Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
00:25:37 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:25:37] S1: Absolutely. [00:25:38] S2: And what an awesome deal. Okay, couple things to talk about this. So for those who don't know Sincera, Sincera is a metadata startup. They have all sorts of interesting data that they observe, which are is then utilized by ad tech companies to either inform their data or build products. Sincera's data was used by TTD last year in a lot of different ways, but I think most notably to build the SP 500 plus. They had a deal with IAS and they were the data behind their MFA product, their quality attention product. Like it's an awesome company. And I think it was a very strategic acquisition for TTD just given where they're going from a quality perspective. And then could not be a better team to pick up for for TTD. This is only the second acquisition TTD has ever done. There was a third rumor acquisition that was an acquihire that apparently is like, you know, buried so far that we'll never see it. So TT has not been very acquisitive. So it would be interesting to talk about, like, does this signal a change for TTD, or is this just, like, so squarely, like, we have to own this thing that, you know, be business as usual? [00:26:49] S1: Yeah. This is my... I have a lot of hot [00:26:51] S2: takes here.
00:26:51 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo, Tim Rowe
[00:26:51] S2: takes here. [00:26:51] S1: So, you know, you know, the famously Amazon says, you know, your margin is our opportunity, and The Trade Desk is your ad tech tax is our opportunity. So in the past eighteen months, they have been attacking the SSPs with OpenPath by... And slowly taking that margin for themselves, you know, reducing the total take rate while increasing their volume. This move is a absolute death blow to IAS and DoubleVerify. IAS and DoubleVerify have very crude ways of measuring the web, the idea of brand safety based on keywords, the idea of MFA. The ways they do these things are just not very intelligent. They're... And not only are they not intelligent, but they're hard bundled. So the customer just gets a true false signal or maybe a percentage signal. They don't have any control. The Trade Desk is buying the only... The world's best and only map of the Internet, the open Internet. They have every single detail about how the ad stack works, and they can make that into products that do MFA, brand safety, viewability, everything else, just vastly better than the existing incumbents who have multiple billions of dollars of market cap. And they're going to do that. It's gonna be better and cheaper and integrated, and, you know, watch out. [00:28:08] S3: Mic drop. [00:28:13] S2: Tim? Got down for time. Please, Tim, take the mic. [00:28:18] S3: I don't know if there is anything I can add other than Ari has spoken. [00:28:22] S1: I'll put it in my newsletter on Monday.
00:28:22 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:28:22] S1: I'll put it in my newsletter on Monday. [00:28:25] S2: Good. And you should. You know, it's funny. When I when I first, saw their demo, this is in 2022, I said something to the effect of, hey, this this like... This reminds me of Moat. This feels like early days of Moat when Moat just had unique data, like across the whole the whole web as it related to to viewability. And Mike and Ian didn't like that. They were like, we're not Moat two point o. We're building something different. But at the end of the day, like, think TTD picked up perhaps the next Moat.
00:28:56 · Ari Paparo
[00:28:56] S1: Yeah. I I think there's definitely an analogy there. The taboo has always been that you can't measure what you also transact. Right? See an independent measurement. I think that taboo has some validity, especially when it's a currency, like the Nielsen measurement. But a lot of what the verification folks do is not currency. I mean, the closest they come to currency is viewability measurement, which maybe continues to be independent. So a good example, and Michael talks about this, is, like, the question of what is an MFA site. So an MFA site, some people will say everything's MFA because there's advertising. Sure. Okay. Great. But there are certain factors that you can measure to make it a judgment about MFA. The number of ads on the page, the ratio of ads to content, how often the ads refresh. There's, like, five or six or maybe 10 variables that go into a determinate of MFA. So let's just put it two ways. On the one hand, you could pay an outside vendor to take all those signals and just tell you, yes, no, MFA, not MFA, and then blacklist the the MFA. On the other hand, you could give each agency the opportunity to take those signals and build their own model to say what they think MFA is or maybe to have a sliding scale of how much they're willing to bid based on some of those variables. It seems like that second approach is the better approach and and kind of the way a lot of things in advertising have been headed. Makes sense. I'm really excited about this acquisition. I still don't know what the price is, though. Do you... You don't know what the price is, do you, Eric?
00:30:24 · Eric Franchi, Ari Paparo
[00:30:24] S2: Nope. No comment. Final word on this because I think you bring up really good points around, you know, TTD having DV and IAS in their sites. Ryan Barwick from Morning Brew, who is awesome, shout out to Ryan, He asks, TTD, like, what does this mean, from other companies using Sincera data? And, you know, what what the answer was, hi, Ryan. We won't stop working with ad tech companies. We will evolve the way we work with them. I think that's interesting because the other question is, with Sincera, do you continue to work with DV and IAS? And obviously it's a customer's decision, so the customers will kind of always weigh out there. But that's the real question here. And I think all this is gonna be to to be determined. [00:31:11] S1: I'm gonna say one other thing, which is someone pinged me like, you know, if Sincera is shutting down its data feeds to these other companies, which we don't know if they are or not, wouldn't it be a great time to start a new Sincera? And my answer to that is literally no one on earth besides Michael and Ian could have created this company. Like, I couldn't. Like, there's just no way. There's... These guys understand this topic better than anyone... You know, maybe a handful of people on the Earth could create Sincera's dataset. So if you're one of those people, ask Eric for a funding round because it'll be a great business. But Yeah. It's it's, like, impossible.
00:31:11 · Ari Paparo, Eric Franchi
[00:31:11] S1: I'm gonna say one other thing, which is someone pinged me like, you know, if Sincera is shutting down its data feeds to these other companies, which we don't know if they are or not, wouldn't it be a great time to start a new Sincera? And my answer to that is literally no one on earth besides Michael and Ian could have created this company. Like, I couldn't. Like, there's just no way. There's... These guys understand this topic better than anyone... You know, maybe a handful of people on the Earth could create Sincera's dataset. So if you're one of those people, ask Eric for a funding round because it'll be a great business. But Yeah. It's it's, like, impossible. [00:31:46] S2: If you're out there, my DMs are open, and we got a spot for you on the stage in March if you're using AI. We'll talk about that later. Yeah. Anyway, let's go on. Second big deal of the week, mParticle is I guess acquired by Rokt. So Rokt, if you're not familiar with it, very cool company. They have, basically built, a retail media network, retail media business monetizing the post transaction. So if you've ever bought something on a d to c brand or basically anywhere and you start getting, you know, very relevant offers based on what you just bought, Rokt is the company behind that. It's strangely sort of kind of positioned by Rokt as a merger by MK... Shout out to MK, Michael Katz as a... As an acquisition. Ari, sounds like you might have a little bit insight on this one.