Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
00:33:44 · Chris Harihar, Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:33:44] S2: I have it sends me talking points for for conversations with... My wife doesn't know this, but every day at 5PM sends me talking points for conversation for conversations with my wife that night, where we talk about our daughter because it's it's ingesting all of these school emails, and it's putting things on my calendar and it's it's in... From a work perspective, it's hugely helpful. It runs our daily monitoring for a number of our companies at this point that we're working on. It's it's fascinating how good it is. [00:34:10] S1: Let's move on. Microsoft. Won't spend too much time on this one. Basically, Microsoft kinda advertising business search is... Search and, you know, ads like LinkedIn and and Bing, growing basically the same rate as Google, 12%. So less than half as much as Meta. But the story here with Microsoft similarly to Google is the cloud. Azure up 48% year over year, just, you know, big numbers. So to your point, you got two legs in the stool. There's, you know, I think a strong story to be to be said here. And Microsoft just wanna keep going. [00:34:43] S0: I'd love to learn more about their ad business. It seems like a big agglomeration of random things. Have Bing, the old app Nexus, like, just don't know what what's going on there. [00:34:52] S2: They've got what the... They've got games in there. It's like, what is happening there?
00:34:52 · Chris Harihar, Eric Franchi
[00:34:52] S2: They've got what the... They've got games in there. It's like, what is happening there? [00:34:56] S1: Yeah. Exactly. Right. Right. Yeah. Xbox. Okay. Alright. We gotta get with the stuff that our friend Ari is all over. So FreeWheel and Universal ads are going to NBC instead of Comcast. And Mike Shields drops a report that Warner and, I guess, SkyDance now, instead of Warner Warner Paramount is looking to drop FreeWheel. What's going on in the world of FreeWheel?
00:35:22 · Ari Paparo
[00:35:22] S0: Yeah. So I I was very confident this was going the opposite direction, and I believe it was. When when Comcast announced the split of NBCU, I I had talked to people, and they all said, yeah. It's FreeWheel's obviously staying with Comcast. Comcast is the tech company, and NBC is the media company. And my understanding is that there was a lot of lobbying and discussions and negotiations, and the NBC team really wanted this. They really wanted FreeWheel and Universal be part of their, side of the equation. It makes a little more sense because NBC is the largest customer of FreeWheel by probably a pretty large margin. And the other... Their peers, meaning people like Disney, have their own ad tech stacks and are going to be executing against that. So they didn't wanna be arm's length. I think for FreeWheel, I mean, I have tons of friends there. I I talk to them all the time. It's not the best look here in that FreeWheel is going from what they wanted to be. The vision was Google for TV, which is like, in... We wanna control the TV monetization world. We wanna help the broadcasters make more money and blah blah blah, have a network of all these people participating, and now it's feeling a little bit like a captive ad tech company for one giant client. Now they they have other clients, and and the beeswax business, I think, is really successful with many clients. But fundamentally, the consolidation of the traditional broadcasters and the vertical integration with ad tech has made the reason for being a FreeWheel a little less obvious, as kind of a big standalone tech player.
00:36:54 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo, Chris Harihar
[00:36:54] S1: That makes sense. Feels like it makes a lot of sense for Universal Ads to go to NBC because, you know, you can kinda position us as another tool in the box for NBC sellers, you know, ability to kind of have reach extension, everything like that. And then I guess if you bring Universal Ads, you become fully vertically integrated to your point. [00:37:13] S0: Yeah. I think Universal Ads has other inventory through FreeWheel, but think probably the majority of it was NBC, inventory. [00:37:21] S2: How was that announced? It it it seemed like what was it? LinkedIn post somebody put forth and then it kind of got out from there. Sometimes, you know, you could tell how things were playing out based off of the distribution strategy for the news. [00:37:35] S0: It was a scoop. Tim... Tim... I [00:37:38] S2: mean, John. [00:37:39] S0: John from Tim... [00:37:40] S2: His news his newsletter is awesome. [00:37:42] S1: So good. Must Must read. Read. [00:37:44] S2: But I thought that was interesting that it was just kind of like a LinkedIn post that went up, I think on a Sunday or of like over the weekend, and then Jean was able to sort of grab it and and write something about it. But, you know, like, I I always find that fascinating as to, you know, why why that as the avenue for sharing the news versus like a more formalized, you know, corporate announcement. And and, you know, like, was was there a desire to sort of like, you know, soft soundness versus like put a a big spotlight on it for the reasons that you mentioned already.
00:37:44 · Chris Harihar, Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:37:44] S2: But I thought that was interesting that it was just kind of like a LinkedIn post that went up, I think on a Sunday or of like over the weekend, and then Jean was able to sort of grab it and and write something about it. But, you know, like, I I always find that fascinating as to, you know, why why that as the avenue for sharing the news versus like a more formalized, you know, corporate announcement. And and, you know, like, was was there a desire to sort of like, you know, soft soundness versus like put a a big spotlight on it for the reasons that you mentioned already. [00:38:15] S0: Well, Comcast has a very strange PR strategy. I mean, basically, talk about blog posts. When they bought Beeswax, it was just like a minor blog post with, like, two paragraphs in it. Like, we didn't get a press release. We weren't up for that. [00:38:25] S2: You're still pissed at this guy. [00:38:27] S0: And then I'd get there, and they'd be like, we're doing a big press release. We have a partnership with a regional agency in Cincinnati, and it's getting a press release. I was like, what is going on here? [00:38:37] S2: What are you what are... [00:38:38] S1: That's so funny. What do you make of this whole, Skydance looking to move off of FreeWheel to possibly Google [00:38:45] S0: Yeah. [00:38:46] S1: Scoop by, Shields?
00:38:46 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:38:46] S1: Scoop by, Shields? [00:38:47] S0: Yeah. So I I I think there's... One is the vertical vertical integration. They see their their contemporaries or their counterparts doing this, and they're like, well, we wanna be able to offer, the full packaged advertisers from the smallest SMBs, the biggest ones with AI and all that stuff. And I think there's a little bit of Jay Ashkenazi being involved here, former Roku. And my understanding is he's, like, kind of a Google guy. He doesn't necessarily... He... I think he's skeptical of a big build out, more or wants simplification. And so my my thinking after reading the Mike Shields article is that they're likely to become a gam shop, not necessarily build their own answer from scratch. [00:39:29] S1: That makes sense. I guess it kinda shoots down my speculation from last week. Go figure. [00:39:34] S0: Wait. What was your speculation from last week? [00:39:35] S1: I don't know that they might acquire because Jay's there. I'm like completely... I was completely wrong. [00:39:40] S0: No. I mean, I might be wrong. We'll we'll have to just wait and see like, you know. [00:39:45] S1: It's all good. Alright. One more ad tech thing before we get into some interesting fun stuff. Pinterest, Magnite announcement came out earlier this week effectively. It's gonna open up its inventory to programmatic buyers with Magnite as its main pipe, but also through Amazon, Google, and shout out Yahoo DSP. Jason Fairchild is now, I think, he's GM of programmatic, GM of It ads, was so