Kind of surreal sharing this week's episode of
@TakingInvPod
with
@gokulr
.
Gokul is one of the most successful product leaders ever, impacting almost every aspect of the digital economy. Just part of his work includes:
- Changing the face of advertising by launching AdSense
@HarryStebbings
First pair of real running shoes I bought when I was 22 to motivate me to stop smoking cigarettes/run a 5k as an early date w my now wife/mother of my 2 girls.
The craziest thing about $meta is that almost all of their ads are "bought" not sold. It is a self-service auction that moved over $400 million of digital real-estate a day in Q4.
I respect $TTD immensely but the reality is the mid/long tail on the demand side are the source of growth going forward & the finite amt of ad inventory connected to the internet is rapidly (and has been for years) shifting from open web to walled gardens.
I learned more talking to
@eric_seufert
for 45 mins than I did in the last 6 months. If you want to hear where the adtech/martech space is going or "why everything is an ad network", check out
@DDruger
and my latest episode of Taking Inventory
From a martech pov, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the platform risk of
@OpenAI
. My first co was reliant on
@meta
's APIs and at
@Snapchat
I was in charge of them. I think I get the game and the fact that I am conflicted on the end state is kind of encouraging IMO. If I
Was just reminded by
@greglieber
that 13 years ago today we started working full-time on Shift (aka Focused Labs aka GraphEffect) and that 7 years ago today was my first day
@Snapchat
. Excited to see what the next few 2/26’s lead to…
Started this at $Snap, unfortunately didn’t happen. Idea was to get tier 2 social networks to create a co-op ad network. Access via ads apis/a front end co-owned by the participating networks via a newco. Could have captured $TTD value with walled garden ethos/scale.
I’ve spent the last 15 years building ad tech in some form or another and the opportunity to innovate around retail media is kind of shocking. Some massive businesses are going to be built over the next few years.
The GOAT of adtech (
@eric_seufert
) returns to the
@TakingInvPod
this week to discuss the state of the digital economy. As usual, Eric put on a masterclass on why the open web cos are whistling past the graveyard, why the walled gardens have such a dominant hand, why the AI tax is
As much as I am a proponent of the walled garden advertising platforms, I do admit that’s extremely annoying to advertise across multiple ones at once. One of the most obvious use cases for AI and why I believe so much in what we are building at
@WithMarketAI
Very hard to run an ads biz w the old playbook and no payments signal. Lots of opportunity for the
@Snapchat
’s &
@Pinterest
’s but they need to change the strategy and make the default approach appealing to economically rational advertisers or this is going to keep happening…
Vizio OS becomes Walmart OS and Walmart gets to improve their graph & fill a % of ad inventory in 3rd party ad supported apps. Pretty smart for a supply constrained platform w incredible merchant relationships. This will be accretive fast if approved.
Snapchat has the greatest UI of any ads manager. It's the most seamless, least buggy place in all ads world.
It's old school FB ads manager before Meta engineers over complicated it.
Earlier today, we announced the beta for Market, the retail media network for independent brands. We have been heads down rethinking how to build a new type of ads paradigm for independent brands, and we’re excited to finally share it. We’ve written a
If you know me, you know that I 100% agree w
@eric_seufert
here: “The walled gardens are winning... this is the sort of locus of power within the digital economy, within the digital advertising market. It’s walled gardens. That’s where all the money flows.” Check out the full
While Alphabet's topline advertising revenue in Q4 missed estimates, YouTube advertising grew by 16% y/y. Notably, the delta between YT & Network revenue grew to nearly $1BN as Network revenue declined again, representing a new all-time low proportion of total ad revenue: 12.66%.
Is
@Meta
pulling back from their commerce ambitions? As
@eric_seufert
explains, not only are they investing in it, they are doubling down... Listen to the full pod here:
We just launched
@trustdotco
- the first card + community designed to help startups make more money from their marketing investments. We are changing how startups invest in their own business by leveraging the collective wisdom and buying power of the Trust community.
LH partner
@AndreaHippeau
on
@trustdotco
via
@TechCrunch
: "Trust understands how important marketing dollars are and gives [businesses] terms that are financially better.”
Today we dropped the first "Snap Mafia Edition" of the
@TakingInvPod
where we feature
@Snap
alum's who have started new cos, starting with
@realdanted
, the founder of
@zittiinc
. Dante was one of the first 10 users of Snapchat (yes you read that right) and went on to help build
Will
@amazon
buy
@Snapchat
,
@Pinterest
,
@X
or
@Reddit
over the next few years? Paying for content good but having users create it for you better (ads margins ⬆️ against “free” vs. paid content). They are supply constrained vs. demand so would make sense to most except the
@FTC
.
We are hiring at - if you are looking at PM/eng/growth roles DM me! We are changing the way startups look at/fund their own corporate investments, starting with marketing. Backed by incredible investors including
@LererHippeau
@lightspeedvp
@upfrontvc
You need 3 things to build a multi-billion dollar scaled, self-service ads business in the post-ATT/cookie world. (1) Inventory: Need perishable digital real-estate to auction off to the highest bidder (2) Merchant Relationships: Businesses need to be organic users of your
Preview of the new
@WithMarketAI
website that is going up this weekend. If you ever wanted to experience what a group chat with your sales data, ads & creatives would be like let me know - we can get you access. We live in crazy times that this stuff is even possible.
#Meta
#Ads
Top 50 tech news podcast in the US has a nice to ring to it.
Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to join as a guest and listen to the
@TakingInvPod
.
@DanielDruger
let’s get this thing into the top 40 before I turn 40 ha.
Next month going to be huge for
@trustdotco
- can’t wait to share some of the new hires and take the curtain off what we have been building. This team is about as stacked as a startup gets. Gonna be fun.
No one really notices that
@Walmart
is trading at all time highs - due in part of their ads business. Can’t really fathom how much more they would be worth if they could have bought
@tiktok_us
during the Trump admin. Legit could be 3X their current all-time high.
Never been a better example of founder-market fit than what
@realdanted
is building
@zittiinc
- so pumped to be involved. This is going to be a huge business that helps a lot of SMBs grow and thrive.
One of the best parts about doing the
@TakingInvPod
is that when you find a product that you love that you can annoy the founder on
@x
and see if they will tell their story. That is how we were able to get
@beehiiv
's CEO,
@denk_tweets
as a guest this week
Just read that eth wallet growth was 20% year over year. Now over 220m wallets. Crazy to think how big the ecosystem will get as people start to realize how good of an experience signing into an app with a wallet is…
This wk on
@TakingInvPod
we had
@robleathern
(led business integrity
@Meta
&
@Google
was VP of product, privacy & data protection). Few understand the privacy landscape, implications of M&A (like
@Walmart
/
@VIZIO
) & where digital privacy is going like Rob.
Introducing suggested chats
@WithMarketAI
.
This is one of the coolest products that we have built. We noticed people were almost overwhelmed by all the things Market could answer and do for their business. To help, we taught Market how to suggest specific questions that it
"WTF is
@Roblox
?"
The only thing that I knew before this week's episode of the
@TakingInvPod
was that it was a $25B company with 70M+ DAU that my 7 year old cousin watches youtube videos of on her iPad.
Lucky for us we had Geoffrey Reed (yet another
@Snap
alum) the COO of F84
@eric_seufert
I don't think there is one. This is the meta-ification of
@Google
ads - will just become easier and easier to buy, within trusted owned inventory, that people spend an unbelievable amount of time using on a daily basis. The ad network is almost a distraction at this point given
As usual,
@eric_seufert
nails it. The walled gardens/compounds will win. The open web will shrink and consumers will keep getting better and better products.
The open web seems to be whistling past the graveyard in the face of third-party cookie deprecation. The economy of the open web, empowered through third-party cookies, is not too big to let fail.
In my view, the collective, unwarranted optimism of the open web with respect to
If tier 2 walled gardens get good at using AI to power their ad systems (basically versions of pmax/advantage+) it will become super easy for demand aggregators to build on top of their Ads APIs. My bet is the future is fragmented+closed (vs. the open one that $TTD is building).
You have to give the
@tiktok_us
team credit from a strategy POV.
They do the obvious things fast vs. most of their competitors who try to reinvent the playbook, end up reversing course, waste a ton of time, and tank a great hand…
🚨 TikTok announces Inventory Financing 🚨
Similar to other ecom lenders, TikTok will now offer funding to qualified stores to help stay in inventory.
Viral videos often sell out smaller sellers.
This causes lost revenue and opportunity cost off those views.
Great move 👏
Today we announced $30M to scale our growth network for DTC brands, helping them get better data/insights/payment terms to navigate the new digital economy. We are just getting started but so excited about what we are building. For more check out
We have been testing some AI features for the
@withmarkethq
ad platform using our swag Shopify store. Can’t share all the details yet but it is pretty wild - a good example is how this image is 100% AI created. Crazy times.
@averyj
A lot less than last year, from
@cnbc
"revenue jumped 25% in the quarter from $32.2 billion a year earlier, the fastest rate of growth for any period since mid-2021, as the online ad market continued to rebound. Meanwhile, the company’s expenses decreased 8% year over year to
1/2 As I told
@martyswant
: "
@WPP
&
@PublicisGroupe
's platforms are a reaction to the success of
@TheTradeDesk
,” The market capitalization of The Trade Desk is about the same as both combined. “You look at the relative value of the agencies that are basically their customer...
I teamed up with
@michaelburgi
to write about some of the recent big AI bets from advertising giants like
@WPP
&
@PublicisGroupe
.
Will holding companies need more data and/or new AI-related contracts? Will they become more like some adtech firms? TBD.
@kthakkar81
Agreed. Doesn’t make it not true. And btw $TTD is still incredible. Worth more than $spot and basically equal to $snap and $pins combined. But the magic of digital ads is owning the inventory that costs basically nothing to create and they don’t have that so it has its flaws.
Most ppl missing how impressive it is that FB barely missed their numbers while shifting usage to a product w no established call to action (reels). Best time to do it was Q4. A few quarters from now they will look geniuses for ripping the bandaid off & going directly at TikTok.
Loved getting a chance to talk with
@kevelapi
Founder & CEO,
@averyj
. Kevel is one of most important ad tech companies and James is one of the good guys of ad tech. Check it out wherever you listen to podcasts.
Good ex of AI tax that the big ad platforms are creating for advertisers on tier 2 platforms. If you aren't offering AI solutions, you're increasing the advertisers CAC on a relative basis. 1 of many taxes levied indirectly by big platforms
@martyswant
Pretty incredible that
@Meta
($800b) is valued 47x
@Snap
($17b). I guess scale is what matters most but crazy to think that $SNAP, $PINS ($20b), and $SPOT ($32b) combined is worth less than 10% of $Meta.
The
@tomfgoodwin
line about the interface capturing the value (ie uber owns no cars, airbnb owns no real estate, etc...) is somehow coming true in ad tech. Owning the inventory (ie $snap, $pins) is less interesting to the public markets vs. being the demand source ($app, $tdd).
Funny how everyone is talking about
@GoogleAI
bias and not about the AI that powers your TikTok feed. I have a feeling we wouldn't be thrilled to know what it really “thinks”.
Martech systems have been steadily increasing in complexity. In general, UI/UX across stacks have gotten more complex too.
Generative AI agents and user interfaces are the first major innovation reducing complexity for the user (even if the system gets more complex).
#martech
Big day for us
@WithMarketAI
with our acquisition of - our vision is to help marketers work better together with the best AIs for their specific objectives and this is a big step forward towards achieving that goal.
Excited to share that we've acquired - whose AI models are designed to appeal to human aesthetic preferences & meet the demands of AI algorithms used by Google & Amazon, aiming to improve on-site conversion rates & search rankings. You can read more here!
The man, the myth, the legend (of API ad tech), and yet another
@Snap
alum who is killing it,
@perasandell
on the
@TakingInvPod
to talk the biz of audio, his journey to
@Spotify
, and why
@conorjmckenna
's "hedged gardens" should be "fenced-in villages"
The present and the future of ads is about apps and walled gardens built around them. As
@eric_seufert
told me and
@DanielDruger
on this week's
@TakingInvPod
: “The app ecosystem has already won... the open web is not that important anymore, no one is coming to its rescue”
For
Once can talk to the
@Meta
marketing API, it is kind of going to change everything.
Ad platforms everywhere about to go through a serious identity crisis.
I’ve recently had a lot of conversations about Meta, Goog, and Snap, mostly about why they are so dominant. Almost every time, my argument comes back to this: they basically rent digital real estate (i.e ads) that costs them almost nothing to maintain. Let me explain⬇️
@elonmusk
@netcapgirl
Is there a way to email you or your team some ideas? Really think there are some non technical ways to accelerate ad revenue within the SMB segment quickly.
We still have an insane amount to build but
@WithMarketAI
completely changes how media is bought in a very good way. Pumped to roll it out to more cos next week.
Big shoutout to
@jspujji
for diving deep with
@DDruger
& I on the
@TakingInvPod
! Jesse dropped some major truth bombs💣 on the power of bootstrapping, mastering the multi-business hustle, and the game-changing magic of a great coach. Plus, a ride down ad tech memory lane!
Grateful to
@jspujji
for sharing his insights on bootstrapped businesses, juggling multiple ventures & the impact of a coach like
@davekashen
while making a few detours down ad tech memory lane.
Apple:
Spotify:
The walled gardens are going to win. All these new commerce media networks need to embrace a version of the same playbook and build their own gardens and tools ASAP.
Facebook has 10m advertisers. That’s 10m people renting digital real estate and not thinking twice about it. Makes it hard not be bullish about web3 as digital ownership gets easier.
If you are a data scientist or a backend engineer and are bored with your current job or know someone that is let me know. We are solving some really complex problems and are hiring at
This wk on
@TakingInvPod
we had Ray Ghanbari, the CTO of
@IndexExchange
, from the early days
@Yahoo
to the VP of Product at
@FICO
, Ray has a fascinating POV on the complexities of building at massive scale which he doing again
@IndexExchange
. Listen below.
Shoptalk was awesome - retail/commerce media feels like the app install space did back in the day. Tons of innovation and experimentation and, ultimately, value to create in the space. Makes me so pumped about what we are building at
@withmarkethq
Working on what feels like obvious solutions to complicated problems is extremely motivating. Never been more confident that we are on the path to building something really special
@WithMarketAI
If the data is shared back in aggregate, this is a no brainer for ad platforms to offer to merchants.
1. Platforms decrease risk with better underwriting (you would shocked how this is done today).
2. Platforms decrease op-ex by offering auto-pay (collections is a mess a these
Our team
@withmarkethq
is starting to explore how to turn any
@Shopify
product image into multiple ad formats to make it easy for brands to use them across the Market network. Our long-term goal is to create our own version of Meta Advantage+, where any size brand can connect
If you want to see how the publicly traded adtech cos are glorified agencies, check out their AR relative to revenue... they’re all on the wrong side of the float. Odd you don’t hear much about it given the lending market reliance it creates, interest rate sensitivity, etc
The most common question we got when we launched Modyfi in August was, “can I animate this?” Today, we’re excited to say the answer is yes!
We’ve launched Motion Effects in Modyfi! We’re live on Product Hunt. Drop by and let us know what you think!
Eventually walled gardens become disposable income extraction machines. As a result, the GDP of a given garden is proportional to the buying power of its user base. One of the many reasons why DAU/MAU mean less than you think and why some networks can’t increase ARPU as fast as
The table stakes for Tier 2 walled garden ad platforms keeps getting bigger.
What is effectively an
#AI
tax is creating an innovate or disappear dynamic and going to make adtech fun to build again.
1/ Launch day 🎉 Superdao has raised $10.5M at $160M valuation to make it absurdly easy to start and operate DAOs.
Here’s why we are building an all-in-one DAO platform
Thread👇
One of the best interviews I have seen in a while. Worth a listen if you want to better understand where the digital economy is headed over the next few years.
@alexeheath
crushed this.
Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg /
@finkd
had to say last week when I asked about this platform and how it’s going under
@elonmusk
:
“Twitter was sort of plodding along before Elon came.. he’s definitely a change agent.. I do think he has been pretty polarizing.. the chance that it
This wk on
@TakingInvPod
,
@ali_manning
, our former
@Snap
colleague & co-founder & COO of Chalice AI, shared her insights about AI in ads, how there’s an entire world of ads outside the walled gardens that most ppl we know, know very little about & more!
Turing is now a Unicorn. 🎉
We are excited to unleash the world's untapped human potential! 🚀
We've now raised >$140M and hiring across all functions. Please DM to join us
@turingcom
!
🙏 for following our journey
@ingridlunden
@TechCrunch
!