Digital Signage Today
00:00:00 · S0, Daniel Brown
[00:00:00] S0: You're listening to the Digital Signage Today podcast. As business leaders look for ways to improve productivity and profitability, they're increasingly turning to innovative automation and self-service technologies. But keeping up with the rapid pace of new innovations can be overwhelming. Now there's a website to help you do just that. From the publishers of Kiosk Marketplace, Bending Times, and Digital Signage Today, automation and self -service covers trends in artificial intelligence, robotics, kiosks, payments, and much more. Visit the site today and subscribe at www.automationandself-service.com. [00:00:41] S1: Ari, thank you for joining us on the Digital Signage Today podcast. Could you briefly introduce yourself and how you got into this line of work?
00:00:49 · Ari Buchalter
[00:00:49] S2: Sure thing. And thank you so much for having me here. I'm Ari Buchalter, CEO of Place Exchange. And in terms of how I got into this line of work that would actually have to take us back a couple of decades, I started out my career actually as an academic in the field of theoretical astrophysics, of all things, something I wanted to do since I was a kid. But a little over twenty years ago, sort of changed my mind and decided to leave the ivory tower because I saw interesting opportunities to apply the kinds of quantitative skills I had developed as a physicist to problems in the business world. And at first, like many, I thought I might end up in finance, where I actually did dabble a little bit because there's obviously a lot of heavy quantitative analysis done in that realm. But I kind of quickly pivoted into the world of digital media. This was back in 2001, 2002, the .com bubble had burst. But it was clear that these new forms of media that were emerging, you know, the internet and social media and so forth, creating vast amounts of data that could be used to make better marketing decisions, right? Which customers should I target? Where should I target them? What messages should I deliver to who? And that all got me pretty excited. And that's basically been the arc of my career for the last twenty years or so, is building companies that use math and technology to make better marketing decisions. And most of that time was spent in the world of online media. But around 2016, 2017, I started to feel that space was maturing a bit and was looking around at where the next set of opportunities might be. I thought out of home was especially interesting because so much technological advancement was happening, but you also didn't have a lot of the headwinds that some other channels were experiencing. So for the last five or six years, I've been taking that same passion for using data and technology to drive innovation and doing it in digital out of home, and I love it.
00:02:46 · Daniel Brown, Ari Buchalter
[00:02:46] S1: I love it. This is fantastic. We need to have a follow-up episode just about the amazing career in astrophysics, and I can pick your brain on box universe theory and David Bohm. And I just had the pleasure in Detroit of hearing the overseer of the James Webb Telescope program talk about the new insights, and that was just a delight, just a delight. He talked about the Drake equation. It was great. So we'll have a follow-up episode just about that stuff. [00:03:09] S2: Sign me up for that one. I still maintain kind of half a foot in the field and would love to talk about that anytime. [00:03:17] S1: Oh my god. I literally... I'll write you a 10 page email later. This is great. I'm glad I'm glad you mentioned that. Well, I'll tell you. So in the Place Exchange world of, sort of the DOH, I've noticed this is a point of confusion even for company leaders sometimes that I talk to. What is the difference between the supply side and demand side in programmatic advertising?
00:03:39 · Ari Buchalter
[00:03:39] S2: Yeah. So I think the programmatic world can cause confusion even among those of us that have been doing it for twenty years. When you talk about platforms, and I think that's really at the crux of the question, right? The demand side platform and the supply side platform, you hear those terms a lot. A demand side platform or a DSP is really technology that's designed to help buyers achieve their goals around media buying, right? So it has to do with all the things that a buyer would need setting up and targeting their campaigns, finding the media that will best achieve whatever their goals are, ideally at the lowest price, and measuring the performance of those campaigns against whatever metrics are important to and specific to that buyer. On the other side, a supply side platform or an SSP is really designed to help sellers achieve their goals around media selling, which are different. So a different set of objectives there would be things like setting up and managing their inventory, maximizing demand for that inventory, ideally at the highest price as opposed to the lowest price, and delivering all kinds of seller specific reporting and so on. So at a simple level, you have buyers and sellers as two different sides of a transaction. And so there are different things they're trying to achieve and different solutions they need to help them do that. If you imagine other types of transactions like an M and A deal, right, each side would have their own lawyers and bankers representing the different interests of each side or real estate transaction where the buyer and seller each have a different agent representing their interests. So it's the same idea here, except these transactions don't just involve different people representing both sides, but rather different technologies that support the different needs of buyers and sellers and help them drive the different goals and outcomes that they're each looking to achieve.
00:05:30 · Daniel Brown, Ari Buchalter
[00:05:30] S1: I love that. That's the most tight definition I've heard yet. So well done there. [00:05:36] S2: Thank you. [00:05:38] S1: Well, this makes me wonder. I hope you don't mind me asking an unplanned question that just popped in my head as you're chatting about this because it sounds like this is a big data, operation on both the supply side, the demand side. And I have heard nothing but AI for the past quarter, two quarters, three quarters, and I've had to write about nothing but AI. And I'm curious, are you seeing a lot of changes in your industry and work based on this new AI phase and the hype cycle and so forth?
00:06:06 · Ari Buchalter
[00:06:06] S2: Yes, is the short answer. There is a lot of data that goes back and forth in the programmatic out of home world. It's not exactly the same types of data as you have in other parts of the advertising ecosystem, right? A lot of the data people talk about with online and social is sort of data about users. In our world, of course, this is a one to many medium. We're not tracking people and targeting individuals on a one to one basis. But there's a tremendous amount of data about the screens themselves. Where are they located? What is the venue? What's going on at that place and time? And you have that across hundreds or even thousands of different media owners and hundreds of thousands or even millions of screens. And then, of course, a lot of different data about the advertisers and creatives that can be appearing on those screens. So we're seeing AI come into play in a couple of different ways. One is clearly around the development of that creative of the ads themselves, you know, using generative AI to think of new words and pictures that you can put on the screens at a rate that humans simply can't do. So kind of idea for creative, but also using AI and kind of its cousin machine learning to sift through all of that data and understand what combinations of screens may work best against what combinations of audiences at what times to really optimize campaigns in ways that just humans using spreadsheets just wouldn't be able to do. There are probably lots of other ways that AI is going to be used in our industry that we haven't even thought of yet. So I think it's just the beginning of the first inning, but it's clear it's going to have a big impact.