Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
00:16:32 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:16:32] S1: It's it's the identity layer. Matt from ID5 hosted, portfolio company of of ours, hosted a nice little graph, today on LinkedIn. I think, Paul Knighton, friend of the pod, sometimes replacement for me, I think Paul built this thing, which is basically like the independent version of the LiveRamp stack. You need a connectivity layer, you need a data layer, and you need a identity layer. Obviously, the the identity pieces where ID5 plays, where I guess, high touch, you know, has the gap. [00:17:02] S2: Yeah. So the post is is called rebuilding your stack post live ramp acquisition. I'm gonna I'm gonna read you the text I just sent Paul, because Paul and I talk all the time by text. And I just had dinner with him him and his lovely family yesterday here in And I said, it's more like, quote, how might someone build this stack, unquote, no one would actually do this, which is my point being, like, it's kind of a theoretical stack of how someone would, you know, be able to theoretically achieve what LiveRamp has. But you can't underestimate the ease of implementation, ease of use requirement of a lot of this stuff. You need to be able to, like, kinda log in, grab a segment, create a segment, say, push to this platform, boom, works. And I think there's a lot of a lot of missing pieces to making that happen.
00:17:55 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:17:55] S1: Yeah. No. I get it. But if these companies locked arms, right, do have some segment of these companies in, you know, each of these, disparate areas locked arms and actually, you know, work together on it. You probably could get somewhat of the of the way there. So, hey, either way, good good good job for for high touch. Other thing that was kinda weird in the news this week, and this didn't seem coordinated at all. Hightouch announced an AgenTex CDP. And then either two days before or two days after, Databricks announced an agentic CDP. Like, literally the same announcement. It could not have been, like, like, weirder in terms of timing. And I guess this is just signaling to the market that like everything else, CDP's are moving into the agentic era, and you need to have these capabilities to compete. [00:18:42] S2: Well, I think this is another kinda tough spot that Hightouch is in because they claim their marketing is all about them being the composable CDP, so where you can have your data on Databricks or on Snowflake or on AWS. Well, when those underlying layers start competing with you, that doesn't feel great. [00:19:00] S1: Yeah. Yeah. That's that's true. Alright. Well, either way, CDP's are now agentic. You wanna talk about TTD? [00:19:09] S2: We always have to. Like, we always have to have an AI segment, and we have to have a TTD segment. So let's do it.
00:19:09 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:19:09] S2: We always have to. Like, we always have to have an AI segment, and we have to have a TTD segment. So let's do it. [00:19:14] S1: Alright. We're coming back to AI heavy in a second. But on the CTD front, since we've talked about this thing to death, I think it's important to put the end cap on it. Apparently, TTD and Publicis settled their beef over fees, and Publicis is back now recommending TTD to clients. Although there's been no details about the settlement or what happened. [00:19:37] S2: Yeah. We we don't know if the beef was really about fees. That was what was in the public. Probably everyone and their brother thinks it was about publicists taking more control over SPO and basically getting more say over where the day... The money flows and things like that. Now that's good that they settled their their beef. I mean, probably one of TG's top two or three clients, so you don't really wanna be in a fight with them. [00:19:59] S1: Yeah. No. Absolutely. They also launched a kind of a RMN network of networks, a travel hospitality network, pulling together Uber, booking.com, Kinective Media, which is United. And I like this one. I know you're gonna like this one too. Riot Media. [00:20:16] S2: Who's Riot Media? [00:20:19] S1: Marriott. Maybe it's Riot's media. [00:20:23] S2: So much. It's just so much that Marriott... First of all, could you think of two... Could you think of an adjective that applies less to Marriott than Riot? Like I mean, I hope [00:20:35] S1: Riot never applies to Marriott when I'm staying in one.
00:20:35 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:20:35] S1: Riot never applies to Marriott when I'm staying in one. [00:20:40] S2: It just does not roll off the tongue. Let's just say that. I think this movie by TTD... I don't I don't know all the details here. I read the article in AdExchanger. I think all of our all of our links to the week are gonna be AdExchanger this week. So it seems interesting. I would just say that this is the sort of thing The Trade Desk should be doing to gain competitive advantage. You're you're big. You're nimble. You're entrepreneurial. Just start... Stack up the bricks in your little hedge garden, walled garden. Get these relationships. They're not exclusive, but they're beneficial in a way. Smaller DSPs just don't have the manpower to do it. This is the sort of thing they should be doing all the time.
00:21:14 · Eric Franchi
[00:21:14] S1: Absolutely. Good stuff. Okay. Before we get into the AI, we should probably talk about SpaceX because we talked about it last week, the hotly awaited SpaceX IPO. SpaceX went public at over 2,000,000,000... $2,000,000,000,000 valuation. Elon Musk became the first trillionaire. The stock, I didn't even look at it today, continued to trade up, because it was extremely low float, meaning only a small percentage of the company was available for trading, and there was great retail demand for this. So the stock just went crazy. They then acquired Cursor, Cursor AI, for $60,000,000,000 a couple of days later while the stock was on a... On an upswing for for stock. So this is just like masterful on a number of on a number of levels, because they're able to, you know, obviously keep the the the price of the of the stock up and, you know, not have a ton of dilution for really interesting asset. Why is this related to ads? I'll tell you why this is related to ads. So number one, don't forget, SpaceX owns both X and XAI. So there's ads somewhere inside of SpaceX, which is the riot. I think number two, maybe this is the more interesting thing is what is cursor? Cursor is not a foundational model. It's an application. So, you know, the bet for a lot of ad tech is that ads and ad tech is an application layer for AI. This is a massive acquisition and a massive bet on the acquisition layer... On the the, the application layer. So I think there's an interesting story here to think about, you know, if this is truly kind of value creation for applications, might signal that there's, you know, more m and a to come across everything.
00:22:59 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:22:59] S2: Yeah. I think I think that is the interesting part of this that, in terms of the foundational models, Grok and xAI are, you know, pretty distantly behind the other folks. And you have Anthropic printing money with its coding machine. So Cursor is generally, I think, considered the second best coding module. And so we'll see if they can spin this into a revenue generating piece of the business. Meanwhile, poor ex ads team is now, like, in the basement office with the drippy pipes, you know, deep within the most valuable company in the world, but, like, nobody knows they're there, and they have to report 19 level... Levels up to Elon who probably doesn't even like ads. It's a... It's tough being on that team, man. [00:23:45] S1: Pour one out. Hopefully, we'll see you in Cannes. Alright. What was in the water this week when it comes to... [00:23:52] S2: Cannes was [00:23:53] S1: in the water. Is it everybody's trying [00:23:55] S2: to get [00:23:56] S1: ahead of Cannes announcements by announcing this week? It's wild.