The Truth About AdTech

[00:00:00] Todd: brands and agencies need to find better ways to work together. It should not always be about price. It should be about efficacy and partnership and outcome and people. And, those investments should be made based on those kinds of. Things you and I would argue, and that's maybe that's why we're also not running a big, massive public company, because maybe those morals don't work well in that level of capitalism, but I'm okay with that Hey everyone, Kelly McGuire, co founder of Vuja Dé Digital, excited to talk about today's topics.

[00:00:59] Todd: Hey everybody, this is Todd, you know, Kelly's partner in the agency. And today I thought we'd talk a little bit about what's in the news. and what's in the news right now is Digiday, one of my favorite publishers. Just had a media buying summit recently, and I was checking in on, their coverage of that.

[00:01:18] Todd: And of course, they had a wonderful article, by Michael, Bergie or Bergie. I hope I'm not butchering your name, Michael. Sorry. but it was overheard at the media buying summit. And I thought some of the points that he talked about were interesting relative to the debate that you and I always have about.

[00:01:33] Todd: Why we started doing what we were doing 10 years ago. it's been a decade now. and sort of the belief system that you and I formed together about media. largely around the advent of programmatic technology and the idea that technology just simply made things more scalable and more profitable for agencies.

[00:01:52] Todd: And we never really aligned with that. But also at that time, we started hearing the word performance, performance, media, performance, media, buying your performance media agency. And I always scratched my head and said, why is that a word now? When was media not about performance? And I don't mean media performance.

[00:02:13] Todd: I don't mean reach and frequency and CPM and. The performance of the plan and the by, which I guess is the historical sort of baseline of media. But again, I didn't make sense to me. and so this article started to talk about that. And so 1 of the 1st quotes in there, is from somebody that said media agencies are now being forced to understand more than media.

[00:02:37] Todd: And in fact, we're being forced to understand the full business P and L function. And this comment was that that's an uncomfortable space for media agencies, because that's not their scope. And that just really strikes me as odd. Again, that I say, when, since when has that not been? Our job since when has the act of planning and buying media solely been for the fact of act and the act of planning and buying media.

[00:03:05] Todd: When is it not always been about performance that the media equates to from driving P and L. Output I just found that very striking that this was a comment about. This is a new space for a media agencies. since when, and what are your thoughts on that?

[00:03:25] Kelly: Yeah, it's interesting because I think it encompasses a lot of topics that we've covered in the past and a lot of the POVs that we brought to the table because highlights the perspective that I've given and we've given around, media not being a zero sum game, it's, the difference between buying a service, the service of placing and buying media versus Partnership and understanding business and locking arms and going in a direction.

[00:03:51] Kelly: And those are very different things. And we built our companies and now the company that we're at now on the idea that media is a component that drives business forward. it's a component that relies on a lot of other pieces and is influenced by a lot of other pieces that aren't just buy more ads.

[00:04:10] Kelly: And this encompasses the idea of the realization of that. And again, when we started the company, a lot of the questions that you and I had talked about is spending these dollars on behalf of the client doing anything? Is it moving the needle? Is it, resulting in the progress of the business and moving it forward?

[00:04:27] Kelly: Or are we just looking at. Numbers on paper and green arrows up and trying to look good. is there a better way to do that? I love that this conversation is coming up because I've always felt that is a place of differentiation, the ability to think about business and user journeys and messaging and human motivation and psychology and all of the things that play a role in when I see that streaming TV ad or that search ad or that meta ad.

[00:04:55] Kelly: Does it matter to me? Is it, does it connect with me? Does it hit me in the right place? Does it say the right things? if I do respond to it, does it get me to do the right things? am I even the right person to be seeing that ad or should that have dollar gone to serving it to someone else?

[00:05:09] Kelly: And again, are we maximizing the investment of getting that two to three seconds of attention by dropping me into blue? The right place on the website. Is it taking me to the homepage when it should take me to the product detail page? Is it taking me to the product detail page when it should take me to go watch a video to learn more?

[00:05:27] Kelly: Is it reminding me to buy during the seasonal? Is it offering me a coupon? These are all the things that, we think about and have those conversations. And love it because it reinforces the idea again, that media is not a zero sum game, that there's not a bunch of. AI and machine learning and algorithms that can just magically figure out how to place an ad and change a human's behavior to do something that they wouldn't have otherwise done and create incrementality of business results, which is the whole point of media.

[00:05:58] Kelly: That's the performance thing you talk about, right? Todd, it's How are we getting by, by spending these dollars, how are we seeing an outcome that is different than if we did not spend those dollars? We can't do that. Then it's a waste. And I think that the evolution here is the art versus the science. I think as we've gotten more on the science side, as we've gotten more data, as we've gotten more visibility and trackability and all of these things, it's gone more science based.

[00:06:24] Kelly: I think that's where the idea of performance all of a sudden came in. Is now we can actually see it and track it and understand it. Whereas before, whether you're talking mad men days or sooner,

[00:06:34] Todd: you could run TV. You could run linear TV ad campaign and you could see, did I sell more cars? Did I see, did I sell more stuff during that period of

[00:06:43] Kelly: a correlated way. Yeah. I mean, were correlations, there were ways to look at, cause and effect and, alignment on those things.

[00:06:50] Todd: But,

[00:06:51] Todd: isn't that performance?

[00:06:52] Kelly: it is,

[00:06:53] Todd: that some measure of

[00:06:54] Kelly: and yeah, and there was a degree of that, right? Like if. If you hired a TV agency, even back in the day, and you didn't see the results out of it, that's why someone got fired, right?

[00:07:02] Kelly: It wasn't, you just, everyone bought it and there was no expectation of anything. It was the, it was the immediacy and the, deep clarity of, can I see linear progress? And can you, prove to me that your media is working more than is where I think the idea of performance came in. Now I would argue that.

[00:07:18] Kelly: That fluctuates tremendously, right? We all saw what happened with iOS 14. 5 and the downfall of the direct attribution of Facebook and the cash cow that that created because of that visibility and obviously iOS changed things, all of the data privacy things are changing things in the visibility.

[00:07:36] Kelly: Now we're going back to a lot of mixed media modeling and correlation to make cases. obviously there's also the user journey isn't flat, right? It's not seen ad click on an ad, buy a product. We've talked about this a lot, but all of that is to say, I like that this is coming to, the forefront, this is where the idea of hiring a marketing or media partner, someone who will evaluate your business, your clientele, your incrementality needs, what is going to move the needle for you.

[00:08:03] Kelly: And formulate a plan of who should we be reaching and what are their media consumption habits and where do we prioritize and how many times do we have to serve them and how much prospecting versus remarketing do we need to do. And ultimately, then we can create what I would call an investment prospectus of how to deploy media dollars in the smartest possible way to yield the best outcomes for your business.

[00:08:27] Kelly: And when I say outcomes, it is Exposure of the media, it's engagement of the media, it's the response to the media and it's the follow up to until you get through the funnel to the conversion. Those are a lot of moving parts where again, the answer is rarely always just buy more media to get to the very end of the road along that very detailed path.

[00:08:50] Kelly: I just laid out. There's a lot of conversations that have to happen with the client. Do we have the right messaging? Do we have the right value proposition? Is the website good enough? Is there competition? Is your pricing, right? These are not media questions, but they're all meat pieces that will help the media get to that end road, which is the path that we're all being hired to go down.

[00:09:11] Kelly: So again, it's a conversation that should have always been happening, but It is a lot more than applying machine learning or hiring someone right out of school in their second job and expecting them to just somehow be able to know all of this and not need the talent, the experience. And as we've argued, the relatively high salaries that come with that experience to actually be able to bring that value to the table.

[00:09:32] Todd: And yet still to this day, age media agencies get hired based on their fee being the lowest. of whoever pitched the account and in many cases, not every case I'm generalizing and also the efficiency of the media by the CPM, you know, things like that matter. I can't fathom how that still matters in anyone's decision logic at all because what matters is.

[00:09:58] Todd: What should matter in my opinion, and this is contrary to popular opinion. So that's why this is, our show. none of that should matter. What should matters. Are you hiring the best team of people to consult and strategize and deploy again, an investment plan that includes buying media to grow a business outcome from an incremental.

[00:10:18] Todd: Perspective, and I don't, I still don't understand why that is, as we've often compared, you wouldn't nickel and dime your lawyer or your doctor for your heart surgeon to find the cheapest heart surgeon.

[00:10:29] Kelly: Some people might, they just might not like the outcome that they get. And

[00:10:33] Todd: That's true. Yeah. I mean, that's true, but I

[00:10:35] Kelly: I mean, there are cheaper and more expensive lawyers, right? That there is a scale of that as well.

[00:10:39] Todd: there is. So, let's segue to that. So, there was a comment about procurement, lead accounts and marketing. Lead accounts, we've come across this in our journeys where the selection process, oftentimes for the agency procurement has a significant waiting in that decision. And of course, their job is.

[00:10:59] Todd: To manage, on the P and L, you know, the most efficient, the spend of their money that they can get the most value. They can get the most bang for their buck. They can get. And that is, I would argue almost always in direct conflict with what the CMO is probably hoping for out of the selection. And I don't know how often those 2 things.

[00:11:19] Todd: I, well, I don't know, maybe recently we've had an account that's come on board where it feels like procurement and marketing actually talk, and align on business goals, which I think has been a refreshing experience. But those 2 things are generally at odds and this comment was about putting them, putting procurement and the marketing team in a room and letting them cage fight it out to see, like, what do they actually want?

[00:11:42] Todd: And I think that segues into this conversation around. Can agencies, should agencies at that, maybe even at that early stage, should we force the tough conversation of, hey, procurement? Hey, CMO, you guys go cage fight this out because. It's really up to you to determine what the business needs and how the business is going to be best be served.

[00:12:06] Todd: But. I was thinking about the idea of owning an agency and paranoia and fear sort of always being what drives. Us owners. I don't think we should be afraid of that. I don't think we should have fear of forcing that conversation. I don't think we should be afraid to force procurement and marketing to come to the table and align on objectives.

[00:12:27] Todd: But it seems like something agencies, maybe we don't do a good enough job at.

[00:12:31] Kelly: I think the industry creates its own problem in this way. because again, this is where you have to have a good relationship with your client and be able to have of trust there, because I think what creates that paranoia and that fear is There's not a shortage of agencies out there.

[00:12:47] Kelly: And a lot of them don't always have the scruples that you want them to have necessarily. And it's something I always operate from, which is there's always someone out there who's willing to stretch the truth and promise and over promise. And Undercut promise to do things a cheaper cost just to get signed on the bottom line and the problem with that.

[00:13:08] Kelly: And what you always like to point out to me in certain ways is we know that it's not going to result in what they want. They're not. going to be an over promise. They're going to be underwhelmed, but it doesn't matter to us because once we lose the business, it's gone for us. And yeah, we might be able to take the moral high ground and say, told you so.

[00:13:25] Kelly: Guess you didn't like that experience. Did you? But that doesn't help us, right? That doesn't help us be able to continue to grow and offer and fulfill on that. So that's the problem, right? Is do you show up and compete in a unbalanced marketplace where it's not easy to understand what you really will get and what's just being promised and said until you experience it.

[00:13:44] Kelly: And that experience can come too late. And so it's this really fine balance and it makes me think about, it's a funny analogy when we talk about procurement and, the idea of when is a win, not a win, when you sort of get your way, but you don't really like the outcome that comes with it.

[00:13:59] Kelly: And I'm going to come up with a funny analogy because, you know, it's football season and I participate in fantasy football and I'm kind of in trade season right now a little bit. And, and it kind of came to mind you know, I'll send out these trades and explore it. and there's this realization that, you start out by offering something that you'd feel really good about.

[00:14:17] Kelly: And unless someone's not paying attention, there's generally some back and forth. And other day I came to this realization. I was like, a good outcome of a trade in my mind, and this is an old business adage is when both sides are a little unhappy, a little uncomfortable with the outcomes, That feels like, one side is just. Throw in a parade, it's probably not going to end in a good thing, No one's going to ever want to do that with you again. But if you're both like, I don't know, know if I want this deal to go through, but I can live with it. And you go through, you're, probably in a good place in that because that's where.

[00:14:46] Kelly: there's give and take on both sides and that's the partnership side of things. One side should not be so imbalanced that the other can't move appropriately. And this goes back to another thing we've said a lot when I work on side projects and development things. And I've had instances where, you know, I've worked on some mobile games and things, and I've had artists that are just kind of looking for the work and they'll come to me and they'll say, Hey, I'll, do this work for this price.

[00:15:09] Kelly: And I recognize that's not fair price for what I want from them. And I will offer to pay more if there's value because I want that person's a hundred percent. I want them to be bought into the project. I want them to give it their all. I want them to go that extra mile for me. I'd rather get the good outcome for a little bit more than literally be the, I'm going to do the bare minimum and move on because I'm getting ripped off here.

[00:15:33] Kelly: Kind of thing. that always sticks with me when I go through negotiations is if I feel like it's not fair. I look, I'm not saying I don't want a good deal, but I think there's a limit to what's reasonable on that front and where you go. And I think you being aware of the other side of what that creates is really important.

[00:15:52] Kelly: And this comes through in procurement. When is a win, not a win you can get your way, but again, you are giving your partner who you were hoping helps drive your business forward. Every reason in the world to look for every opportunity to cut a corner for you, hire cheaper talent, outsource it, use a tool, automate it, spend less hours, cut more meetings, not give as much thought.

[00:16:14] Kelly: Why would you motivate your partner? To do those things, it just doesn't make sense.

[00:16:20] Todd: Yeah. maybe we should buy some advertising to get more people to listen to what you just said, because I think that's, That's universally true I don't know how many more generations or decades of Agency and marketing people need to sort of go through the world of marketing to get to a point to understand that what you just said is what makes sense.

[00:16:40] Todd: I mean, we're a service or service based industry. And so this article went on to talk about, service based industries, like us being afraid to ask these really tough, hard questions. you know, you said, well, you have to earn the truck. We can't, you don't have trust of procurement in the RFP pitch process.

[00:16:56] Todd: there's no trust there yet, right? Like

[00:16:58] Kelly: There's promises, there's promises that you don't know what's really going to happen.

[00:17:01] Todd: So you can't really do that you don't have that trust at that point. But that's also a point where we could still pose really tough, challenging questions to procurement, and marketing. But in that pitch phase, what do we all do?

[00:17:16] Todd: We're just trying to win the business, right? And so I think. For us. Yeah. We've lost a lot of pitches because we just simply won't budge on price. And we just simply say, this is the value that you get for what you pay. And if that's not what you're looking for, we're fine with that. Go somewhere else. I still hate the fear.

[00:17:34] Kelly: it's important to note there, right? we say it, yes, it is definitely a value. again, this is the problem is, is everyone's going to say they're valuable. Everyone's going to say they have the best people. Everyone's going to say they're going to go above and beyond, right? This is where it's like an interview, most people don't sit in an interview and be like, I'm going to be mediocre at this job. I'm slightly qualified for it, right? You have to be able to use your gut and really feel someone out and understand. And especially in a pitch process where it's not even the person, like, am I even talking to the person who's going to fulfill these promises?

[00:18:05] Kelly: Or am I talking to someone who's. Literally commission motivated to get me to sign the dotted line and not even caring about who is now going to inherit those problems and those promises to actually matter. Does the team that is going to fulfill these promises even work at this company yet? Or they can go Randomly hire and hopefully they get good talent on those things, right?

[00:18:27] Kelly: It's so interesting when you think about you do, this is where that relationship and that gut feeling, that process, , and really understanding and going through that becomes so important. Because if you just hire on an agency's past experiences or their case studies, or they're like most case studies, I would be willing to bet the majority of agencies, this is probably on the bigger side of things.

[00:18:47] Kelly: The people that played into that case study probably don't even work at that agency anymore. I would say the most of those are in there. They move on. I mean, look, we've seen case studies of clients we've taken over and we know the results and we'll see a case study saying how great they are. Yet we have the client coming at us being like, Our business is down.

[00:19:04] Kelly: It's not working. We're firing them. And it's like, this is wild. It's so wild when you put it in perspective in that way. But yeah, I mean, look, it's all about the practicality and the motivations and that, that gut feel. It's also why I think sometimes it's not always quantitative. You can't directly say, you know, not everything on marketing is going to be so linear.

[00:19:23] Kelly: A lot of it is just, am I getting the experience with my I'm going to keep using this word partner. Do I feel like they are passionate about my business? Are they going the extra mile to come up with ideas? If, if something's not working, are they just throwing their hands up and saying, it's not this or it's you, or they, are they making excuses?

[00:19:40] Kelly: Are they brainstorming ideas with me? Are they, thinking about things? Are they digging in? This is that going beyond the media understanding. Are they asking about my business operations or my competitive pressure? If my pricing can change or what works Am I getting a conversation in an engagement that makes me believe that this person is bought in and cares.

[00:19:58] Kelly: Beyond just whether or not they lose my business or not.

[00:20:01] Todd: Well, that is one of the other comments, in this article that I thought was interesting, which was, it talked a little bit about the importance of QBRs to align on strategy and goals and. Probably more macro level financial performance and output relative to a PNL. but it also went on to talk about, that's too long to wait, QBR is way too long to wait because there's stuff happening in most cases every week. And, a lot of agencies to scope having weekly meetings, weekly standup meetings with your clients is probably doesn't look right on a utilization and staffing plan and a, margin plan for the agency.

[00:20:41] Todd: But it certainly is probably the right thing to do. in many cases we have weekly strategy reporting, standup status, check ins all the above. with our clients and So many things get discovered and just that short period of time. Other things take longer to marinate before you can have, statistical sort of relevance or, numbers you can rely on.

[00:21:07] Todd: But this article talked about, that should happen more and more. And I, again, I went back to like, well, doesn't, that always happen. we can't be the only ones that are

[00:21:15] Kelly: Yeah. I think it's different things, right? Because there's a balance here, not every client needs weekly reporting, but I think, where it gets conflated is I don't think you need to report to your clients weekly or even bi weekly, but I do think that you should have strategic discussions at whatever cadence the business needs, If things are Going well, if the team understands the business and the motivations and what's happening in market and things like that. Great. But if campaigns aren't going the way that you want, or there's some element of the business where things are shifting and a more real time element. This is the, again, the difference between if you're buying a service with just simple hours basis, applying those hours just to simply tell you we're doing great, we're fine is a waste.

[00:22:00] Kelly: But if you're hiring a partner to move the business forward and there's enough things to discuss and engage with that will actually make meaningful changes to the decisions we make, the audiences, the data points, all of that, that we can interact strategically. That's what should happen more often. if there's a reason, if there's a strategic reason that's going to yield value to what we're doing on behalf of a client, that should happen more often.

[00:22:24] Kelly: We have clients where. Things are moving in such a way that having at least those weekly check ins of how is the call center doing? What's the volume up and down? What are the conversion rates? What's the promo calendar coming up? I can't learn that on a quarterly basis. If I need to make decisions on a weekly or biweekly, cause it's changing that often, but there's other clients where if we try and do a weekly or biweekly.

[00:22:45] Kelly: Every call is like, Yep, pretty much. Things are the same, not changing that much because we've reached equilibrium. Things aren't in there and it's a waste. So it's just understanding where do you get value. But this is the mentality shift between buying a service and a block of hours on my behalf versus partnering to get outcomes and what goes into getting those outcomes.

[00:23:06] Todd: Yeah. That's what I was going to say. I mean, that's, the moral of this story is. Is what you just said, all those things that you talked about should be talked about on a weekly basis or could be, again, none of that has anything to do with CPM or reach or frequency or impression or click or anything.

[00:23:23] Todd: It's not a media conversation. It's a business conversation. And like you, I'm glad this article was written. I hope that a lot of people read it think about what they do and the decisions they make and why they make the decisions because hiring a media agency should be about what we just talked about.

[00:23:40] Todd: Yes. You're eventually going to plan and buy media with a dollar, but before you do that, you should know all these other parts of the business and all those other parts of the business should be connected. To the decision, the plan, the logic, the outcome, the constant iterative refinement of what it is you're doing in the investment.

[00:24:02] Todd: the media, I don't know why those conversations why this article would call this out in the sense that. It just must be a conversation that a lot of media people aren't having, or maybe they work for agencies that don't approach it that way. I work sort of in our own little myopic world. And so we don't know, I do know that when we interview people to hire people that come from all of these other well known agencies, they all sort of have the same story, which is, yeah, we didn't really do as much as we could have.

[00:24:32] Todd: and we just sort of, run of the mill, stuff. And you and I always scratch our heads. Like how did these agencies get that big with that much notoriety and fame and those big clients when. Every time we interview people from those agencies, we're told, yeah, we could do better, but we can't because of the model.

[00:24:51] Kelly: Yeah, I mean, look, talked about this before. I mean, we have a million Insider exposures from past experiences to engagements, to other things and audits and opportunities and things where, cause look, I'm mindful about this, where I don't want to be saying these things about this industry just on the whim or to come across as jaded.

[00:25:10] Kelly: I do try and pay attention to like, where do we see areas where what we say and what we claim is, is out there is very validated. And I'm trying, and I try to be quite mindful of that. I think it's interesting. I mean, my last point in this, Yes, there's all these business things and all these elements.

[00:25:24] Kelly: And we've talked about, hiring and interviewing and making sure you find partners. There's also just a trust factor. There's a comfort factor. There's a human factor of, When you hire partners, these are people that hopefully you get along with and you enjoy being on calls with and you, trust to be thinking out and looking out for you and, you want to enjoy who you work with.

[00:25:43] Kelly: You want to enjoy who you have these calls with. You want to be able to sit and be like, man, if I'm not grinding and thinking and digging in and identifying things, then things are going to get missed. You want to be like, no, I trust that. This partner and these people have it handled. And if there's something I need to know, they're going to bring it to my intention and I can focus on the million other things that I have.

[00:26:01] Kelly: And, you know, there's just the way of working that, that goes in that, that I think it's really important and really valuable to have a lot of that and to have those things built out. And again, it's, you get what you pay for, right? You get, think about everything in life the quality and, not just that it's not only the skill level that you get, but it's also what that output and that day to day experience is going to be.

[00:26:22] Kelly: Someone's going to look at that and be like, man, this is my bread and butter. This is my, top client. I love these guys. I love working with them. I'm going to go the extra mile for them. I'm going to do the best things for them. That's the experience that I always want. That's where I want to be in the position

[00:26:34] Todd: Yeah. Well, kudos to a digi day for publishing this story. I like it, gives us something to talk about. cause this is something that you and I always talk about every day have for the last 10 plus years. And we'll probably keep talking about it for the next 10 plus years. If I worked that long.

[00:26:51] Kelly: assuming AI doesn't get so good that all of this becomes a moot point.

[00:26:54] Kelly: I know that that continues to

[00:26:55] Todd: yeah, who knows? hopefully people will still like working with people and not just AI. all right. Well, thanks. We've obviously kicked this topic around enough. and again, great article. Thanks Digi day for putting this out and talking about it. I'm glad it's being talked about. It's a topic that needs to be talked about.

[00:27:12] Todd: brands and agencies need to find better ways to work together. It should not always be about price. It should be about efficacy and partnership and outcome and people. And, those investments should be made based on those kinds of. Things you and I would argue, and that's maybe that's why we're also not running a big, massive public company, because maybe those morals don't work well in that level of capitalism, but I'm okay with that.

[00:27:40] Todd: Thanks, and I will talk to you on our next show.

[00:27:44] Kelly: Thanks everybody.