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Oct. 22, 2024

Ravi Patel teaches us about Curation and How SPO is shaping the future of Programmatic DOOH

Ravi Patel teaches us about Curation and How SPO is shaping the future of Programmatic DOOH

Connect with Ravi Patel, Founder of Swym.ai
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravipats/

Check Out Swym.ai here:
https://www.swym.ai/

Marketing Brew Curation Article
https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2024/10/15/the-ad-tech-world-s-newest-buzzword-is-curation

Microsoft Exits Retail Media
https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2024/10/15/microsoft-is-reportedly-exiting-its-retail-media-business

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Transcript

Tim Rowe:
Welcome back to OOH Insider. Go back and check out last week's episode. Make sure to check that out. We're calling it the Programmatic Publisher Primer. I know that's a mouthful. Go back and check out last week's episode where we broke down all of the DOOH revenue numbers, programmatic distributions, really laid out a roadmap for how to think about 2025 as a publisher. So go back and check that episode out. There's an accompanying slide deck that you'll be able to download. So you've got it to share with your teams. Really valuable episode. Encourage you to check that out. Next week, we're going to continue the AI in programmatic track with Jonathan Moffey. He's the founder of a company called Streamr AI. They're an AI-powered self-serve platform that's actually designed for publishers to unlock and simplify CTV ad buying. So be sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening so you don't miss that. And there are only seven weeks left. until the Placer AI Discover event on December 10th at Chelsea Pier in New York City. It's going to be a full day of speakers, content, networking, all focused on the future of location analytics. And I've got a way for you to save 70% on your registration. You're going to go to the oh insider.com you'll see a banner across the top can't miss it. It's also linked in the navigation bar on the website normal tickets 399 which is wildly reasonable. But I've got a way for you to save 70% on registration go to the oh insider.com you'll see that banner can't miss it. Use promo code oh insider 70 that's in the banner on the site so you don't need to write this down pull over to the side road, anything like that. OOH Insider 70, you'll save 70% on registration, which makes it like 120 bucks. So there's no reason for you to not be there. I will see you there. Now for today's conversation. Ravi Patel, SWYM.AI. Can you give us like a 60 second commercial on the problem that Swim solves and who you solve it for?

Ravi Patel: Yeah, so one of the areas that we're kind of really focused on is the entire programmatic supply chain and how convoluted it's become and complex it's become. The idea of spending a dollar and not knowing where it goes is just still baffling today as it occurs. And so we kind of went out to solve really that pain point of saying like, let's make sure every dollar that you spend, you think about who you want to spend it on. And then you think about how you want to target and what you want to pay for it. And that's what programmatic was really originally started to do. But then the Lumoscape just blew up. Every SSP started adding almost every publisher and just kind of went from what should have been a contained environment that allowed bid auction mechanics to be as efficient as possible based on supply and demand into something that's just become high fraud with 25% of media dollars of programmatic going to wasted spend in terms of fraud, MFA, too many SSPs, domains that make no sense, and brand safety issues.

Tim Rowe: Wow. So what you're seeing is off the top, 25% is going to wasted ad spend, going to fraud, 25% right off the top.

Ravi Patel: Yeah, there's a 25 cents on the dollar and I like to use the lemon and cherries example. So I always say like we have a programmatic supply paradox. So and what I mean by that is there's an issue in this ecosystem that inherently we just we're not going to be able to fix, which is imagine you walk into a grocery store with money in your pocket. And then when you walk into that store, as soon as you step foot in it, you've got to spend all the money in your pocket or else you can't walk out. You can't leave that store without spending the money. Get to the store, and on the shelves, you came in looking for cherries, but you ended up finding lemons, things that you didn't want. You came in looking for things that you wanted, you know, you have your sweet tooth, you wanted cherries. So you find a few cherries, mostly lemons, you fill your basket up, pay all the money, and walk out. Now you've walked out with 90% lemons and 10% cherries, and that's inherently how campaigns in programmatic today work. If you put a budget into a DSV, it's going to be spent by the end of the day, no matter what you do, right? Whatever it buys. Whether there is enough good stuff out there or it's just a bunch of crap, it's going to spend it.

Tim Rowe: So Ravi, how do you start to think about solving problems like that? Obviously that's what SWYM.AI is focused on, but conceptually there's a lot to unpack there. Where do you start?

Ravi Patel: One of the things is we always, whenever we run a campaign from the buy side, we always think on who do we want to buy? What do we want to pay? What is our budget? So we always think about how to just optimize demand based on whatever's available. As opposed to going and flipping the script and thinking about how do we optimize, how about we first go control supply, what we want access to, what we want to bid on, what is good for us, and then optimize the demand on it, then put all your audience targeting and other targeting on it. And that's essentially the way to control programmatic, right? Like now, You're going to be on things that are going to be grant safe. You're not going to have wasted spend. Sure, you might not get perfect targeting on users and stuff, but at least you're going to be on things that have a propensity to work for you as much as possible and thus lifting your end KPIs in the end.

Tim Rowe: Because that's really one of the key pain points that we hear frequently in conversation is transparency, not knowing what you're buying to your point on the lemons and cherries and being forced to spend money on it. And also, I don't know what's even going to be in the store before I get there.

Ravi Patel: Yeah, so imagine you can be essentially the buyer for the store and say, I know what I'm going to put on the shelf before you even get to the store. And so then you can go pick out exactly what you want and how much you want and then walk out, right? You're still going to have to spend all your money and you might pay a little bit more for a certain cherry that's, you know, more organic in nature and then a certain cherry that, you know, is not organic, you might pay a little less for. But at the end, you got things that are going to work for you, and things that you want. So that's what matters at the end. And a lot of people, the reason that we got so much fraud and waste in the ecosystem is because it's been a CPM drive to the bottom, right? It's like, oh, I want to buy inventory for $1.50. Well, For $1.50, what publisher can run their business, right? No publisher has billions of impressions on a daily basis. So you got to pay your fair share for the right placement at the right time at the right location.

Tim Rowe: And in a price driven race to the bottom, that problem ultimately being worsened by layers of intermediaries. Hey, I want to pay the lowest price. And there's lots of people that have to make money in between me, the brand, and ultimately delivering my, my content, delivering my ad against content, 25 cents on the dollar to your point, going to fraud and waste before all those people get paid along the way. That's a lot of money coming out of the working media.

Ravi Patel: Yeah, the supply chain is very complex. Obviously, you have to pay your DSP fees, SSPs get their fees that are paid by publishers, but then sometimes there's a lot of arbitrage, right? An SSP1 will sell to an SSP2, which will sell to an SSP3, and no one sees it unless they know exactly how the systems work. You'd be surprised about how much inventory, even in programmatic, not just programmatic display, but in CTV, is reliant on using these adapters from all these other SSPs, so everyone's like, oh, I have CTV inventory. You don't have CTV inventory directly. You're just getting a bid request from another SSP which is monetizing it too.

Tim Rowe: We had Chris Kane on a couple weeks ago. We talked about the great research out of jounce around DOOH. where they highlighted that 92% of the available open auction supply is going to just 10 DOOH publishers and 70% of that money is coming from CTV pipes. So as we're talking about transparency, bid duplication, all of these sorts of challenges, really knowing what I'm buying, what do you hear, Ravi, when you hear those sorts of challenges? What do you take away from that?

Ravi Patel: So what's happening is whether it's DOOH or even OLV publishers, right? Online video publishers. They're trying to masquerade as CTV because CTV commands high CPM. CTV gets you that $25, $35, $45 CPM. And so everyone wants to somehow position themselves as CTV inventory when it's truly not CTV inventory. Um, and that's essentially, uh, what's happening here as well as like these DOOH are saying. Sure. It's prime real estate, right? You're getting in front of an audience, but to fraudulently label it as CTV inventory, just because it's a video 15 second ad doesn't mean it's right.

Tim Rowe: So Ravi, what do you think happens? What's the potential fallout from all that? Are there risks to publishers? Does it all kind of just get washed out as a rounding error? What do you, what do you think the actual risk of all of that is?

Ravi Patel: The risk is now what's going to happen is all these brands are going to go to the big guys and double down. So they're going to go create I.O. deals or direct deals with the Disney's, the Netflix's, the Hulu's of the world directly. And so that's going to take out all the budding publishers that are really trying to monetize in the right way, in an honest way. And so you risk just essentially helping the smaller guys by doing practices like this. And this is also like, you know, we hear about MFAs in the display ecosystem pop-up, and this is essentially what happened. So everyone thinks MFA just happened out of the blue and it's a big issue. Not necessarily. If you look three, four, probably four or five years ago, and MFAs were anywhere between 3% and 5% of monetization. So still a fairly large amount, but small compared to the 24% the ANA said last year. And MFAs are essentially made for advertiser sites. So it's like, you take a site, you take a page, and you just load it with ads, like 20 ads. The reason it started up was around pre-COVID, we had a lot of procurement just say, hey, we need to be buying cheaper CPMs. What happens when you go buy a publisher at cheaper CPMs? The publisher's going to be like, all right, instead of paying me $4 last year, you're going to pay me $2 this year? Well, I'm going to put two ad slots. The year after, it's like, I'm going to pay you $1. OK, I'll put three ad slots. And that's essentially what happens.

Tim Rowe: Interesting as a way for DOOH to position itself where we have inventory that's expiring, right? So we can afford to maybe make some concessions on the pricing, but we can still offer verified delivery. So it may be able to balance some of those things out for brands where we want to pay a really low rate. We want as much of it to go towards working media as possible. And I want to be assured of guaranteed delivery. Something to think abOOH.

Ravi Patel: overall, like DOOH hasn't seen, you know, a lot of the money partly because it hasn't been digital, right? It's been direct deals that are cut. And so it was a lot more legwork to kind of get OOH deals. So people would do a few and that's it. I think that the percentage going to DOOH s and slowly start increasing because there's a lot of opportunity there, right? You get a lot of eyeballs there. And And the other piece is a lot more scrutiny is also going to come under. What is the verification service for that? Like how is it going to do? How are you going to go verify to actually serve the ad? People actually saw it. But because it's going to be DOOH, the activation becomes easier. Most of the money is outside of Google and Facebook and TikTok. And Amazon is in programmatic DSPs, like Trade Best, DV360 and others. So being able to programmatically activate based on real-time data, ensuring targeting, effective ad placements. And then the beauty of this is, how do you make it easier for brands to access the best placements without the layers of vendors overall?

Tim Rowe: So Ravi, how does Swim solve that for brands, for publishers, specifically for DSPs and SSPs? Maybe we could start on the buy side. How does Swim solve challenges for the buy side?

Ravi Patel: On the Swim side, we've utilized a mixture of machine learning and also what we know about the programmatic pipes to essentially go and analyze vast amounts of bid requests. So we identified the most efficient and transparent path for media buy. So it kind of removes the guesswork. We know where the unnecessary spend is coming from. We know what's working, what's not. And then also finally, we know how every dollar can get allocated across the entire ecosystem from starting at the DSP down to the actual publisher. And DOOH ., it's a little bit different, but as these DOOH. SSTs get going, right, they're going to enable these kind of ability to craft, take that supply that's coming in real time and be able to essentially dynamically fill it based on what's necessary and the signals that exist, right? There's a lot of location-based companies. There's a lot of people that have demographic data, right? So if you can go figure out the locations of where these DOOH. systems are and the placements are, Are they in healthcare offices or are they down in a strip mall? And then be able to properly figure out how much you want to pay for and how bad do you want it based on weather patterns in real time. So that's going to turn into being more dynamic and also then finally having a potential for a closed loop analysis. It won't be perfect, the measurement side of it, but there is trend-based kind of measurement which just says, hey, you know, people started visiting my site after they saw this. The other piece of it is also going to be like, who's visiting your site within that area, right? You can ping the geolocation and see how far they are from those DOOH places as well. The other piece is going to, so big thing is going to be location data, audience movement patterns in real time, optimizing when and where ads are shown, creating a more dynamic and responsive strategy. That's going to allow more budgets to shift to DOOH.

Tim Rowe: And how about on the supply side?

Ravi Patel: On the SSP side, right. And the publisher side, I think it's, if you have access to that inventory and you can make it more readily available. So it's not in a closed environment. I think that's the way you kind of get it monetized because people want access to it, but they want layer data on it. Right. And they don't want to have to go one by one trying to contact an SSP for a deal ID to get done. They want something that they can actually act on. I think some of the DSPs have done a good job integrating some of those SSPs to enable that. But if you start working with, you know, partners and agencies a little bit closer, that's where you kind of get it out there. The other piece is going to be data. How do you layer on data at Digital At Home? You can't layer on audience data, right? Like in terms of one-to-one like you can do with display campaigns or CTV campaigns. So you've got to figure out what are those cohorts of data that you can make available and easily activatable across it. Like at Swim, what we do is integrate on the display native OLB and CTV side, SSPs, like traditional SSPs that we know of, big ones. But we're sitting on their infrastructure. And so then agencies with a click of a button can utilize any of our data assets in order to enable our models to go find the right inventory at the right time. Because we get performance signals from their ad servers and their buy side data and their attribution signals as well. So we feed that in so we know exactly what geo we want to over-index them. what kind of media type you want to over index. And so with DOOH, that's similar. It's like, consider working with curation partners who have access to a lot of different data sets that can enable you to kind of scale out and fill the inventory that you have available at a very competitive kind of season.

Tim Rowe: So who is primarily doing the curating?

Ravi Patel: Agencies are becoming their own curators, right? They're trying to go and control supply and do that. So, um, I think that's the way to really do it. It's just enabling the aspect or the, uh, capability of curation is going to open up the pipes for them.

Tim Rowe: Where do folks learn more about swim AI? That's S W Y M. AI. We use Latin long here in the real world. Where do they learn more about swim?

Ravi Patel: Yeah. SWIM stands for stop wasting your money. So S-W-Y-M, go to the website. You can email me Ravi, R-A-V-I at SWIM.ai. So our whole premise and our whole vision is then how do we enable the ecosystem?

Tim Rowe: You know, I'd been meaning to ask you that earlier, if SWIM was an acronym for something. So stop wasting your money. I love it. We'll be right back with a little bit of news. Recently, I shared a conversation completely generated by AI based on transcripts from this podcast. This is a completely 100% AI generated conversation between two kind of radio hosts, if you will, via Google's Notebook LM. What I did was I curated transcripts from the podcast that I think are particularly relevant. I gave it to Google's Notebook LM. At the end of this episode, you will get to hear that eight minute and 15 second conversation of AI talking about the concepts we talk about right here on the podcast. So stay tuned to the very end. Hear an interesting AI powered conversation. And we're back here with Ravi Patel, founder of SWYM.AI. Stop wasting your money. We just found out what SWIM stands for. SWYM.AI. Ravi, we talked a lot about supply path optimization, SPO. So I wanted to cover this story. It was in Marketing Brew, all about the word curation. Curation is more of a concept than a specific product. Well, it's not yet been defined by the IAB standard setting organization. It's generally used to describe private marketplace where ad tech companies offer a select list of publishers that they'll serve ads to and audiences they'll target. What's your take? Is this just another buzzword or is this a trend that's here to stay?

Ravi Patel: Curation is one of those things that's I think here to stay. I think what it's happening is a lot of DSPs have essentially amassed control over the entire ecosystem. You think about trade desks open path, you think about credit as direct better. It's not only are they on the brand side making money, they're going direct to publishers now and bypassing SSPs. SSPs have woken up and said, hey, We already have access to all the publishers. We have a lot of cool things you can do. You can do a lot of data matching. You could do a lot of inventory selection just directly through us, and we'll just feed the bidder the right thing. So I think curation provides that control back to the brands and allows them to kind of decide what do they want to be on, why do they want to be on it, and how do they get better scale with it. So I do think it's here to stay. The question's going to be, who's going to provide these curation services at scale. And there's going to be software around it. I mean, we're building it. But at the end of the day, like every agency is going to want to curate their own inventory. And that's going to lead to a way to control open exchange and all the fraud and the waste. But then, at the same time, it's going to be how do you curate at scale across hundreds and hundreds of campaigns. You can't just set up a white list. And curation's been around for a while. The buzzword is new, but it's been around for a while. Historically, it's been known as TMPs. And in PMPs, essentially, you create a white list of inventory that you deem premium, and then you go pay 40% markup on that. But you've got to remember, 95% of PMPs are open exchange inventory packaged together. And I think curation is that new buzzword that kind of brings this into light.

Tim Rowe: I think that's a great take. James Trott, senior director of global addressable media at the Coca-Cola company, said the beverage giant has leaned into curation as a way to mitigate the risk of quality loss by ensuring that our minimum standards for programmatic media are being respected. mentioned Criteo in there, I think a little bit of a windfall here for Criteo, as Microsoft is exiting the retail media space. Originally covered by Digiday picked up by retail brew. Microsoft is exiting the retail media game because of low margins. Promote IQ, that's Microsoft's retail media platform. Promote IQ's chief revenue officer, Harsh Gendini, said the margins were very low and that was going to take a while before it became a billion dollar business. So Microsoft is out on retail media. Criteo is going to take that over. What do you make of this? Seems like it's really, really hard to make money.

Ravi Patel: Yeah, I mean, you know, Microsoft doesn't have, it's not Amazon. Amazon is its own storefront. It has access to data around what people want to buy and wear. So it makes sense, right? So Amazon can, it makes money on more of the audience data and less on the actual ads. Granted, everything is a blended CDN because they are the owners and the publishers in a majority of cases. So, I'm not surprised by this. I think Microsoft takes shots, a lot of shots because they're such a big company and some work out and some don't. I think this is good for Credio to get out there because they definitely need some growth to figure out what are they going to do next and how are they going to scale out next. So, I'm curious to see. I don't think retail media is going anywhere. I think it's going to keep growing for the most part. There's a huge opportunity in retail media, I mean, Walmart and Amazon being the biggest, but a lot of also retail media networks are popping up by tier two, tier three companies too.

Tim Rowe: It's a really relevant point you make on Amazon packaging the data, really the inventory almost becoming bonus at that point, selling on a blended CPM, but really making the money on the data. So if you think about that as a DOOH publisher where you may not have those same levers to pull on, like Amazon. Ravi, I can't thank you enough. This has been a great conversation on all things SPO.

Ravi Patel: Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity, Tim.

Tim Rowe: Absolutely, Ravi. Thank you. It's been a pleasure having you. Now, if you're ready for that eight minute and 15 second conversation with AI, sit back, relax and enjoy this extended bonus cut. What brands want as perceived by AI out of Home Insider Edition. Enjoy.

AI Host #1: Okay, so we're diving into DOOH. advertising today.

AI Host #2: D-O-O-H.

AI Host #1: Yeah, D-O-O-H. It feels like it's everywhere. You know, those big flashy billboards, the screens you see in, like, Ubers and taxis.

AI Host #2: Even in those mall kiosks. Yeah. Everywhere.

AI Host #1: It really feels like it's everywhere we look these days. But I have to say, for something that everyone's talking about, D-O-H isn't exactly setting the advertising world on fire, is it?

AI Host #2: Well, that's the interesting thing. You know, the potential, it's definitely there. Right. I mean, the technology has gotten really sophisticated. The audience is huge. But it's like it's stuck. Yeah. Yeah. It's like stuck in second gear or something.

AI Host #1: It's having a bit of an identity crisis, don't you think? Is it just like a really fancy billboard or is it trying to be like the next big thing in connected TV?

AI Host #2: Yeah. And what's with that prediction? We saw that by 2028, D.O.H. ad spending in the U.S. could actually shrink. I mean, that doesn't exactly say future of advertising, does it?

AI Host #1: No, it doesn't. It really doesn't. You'd think combining the old school impact of billboards with the whole, you know, hyper targeted thing that digital advertising does so well would be a slam dunk.

AI Host #2: It seems like a no brainer. Right. You get the captive eyeballs but then you can really zero in on who you want to reach. The technology is getting really good at understanding who's actually seeing these ads. Exactly. But there are some big roadblocks. Some big ones.

AI Host #1: OK. So what's roadblock number one.

AI Host #2: Well you know I kind of think of it as this identity crisis we were talking about. OK. The media buyers the people who actually decide where the advertising money goes. Right. They're not quite sure what to make of DOH. Is it a billboard. Is it TV. Is it like some weird hybrid. And that makes it really hard to measure how effective it is.

AI Host #1: And if you can't measure it.

AI Host #2: And in advertising, if you can't measure it, you can't justify spending on it.

AI Host #1: You can't put a number on it. Yeah. It's a nonstarter. And we saw that firsthand, actually, with that whole thing with that CTV ad network trying to pass off these sidebar ads in bars as some kind of like super premium inventory. It was.

AI Host #2: Kind of outrageous. It's like they're trying to have it both ways. Yeah, exactly. And that just erodes trust. For sure. Which is, you know, that's everything in advertising. And that leads us right to roadblock number two. The DOO's landscape is incredibly fragmented.

AI Host #1: Okay, this is where I started to get a little lost, to be honest. All those acronyms were flying around, SSPs and I felt like I needed to decode a ring or something. But my takeaway was that online advertising is kind of consolidated, right? You have your big players, and everyone knows who they are.

AI Host #2: Right, exactly. Online advertising has its giants. Right. But DOH, not so much. It's dominated by a handful of major companies.

AI Host #1: So it's like walking into a grocery store. Yeah. And there are only five brands of cereal on the shelf. Right. You know, you might find something you like, but it's not like you have a lot of choices. That's kind of what's happening with DOOH.

AI Host #2: And that lack of competition. Right. It really stifles innovation.

AI Host #1: Yeah. It's like why bother innovating if you can just coast along and.

AI Host #2: Exactly.

AI Host #1: And rake in the cash.

AI Host #2: If a few big players control the game why change it.

AI Host #1: And speaking of a few big players that jounce media research you sent over man talk about a rabbit hole.

AI Host #2: It is. It's a lot to unpack.

AI Host #1: It really is. I felt like I was getting a crash course in all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes in the ad world that we never even think abOOH.

AI Host #2: Yeah I mean it can feel like a bit of a black box. Totally. And what Jounce found it's pretty revealing. Basically there are a small number of D.O.H. companies that are just flooding the market with these ad requests those bids. Right. Right. You're talking about bids. It's not that they necessarily have more inventory. Oh interesting. It's that they're really good at gaming the system.

AI Host #1: So it's not about the quality, it's about the quantity. Those people shoving flyers in your face on the street, you're more likely to just take one to make them go away.

AI Host #2: It's kind of like that, yeah. Imagine one company sending out, say, two or three bids for a prime advertising spot. Another one's bombarding potential buyers with 40 bids for a similar spot. Who do you think's going to win?

AI Host #1: The 40 bids, for sure.

AI Host #2: It's a numbers game. Wow. But that's not the whole story. That's just one piece of it.

AI Host #1: OK, so what's the rest of the story? What else is going on?

AI Host #2: So ad networks.

AI Host #1: Ad networks, right.

AI Host #2: This is where it gets even more interesting. These are the middlemen. OK. They operate between the companies selling the ad space and the brands that are trying to buy it. All right. And what they do is they bundle together DOOH inventory. OK. And often mix it in with connected TV inventory

AI Host #1: So wait hold on. So you could think you're buying an ad on like Hulu. Right. But it could end up on a billboard.

AI Host #2: Potentially. Yeah. Or on that screen at the gas pump.

AI Host #1: Oh, wow.

AI Host #2: See, that feels- And they're not always completely transparent about it.

AI Host #1: Yeah, that feels a little bit worse. Yeah, a little shady. I mean, I get it. Everyone's trying to make money. But if I feel like I'm being misled, or I'm not really sure what I'm buying- It creates this distrust and confusion.

AI Host #2: Exactly. Which makes people hesitant to really go all in.

AI Host #1: Yeah, totally. It makes me want to just stick with what I know.

AI Host #2: And that's a problem for D.O.

AI Host #1: Right, because it needs those advertisers to buy in.

AI Host #2: Exactly. But it's not all bad news. Programmatic DOH, despite all of this, is growing.

AI Host #1: Okay, so there's hope.

AI Host #2: There is hope. I like hope. There are signs of progress.

AI Host #1: So Programmatic DOH, it's growing, but it's got some work to do.

AI Host #2: It's a work in progress.

AI Host #1: Yeah, kind of like what? Growing pains.

AI Host #2: Exactly.

AI Host #1: So where are we seeing progress? Like what's actually looking good?

AI Host #2: Well, the good news is some companies are starting to address that transparency issue head on. It's about time. Right. They're realizing that if they want advertisers to trust them, they've got to be more upfront about, you know, what they're actually selling.

AI Host #1: Honesty is the best policy. Right. Makes sense to me. What else is looking up?

AI Host #2: Content adjacency is another area where we're seeing some really interesting developments. Remember how we were talking about DOH trying to be more like TV? Right, right. Well, companies like AdExector are trying to bridge that gap. They're figuring out how to combine that really precise targeting that you get with CTV with the real world impact of DOH.

AI Host #1: OK, so how does that work? Give me an example.

AI Host #2: So imagine you're at a sports bar, right? You're watching the game highlights, the energy's high, and then boom, right when everyone's glued to the screen, an ad pops up for, say, a new energy drink or a sports betting app. It's about timing and it's about relevance.

AI Host #1: So it's like, it actually makes sense in that moment.

AI Host #2: Exactly.

AI Host #1: It's not just some random ad that has nothing to do with what I'm doing.

AI Host #2: It's all about context. Right, right. And it's only going to get more sophisticated. Like, imagine an ad for allergy medication that plays on those digital billboards in your neighborhood, but only when the pollen count is high.

AI Host #1: Wow, that's next level. Right. OK, so what about measuring all of this? I mean, can we actually prove that DOH works?

AI Host #2: That's the million dollar question and the answer is it's getting a lot easier to do that. Real time data and analytics are becoming so much more powerful. We're not just talking about estimating how many people might have seen your ad. We're talking about knowing like, did they actually go into your store after they saw that ad? Wow. Did they make a purchase online? That kind of data is incredibly valuable.

AI Host #1: So big picture, where do you see DOH going? Is it going to be this huge part of our digital lives or is it going to fizzle OOH?

AI Host #2: I'm optimistic. I really am. I think D.O.H. has the potential to be a really big deal. But it all comes down to trust and transparency. Can these companies be honest with advertisers? Can they deliver on their promises? If they can, I think we're going to see amazing things from D.O.H. And that is our deep dive on D.O.H. What a wild world it is.

AI Host #1: It really is. And it's only getting wilder. So will D.O.H. weave its way into the fabric of our digital lives or will it, you know, kind of fade into the background? That's for you to decide. This has been a really fascinating deep dive. Thanks for walking us through all of it.

AI Host #2: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

AI Host #1: Of course. Until next time.