Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
00:41:28 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:41:28] S1: Yeah. For sure. Alright. There's the cool kids club. Let's talk about some deals. I wanna talk about the smaller of the two, presumably smaller of the two, we don't know, which is, Stagwell. So an agency holdco acquiring Freestar, which is publisher monetization and an awesome company and led by a friend David Friedman. So shout out to, David. So Stagwell, you pointed this out in the notes. They actually own media. The division is literally called owned media by the way. And it's Reach TV, which is travel. They've got an AI, your media system called the media machine. Now they pick up Freestar, and they've got access to a thousand publishers. So talk about the demand side and the supply side coming together. This might not have been the one on everybody's minds if you thought there would be a transaction of agency acquiring publisher side ad tech. So this is super cool. [00:42:26] S0: Yeah. I mean, Freestar, my understanding is that they're mostly like a publisher management layer, like header bidding management and yield management and stuff like that. [00:42:35] S1: It's everything. It's everything. Everything. Monetization. [00:42:37] S0: It could be monetization. Right? Yeah. It's a really good strategic move, I think, because if you're really if you're really AI pilled about media buying, then why not get in there with the publishers and be able to put your orders in there with all the data that's coming in real time, as opposed to having to go through PubMatic or Magnite or somebody and let them do all that decisioning and that that throttling.
00:42:37 · Ari Paparo, Chris Harihar, Eric Franchi
[00:42:37] S0: It could be monetization. Right? Yeah. It's a really good strategic move, I think, because if you're really if you're really AI pilled about media buying, then why not get in there with the publishers and be able to put your orders in there with all the data that's coming in real time, as opposed to having to go through PubMatic or Magnite or somebody and let them do all that decisioning and that that throttling. [00:43:01] S2: So agencies have no data really outside, there's like all of it is client data essentially, so to have your own data if you're talking about building AI capability, I'm in an agency, what data do we have outside of what we have permission to use from from our customers. And so I do think from an AI perspective to your point, Ari, I think it's a smart move. [00:43:21] S0: I I think companies on the sell side who have a lot of variety have a certain value to them like the Raptive or, Sovrn of the world or may... You know, people have tags on the page and are involved with a large number of publishers, have an interesting position here in the AI world because having a large number of publishers is kind of a, differentiator when you're thinking about AI versus just being one big publisher. [00:43:45] S1: Makes sense. Do you think we see more of this? Agencies acquiring publisher tech? I don't know [00:43:49] S0: if agencies do it, but I think those two names I mentioned are pretty interesting as in the... As companies that might be better suited as part of a vertically integrated stack.
00:43:49 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:43:49] S0: if agencies do it, but I think those two names I mentioned are pretty interesting as in the... As companies that might be better suited as part of a vertically integrated stack. [00:43:58] S1: Alright. Another deal. This one just got announced this morning. It was speculated and then the... Then it became official. DoorDash is gonna acquire Instacart for $17,000,000,000. Assume this gets approved. These are, you know, this one might actually, you know, have some conversation with the with the FTC. Again, you pulled this earlier this week when there was some speculation, effectively together they represent about 3,700,000,000 in annual revenue per Brian Wieser from Matt's Ad revenue. Shout out. [00:44:26] S0: Ad ad revenue. Yeah. Ad revenue. [00:44:28] S1: Yeah. Revenue. Ad revenue. Why are we talking about it? It's the ad revenue. Yeah. So it's half of Walmart, but it's still top 30, top 35 total seller of advertising. So this not small, and there's... Obviously, you put these together, there's real room to grow.
00:44:28 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:44:28] S1: Yeah. Revenue. Ad revenue. Why are we talking about it? It's the ad revenue. Yeah. So it's half of Walmart, but it's still top 30, top 35 total seller of advertising. So this not small, and there's... Obviously, you put these together, there's real room to grow. [00:44:43] S0: Retail media, as it relates to consumer packaged goods is very ripe for consolidation. The buyers want fewer fewer ways to buy larger reach, and the products have standard SKUs across many, many retailers, many systems. And so I think that makes a ton of sense. And both of these companies are operating sort of closed marketplaces for ads. They don't, I don't think, do programmatic or anything complicated. It's really just, you know, buyer and seller in the same app. So it's it's, you know, right up the avenue of Kevel, which just raised money last week, you know, that type of technology to build a marketplace. So this makes a ton of sense. I think we... We're starting to see 3,700,000,000 a year in ad revenue. That's big. Like, that's that's really, really sizable.
00:45:29 · Chris Harihar
[00:45:29] S2: And does DoorDash offer technology to help other players monetize their digital storefronts in the way that Instacart does? Because I think that to me... Yeah. That's that's... That seems super powerful for for DoorDash to own that and have access to something like that just given the fact that I think but we're also seeing like it's commerce media, It's not just retail media. So if you have... If you own properties, if you own data, you can have a media network and like even Chuck E Cheese by the way. I mean like, so there's there's a real opportunity I think to to do more with that technology. But one thing that I find really interesting about it is it very much feel... It's a great deal, makes a ton of sense for now, but one wonders how AI shapes things in the future. You're gonna have more agents buying things and shopping on behalf of consumers, does that affect retail media ultimately and media networks and then at the same time, a lot of these shopping decisions are migrating over to AI search and so like do I go to a website and like browse what's available and make decisions that way? That feels more of like a dated way of buying things. Now it's increasingly, I think, shifting over to to AI search where I'm just gonna query, you know, my preferred chat model or bot and, you know, get an understanding of what I want and wanna buy that way. I was just I was just talking about this with some of the folks at THRAD actually, the ad tech startup, and, you know, we're just having a conversation about this. I think it's it's interesting to think, you know, longer term, how does this overall category get affected by by agents and, you know, does this deal... I mean, it makes a ton of sense now, but down the line. Well,
00:47:04 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo, Chris Harihar
[00:47:04] S1: there was an announcement this week that might tip our... Tip the hand of where this is going. Walmart launched an MCP server. So, you know, all of these companies are either blocking or embracing agent to commerce, you know, you know, sort of like personal agents. Walmart is going in. So basically, you're gonna be able to authorize, your agents, to have, you know, a connection with your Walmart account. You can start shopping, you can have permissions. This looks like really good. [00:47:34] S0: This seems so thoughtful. They... Basically, if you wanna use this as a as a customer, as a consumer, you authorize it separately, and then you could give it a maximum budget that require... Anything above that requires approval. You could say, like, hey. Let the agent spend up to a $100. No biggie. But if it's over a 100, I need to approve it. That's... This is really thoughtful. I'm I'm very impressed. [00:47:55] S1: Yeah. I... Ironically, I tried to use Muse to buy something called Walmart this week. Mhmm. And and I I couldn't get the the login connection to work, and I just abandoned it. But I was like, man, this would be awesome if I can do this. We're gonna [00:48:08] S0: be able to [00:48:08] S1: do it. Just send an email [00:48:09] S0: send an email to Arthur at Vibe. Fix it for you. [00:48:13] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He'll be on it. But there's... Just take a [00:48:16] S2: a photo of your credit card and, you know, feed it feed it to Muse and just just say, [00:48:20] S1: have that issues. Yeah. Exactly.