In this episode, Bill Michels, EVP of Product and Engineering at The Trade Desk talks about how you can be a great leader, the advantages of the cloud, the future of the ad tech industry and much more.
In this episode, Bill Michels, EVP of Product and Engineering at The Trade Desk talks about how you can be a great leader, the advantages of the cloud, the future of the ad tech industry and much more.
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Steve Hamm: Okay, bill, it's great to see you today.
Bill Michels: Thanks, Steve. Great to be here and thank you so much for having me.
Steve Hamm: All right. Well, you know, many of our listeners probably aren't familiar with the trade desk or, or even with the demand side platform sector within the ad tech business. So I think it would be helpful if you would explain how the industry works and the role in it, the trade desk plays.
Bill Michels: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll step back a little bit and at a higher level and try to sort of continuously narrow down what exactly we do, but true trade desk is a, the largest independent demand side platform or DSP, like you mentioned. What that means is that we're we're software for agencies and brands to make data-driven decisions on the digital media purchases they do on the internet internet, open internet.
Our clients are fortune 500 and that sort of a types of inventory or the channels we buy in, or things like desktop, [00:01:00] mobile, audio CTV, and even things like out of home now.
Steve Hamm: wait, explain that. I don't know what that is.
Bill Michels: So think of it. as
the broader ad tech industry is a real-time marketplace where publishers offer ad space or what we call it. Inventory that is purchased by a bot by a buyer, through a bid at auction that that happens in milliseconds. So. Every time you, uh, you know, every time you see an ugly hero, a new site, you see, uh, you open up a new page that generates, it generates a piece of ad space that gets that.
That's what we call a piece of inventory. That goes into an exchange where everybody, where other were DSPs, look at that and then decide if they would like to purchase that through, through a bid at auction. Now it's not only web pages, it's also in mobile apps. It's also on an audio. So things like music, apps and podcasts, it's also more and more so on connected TV.
So when you watch. Uh, when you watch an ad through, I dunno, peacock or [00:02:00] Hulu, one of those that, that's also part of what we call inventory and also a new channel, which is growing as out of home. Out of home is, is just shorthand for billboard. So it's, it's sort of the, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's think of that as a, that's a piece of advertising inventory, just like what you see that ad will scroll through in a feed in a mobile app or what you see out of a commercial on TV. It's just another piece of inventory.
It just happens to be in the physical world. Those are transacted on now. Programmatically. Those are delivered. With digitally and those are bought based on real time decisioning and data.So that, that larger, uh, I guess landscape is what we call the programmatic industry, meaning that.
Data, the ad inventory is purchased through a set of standards, uh, in this bidded marketplace. And it's, uh, you know, transacted on to give you a sense of the scale. We trade desk, look at about 13 million ad [00:03:00] opportunities a second, and then we buy, you know, several hundred thousands of those.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. And is the trade desk, the largest player in.
Bill Michels: Uh, we call it the largest independent DSP. There, there are several DSPs out there. Um, and then advertisers can also purchase digital media through a walled garden, which would be something like a Facebook or Google and to make it also more confusing. Google also operates a DSP.
Steve Hamm: Oh, I see. Well, let's do a compare and contrast. How does the business you're in compare with the advertising models of Google and Facebook, the main Google model and the Facebook model. What advantages do you offer advertisers ad agencies, you know, over these other models.
Bill Michels: Yeah. So w we, we purchase where we DSPs and trade desk. We purchase inventory on the open internet. Uh, we, the, the closed environments we referred to as [00:04:00] walled gardens and Facebook and Google are our big examples of that. They're also smaller walled gardens. So there was Twitter and their Snapchat and Pinterest would be examples of that.
Now the distinction there. It Facebook and Google and those other apps or P R or publishers there, they are both the creator of that content and the seller of it. Right? Facebook, we don't create news websites. We don't, uh, you know, we don't create TV shows. We don't create mobile apps. Uh, we have. Those that do monetize them in the best way they can.
If you're an advertiser and you're buying through a walled garden that there's other distinctions too. So you're buying from the creator of the content, but you're also using their tools, which are a little different from what sort of a standard programmatic, uh, tools. So when you buy it, you buy on them, you get aggregate reports by.
Uh, so meaning that, that what you spend, you don't [00:05:00] necessarily get what we call log level data back. So you can't w uh, you can't do what we call frequency capping across them. So for instance, A purchase through a DSP, you can make sure you're touching some, uh, some de-identified or way of, uh, some ID on the user in a sort of a privacy safe way, but to make sure you're not touching them more than.
10 times a week, sub something like that. Uh, now if you do that through a walled garden, you don't have that level of identity across platforms. So you can, you can't, you can sort of manage that across a Facebook, Google, and a CTB or a Twitter or something like that. That's one. The other is, is that the, what you get back, the number of people who saw.
Uh, whether or not they converted things like that. Those are all done at an aggregate level. So if you just get a dashboard of, uh, about what [00:06:00] they, what the exposure was there,
Steve Hamm: you're saying your model allows for richer, personalized.
Bill Michels: uh, say, I think personalization is, is, uh, you're able to do that on, on all these platforms. Our model is a broader set of properties. It's not just one or two that they, that they operate. It's not, uh, it, uh, it allows the advertiser to buy on that broader set without with, with using, uh, one tool without having sort of be restricted to say that the Facebook or the Google tools, uh, it allows for more detailed reporting on how accurate they were and who saw those ads.
Uh, yeah, those, those are a few, uh, standout examples.
Steve Hamm: no, I think that's really clear now. Hey, why don't you walk us through an example right now, kind of a scenario of how your platform serves customers say there's a brand brand X [00:07:00] to come to you. What's the process that they engage, you engage with them and the results they get.
Bill Michels: Sure. I'm sure. Let's let's use an example. I'll start with toothpaste though. It's somebody, we, we have a CPG brand comes in. They're looking to sell toothpaste.
But what they do is they come into the platform. Uh, they set goals on what they're looking to do. Uh, goals can get range from a few things. Uh, it could be from actual driving the sales. Uh, it could also be just around awareness, things like that. So some, some products are not as prone to frequent sales, like, like auto as opposed to toothpaste.
Right. So you're gonna get. Uh, general awareness may be that metric as opposed to actual conversions or sales, they'll choose their goals. They'll set budgets. Uh, they'll, they'll, they'll leverage data that we can use to help them with that could be their own data that they have. Maybe they have, uh, [00:08:00] emails based on previous purchasers of their toothpaste or, or their product.
Maybe they have third party data. That they've gotten through through other relationships. They could leverage data that we would have in our data marketplace.
Uh, they could also set the types of channels they're addressed it in. So audio CTV display, uh, and all that. And then they would also say, Hey, we want you to help us. Right. So we have it. We have an AI tool known as Koa that helps you build a campaign based and make suggestions and guide that campaign for you.
So it's, you know, it's a very powerful tool. So a lot of our. Product and, and improvements around UX is helping you guide that sort of like, you know, we're giving you a, we're putting it in the cockpit of a, of a, of a rocket ship there. And we want to make sure that we, you know, you don't have to work every dial for, for it necessarily for you, for it to work for you.
So you could, you could, you could say, look, you do this for me. We have wizard a wizard that helps walk you through, like, these are what we suggest based on that goals and the data you have [00:09:00] access to. And you can say, I like that, but I'm going to maybe trim it a little or add other things to it. So we sort of know more and more we're automating pieces of it for you to do a.
Make it as seamless as possible. And then once you do that, you, uh, you, you start it. But the great thing is, is that it's constantly learning and recalibrating, right? So that these campaigns can run for weeks to months. And it's not just, you know, that's it, you forget about it. Like what, while it's going on, we, we're seeing, what's working.
We're seeing what is translating into a sale or, or whatever that goal happens to be. And then. We're doubling down in those areas and we're reallocating into the, the tactics and the data sets and the channels that are working. So it's constantly self-learning and getting better and better at what's working.
And then at the end, you get a report to see how, how you performed against your goals.
Steve Hamm: Well, that's a great, great description of the process. Now I understand that you're new to the company relatively new, please. If you would tell us, you know, [00:10:00] what your role is and where you see the company's product and engineering strategy going over the coming months.
Bill Michels: Right. Good question on that. Okay. So my role is VP of product and engineering. I've been here about 15 months, and I guess the, how do I describe my role as I help lead a global team that, that we build and iterate on our platform so we can make the best product for our clients. Uh, and that means, you know, things we can do now, but things we're also planning for.
And. Gearing up to build for next year and the year after. And it's sort of laying the groundwork for that and identifying dependencies around that. We also make sure that the platform operates and doesn't go down and lots of other things related to that, where we're looking at so much data and so much volume at a millisecond basis.
So we, you know, we ship product every. We have a roadmap that a lot of work goes into sort of distilling requests from all of our clients [00:11:00] and trying to understand what the market wants. We learn from our relationships. We have lots of relationships like on the publishers and what we call supply side partners.
We have lots of relationships with data partners who are consciously sort of observing, distilling. Trying to understand where things are headed and what we need to be doing now to build the best product for, for our customers. And we also look at updates in technology and capabilities, just because we deal so much with processing large amounts of data that we have to be world-class there in terms of, of, uh, efficiency in terms of how we're leveraging that data, actually for learning machine modeling, uh, You know, improving our COA, which I've mentioned before and other things like that, like has to always be getting better.
Um, and that's just table stakes.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like, you know, the ed tech business is pretty mature in one sense. I mean, th they're [00:12:00] very sophisticated capabilities, but at the same time, it's still rapidly changing. Right.
Bill Michels: Yeah. It's, it's not, uh, it's not, uh, idle at all. Right. So yeah, it's, there's so many different things that are happening, whether it's requests from clients, consumer expectations, uh, regulatory changes, you'll see, uh, privacy changes, uh, things like that. It's, it's, it's constantly evolving, but I would say the fundamental, the at a very high level, the fundamental things are.
Stay the same, which is brands, advertisers. And agencies w uh, on their behalf wanting to win hearts and minds of, of consumers. Right. And that's, that's happened forever back to radio, back to print. And even before then, yellow pages, things like that. And it's always been there and, you know, that's how they grew up businesses.
That's how they established a brand. And that's how they sort of create that dialogue. On the other hand, you know, The, uh, publishers, and that could be a [00:13:00] developer of a mobile app, or that could be a TV show or a CTV app or a website. They have to, uh, they engage, they engage with users and offer them a service.
And in exchange, they get access to, to their, their time and their eyeballs and then some aspects of data around them. And then there's a value exchange that happens there too. Your time. And sometimes it's money, whether that could be Netflix or New York times that have a subscription, but it also could be, uh, pieces of your identity, like a logged in a way to understand who you are and, you know, treat that in a safe way.
And that value exchange happens and allows for. That publisher to, uh, to, to serve relevant advertising to you, to pay for the service. So, so I, I, the way I think of it is, yeah, those, those are sort of like core tenants of our business that hasn't changed, but there's so much going on in between, uh, on a day to day, month to month, year to year basis, that that's constantly changing that, you know, to, to deliver [00:14:00] against those requires a lot of work, a lot, very large engineering teams, very large product teams and
Steve Hamm: it sounds like a lot of stress to me. I got to tell you a lot of stress on leaders and also on programmers, engineers, stuff like that. Now you worked previously for factual and Yahoo. What kind of management and leadership lessons did you learn there that you're applying to your job at the trade desk?
Bill Michels: good question. Yeah. So I think everyone's sort of constantly evolved. Over time you generate, or you sort of gravitate towards your own style, but, but there's probably, you're constantly learning and getting better hopefully. And, uh, I think that the things I, I learned it took with me. It's probably so.
Sort of patchwork of what I see or when I like someone who was a manager for me or someone I saw interacted with a team that I liked and I, you know, over time maybe subconsciously or something can take up pieces of it and you develop your own [00:15:00] style. But, but you know, I'd say some of the main. Concepts would be as luck.
It all starts with finding and hiring and retaining amazing people, give them the right tools to do their job, but also give them the right agency. Like don't tell them what to do. Tell them, make sure you sort of paint a very strong and clear strategic vision. But let them, let them have the agency, let them have the sort of canvas in front of them to work on the things and, and make those decisions and have a, a rewarding career or a rewarding day at work where they. They're in a state where they're problem solving and they're doing what you, what you hired them to do. So sort of get out of their way and let them do that. The other thing that I've noticed is that, uh, that, you know, companies all develop a unique culture and instead of values, There, you know, they're always a little different and some of that comes from the founder and the CEO that, which totally makes sense.
I could say that, you know, coming to trade desk, [00:16:00] I was excited to see, you know, us, us live, uh, uh, with our values. Like, you know, these are things like we, we're pretty, we're pretty. I guess transparent about him. And we, we, we bring in people and we sort of explain what they are, but the things like vision, grit, agility, full-hearted generosity, openness.
And, you know, I think when I was younger, I was a lot more cynical about these. What do they mean? But as you get. As you see teams work and you see people gravitate to sort of cultures that, that they can, um, do theirselves in and, and fit with their values. I think they, I realize more and more that they are really important and they, they, they sort of are self-selecting and they find people that want to work with those type of, uh, in those types of environments.
So that's the other thing over time, is that how important culture is and establishing a set of values that are, that, you know, everyone appreciates and is, uh, you know,
Steve Hamm: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they, they call this things like soft skills or things like [00:17:00] that, but values really guide a company. They they're the, the foundation upon which it's built. So I'm glad to hear that the trade desk really has that kind of strong foundation. He let's, let's get into some data conversations now.
So when and why did the trade desk move? It stated.
Bill Michels: Yeah. So w we've had a E we deal with a ton of data, right? A lot of that is real time. Uh, and a lot of that is in batch boat and, and, and not necessarily in real time. So we've, we've adopted a really sort of what I think is clever and, and ever changing and evolving sort of hybrid strategy. So that, that 13 million QPS, which is queries per second, that, that, that would look at requires a lot of, a lot of transactions.
That we have to make decisions. Uh, you know, we have to make decisions that that can't be in the cloud because some of that has to be on on-prem and just pure. I'm sorry. Some of that has to be in the cloud. Next to geographically where [00:18:00] those, those responses can happen so quick. So that, that was part of our initial decision.
As we needed the cloud cloud providers to help us get geographically close to where those users are, right. We didn't want to have to necessarily operate on on-prem solutions next to all these and that the cloud providers help us get there. I think, uh, And it's evolved over over the years and more and more.
So I think we're, we're pushing more and more to the cloud just because it helps us. It helps us get the, um, you know, build out that global footprint and helps us a lot with the dials. We need to operate the business in terms of our OPEX versus CapEx. It helps us also get products to market that much faster.
We could test things out. Um, we can see how things work before sort of, you know, having to onboard and buy servers and things for that.
Steve Hamm: Yeah, that's really interesting to think your business is probably the, the, one of the most high speed other than high-speed trading on wall street. That that [00:19:00] happens. You can't have latency Kenya.
Bill Michels: right. Exactly. It's, it's pretty, uh, it's pretty mind boggling. And then we have to have a whole system with people that are on sort of on-call and making sure that things don't go down because yeah. When they go down. Uh, it hurts our clients and they have, they have money to spend in there.
There's consumers out there and there, we want to make sure that we're getting their, their message across. Yeah, it's a, it's definitely a global system and yeah, that's a good one. Is the high frequency trading, probably Google search is another one that's like happening around the world in real time.
There's not as many that many.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. Yeah. Now, at some point you, you got a relationship with snowflake. I don't know whether it was before you came on or after, but if you can give us a little bit of the history there, I think that'd be helpful.
Bill Michels: absolutely. So, so we started talking to snowflake. I think it was in the summer of 2018. We were evaluating lots of different play compared to cloud options for us. It's [00:20:00] accelerated very much over the years. And one of the first ways we really started to do in depth, there with them is to, is, is to create a partnerships where we, we allow the results from our, from the ads we purchased to go into Stoweflake so that our, our clients can do analytics on that without having.
Data without having the data movement. So, so what that means is, so you could think of, uh, a large agency client of ours or brand, if they have, if they're a mutual client of snowflake and they could see who purchases something, or they could see other results of transactions in their platform. They store that instilled flake and then where we're also putting in snowflake in the trade desk instance, there, things like who was exposed to what ads now we're, we're enabling that client to make great, that develop an amazing insights and understanding of the effectiveness of their advertising [00:21:00] spend.
That having that data move without having to ask them to send us privacy centric or directly identifiable information on their users. And we don't have to send the, the data we have on those users. And it was, it was a very nice sort of, um, fit for both companies. So in a way, We, we help our clients get what they need.
And you're still flake is sort of the, uh, mutual party there. They they're helping, uh, we, we both, uh, we both, uh, benefit from having, uh, you know, the same set of same set of brands and agencies on your platform.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. So is it basically, are all of your brands and agencies and you all on snowflake or, I mean, or can they do business with you without snowflake? I don't quite understand.
Bill Michels: Oh, yeah. So, you know, we we've been in business for a while. So before we, we, we have lots of data that comes directly into the trade desk. Uh, we have other partners we have other means from helping them understand the efficacy of, of the spend [00:22:00] on trade desk. But, uh, this stuff we've been doing the past couple of years, the snowflake and it's as accelerated as is it new means to do that?
That has been very, it's been, it's been great and very fast.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. Cool. Cool. Hey, if you could, if you could talk about a couple of the applications using snow, but I, uh, the data cloud for what kind of, you know, what's the application, what's the benefit you're getting.
Bill Michels: Uh, I think that the main one, well, there's, there's a, the trade desk version of it, which is what w which is the application is. Trade desk putting into snowflake, the exposure that the user level exposure of to certain ads and then without having data move it, we could see what the brands being able to do the analysis on, on their, uh, their, what we call conversions or like what they're seeing in purchases or re-engagement with their, with their, um, with their users.
So that's what, what application use case the [00:23:00] other is? A recent one we've done is enable the generation of IDs. So trade desk has, has funded and built the. AE industry ID solution. So it's not a trade desk solution, but it's called unified ID to, uh, and we have a, we have a relationship there where snowflake is able to help publishers or advertisers or other third-party data companies generate UAD tos as a sort of a function as a tool within snowflake.
So. If I am a, an advertiser and I've got all my data residing in snowflake, and maybe it's tied to an email address, I would like to generate a UID on those email addresses. But I don't want, I don't want to have to send those emails out side of snowflake. Uh, w we would still feel like enabled is a fantastic tool that just does that with inside the instance.
And there is no sort of movement or transport of data. And now, now what you have is all that data [00:24:00] now has a new currency. It has a new key by which they can pick an act on it and they can, they can actually buy against it and they can measure impact against it. And they never have to.
Steve Hamm: Hmm. So does unified ID too. Does that protect personal data privacy or,
Bill Michels: Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Absolutely. So, so what it is is a, we think of it as a currency, it's sort of an interoperable ID that, that allows either an advertiser or a publisher or, or data data, uh, uh, third party data companies as well. So what it is is think of it this way. A publisher in that week we talked about earlier, is that value exchange.
So the publisher shirts engages with the consumer. They can ask for a login that all publishers do this. We don't expect them all to, but a good portion would do and more and more will over time. They asked for a lot of. Now when the publisher gets that email, uh, the desk, they don't want to have to put that email into [00:25:00] the, into the exchange, right?
Would it be like an open string? They don't want everyone doesn't want their email flying around. So what they do is we generate, uh, an ID on that. It's a, it's a safe ID, which is basically a string of numbers that, that can't be reverse engineered. That that is then encrypted and that's put into the, to the marketplace.
And that's what DSPs can look at the bit to. So what happens is the publisher then is able to get the sort of economic benefits of having a identity on their webpage or on their piece of inventory that it, that enables. So, you know, think of there's all the advertisers that have. Th that, that enables the advertisers to bid more on that inventory, just because now they know a little bit more about that person through the, that currency, that common currency, and that helps them get a higher, what we call a CPM, which is a higher fee on that advertising.
Steve Hamm: Yeah, I get that. Now that's
Bill Michels: Okay. That makes sense.
Steve Hamm: Yeah, yeah, [00:26:00] absolutely. Yeah.
Bill Michels: economics of the.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. Yeah, that's good. I'm glad that's happening. Uh, for all of our privacy sake now. Um, so snowflake, I mean, a few years into, it looks like you have several applications going, where do you see the relationship going from here?
Bill Michels: I think we'll see, I think we'll see a great expansion around the data sharing aspect of it. So it's still, it's gone well, but it's still very early for us. So we want to enable more advertisers, more publishers to sort of share their data, uh, through, uh, through stiff. That allows us to, you know, in a way, like we have a great product, we have have a platform that enables targeting and it really had real time decisioning.
We want to make sure that advertisers can, can take those results and sort of see how well it's performing. And I think I see snowflake as a great means by which to do that. [00:27:00] So you could think of it. Yeah, the transaction data, maybe that maybe retailers are pushing it to still play that this is a new path that allows them to say, look, my advertising on the trade desk is working.
And because I can do this through non not data sharing, I, I feel good about the, about these results. And I feel good about doing it in a privacy safe.
Steve Hamm: Yeah.
Bill Michels: It's a lot of expansion on yeah. On a data sharing. And then the UID has been fantastic for us. I think we're early here too. We're just starting to work with some, some of your publishers and advertiser clients to, to get them to start sort of adding this, this new field, this new attribute to, uh, their data sets and that's, that's another, that's been great.
Steve Hamm: No, that's good. So bill, where do you see the ed tech technology is going in the next year or so?
Bill Michels: Right. It's who's done. We talked about the speed of which things change. So I, that, that is not slowing down. It's [00:28:00] not, it's, it's accelerating. Uh, we hear more and more from our clients that they will be spending more and more on programmatic and that they, we spend more and more of their dollars onto the opening. W one thing also is that the channels by which of the inventory that's accessible through, through ad tech or, or programmatic is continues to evolve and continues to get of higher quality. We did a panel last week with the chief marketing officers of several sort of automotive, CPG, other beverage companies.
Uh, they all agree that the majority, if not all of their TV budget was going to be transacted digitally in the next two to three years. So we, we, we see CTV as a, continuing to be a massive driver of the adoption of, of ad tech. So, so, so in a way we we've said it, uh, French or trade desk has said this before, is that everything we've done?
In display and mobile, it's sort of been a dress rehearsal for getting ready for this for CTV. And I think we're starting to see that payoff, [00:29:00] like this is some of the best ad inventory that's ever been put forward and to be able to transact on it with data-driven decisioning is, uh, is the first time, uh, we're doing it at scale and that'll continue to drive fantastic results for, for clients that also continue to drive great, uh, monetization for publishers.
Steve Hamm: Now.
Bill Michels: thing.
Steve Hamm: Okay, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, I, I, I think I'm hearing, maybe reading between the lines that you think that the demand side platform model is gaining market share on the walled garden model. Is that, is that happening? Are you predicting that will happen or?
Bill Michels: I think exactly. So I think over time, it like walls come down, like economic forces went out. Uh, if, if we are, if we have access to data, we're pulling out the best, you know, w we are building the best results for those publishers and the best results for the clients. I think eventually you see walls to cave because, uh, economic forces [00:30:00] are strong.
So it it'll take a while. And this is, this will be going on for years and years, but I think. That is the longer-term trend. That if, if you are a publisher, you have access to inventory, you would be better off enabling lots of different platforms to access at lots of different DSPs. You could, Y Y Y restricted to just your own advertising tool, let others participate.
And if, uh, let's see who can perform the best for the advertiser, I can give you the publisher, the best economics.
Steve Hamm: Yeah, I hope. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, we don't like monopolies we, so
Bill Michels: not great for that, but great for the consumer. It's not great for innovation. So yeah, I agree. I, I think the world is better with lots of options and the open internet is a, you know, that, that hopefully that plays out on the open internet. We don't want just three websites.
Steve Hamm: Now, before I interrupted you, you were going on to a second point, kind of a hot trend [00:31:00] in the next year. Yeah.
Bill Michels: Yeah, the other is, I think those that are watch, uh, you know, return on ad tech is, is identity continues to be a massive area of investment focus. So how we think about things. So, uh, as a little background, as a third-party cookie is, is eventually going away. Uh, this is the. Sort of the third-party identifier and in Chrome.
So it's already got in safari and Firefox Chrome is the last of the big browsers that it's present in. Uh, Google was going to put it a deprecated sooner. They've extended that maybe two years, but eventually it will go away. So I think what we're going to, another sort of thing we'll see over the next couple of years is that that more and more publishers will ask for a login.
So this is part of that value exchange we were talking about or. So it's, it's, you know, they've not had to ask for that because they're able to drop this cookie, this little piece of code on your browser to understand a little bit more about who you are, uh, [00:32:00] when that goes away, they're gonna, they're gonna ask for that login.
It could be over, you know, so, so asking an email to access a site will become more and more of our user experience. So we'll have to have. Uh, and this is where unified ID comes in. It's a, it's a strong currency. It's a backbone to enable that there could be and will be other identifiers too. I think we're, we're excited for that.
This is sort of an industry wide initiative and all these other ideas can get integrate or be in what we call interactable with the ID too. So the, the, the. The sort of, I guess the, our view there is that there'll be more of these value exchanges. There will be more, uh, identity in better that gives consumers, privacy and control than cookies have done.
They haven't done a great job of that on those, on that inventory. But there'll always, there'll be, you know, there'll be always be a portion, a large portion of the internet that is not locked in there. Just some websites and some experiences that just [00:33:00] are not sort of don't lend themselves to being logged in.
If check a quick support score, or I don't know, you do a quick search and you get an answer. You're not going to like me and just to get it. And that's completely fine. There's lots of other technologies and things that will be used to. Uh, death to inform how we value that, that piece of inventory. And it could be things like extrapolating out the locked-in portion, there things like contextual data as publisher data, all those will be leveraged as well to help inform them.
Um, but yeah, I, you know, I see that, you know, that's going to be a big piece of how things play out in the next year.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. That's interesting. So that's kind of a short-term view. Hey, I'm going to ask you to put on your visionary cap here for a minute. Kind of look ahead five years or more. What are the major changes in data management and analytics that you see coming that could really transform business or even society?
Bill Michels: Right. Okay. Good one. So. [00:34:00] You know, I see ad tech w will, will continue to play even probably more of a significant role in keeping the internet free and open and not just rolled up within a few walled gardens. Uh, I think the industry will begin to appreciate this more and more how important it is. Things like having, uh, keeping things open and accessible and not having sort of concentration of power.
And if, if the industry is. Continues to, uh, work together and collaborate and solve for some of the privacy and interoperability questions. I think that's going to be a, uh, you know, many years a great service that will sort of provide for society that will give users lots of choices and whether that's news and entertainment.
How they consume their media, uh, will be, uh, you know, will not be constrained or restricted to just a few places.
Steve Hamm: That's
Bill Michels: The other thing is I will continue to see and stuff like certainly is a big piece of [00:35:00] this is that how data sharing and privacy will, will continue to play an important role. I think there'll be a lot more, a lot more advances.
Uh, I, there there's a trend with things moving towards the client for some of that, some of that data processing and some of the data analysis. So some of the mobile phones are starting to do that, where they push out to the phone, some of that analysis to understand about the user. So the right advertising and interest based advertising decisions can be made.
But maybe the details about the consumer stayed on the phone. It never left.
Steve Hamm: that's interesting. That's a great idea. So is it kind of a new wrinkle of edge computing,
Bill Michels: Exactly. Exactly. And it could happen in the browser too. Right? So you could, you could think of it the same way and that this is gonna require rethinking around how things like the bidded marketplace could happen. Maybe there's elements of it that happened actually on the phone or they happen in the browser or on more and more so on the TV or some that did that.
Resides there, but doesn't have to. And so the consumer is safe, but one of the [00:36:00] publishers still gets the benefits of that economics and the advertiser can also get really great return on their spend by is there, you know, leveraging smart data. So I that'll be really interesting to see how it plays out there's many more years.
And then the other is it's related and is also multi-party computation, which is how different data can be shared across companies without it moving. Right. That's obviously. One of the big tenants as I saw it was, I understand for still Blake. And I think you'll get to, you played a big role there. And I think that there'll be some more standards and stuff around that.
You'll probably see more of that with, um, you know, how advertising not only the targeting, but also the measurement and, and, and how we sort of do the analytics of how it's performing is done as well.
Steve Hamm: So, so we always like to finish with a, on a lighter note, a more personal note, and I understand you're a big reader and you know, I've been told and I'm a book author. So this hurts my feelings, that books are going out of style. So I'm glad to see the they're not going out of style [00:37:00] with you.
Bill Michels: Uh, yes, I try to, I don't, I don't have as much time as I'd like, but I, I try to read at least a little bit or some every day. So, uh, you know, I think it's a good habit. And, uh, you know, I try to, I kind of go back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, depending on, uh, oh, maybe I have a couple of going at a time, but.
So, yeah, it's a cigarette habit to be in, try to get my kids to do it. Not necessarily successful at that quite yet. It'd be with my daughter, not with my boys yet, but yeah, it's, it's a happy to sort of give a couple of recommendations of some, some cool stuff I've been reading lately. One of those I, as, uh, is, is sort of like, eh, I guess I'm not a big Saifai reader, but this was the first one had read in a while.
It's called the three body problem, which is I haven't read Saifai since, almost like a long time since I was a kid, maybe, but it's actually a translation from a Chinese Saifai book. Uh it's it's a three book series [00:38:00] about, ah, it's going to sound so. But it's, it's an alienated patient. Yeah. We we is happening, we know is happening, but it's going to take them that give them too much away here, but it's, it's going to take them 400 years to get here.
Uh, but we're communicating with them and had, how does that play out? What, how do we start preparing for this, this eventual? Battle. Uh, and it's actually a lot of the science and stuff about how we communicate about them, how we prepare for them prepare for this, how we like a lot of this, the psychological effects on people that are realizing that, uh, well, it may not be me.
That's fighting this battle, but like some generation of me, maybe
Steve Hamm: Hey, you know, this sounds like climate change. Doesn't it though. I mean, we don't have, we don't have 400 years notice. We have, like, we gotta, like, we have about four years to do something about it. Hey, you know, I'm going to do something. I'm going to do something very self-serving right now, which is so I just published a book called the [00:39:00] pivot is called the pivot, addressing global problems through rope local action.
And it's about addressing climate change. So he would, you'd win a lot of points with me. If you added this to your, to your book package,
Bill Michels: Um, I'm searching for it now.
Steve Hamm: Oh, instantaneous gratification. I love that. I love that. Hey, you know, this is, this has been a great conversation, bill. I really enjoyed, I, I feel like you really got into some of the detail, uh, for people who are familiar with that tech to see where the technology is going. But I also feel like it was almost like a primmer in ed tech, uh, for, for people who aren't in the business and just hearing about how fast things have to happen, you know, like zero latency and.
You know, just one last thought is, you know, I forgot who the guy was, but it was some retailer around 1900 said the problem with marketing is that half of your money is wasted. You just don't know which half. Well, hopefully the ad tech business [00:40:00] is really putting that one to rest. I mean, if not already in the near future.
So that's kind of an encouraging thought.
Bill Michels: Yes. Yeah. And it, uh, thanks. Uh, that is, uh, is a waste of a call. And I used to know wonder man, or it's a retailer as a
Steve Hamm: It was, I think it was like on a Chicago. Was it Marshall field? Something like that.
Bill Michels: something like that. Yeah. I should know that I did
Steve Hamm: Or Joe always John wanna make her out of Philly. That's
Bill Michels: it was a w I, there was a w uh, yeah. And the other thing is thinking of it is like, it's a great service for the world.
I mean, like, Uh, PR uh, allocating funds and the economics to publishers, and that, that create news, that created content that create entertainment. Podcasts is a great service to give, you know, we, can't all, we know we can't all pay for all of our media. Uh, and I think it's, uh, it's great to see that, um, you know, allocating it where in privacy safe ways is a, is a good service from products to build.
Steve Hamm: All right. [00:41:00] Well, that's good. Good note to end on. Thank you so much, bill.
Bill Michels: Thank you. Thanks, Steve. Really enjoyed it.