital, piece. So it's got to be unified and cross screen and then privacy, right? There's privacy is a consumer, right? We've done a lot of innovation in this. In this space over, over the years the solution got to have privacy wrapped around everything that we do. And then finally, you can't, you can't be anything and everything to everybody. You've got to be interoperable in terms of how our clients are using. Various solutions to solve some of the problems that they're, they're dealing with. So a bit of a long way to answer there. Well, let me, let me dive in on a couple of things you said. So you said, you said the future is multi currency, but then you said, well, advertisers want a single view across platforms. Wouldn't advertisers be better off with a single currency? Yeah, it's in terms of in terms of scoring the actual media. Perhaps I think if you look at the digital ecosystem, it's thrived in a multi measurement environment for years. I fundamentally believe that's where we're headed with with digital. Excuse me, with with with traditional TV. You know, you look at the number of players that are in this ecosystem that are doing everything from audience measurement to brand safety, to outcome related measurement. Those all have big roles to play for, for our clients. For, for Comscore you know, we don't have to own all those gas stations, our data and assets can fuel and be interoperable with those solutions to, to help clients round out things that help them go beyond just, you know, Standard region frequency. So how does the other thing that struck me about your introduction was your comment about publishers suffering from a lack of cookies. And that definitely makes sense as we move into this into this world without cookies. But how is that? How does come score help with that? So great question. I think with, with with that deprecation across the ecosystem, we're really focused on advancing our digital measurement approach, which is really powered by fundamentally a completely new methodology. Around privacy, preserving unified digital measurement or original comfort digital product was the methodology was based off of a unified digital measurement. We've, we've updated that to operate on, you know, first party signals instead of third party signals. And so it provides a tremendous benefit to the publisher ecosystem. In allowing them to surface their audiences in ways that allow them to, work around, if you will, the signal loss that we're all dealing with. So publishers are putting your tags on their page and it's giving you signals and then you're combining that with your panel, which is you know, an installed piece of software on people's machines. That's right. So, cross channel. How do you, how do you then take all that data and tie it to someone's living room behavior? And CTV or otherwise? Yeah, look,, our methodology fundamentally starts at the household level. We're, we're ingesting, you know, hundreds of millions in the case of digital billions of call them transactions on a daily basis. And we start at the household level. We now have insight into the individuals in those households and we build our methodology from the ground floor up. So we started the household that scales to all roughly 42, 000 zip codes across the U S marketplace that then ladders to all 210 demos and rolls up to a national view of. what's going on. And so we're really the only company that can say that we've got the foundation that starts at the household and ladders up in one consistent methodology. And then through unified I. D. We're able to, link are our digital data with our TV audience viewing data to help provide clients with A view of true, incremental reach in frequency. When you say start to the household, is that the legacy of the RENTRAC acquisition, which had pretty large amounts of data from set top box? Yeah, and it's only grown, grown from there. Our digital, our digital assets have expanded. We've got visibility through all of our set top box relationships. We're integrated with. Gosh, tens of thousands of publishers across the media ecosystem. And then we've got probably one of the largest, if not the largest digital panel that we calibrate our big data set against. And then we've got our total home panel, which gives us an install base of roughly 7, 500 households where we're. Able to kind of get picture of what's going on in the household that we use to calibrate our big data sets against and the local focus. That's a little bit of a jab at Nielsen, right? Which lost its MRC accreditation for local. And until recently, we still had people like writing down what TV shows they were watching. Yeah, look, we think the superiority of our, our local measurement product is unmatched. We know that the stability, we're measuring one in three households, the incumbent panel. Measurement capability. You're talking about one and roughly every 2000 households. And so when you start to think about the stability and reliability of a measurement platform that's built off of big data, what that does to sales teams, eliminate waste, help them think more creatively about. audience insights and how to, how to plan their sales efforts. The reliability of that data set is just so much superior. John, I was, you know, sort of like doing a little bit of way back research in preparation for this. And when, when I think of comp score, sometimes the first thing that comes to mind is is the rankings. So, it's long been you know, a thing that some of the scaled. Digital properties can boast like we're a com score top 200 com score top 2 50. And you know, that's extended now to, you know, basically everything, which is, which is great. The the foundation of this was the Jupiter media metrics acquisition in 2000 and like the depths of the bear for one and a half million dollars. So, I mean, the ROI on that, you know, has got to be, you know, pretty insane. How much of the sort of rankings still plays into you know, why customers use Comscore? And do they use it for planning or,, a sort of, like, what's the state of the whole rankings biz? Yeah, many of our, many of our clients still leverage exactly what you're talking about in terms of our rankings of publisher websites around the globe again, it's a global footprint that we, that we take media metrics is still the foundation of our digital assets and we've scaled off of that to build out, you know predictive audience activation business that really has it's been around for a little while, but it has taken us a bit of time to, to scale it, but is now getting, you know, pretty extensive scale and that's built off of the foundation of our digital asset coupled with our TV assets. And so that old media metrics business that you referenced the company buying it for, you know, essentially a song back in the early days is continuing to pay massive dividends and it gives us. A foothold into just about every single major brand and every agency whole co in, in the, in the media ecosystem. Yeah. that, those, that data and media metrics was the, I don't want, I don't want to say the currency, but it was the most important data for buying digital before programmatic because before programmatic, you were effectively buying sites and you had to, as a media planner figure out which sites correlated with the data you cared about, but programmatic came and the naive point of view is that that all went away. And now we just buy the actual people. Yeah. The actual audience users that we want. We don't need a ranking and rating of sites. Would you dispute that? Yeah, it's a fair question. And certainly the rise of programmatic changed that original business model quite a bit. Given the proliferation of signal loss across the environment today, I would posit that our our digital business, our digital assets. Are more important today than perhaps they've ever been before in terms of allowing the pub, especially the mid and long tail publisher ecosystem who rely heavily on programmatic, open market, programmatic cookie based revenue. You know, we've got statistics that, that suggest that that top line hit just on signal loss is, upwards of 60 percent deprecation to, signal loss. And and and significant revenue declines are digital product because we our tag sits on the site. We can surface first party data. We become incredibly valuable to these, not just the publishers, but the demand side ecosystem who are also struggling to get scale in the absence of cookies on their platforms can now ride along on our tagging container. So we can surface audiences that are now verifiable you can identify who the audience is, the demos and the, the publisher ecosystem benefits In that because they're able to get credit for advertising that was somewhat obfuscated, given the signal loss that now is more visible and we can stitch back together that linkage between the buy side and the sell side. So we're, we're incredibly bullish on the opportunity in front of us for the, for the digital business, given what's going on with signal loss alone. Let's talk about TV. So the Jik, is it pronounced Jik, Gik? Jace, what no, the JIC, what is the JIC and what's going on and what's your involvement? Yeah very topical. The JIC from my perspective, and I don't think this is a secret. It is really about trying to bring the, the, the buy side and the sell side together here to help advance what I talked about at the top, which is this notion of, how do we start to measure accurately all the fragmentation that's going across, going, going on across the. Platforms. And so with the shifts in consumption from traditional TV to streaming, I think what the chick has realized is that in order to facilitate a standard measurement of sorts, they need to come together and bring their First party data as it relates to all the streaming behavior and bring that and make that available if you will, again, in a privacy forward way to all the measurement partners so that all this stuff can be, be accurately measured. Right? Look, I mean, all of these companies who have stood up D to C business models are losing hundreds of millions. Right. Of dollars. And so the, the notion that traditional measurement can help solve that is just not a reality. And so I think this is a massive effort to kind of bring that together and provide measurement companies with an accurate view of what's going on across the streaming platforms so that those. Companies can start to get credit, appropriate credit, for the audiences that are, that are vastly moving to those. But what's, what's the expected output of the JIC? Usually a JIC outside the U. S. It picks a vendor, and it says, for the next two years, we're all agreeing, we're going to use this vendor for this medium. And that actually, makes a lot of efficiency gains, because everyone generally I think the conventional wisdom is that this JIC is not going to do that. It's going to maybe pick many vendors or many methodologies. Could you give us a little bit more of the inside view of what the JIC is doing and what the output's likely to be? Yeah, so, we've, we've gone through a certification process. I think all the major measurement players with the exception of, of Nielsen have, signed on to be a part of the JIC process. And, you know, they're putting us through a certification process of sorts. And, you saw an announcement or maybe you didn't, but there was an announcement, you know, gosh, a week or so ago where we got the results of, of the initial evaluation from the JIC members on, you know, our submissions. And they conditionally certified Comscore as well as two additional measurement companies. And so they're, they're certifying you. Why is this different from the MRC? Why do we need a JIC, the JIC if we have the MRC whose goal is to certify the counting methodology? Yeah, look, I think the JIC has been clear that as part of getting, certification overall I think they've been public about the, companies. Needing to be in the M. R. C. process as well. And going through that we've been very vocal at Comscore in our support of the M. R. C. and what it does for the industry in terms of providing transparency into the measurement products that are being used to score effectively billions of dollars of advertising. We're the only measurement company that was conditionally certified that is also currently undergoing an MRC accreditation for our audience measurement product. And we see that as a key differentiator here, but the JIC has been supportive of, of players like us. Participating with the MRC and recognize the importance of it. Right. So so a a cynical view would be that everyone wants to replace Nielsen, but the JIC is not able to recommend one company to replace Nielsen. Is that is, am I totally off base or is that a a cynical view that has some, has some weight to it? Yeah, look, I'm not in the camp that Nielsen goes, goes away. Right. Nielsen will continue to, to command. And You know, a certain percentage of, of the transactions that take place here. But I think fundamentally the offering as it stands today is, is limited in what it can do to help solve some of the problems that I talked about at the top that our clients, are asking for us to help solve. And that gets back to. Look, everybody's talking about big data and big data solutions, and Comscore from day one has kind of been the OG on big data methodology. And we've, I kind of look at it and say, look, are we trying to be like them or are they trying to be like us? And I, I like the position that we're in in terms of what we've built and the product that we have in market. Yeah, I briefly worked at Nielsen and it was very unpleasant. Well, we have that in common Harvey. I don't, although I don't know that our time at Nielsen together overlapped. No, it didn't. But I will say the one thing is the nicest office I will ever have in my entire career. It had a refrigerator in it. Like, I'm never going to have that level of lux again. So one last question on this. So what does the world look like if you have three or four vendors that are all like, JICs and MRC certified to do TV measurement cross screen. Does a marketer, does the CMO pick one and say, Hey, we're a com score shop or we're a video amp shop and we want to use it for everything. Is that the dynamic or is it like different use cases for different campaigns and different objectives? Yeah, I think it's more the latter than, than the former here on that. I think there's. There's players like the ones that you mentioned that serve unique aspects of the, the digital environment. What I'll say is, you know, if we're talking about solving cross screen measurement you've got to have big data at scale and you've got to have digital and you've got to have local granularity, if you think about at the end of the day. where outcomes happen. They happen locally. They happen at the household level. If you're a national advertiser, I don't care who you are. Your goal is to get somebody into your storefront locally. Or online to your property. And that's where I think the com score data assets significantly are differentiated from some of the players that just don't have the scale at the granular enough level to help clients truly solve for cross screen. And so we're feeling pretty good about how we're positioned, given the assets that we have under the hood of this thing. Got it. So I want to ask one last question before I take a break. So your background, you're from a finance background, which is interesting. Usually it's measurement kind of people who are running measurement companies. Also, I, I have to ask, like, You know, Comscore has this sort of tortured history over the last decade. So how do those things come together? Are you like the steady hand on the wheel who is, you know, less likely to end up with a prison sentence than other folks? Is there, you know, how are we moving forward here? Yeah, look, I hope, hopefully you don't hold my finance background against me. Your audience doesn't hold my finance background against me. I've been pretty lucky in my career and had a chance to work alongside some. really talented and amazing leaders that helped me get to where I am today. We're, you're, you, you referenced some of the, some of the history here at Comscore. Look, we serve the media industry and there's always a press release that comes out and there's always some, some noise in the market. We, try very hard here at Comscore to not get caught up in that we, try to control what we can directly control. And there's no doubt that this company has had its fits and starts, but we're firing on all cylinders here over the course of the last. 15 months, and especially through the first call it nine months of this year. And we're, intently focused on delivering solutions that are going to help our clients address the challenges that plague their businesses day to day. And, you know, we're not perfect. We don't profess to be but we wake up every day trying to get a little bit better than we were the day before. And as you guys all know you do that day after day, week after week. Things start to, things start to happen and it's always bumpy, but I like bumpy and up to the right and I'll take that every day. All right. You heard it here first. Let's take a quick break and talk about the news of the week with lots of financing news. So Eric, one of your portfolio companies, and actually I'm an investor as well, since Sarah made some news, do you want to talk us through that? Yep. Well the big news was Ari Papari. Yeah. So since Sarah, it is a metadata company it's got this like pretty innovative way to crawl the web and get. Aggregate data on ad tech and they've built a business that allows ad tech companies like ID five and trade desk and live ramp and, and others to to sort of use that data to understand what's going on in the market and build products better and faster. In the article in AdExchanger, we should put in the show notes for everybody to, to check it out hopefully that they have not corrected your name. You know, it's refer, it was like sort of referred to in the beginning as Moat 2. 0. Which the company has since moved past, but it's a little bit of moat early days in that it's like incredible data that can be used like by ad tech companies, first and foremost, to, to drive innovation. Super talented team, Mike and Ian, they're, they're, they're product. Leaders. And it's also interesting from a financing perspective, from a. A couple of angles. Number one price rounds are a little bit less frequent these days. And you know, it was, it was a price round with a, with a, with a proper lead. That lead was next view, which was a seed investor in triple lifts. So have a good experience in the, in the space and a good outcomes in the space. And then, you know, a parent was an investor. TD seven was an investor. Library was an investor. Jonah. You know, a whole bunch of folks that sort of like ad tech natives. So I think it's a super interesting business and, from, from a number of sort of like strategic angles. What's your take on it? Yeah, it's interesting because it's a data business, but it absolutely does not touch user data at all. There's no privacy issues whatsoever. It's a sort of a dictionary almost of what's going on in the ad tech world. And from my experience at Beeswax, for example, so many of those data sets had to be reproduced from scratch by every participant in the ad tech ecosystem. So I think it's pretty interesting. You know, it's a very interesting data set. John, are you familiar with SINCERA? Have you, has it crossed your path? I, am not, but you guys have got me intently interested based on what I just heard. All right, we're doing some business development here on the podcast. The other news just came out this morning is that Brian O'Kelley's scope three raised 20 million on 100 million valuation. That's a wall street journal article on that led by Google ventures and Venrock. So I don't think this is super surprising given that they've Position themselves. I can't speak for the actual results, but they've positioned themselves as the definitive source of carbon information in the ad tech ecosystem. And if you imagine that becomes more and more important to advertisers and publishers, you could imagine that becoming a pretty big business where they take sort of a big on the transactions to make them more carbon neutral. John, I'll throw it to you for a moment. What's your thought on carbon in ad tech or carbon as a measurement dimension? Yeah, not not an area that we we play in. Although clearly getting a lot of attention, it will be interesting to see how this evolves and and how how companies lean in in terms of you know. Funding the growth of some of these, some of these companies that are clearly focused on driving measurement around some pretty important topics. A little bit outside the center of bullseye for us, but certainly worth, worth us following. Yeah, there's sort of this history where the core audience companies like Nielsen and Comscore are great at what they do. And then there's innovation that happens from small companies measuring new things. And then eventually maybe they get acquired or, you know, get put into the tags and otherwise give advertisers a more complete view. Yeah, I think that's, that's right. And you know, not surprised that it's something that, is sort of on the radar, but, but not really being operationalized yet. But by Comscore with what John said, you know, this is it's an early stage company, even though it was big raise at a, at a, you know, I think you know, look high valuation just in terms of sort of like the overall number. No, no insight into, Into what their revenue is. And, you know, if it was sort of, you know, kind of a high multiple it's, this is an investment for, five to 10 years from now, right. From, from GV and, and, and Venrock perspective, I think the thing, one thing too, is it's kind of interesting that GV was one of the leads in the round because, you know, they're not investing for Google alphabet per se, but they can bring. A lot of resources and a lot of coordination you know, with the connection to, to, to Google, obviously. So I thought that was the pretty interesting thing. And, you know, obviously you can't bet on, you can't bet against anything that, that Bach does. Yeah. A little inside baseball. So Venrock was the largest early stage investor in AppNexus. And scope three was spun out of Brian O'Kelley's previous startup. So I think they sort of split the baby on their initial seed round. So the capitalization makes sense that they would need some additional funding. It is encouraging to see that, you know, there's that there's still still money in the marketplace changing, you know, chasing, smart, creative ideas and companies that for sure are going to help shape a bit of the future here down the road. So encouraged by The dollars here again, not clear on the revenue, but the valuation certainly encouraged to see the funds flow if you want to hear more on the subject, just about three or four weeks ago, we interviewed Amy Williams at good loop, which is a competitor to scope three, and she did an excellent job of sort of explaining the whole landscape for both carbon and ESG advertising. And you're right, there's a landscape emerging and I think a fund, a funding like this is going to start to accelerate perhaps some more startups. Yeah, absolutely. So Eric you wanted to talk a little bit about OpenRT standards and retail media. I think Kevil has been pushing that. Yeah. The article again, we should put in the show notes from from ad exchanger. James Hurcher has been like all over the retail media and commerce space. Did a did a good write up. Kevin, who's a portfolio company of ours is spearheading. Not leading an initiative to create open RTP standards for sponsored listings which is not, you know, a counter to any IB efforts. This is just a consortium of companies and includes, the programmatic leaders as well as the, you know, sort of key scaled retail media platforms to just cooperate, move faster. And then ultimately had this be a, an open RTP standard. I mean, for the industry to, I think, achieve the revenue targets that everybody's putting against retail media. One of the key things is going to be standardization around sponsored listings and how to scale things using all of the, you know, sort of like disparate data across the open web. So this is it's kind of wonky, but it's like so, so, so important, at least from my perspective. It's really important because product listings, sponsored listings are totally non standard. The only way to buy them is to log in to the walled garden your retailer chooses and maybe that's okay for brands that are very concentrated on certain retailers. But if you ever want a non endemic ad, like a progressive insurance ad, to have an opportunity to buy that space. You're going to need RTB support. So be very interesting to watch that. One topic that caught my eye that I'll just talk about is and, a lot of this, a lot of the content for this podcast, honestly, it's just me explaining people's complex tweets. So so there was this little back and forth with Alex Cohen, who's who's involved with the sandbox at Google. I think it's the product manager for it. That the topics API, which is the kind of profiling of users in an anonymous way is not going to be opt out in Europe. So most of the other sandbox technologies are opt out, meaning your Chrome gets updated and your browser is enrolled in them and you can turn it off. But topics in Europe is going to be opt in because it that's how the regulations are, are flying, which actually makes it probably pretty useless because I really don't think many users are going to click like, yes, please track me with with my browser in Europe. The other, just a clarification was that the other sandbox technologies, like the ones for conversion attribution and for sort of ad serving are going to be. Opt out in Europe. Just like what does this mean for, you know, European targeted advertising? Well there's a lot of controversy about how useful topics actually is going to be to publishers. So the way topics works is basically as a publisher, you put some tag on your page and that allows you to read the user's topics from the browser and then target ads to them. And it's sort of a replacement for third party data in some sense. So publishers, I think, are counting on that for generating some level of revenue or additional uplift in their, in their CPMs. And if it's opt in in Europe, it's probably basically just not going to be effective. So it's another kind of difficulty for publishers. Hard to quantify, but does, doesn't look good. Yeah. I mean, look, if publishers can now only maintain first party cookies on, on, on opt ins, it's certainly going to limit, you know, data collection and their ability to monetize their inventory I'll take a minute to selfishly plug our predictive audience product which is, which is a, which is a big alternative to, to the topics product. The, the move here is definitely a blow to pubs that had planned on using topics as a teletromy, if you will, for in the absence of third party cookies. Yeah. Topics is really a hot topic with publishers. Some some publishers like you get crazy people out there, and some people are like, this is just a way for Google to steal my data and enrich themselves. And then other folks are kind of counting on some of these technologies. It's really fuzzy. No one knows what's gonna happen in 2024. Last news. So Paramount added iSpot TV as an additional measurement partner joining Comscore and VideoAmp. I just thought this was a good. Topic to bring up with John here so we can kind of get that perspective. John, do you think all the major media companies are just going to have multiple approved vendors so that it could have the flexibility is ultimately they're going to be the same three or four as options with every one of these big media companies, or is it going to shake out at some point? Yeah, I think certainly in the short term what you're seeing here is, you know, on the heels of the conditional JIC certification of which Paramount is obviously part of the JIC they're, Paramount and others obviously keenly interested in making sure that they can work across all of us, CommScore and the other two and so I think that's what you saw in the announcement there with Paramount just announcing that they can now, Thank operate on essentially all the, all the conditionally certified measurement providers you know, how this shakes out over time remains to be seen. At some point you know, there, there, there's. Not enough traditional tam, if you will, for, for there to be room for, a handful of us here. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was continued consolidate. You already saw some consolidation with with I spot and 605. Recently, I don't expect that that will be the end of it. Yeah, people don't realize how expensive it is to run these services. The data expense, the panels, you know, everything. Yeah, but it's pretty cool to see how aggressive the the competitive set is, is getting. You know, I spot is now making headlines feels like weekly video amp had that big 180 million raise. There's definitely shifts happening in the, in the space. So you know, obviously love to see it from a, from a competitive standpoint. Certainly helps spur innovation and you know, keeps us moving quickly. For sure. All right, well, let's call it then. So John, CEO of Comscore, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate the discussion guys. Thanks for the opportunity. Eric, always a pleasure. This is Eric Paperi signing off. Please please continue listening for justify your existence with Adorize. My good friend, Adrian D'Souza will explain why rich media can be white labeled. And thank you everyone. Welcome to Markitectures, justify your existence, where we ask early stage ad tech and martech startups to tell us why we should care about what they're building. Today we have my old friend, Adrian D'Souza here. So Adrian, what's your company called? Company's called Adorize. Adorize. And how, when was it founded? How big is it? And what funding have you taken? It was founded mid 2022. And we haven't taken any funding at all. It's entirely self funded and we're growing and profitable. Exciting. How many employees? I don't like to disclose it, but definitely under 50. Under 50. Okay. That's the qualification to be on this segment. So we'll say you qualify. All right. What do you do? So I'm the CEO of Adorize. Yeah. And I... What does Adorize do? Great. Adorize is a white label bundle solution of creative services and ad serving. And we provide these services across video and display, across multiple medium. Okay, so white labeled creative services. So is this like, who do you sell to? Is it a publisher product? It is a product that we sell to publishers, agencies, and DSPs. Right. Where effectively we're giving those organizations another thing to sell, another product line to sell, except it's white labeled so they basically can go to market and say, Hey, we have creative services and we can do beautiful creative for you. And we are the team behind the scenes delivering against that. Okay. And, and to what extent do you have like proprietary formats or, or other tech that, that enables that? We have a bunch of proprietary things, so we have unique formats in the, in the 3D space. I would say one of the other unique things about us is, is that it's, uh, it, there are, we have proprietary technology that does compression without compromising on the quality of creative. And so we typically, one of, just one of the founding principles of our company was being green. And so we're carbon neutral and our entire stack works on renewable energy. But as I said, our file sizes are around 50 percent of typically what the competition renders at. I'm picturing you, like, with a bunch of, a bunch of programmers sitting above a waterfall just, like, getting the hydroelectric energy to power your ads. Ha ha ha ha ha! Alright, so, 3D formats and, and video formats. Is it fair to characterize that the main use case for your product would be high end branded stuff? It's high, well... Here's the interesting thing, right? People associate brand with lack of engagement and lack of responses. We build beautiful creative. And so we see applications all the time in the, in the direct response space too. Because you know what? Our creators are light. They are beautiful. And so as a result, they perform really well. And so while, yes, I think you look at any of our formats and say, Oh yeah, that must be branding. It actually performs really well. For example, we do a lot of business in the entertainment sector with movie studios for launches and things like that, driving, driving folks to basically, you know, the nearest theater or things like that. And part of it is just the, the formats while light are very engaging. And so, right, right. Back when I was in the rich media business, the movie studios were, were movie studios, automotive and like gaming were three of the biggest sectors because they really wanted good looking video heavy creatives. Yeah. And that's the one difference, right? You asked, what's my reason for existence? You know, It's precisely because we're trying to be the anti rich media companies of the past. Heavy creative. Right. Very light. I think at times publishers used to hate those creatives because it used to be heavy. And marketers would scratch their heads saying it is really, really difficult to deal, you know, like, it takes a lot of time and resources. We are fully managed services. And so we take on all the heavy lifting. And because our ads perform really well, it has a great, while we are all about the consumer and building great creative, it translates into all kinds of goodness for marketers, because it delivers superior performance, and publishers, because the ads work great and it enhances the consumer experience. Right. So I just want to make sure we all understand what it is. So let's say I'm a publisher and I want to offer a new product that's like some really cool ad, and I'm small. What you would enable me to do as a publisher is to go to my potential customers who want to buy direct ads and say, We're going to create a really cool ad for you, and it's in our format that looks nice, and you don't have to do anything. Just give us the assets and we'll make it happen. That's absolutely right. I'd just say a couple of tweaks to what you just said. Yeah. One is... That very often if we don't even get the assets, we can scrape content. Uh, off the web as a starting point and deliver an initial mock and that's what wows the customer and says, wait, wait a minute, you're doing something better than what my own resources can do. I want to, I want more of that. Secondly, we not only do all that, but we've actually got playbooks designed, including like videos to train the sales team and kind of like detailed process flows and it's an ops company. And so we try to make it really easy to onboard our partners without them having to worry about go to market efforts. How do you charge? We charge on a CPM basis, primarily. We have another model that includes a charge for creative services and, and ad serving. The ad serving at that point is less, but that's primarily when the volumes are very low. But as long as the volumes justify it, we believe we should partner with any of the sales teams and take on the risk. So when we're delivering marks and we're delivering stuff, it's only when you win the business that we start getting paid. Right. But, uh, that's part of, uh, why we built the company. Like at the end of the day, we are going to get a lot of recurring business and we do because of how easy we are to deal with as well as that we deliver superior performance and beautiful creative. And so that's the reason why people do business with us. Very easy to do business with. Sure. Sounds great. Sounds much better than the rich media business. We're trying to transform it. Yes. Last question. If your company was an animal, what animal would it be? Oh, that's an interesting one. I, I would say the, the cheetah cheetah. Okay. Why fast? Recently, one of the execs at one of our partners shot a note. I know him personally. He said, Hey, how are things going? It's been six, uh, I think it's now around eight months since I joined AdRise. And he's like, how are things going? And I sent him a note. Basically, I wanted to give him detailed status of everything that's going, but we are extremely nimble. And so we can do great things in a short amount of time because, and you'll appreciate this being a startup founder yourself, no bureaucracy. We decide the executive decides we want to go do something. We do something. And so we right now have, uh, A product with a major auto brand that's running, which is a micro targeted video product. And we, here's what we did. We built a massively scalable video, video rendering farm where we can take the video assets and we can take all the offers in a feed for the APR or cashback. And in a couple of hours we can render thousands of videos and then we push it to our ad server automatically and it gets, and they start serving based on typically the zip or IP address. And all that happens seamlessly, without Opsteam having to go traffic thousands of lines. And we report granularly, so we don't need that, basically the trafficking of lines to actually deliver at that level. So that's an example of like, all the incumbents are struggling because they have, you know, years of legacy code, etc, etc. We are the cheetah because we can move very quickly and deliver stuff immediately. You snuck a full case study into the animal question. I'm impressed. Well, Adrian, thank you so much for being here. Your company is called Adorize and you justified your existence. Thank you.