Pod Insights Summation with Auren Hoffman Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise - building the operating system for advertising About this episode Bill Wise is the CEO and co-founder of Mediaocean, an adtech platform that processes over $200 billion in global media spend annually. In this episode of World of DaaS, Bill and Auren discuss: The hidden plumbing of global advertisingMeasurement monopolies in adtechThe transition from linear TV to CTVCultural integration in tech acquisitions Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @worldofdaas. ...
Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Hello, fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdaas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Bill Wise. Bill is the co-founder and CEO of Media Ocean, the advertising technology platform that powers over a quarter of all global media spent. Prior to Media Ocean, Bill held leadership roles at other ad tech companies, including DoubleClick and Right Media. Bill, welcome to World of DAS. Orin, thanks so much for having me. I always love intros because it makes me
0:46 Speaker 00 sound so much better and more interesting than I think I really am. Totally. Yeah, yeah. I forgot to say all the Nobel Prizes that you won and all the other types of things. And yours was very pointed. It wasn't a long one. It was just right to the point. Keep it good. I don't talk about your amazing kids or anything else in there. Love it. Well, listen, I mean, you've been at this podcast for a long time. I finally got the invite. So I was clearly on page three. We have a whole thing now to go through the OGs of ad tech. So that's been my goal over the last couple of months is to slowly go through the OGs. You're clearly one of them, maybe the OG in ad tech. And for people who don't know, you're kind of like the system of record in the advertising world. What does that exactly mean? You're kind of the blockchain
1:31 Speaker 00 before blockchain, the ledger of all the different transactions. They didn't call me Billy Blockchain for no reason.
1:39 Speaker 00 The heritage of Media Ocean, we're more like a vertical ERP than we are an ad tech company because a lot of what we do is what an ERP would do in other industries. You're consolidating transactions. And figure out where the money goes. We're doing all the back office stuff, everything from reconciliation to bill pay to media finance, integration to whatever your financial system is, payments to vendors, et cetera, et cetera. Reconciling APAR. And so all that back office stuff is what kind of our agency system business was. We saw this one Venn diagram, which was a Harvard Business Study that said, hey, in most industries, there's a system of record, a system of engagement, a system of intelligence.
2:22 Speaker 00 And the goal is if you can be all three, that's the pinnacle of a technology company. So we were kind of the system of record. What's an example of another industry where there's somebody who's all three? Well, all three is nearly impossible and there's inherent conflict of interest of being all three. That being said, big tech is all three for their stuff. And actually, what you want as an independent participant in the ecosystem is to actually pick leading candidates for each of those and then say, hey, it's okay to have my system of record and system of engagement be the same company because that drives workflow efficiency. But if you actually have your system of record and your system of intelligence crossover,
3:03 Speaker 00 and this is the case of Google, and you're an ad agency, if you use Google for both of those, they will absolutely disintermediate you because they'll gain all the intelligence and use that to drive system of record directly to advertisers or publishers, whatever. And this is what the DOJ is looking at. But we also said, system of record companies are great, but they typically are like lower growers, high market share, smaller TAM. What are we going to do? And so we started acquiring ad tech companies, go from back of the house to front of the house. And we started that during the pandemic. That was like Flash Talking, some of these other acquisitions you made. Yeah, 4C, then Flash Talking, then an AI company, and then most recently Innovate, which is the largest deal.
3:47 Speaker 00 We've done that a little over half a billion dollars. In the core business, for people who don't really understand ad tech, the money flow is super complicated because there's often like 20 hops between the buyer and the seller. Walk us through that complication. I assume stock trading or something has some similar complication. Yeah, it's funny. We hired a president of technology a bunch of years ago, and he came from a company that built software for Wall Street. We've had more success hiring outside of ad tech than in ad tech for that business, for that reason. What people don't realize is in ad tech, it's like we're going to increase innovation and stability may go down, but you're willing to offset moving the needle.
4:28 Speaker 00 In the system of record business, you got to reconcile $180 billion worth of annual transactions to the penny. And if it doesn't reconcile to the penny, it's off and it's broken. So stability matters more than innovation in that business. And so for those of us who are technology enthusiasts and technologists and worked at software companies, it's hard to reconcile that pendulum. But at the end of the day, it's stable and one can argue we are this for the buy side of the advertising industry. There isn't an equivalent on the sell side and it shows. When you're talking to NBC or Google as the publisher, the fact that they don't have a standard on the sell side like we have on the buy side.
5:11 Speaker 00 And why do you need two separate standards? Why can't the standard on the sell side be the standard on the buy side? Because the money is flowing. Is there just a conflict of interest? It's an inherent conflict of interest unless you stayed completely neutral. When we look strategically at, hey, we have this near monopoly on the buy side system of record, which is fine. We're not doing optimization, decisioning, et cetera. It's fine. Our market share is fine. And we have long-term contracts and our clients are happy. So the question was, do we do the same to the sell side or do we get into the intelligence? Get into those systems of engagement, systems of intelligence.
5:49 Speaker 00 And in the end, we decided to go there and focus on the buy side and be kind of an independent technology provider at scale for the buy side. Because we just saw inherent conflict of interest with Google, Facebook and Amazon being both the largest sell-side players and the largest buy-side ad tech players.
6:09 Speaker 00 That's really an inherent conflict of interest. This business you build is super massive, but it really doesn't get the spotlight. Is that positioning deliberate? I always say people don't give a shit about plumbing and electricity until it's broke. And I would say we're the plumbing electricity of the advertising industry. I think as we acquired Flash Talking and now Innovate, I think now people probably know us more through those deals than they do our core business. That's your still your cash cow, I presume. That's where all of our cash flow and EBITDA comes from. But I think the other part is there's interesting things happening. Obviously, we all see, you know, what's happening with Google and antitrust.
6:49 Speaker 00 But I think marketers are waking up to say, hey, in a world of data, AI, decisioning, who are the partners I want? I also would say that for the last 20 years, it was advantageous to be a startup. Whereby you could be nimble, you can be quick, you can scratch an itch that people have. Now, I would say because Fortune 500 companies are leaning in, you need to be an awesome technology provider at scale. And Procter and Gamble, Unilever, General Motors, they don't want to work with 48 ad tech companies. But they're probably working with 400 ad tech companies today. But as they start bringing those contracts in-house and start decisioning and signing contracts, they don't want to work with 400.
7:34 Speaker 00 Through the agency, sure, or through a trade desk, sure. But as they're saying, hey, who are my partners going to be? They want to work with less than 20. There's this relationship between like agencies, brands, tech vendors. There's a lot of tension sometimes between all those guys. How has that been evolving over the last 10 years? Kind of a North Star for me as I think about the strategy going forward is we want to be neutral and independent. Obviously, the world is not black and white. It's varying shades of gray and it's getting more varying shades of gray. I talked about the supply chain earlier. When people think about complex supply chains, they think manufacturing and logistics. And they don't necessarily think of advertising, but you and I both know the advertising supply chain is,
8:19 Speaker 00 it's insane. The question is, are you truly getting the ROI for the cost you're spending? If you're spending 40 cents of every dollar of media, that means only 60 cents is being used for actual media, the actual product, and 40 cents is going to supply chain. You got to make sure that. The ROI on that really is worth it. There's this tension between the agencies and the tech vendors. You kind of work with all of them, but there's more winners and losers there. And recently, there's been lots of folks who have been on the winning end or lots of folks who've been the losing end and it's changing all the time. My point was being independent and neutral allows me to go into any room and truly understand what their business objectives are, what hurdles they have.
9:05 Speaker 00 And I can go into an agency, I can go into an end marketer, I can go to an ad tech company, I can go to NBC or someone on the supply side broadcaster, and I don't compete with any of them. Now that we're getting into ad tech, the question is, should we start competing with some of these guys? Because there is fragmentation and there is complexity of the supply chain that's probably too costly. Media Ocean, like your core business, you're number one, you're the clear market leader. Now you're buying things that are not necessarily number one in their market. Maybe they have the potential to be number one, but they're not number one. They might be number four in the market or so, lots of other companies, very, very different type of business that's out there.
9:48 Speaker 00 How do you think about how to acquire, what to acquire? The interesting part is, we ran a sell process, the single worst time to ever run a sell process. February of 2020, we ran a sell process. And obviously about five weeks later, the world was shut down with a global pandemic. Cause you're owned by private equity firms and private equity firms tend to trade businesses. We sold our company to private equity, Vista Equity in 2015. In 2020, we ran a sell process. We had to shut it down because of the pandemic, but we picked it back up a year later. And the interesting part is because we actually started the process and sent out the book. People had our numbers.
10:30 Speaker 00 Typically, companies that are selling their companies, they have these sell side models and people are always trying to figure out, all right, where's the bullshit? Because people are on the higher end of what do you think you can do? A little over a year later, we run a process again. And so people naturally go back to the book from 15 months earlier and we exceeded all our numbers in a global pandemic. I was thinking to myself, there's no better credibility than running a process, pulling it. And 15 months later, actually say, hey, you know that sell side process that you probably thought was on the optimistic end of the range? Not only did we be
11:02 Speaker 00 it in the middle of a pandemic, we exceeded it. So we ran a sale process and people were like, oh my God, you've done a great job. We like you. We like the business. It's incredibly successful. It's unique. It's high market share. We didn't get one offer. Every single meeting went well. Everyone was showering with compliments. I was like, this is unbelievable. So I ended up calling a couple of the PEs that I thought I had the best meeting with and said, I don't understand. We had a great meeting with your team. And one person summed it all down. Hey, listen, your core business is a phenomenal business and we see how Vista is going to get their three acts 20% net IRR, but we don't see how we are because you have such high market share in a pretty low TAM market.
11:46 Speaker 00 is you can't increase your market share that much.
11:49 Speaker 00 Exactly. So they were like, but if there was something you can add on to that ERP or system of record, that's a much higher TAM, even if you had smaller market share, but you can leverage the core asset. I would love to take credit for being this visionary, but it was actually failing in a sale process. And so I said, this is coming flash talking. I think if I integrate the ad server, it's a much higher TAM, da, da, da. And so we ended up selling the company by buying Flash Talk, which is a much higher TAM. It got us into creative personalization, AI, ad serving. And then now we're in this ad serving market that's monopolized by Google, who has probably 80% market share on the buy side, 98% market share on the sell side.
12:35 Speaker 00 Is it really that high? Is our market share that high? On the sell side, it's probably call it like 70%. That's mostly only because when they bought YouTube, people didn't want them to be serving ads into video and CTV. So that's where Innovate probably has 50% market share of CTV. And so that's when we said, being the distant number three player in that space, the market is kind of natural duopolies. If you're not one or two, you're just spinning your wheels to become one or two, and it requires a lot of investment. So we kind of leveraged as much as we could. And then we said, we got to go out and buy the number two player and merge Flash Talking. And of it together. That's the journey.
13:16 Speaker 00 How would you advise? I think it's a very hard decision sometimes to decide, okay, we're going to go into these other markets. And sometimes I've been a part of companies where, okay, we're going to go into this other markets hotter. We'll buy the, if you think of these companies back in the day, New Star, they were like the number four in everything. They spent, I think, four X more in acquisitions than the end up market cap of the company. Clearly was a bad strategy. It's clearly has a way of biting people in the butt sometimes. How would you advise other CEOs to like, think this or? I would say a majority of M and A fails. You got to have a level of precision on these things. And by the way, tuck ins are fine. If you can do tuck ins with your operating cash, great.
14:00 Speaker 00 But if you're going to actually go and raise debt or raise new equity, we had to do both for the end of a deal. You better make sure it's going to work. So I would say we got into the ad tech business by buying 4C and we completely screwed it up. What did you do wrong? I would ask, what did we do right? The first is going from being this legacy ERP business to like being in the dynamic ad tech business. The first thing we realized is the people were all there working for equity. Probably making a little bit below their market value in terms of cash for the dream of an exit and IPO, et cetera. Private equity doesn't give equity out to everyone. So very quickly, we lost a lot of good talent.
14:44 Speaker 00 And we didn't embrace the culture. Everything from like, what systems do you use internally? How do you compensate people? You're using Outlook and they're using Google Apps or something. The biggest one was we were a teams company. When we told them they were going to move from Slack to Teams. You would think we were just ending life as we knew it. Then we made another acquisition, flash talking, and they were like, oh, we are not moving off of Slack. And then I started tinkering around with Slack and I'm like, why are we on teams still? We should have listened. We didn't embrace the culture. We didn't understand the attributes. We also were leveraging the fact that we were this major staple in the industry and we can just add this thing on, integrate it in.
15:29 Speaker 00 And people are just going to start using it. Didn't happen. We ruined the 4C business and then we had to then reinvest back. We also fell behind the market. Markets moving so fast. We stopped developing at the pace in which the market was developing. Was this all about a cultural thing? if you kept the culture alive.
15:48 Speaker 00 It was a combination of And you ' ll appreciate this. It ' s a VC mentality versus a private equity mentality. And there ' s a reason why private equity doesn ' t buy immature subscale companies. They buy established companies who already make money, who have a position. And so trying to do a VC type acquisition in a private equity model is very difficult because there ' s constant expectations on three Xing my money and getting twenty percent annual returns. And that ' s hard to do. And when you buy an immature company that isn ' t yet at scale, that requires investment. We screwed that one up and we ' ve since fixed it, but it required a lot of energy and it also required us to completely invest back in the business. So we literally just in the middle of last year rolled out a new platform for that business and it ' s already paying dividends.
16:38 Speaker 00 We ' re now growing that business for the first time since we bought 4 C. When we bought Flash Talking, we were like, we are not going to do the same thing. We kind of did a little bit in that we were organized functionally. So we decided, hey, let ' s integrate Flash Talking functionally, but we kept all the other things. We gave more people equity. We embraced things like Slack and their cultures. And then what we realized was these are two different cultures that you can ' t force together. Yeah, you can ' t fail team reporting to your global CRO or something.
17:13 Speaker 00 Exactly. And that ' s exactly what we did. So we decoupled them and actually started running it as business units. That casted the whole thing, which is, do you want to be a branded house or a house of brands? Do you want everything to be Mediaocean? But then we were like, no, Mediaocean is this high market share, slow moving cash cow stability. So we decided to kind of be a house of brands. And so now we ' ve embraced flash talking. We ' re now embracing Innovant. We made 4 C social ads by flash talking. And now we ' re rebranding our legacy business to not be Mediaocean because that ' s going to be the parent company. The new business is Prisma. And we ' ve also decided to brand the ad tech business, Innovant. So we ' re going to change it from flash talking to Innovant.
18:00 Speaker 00 Why do that? Because Flash talking has its own good brand, Innovant has its own good brand. That Flash talking brand is probably worth at least twenty million dollars. You kind of take that away if you We went to, why do you make that decision? Well, first, Innovid went public and just the brand equity of going public and being out there. There's two parts of the market that's growing the fastest. One is retail media, the other is CTV. They are synonymous with CTV. We want to be the next generation CTV company. We hired Bain and did all sorts of stuff and in the end it spit out exactly what we knew. Don't you think ever hiring Bain is always a bad move? Does it ever work? Why do companies hire Bain is what I'm asking. So we've hired Bain multiple times. They have helped us on numerous occasions.
18:42 Speaker 00 But you have to be very prescriptive on what their scope is, what they're going after. Honestly, getting through investment committees will be very difficult without the work of Bain. That's helpful. Just to check all the boxes for the private equity firms. We now have three private equities. So we went from Vista to CBCTA and Charles Bank. So we don't have one private equity. We have three private equities, three investment committees. That you definitely need Bain. They can like wrangle it all and stuff. That's the tax. Okay. That's interesting. When we sold LiveRamp, there was two things that the parent company wants to do. The first one was to report in functionally, report into the CRO, report into the chief product officer. And I was like, oh, that's a very interesting suggestion that you made, parent company.
19:27 Speaker 00 But we'll have that under advisement and we never did it. Thank God, because LiveRamp, it ended up being a reverse takeover. It never would have happened. Exactly. Plus everyone would have left. And then the second thing they said is, oh, you have to use all of our tools. You're going to be on Outlook starting in two weeks. And I'm like, oh, that's a very interesting suggestion that you made there, CIO. We're not going to do that. They were like, well, you have to do it. I'm like, oh, it's very interesting that you suggest that and we'll take it under advisement. So we never did that either, actually. We never integrated any tool. We never even got on their sales force and just allowed us to move faster. Otherwise, you know, people We're gonna leave and you gotta protect your people.
20:09 Speaker 00 By the way, that's actually a good point to all your listeners, which is when you get acquired, there's typically a liquidity event and everyone's happy, but it's actually strong leadership. Strong leadership has to stand up for their businesses. So you as a founder and CEO, when you sold LiveRamp, you had the fortitude to be like, I know I just became pretty wealthy, but we gotta do what's best for our business, our clients, and you bought this business to get an ROI yourself. If you do these three things, you're gonna kill the company. And by the way, I had that happen with flash talking. When people sell their companies, they kind of take their eye off the ball of the business. So typically you buy the business, you're all excited and then you get the first month's results and you're like, oh, you didn't execute.
20:53 Speaker 00 And so I'll never forget I had a conversation with the CEO of Flash Talking, John Nardone. And I was like, how do you miss the first month out? We cannot have a broken business. And his response to me was like, Bill, you've already broken the business. And I was like, well, that's a little dramatic, John. In a weird way, he wasn't wrong. They have to do all these internal meetings and these integrate. If you spend all your time doing that, you can't actually be in the business. Exactly, but we did force them functionally. And then literally within probably two quarters, we said, this isn't gonna work and we course corrected. So also being able to like admit when you're wrong is critical. It's hard to do. You've also been vocal about these measurement monopolies that are out there, things about attribution.
21:39 Speaker 00 How can we make that better? If you think about brand safety and viewability, there's kind of a duopoly out there. You have double verifying IS now that Oracle and Moat are out of the business. When it comes to currency, you still kind of have a monopoly in Nielsen. And then you have all these measurement companies, like outcome based measurement companies. That's where there's massive amounts of fragmentation. And frankly, if you're like kind of a small company, I met with a company the other day who's doing incredibly well, growing 50, 60% a year. They have one client, 60% of their revenue. You can kind of get that core anchor tenant and grow a business. And in the world of AI, If you're building your business a little bit more intelligently than the incumbents,
22:20 Speaker 00 you can use that to your advantage. And so I've been mostly vocal about the duopoly of DV and IS because we kind of bought a small little company called Protected that we think is next generation technology. But it's one of those things where, hey, if it's not broken, don't fix it. DV and IS are also both great companies. I'm not disparaging them at all. They're wonderful companies. We think there's opportunity. If you're the system of record and you're the system of engagement or workflow systems, do you integrate systems of intelligence or measurement companies? Or do you become one? Our tact is primarily to take a partnership strategy there. And there's wonderful companies. I just attended this conference in the Bahamas that was run by a Tain.
23:05 Speaker 00 A Tain is a new company. You have Jonah Goodhart doing Mobian. You have Brian O'Kelly. That started with Scope 3 and he bought a new thing. So I think a lot of us are trying to figure out, there are these pockets of gold, DV and IS, at their peak, they're worth $10 billion combined. Right now, it's probably more like four or five. That's a tremendous amount of value for someone in the intermediary business. And what we've seen now is DV saying, yes, not enough just to do brand safety verification. They're going into outcomes and measurements. They've acquired two companies, CyBids and just another one last week. For us, we are partners to everyone, even if we compete with you. DV and IS are critical integrations that we have with our system of record,
23:50 Speaker 00 even though we own Protected, which competes with them. In some ways, money could flow measurement. You could say, if this outcome happens, we will pay you an additional X or we'll give you this spiff or this CTA on this or whatever it might be. And so then having that somehow integrated with the money flow system. Has some sort of power there. A hundred percent. We'll continue to look at it. Innovate did have a business called XP. They went public through a SPAC. So when they de SPACed, they bought a measurement company. And a lot of these measurement companies, as they're growing, they kind of look and feel more like managed service businesses versus true software and data companies. A lot of times you buy these companies and you're like, all right, how do we now automate it?
24:35 Speaker 00 And so it took them a couple of years to do it, but they now have a business that they call Innovate XP, which is measurement and it's a business that they provide to both sides of the coin. The sell side is roughly 50% of the revenue of that business. So in CTV, you can't just be on the buy side. You need to integrate into all the streaming devices, Hulu, Netflix, et cetera. As we start focusing more on next generation television and CTV, I think providing more solutions to both sides of the coin actually makes sense. And there's been all these other like measurement players over the years, which maybe didn't survive. If you ask me 10 years ago, maybe comScore was a well-known one.
25:17 Speaker 00 And then they kind of bought Rent Track, which seemed like a great idea, but then they had their own issues and it's been kind of mired in some things and Video Amp going after Nielsen for a while. Maybe they still will win that one, but it seems the measurement stuff has been like remarkably stable the last 15 years. The same companies from 15 years ago are still the main ones today. And by the way, just how many companies have tried to go after LiveRamp? Yeah, exactly. This is a very dynamic market where you think there would be a lot of changes. There would be, but the incumbents, they're probably on tech that's three generations ago. And they probably have other things that are hampering them to move quickly. Why are these incumbents so sticky? We took a flyer on Video Amp.
26:01 Speaker 00 We owned 10% of Video Amp about 10 years ago. We liked what they were doing. At the time, they were like a video DSP that wanted to get into measurement. Then the minute they set their eyes on currency and raised a lot of money to go after Nielsen, it just didn't make sense for us to be in that business anymore. And we ended up selling out our stake. You got like a secondary transaction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a secondary transaction. And at the time, people were talking about iSpot Video Amp. NBC was like, hey, how do we create this whole industry thing? Around beating down Nielsen. My take, and I said this publicly, was I wouldn't bet against Nielsen.
26:41 Speaker 00 There are moats, which is if you have the buy side, the sell side, and the intermediaries all agreeing on a currency. And this is actually what LiveRamp has. There's a lot of people who are like, oh, LiveRamp moved too slow, don't like the service. Companies that have incredibly high market share that have created a moat are incredibly difficult to get out. Often the company really has to screw it up. You got to figure out what is your angle. I think with Video Amp, they always said, this is a domino where I just need one of them to fall. So it was going to be NBC because they were the most vocal. And next thing you know, NBC renewed with Nielsen after years and years of kind of having their like data scape, loom escape, whatever around that stuff.
27:24 Speaker 00 Maybe it was good for NBC because maybe it was a negotiating tactic and they renewed at a better rate. A hundred percent. Because that's the problem is if you're in your startup, these big guys like NBC, they just might be playing you to get a slightly better deal on their contract. Hundred percent. We saw it recently. Video Amp had another company about to go, created a scurry. They ended up resigning with Nielsen. Companies who have created moats, very difficult to bring down. As an industry, you should be leveraging these startups to tell Nielsen. You're not the only choice, even if they are the only choice. You want to make sure that companies who have high market share continue to invest.
28:04 Speaker 00 Or else the industry won't move forward. And if the industry doesn't move forward, we all lose. We had a small, little competitor during the pandemic. And I credit them for making Mediaocean a better company. We needed that competition. Yeah, lights a fire under you. Yeah, it was great. Now they're no longer in business, but we needed it for a couple of years. Now you need a new one. It was interesting because in the credit finance world, there's FICO. They have this currency and everyone else says, oh, their algorithms aren't very good. In some ways, it doesn't matter. Literally, these loans are packaged by FICO scores. There's just no way, unless they really mess it up. And they're incredibly well run. The CEO is amazing. So they'd really have to mess it up to. Like a huge opening for somebody else.
28:47 Speaker 00 We all have like these various friend group text groups or whatever. In one of the text groups, somebody said, hey, what's everyone's FICO score? And I was like, I have no effing clue what my FICO score is. So they're like, oh, you can go to American Express, da, da, da, da, da, go look it up. Everyone was sending each other their FICO scores and I went and looked it up. Mine was like dreadfully low and I kind of don't give a shit. I have no idea what mine is either. This happened to me like seven weeks ago, eight weeks ago. It really bothered me. I basically spent two hours and now I have a really high FICO score. Just to brag to your friends? Yeah, in a way I felt just not good enough. I don't even want to say what my score was. Maybe your listeners can guess what it was. There's one guy who like prided himself on his FICO score and I couldn't get to his level.
29:32 Speaker 00 You just hacked the system or you closed down these four credit cards or whatever. I called my bank. I'm like, tell me what's driving this. And it was some car loan or da, da, da, da, da, da. And I was like, no, I paid that off. You can correct it. So I did. I spent a couple of hours of my time corrected it. That's hilarious. I have a buddy and sometimes when we go to dinner, he's like, everyone whip out your phone and let's see your Uber rating. Dude, I'm always the highest. And then he's like, whoever has the lowest Uber rating has to pay for this dinner or something like that. One time I had the lowest Uber rating, I'm like, oh, I gotta be much nicer to the Uber driver. So I'm like giving him flowers and stuff just so I can compete with this guy. The very common one. I have a very high Uber rating. I happen to be pleasant.
30:16 Speaker 00 You seem like a very talkative guy. I'm like surly in the back of my laptop. Oh, if you're on your laptop, your maximum rating is a four. You can't get a five if you're on your laptop. I'm always on my laptop in the Uber. That's my problem. There are times I'll be like, all right, let me take an Uber because I gotta do this call. And I apologize in advance and I apologize when I leave. Oh, wow. Everyone always is like, all good, brother. I get it. And then you slip on the toilet. I mean, has the world gone crazy on tipping? Oh, my gosh, it's the worst. I get a cup of coffee and it's like, how much tip do you want to leave? And I feel guilty about saying none.
30:53 Speaker 00 In Manhattan, a cup of coffee is $22 or something. So first of all, that's the problem in itself. I went the other day at a cafe. I got a cup of coffee. It was over 10 bucks. I'm like, this is insane. What is going on? Then, of course, you have to tip 25% and they watch you tip. It's not like on the slide. They're like watching you do it. Otherwise, they're going to spit in your coffee if you don't give them a good tip. Tipping has gotten out of control. That being said, the cost of living has gotten out of control and we need to pay good wages. That's true. I don't know what the answer is. The Waymos are the answer, maybe. I don't know where we are on this, but I guess everyone ran on tips will not be taxed. It's true. So I don't know where we are on that.
31:31 Speaker 00 That's a good point. They should make the price lower and then they should make the tips 100%. That would be the smart move. They should do that like the private schools too. They should just lower the tuition and then just encourage you to just donate a massive amount. There's all these ways, I guess, to tax it. Oh, it's a game of the system. I like your thinking. Yeah, the game of the system. We had Tim Vanderhook see a Vian on recently and he thought linear TV is just going through this implosion over the last few years. Where do you see that industry going? I love me some Tim Vanderhook, but he comes out with these audacious sayings or whatever. He is the best branding. You know, his ticker is DSP. I mean, that's so brilliant. What a brilliant marketer. Okay, so first off, his ticker is DSP. Innovate's ticker was CTV.
32:17 Speaker 00 Oh, that's a good ticker too. Wow. I'm going to go on record as saying terrible strategy. Oh, really? Salesforce's CRM. That's worked out pretty well for them, I think. Salesforce is the exception. You want the association to be with the name of your company and the brand. It's like, oh, it's Viant. What is it? So let me just V I A. No, it's DSP. What the hell is that? Those of us in the industry think it's cute and it's nice and it's awesome. People who are stock traders who have no idea what the company does or very limited, don't even know what a DSP is. So I would argue, and I've been thinking about this because I love CTV. When they first came out, I had the same idea. Phenomenal tickers. They're both trading below their IPO price. I go on record as saying if Meteor Ocean goes public, we're not going to do cute. We're going to do something that represents MediaOcean.
33:02 Speaker 00 The MSFT for Microsoft, that's the better strategy than software or whatever a soft could be or something like that. A hundred percent. I think Salesforce did a wonderful job being like, we're not this, we're not that. Software as a service. So they pushed the CRM. They did a great job. I think that's the exception, not the rule. Don't be cute. If you're not a 30, 40, 50 billion dollar company, don't be cute. You want name recognition, Viant. If you're not a 30, 40 billion dollar company, should you even be going public nowadays? It all depends on your investor bases. Private equity buys and sells companies for a living. They have to exit. They have other opportunities for other private buyers to buy it and other partial exits.
33:44 Speaker 00 You get to a certain level, if we're expecting MediaOcean to be worth six, eight, 10, 12 billion dollars, there's a limit on the number of companies that can pay that price. At some point, you have to go down the path of IPO. You just have no choice. It's so tough to be a lower than 10 billion market cap public company. It's just so hard. Even with small cap Nasdaq, if you're worth under a billion, you're not going to get the analyst coverage. I don't think you'll get it under five or 10 billion nowadays. It used to be like, hey, you get to a billion dollars and you're a high grower. I think you're right. Five billion is the low end of companies that should go public. It's really, really tough. But getting back to Timmy Vanderhook, people have been calling for the death of linear television for years.
34:28 Speaker 00 The inception of MediaOcean, which was the merger of DDS and MediBank, which is the venture funded company I was running. We've collectively been processing 70 billion dollars of television for 15 years now. People have been calling for the death and hey, his eyeballs shift, it's going to shift. Guess what? It hasn't. It was 70 billion 15 years ago. It's 70 billion today. The eyeballs are shifting, but the dollars are steady. Because other than search, it's the most effective form of advertising. It's sight, sound and motion. It's upper funnel. You can elicit emotion. You can drive sales. It's tonnage. It's brand marketing. It's direct marketing. But you can do that in CTV too. You don't have to do it on linear TV.
35:12 Speaker 00 I don't know anybody under the age of 65 that watches linear TV. I'm sure there are some people, but I don't know anybody. I've never met anybody. Under 865, we're Brian Leonard, TV. I did this class and I was talking about who the top actor was on primetime television last year. People start talking like Rob Lowe, Grey's Anatomy, people, this and that. No, the top actor in terms of ratings was Lamar Jackson. Oh, right. Of course. Everything is football. It's all sports. It's all football. Nobody watches the NBA. NBA is so boring. I mean, it's so boring. Football is so amazing. It's like 99 of the top 100 is football and most of it's NFL, maybe a few great college football games on there as well.
35:58 Speaker 00 Who doesn't want to watch Lamar Jackson? I mean, the guy is amazing. I love watching Lamar Jackson. Amazing. And by the way, you just moved to DC recently and. The commanders, right? Jaden Daniels. These are amazing athletes. The commanders, they had a great year. I love the NFL. I love it. But anyway, my point is 15 years ago, the quote unquote TV market was 70 billion. Today, the TV market is a quarter trillion dollars because we still have that $70 billion of linear. We have 40 billion of CTV. We have 100 billion of online video. When I said Meteor wants to be the next generation television company, naturally that 70 billion will go down, but CTV will gain it.
36:39 Speaker 00 I look at the TV market as going from 70 billion to a quarter trillion to a half a trillion to a trillion. That's inevitable. So whether it's linear or CTV, it doesn't really matter. And then the question is, how do you transact? Companies like Viant or DSP as their ticket symbol represents wants to be the lion's share of that. But the reality of it is there's going to be a lot of DSPs that matter, right? Obviously, Google has DB360, you got Trade Desk. Now, Amazon has their DSP. The Yahoo DSP is great. I think Viant's a great company. I'm a shareholder. There's going to be fragmentation there. So we believe there needs to be a system of record and there needs to be an ad server that will feed one of the five, six, eight, 10 DSPs. You mentioned your shareholder in Viant personally or how does it work? Personally.
37:24 Speaker 00 I don't even know how these things work when you're CEO of these things. I'm just a supporter of the industry. You're just. Along the industry, you're a supporter, cheerleader. I'm along the industry. Here's the deal. A few years ago, I coined the term, I always buy at the 51 week low. I am the worst public company investor. So I then took a different approach, which is I'm bullish on my industry. So I'm just going to start buying companies that are public companies that I think are good. But you buy them individually. I don't even think there's a good ETF to buy ad tech or something that I know of. Not at all. I think Terry Kawaja wanted to do something like that. Yeah, I don't know why there isn't. There should be. Yeah, there probably should be. Well, maybe you can do it. Totally. I'll do that on the side. Another thing to do. As if you don't have more things going on. Yeah.
38:09 Speaker 00 And then I said, I'm just going to buy products I love and use. I love Uber. I love Uber Eats. I love Uber. I bought Uber. I love Netflix. I bought Netflix. Because then it's fun. The minute I stopped applying intelligence to my stock buying, I actually became more successful. And here's the other thing is B to C brands have the ability to trade at way more than what they're worth. I bought a Tesla four or five years ago. Loved it. I was like, let me buy Tesla. The old me would have been like Tesla is so overvalued. They were worth more than all auto companies combined. It's stupid. They're not a tech company. They're an auto company. It's stupid. You shouldn't do it. It's irrational. But the new investor who's just like, I love Teslas. I'm going to buy Tesla stock. Their cars are amazing. Amazing.
38:53 Speaker 00 I wouldn't put 50% of your net worth in it or something, but it's fun to be along for the ride. Why not? Yeah, exactly. Remember Peter Lynch, the fidelity guy from like the eighties and nineties? He was the most famous kind of investor. That was like exactly his strategy. Find the brands you love, dig into them because they may not all be perfect, but find the ones you love. And don't get donuts or whatever it is, and then buy those stocks. Starbucks. I'm an investor in Starbucks. I love my Starbucks. I love that. Easy strategy. A decade ago, probably most of your customers were at least from the media sector were agencies. Now I'm sure that's changed. Over time, how is that evolving?
39:30 Speaker 00 So when we sold the company to Vista in 2015, the agencies were 100% of our revenue and the six holding companies were 91% of our revenue. Today, agencies are about 42% of our revenue and the holding companies are 35% of our revenue. We've done a really good job diversifying the business. Now, partially also because they are less important than they were. They're still obviously very important, but they're less central to everything than they were. I wouldn't say that. I would say marketers are leaning in and making technology and data decisions themselves. This whole in-housing is not really fingers on keyboards in-housing.
40:14 Speaker 00 Blue chip marketers care about their data and care about where their data is going and they know that's going to fuel an AI strategy, et cetera. They desperately want to control that. But agencies continue to be fingers on keyboards. They continue to ride shotgun on these decisions. They have to interoperate. And so I think it's become more complex and I think agencies have a great opportunity right now. The companies that are embracing AI identity, audiences, data, like Publicis are crushing it. Now, Omnicom, GroupM, Dentsu, very quickly following path. I think pendulums will start switching there. Interesting. All right, a few personal questions. The first, we were talking about
40:56 Speaker 00 this before we started taping. Why is Walter's Hot Dog the best hot dog in the world? You and I both have an affinity for Walter's Hot Dog. It's so good. I lived in Larchmont for two decades. Orin grew up in Larchmont. And so a lot of times, we'd have a lot of conversations about Walter's Hot Dogs, which is an establishment. Yeah, it's right across the street from the high school. So if you go to the high school, you just walk across the street, give yourself a hot dog. Single best hot dog in the world? By far. By far. It's not even close. They slice it down the middle and no one else really does that for some reason. I don't know why. It's not that hard to do, but it's the key to making the flavor go. It's an extra step in the process, but it's also the secret sauce on top of splitting the hot dog down the middle. Yeah, yeah, they have better mustard.
41:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've since moved on from Larchmont, as have you. I probably lost five pounds. Just not being near Walter's hot dogs. It's a good point. So there's pluses and minuses of Walter's hot dogs. All right. Two questions we ask all of our guests. What conspiracy theory do you believe? I was actually thinking about it last week, just about AI. I was thinking, one, there should be kind of some sort of bill of rights around AI, but it would have to be a global bill of rights. I think AI could be the greatest thing ever. It also could be a threat to humanity. And then I was thinking, God, wasn't it great back in the day when people trusted the government as opposed to today? The government would just work on shit behind closed doors, not tell anyone about it. And he actually trusted them to do that. Like the Manhattan Project or something.
42:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. So to a certain extent, I think there's a lot of conspiracies that I do believe in. And it's mostly because we had trust around institutions and governments that we no longer have today. We had competence. We had a lot more competence. And in a weird way, transparency isn't necessarily the best thing when it comes to like certain people that you trust working on something. I for one was like, obviously there's gain of function research happening at the Wuhan virus. And obviously that's where COVID started from. It's like, duh. But at some point that was a conspiracy. It started as a conspiracy. It started as a fringe belief, but now I feel like 90% of people in the US believe it. So it's no longer fringe anymore. Yeah.
43:06 Speaker 00 So because I didn't do my homework, I'm going to use that. I actually think there's a lot of conspiracies that I believe in. Totally. There's a few I have, but they might get me fired as a CEO, so I can't say them publicly. Last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice? I actually got into a little squabble of the great Professor Galloway. I'm a passionate guy and I think passion's great. He threw out a challenge, which was the only people who tell you to follow your passion are like rich, successful people. And then I started thinking about it. I didn't follow my passion. I studied accounting because I went to college right after the recession of the late eighties. And the only people getting jobs were like teachers and accountants. And so even though I hated accounting
43:50 Speaker 00 and it brought down my GPA because I wasn't very good at it, I became an accounting major because I wanted a job. Necessity breeds some invention sometimes. I became a CPA because that's what accounting manager is supposed to do. And it's a really hard professional exam. And then it took me like years to get rid of the CPA because I was an accountant. Then I joined an internet startup in the mid 90s. Nobody really had any financial acumen at the time. And so I kind of rose to prominence because I actually knew how to run a P and L and what it meant. And these media businesses where you were paying publishers 70% was never going to make money. And so I actually didn't follow my passion. I actually learned something that would get me a job. I think that's the one.
44:33 Speaker 00 Don't be in a business that you don't like either. You probably worked with good people that you enjoyed mostly and. You can be passionate about industry. You can be passionate about your clients. You can be passionate about your colleagues. If you're an IT guy, you can be passionate about the things you do in IT or engineering. You have to love what you do. I always say I spend more time with the people I work with. By the math, if you just work like nine to six, just by the function of how much sleep you need, you end up spending more time with the people you work with than you do your family. And I love my family, so I better love what I do. Yeah, absolutely. All right, this has been great. Thank you, Bill Wise, for joining us at World of DAS. I follow you at Bill Wise on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been a ton of fun. It's been great. Thanks, Arun.
45:19 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review and check out worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.
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