Watch Machine Zone’s CEO freak out a room of media people — full interview Code/Media 2016

Gabe can I embarrass you for a second maybe you won't be embarrassed it's great that you're here but I think you were most excited last night about about getting an autograph it's like Joan from Spike Jonze do you want to tell me what what you had Spike Jonze autograph I had him autographed a VHS of Mouse which is the most important skateboard video 1990s in the 1990s sure explain what a VHS yeah all right it was awesome he had a Sharpie had a sharpie and every who tapes in a bag I watched that thing a thousand times they'd be so happy that did you get the autograph lutely awesome um so let's explain who you are to this crowd because I think a lot of them may not know machines own they may know they may know the game but they may not know what what it is that you do so machines owns a real time technology company but what we're famous for is for game of war and now a mobile strike these are the casual mobile free-to-play game they're hardcore mobile free-to-play games yes uh and and if you don't do those things you might still be familiar with what you do because you advertise a lot on in addition to the phone tell them we are a very large-scale buyer on mobile and television yes mobile teller so last year you had ads with Kate Upton Kate Upton Conor McGregor moving for I Caroline Carey Arnold Schwarzenegger yes the the Arnold Schwarzenegger added everyone saw on television for the last couple months that's you yes okay we're gonna do a video but then we realized the guys have all seen that ad I suit there one seen the ad we've seen almost Watson tiger on television no no one is seen no one's seen it we still some buy more so explain first of all how you got into gaming because this is not your first first-run I think I started in the game industry at Atari there real Atari back in Milpitas California in 1999 and I worked in the coin op industry for eight years before I got into actual arcane of Arcadia and got into the free-to-play industry in 2007 and and again we'll just level set for people here free-to-play games mean what free-to-play games are games that you can download for free and play until you choose to make it an app purchase right so and this is a model that was popular in Asia didn't show up in the US until recently - around 2007 yes for a while so if you wanted to buy a game for even further an iPhone right you paid money for you gave wrote Rovi Rovio 2 bucks to buy and yes burns yes and that switched over but I want to back up again so how did you didn't just start at Atari right you did some interesting stuff in between Atari and went Atari and I my first company I made a game for the US military called America's army i ported their PC game to the arcade she made an arcade game for the military yes would you learn working for the military they care a lot about simulation yeah yeah means what they build a lot of interesting they were building a lot of really interesting simulation technology for running different kind of scenarios at the time so let's move up to machines own a game of war I always get the name wrong it's game of war voyage yes that's us : in there it's tough for me to remember but people would play it that was not your first game machine zone right now first game was I mob which was January 2009 it was the first free-to-play game on iOS so prior to that if you wanted to play a game on the iPhone you paid money to play it generally what was the first game worried we were selling and app purchases essentially in kind of a about a year before and our purchases were enabled but we were selling paid apps to unlock content in the free day right the idea is the game is free you play it eventually gets frustrating enough that you want to sort of move past a level and we give you some money no more like you play it for two to four weeks and you're probably playing for three hours a day so you make a decision that it's worth spending money on and it's a sort of classic freemium business right where you're converting a low single-digit percent of the people yet everything everyone else plays for free most people play for free yes so that's a big giant hit that game came of or sprit eBay yeah can you give us a sense of scale well it's the largest MMO I think it's the largest MMO in the world translate MMO for this multiplayer online game it's a it's the largest real-time game on on mobile it's probably the largest real-time game in the world actually so so you have a giant hit game this is sort of the the Holy Grail and there are a few people in the gaming world who have created a giant hit games sure and there is a long now history of people saying well we're going to do more than this we've reached Angry Birds candy crush everyone sort of stops at one game maybe they get to a second game having one hit game can make you an enormous amount of money right you could never make another game again and continue to make a lot of money but you guys are trying to make more games so how are you thinking about avoiding the pitfalls at other gaming company mobile strikes already at top 5 it's number 4 on Android writer game yeah number 4 on Android right now number 5 6 on iOS so we did it twice so how are you thinking about getting it so you just we nail that we did a second game how did you do that what do you think you're doing differently than your peers are well for the player experience we we really care about player two player interactions so it's from a Content perspective I don't believe I'm creative enough to come up with something that everybody will love so I create scenarios for people to play with each other and whatever they do with each other is far more interesting than anything I can come up with so tomorrow so yeah we we monetize social networking better than anybody else in the world by far but it's essentially a highly structured chatroom right so and again did you reach that so you figured that out with the first game yet back in 2009 yes and now you think all right we can just replicate this with the future games we've done it 13 times yeah but there's only one other big hit all right well game of war was our first the other ones were all top grossing games it was just that the market changed a lot in 2012-2013 what changed got a lot bigger well a lot bigger well distribution Facebook came online YouTube came online a lot of distribution channels came online that weren't available before so before today because Facebook was around before 2000 doing an app they weren't doing in app sorry app installs okay so what's this is an important part of this business for these people to understand yeah install our app install ads on Facebook or hundreds of other channels you essentially pay cost per install right so you're paying Facebook every time someone downloads that game if Facebook deserves the the payment yes if they're attributed towards Facebook yes right that's a whole other subgenres but the broad idea is you can it's you found this very effective way of marketing specifically to install an app it's been a big booming business for Facebook primarily but I think other folks as well it's a big booming business period mobile media has kind of converged on app installs because for many reasons but that that seems to be where it's going to be for a while there there was there's an open question about sort of how big that app install business what percent that app install business is for Facebook who's going to win like do is most of your app install advertising on Facebook no no we work on 300 different channels so in Facebook's not the biggest percentage of those know it's distributed evenly it's pretty even yeah and that's on that's on purpose but yes it's it's pretty even yeah I have to twitter twitter said in their last 10 q that the app install has a decline for them any idea what's going on there well Twitter's going through a lot of different things right now but I think that they probably just need to refocus their engineering efforts on it they they definitely have some catching up to do when it comes to targeting and things like that but their plea they reach enough people for that to be a worthwhile place you know we we are a large advertiser on Twitter yes so so app install ads come on in 2012 2013 they sort of supercharged that one particular game related to per charge all of your games well it just it so mobile get mobile gaming is the most frictionless business that the world's ever seen no nobody's ever seen anything like this you've got three billion devices I can put a billboard up on the side of a freeway you can or let's say the side of the street you can take out your phone out of your pocket you can go to the app one of two app stores you know it's either the Google Play Store or the Apple iOS store you can download the app and you can start playing and potentially maybe if you like the game you can spend money on it all within 120 seconds you can't distribute can't sell water that efficiently you need water to live I have to distribute water this is all instantaneous worldwide instant distribution with potential instant engagement and instant monetization that sounds awesome did you know that was coming or did that was at a happy surprise that was no accident no it was a happy surprise it but it's it's the potential so why you see machines own so much why you see it on TV so much why you see it so much when you're online is because the potential is literally the whole world the business is the whole world everybody will download a free game at some point it's a free game so our goal is how do you how do you get it to everybody that's that's it's really really tough so media buying has become really important to us and during kind of here we've been hearing some shocking comments to be honest from the platform owners over the course of this conference so far about what they think about media and where it's going really kind of just really bizarre statements around how I want to create the next gen media platform but I want to get away from programmatic buying and I want to bring back the 1950s model of a thick CPM on my digital content it's this it's trying to bring television style advertising to digital trackable media and it frankly doesn't make any sense let's unpack that so so you're saying programmatic a robot technology driven ad placement and purchasing that's not only the future that's now and we're not going back we're not going back now that only work for for what you do for this an awesome awesome TV business so what's the des marketing I think we could consider ourselves experts in buying at this point and there hasn't been any representation on the stage from a buyer there's a lot of people selling things and there's a lot of questions around well how are you going to make more money and they sell you a it's not an accident be heavier Yeah right how are we going to make more money well we're going to raise prices and then maybe another weird comment last night about how we're going to get some ad tech we're just going to add some the there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet means for media companies it means that we're very quickly getting to a point where we can value your eyeballs we're not going to just talk about how many you have anymore that's gone forget it no one's going to give you money because you have eyeballs we want to know if they're real because we know that there's a lot of fake eyeballs there's a lot of fraud right we want to know if it performs when we buy it we want to know what the effects are we want to know if we can buy more so price discovery and value discovery is happening so again your for you guys it's not simple but it seems like it's simpler than say someone selling a car or someone selling a movie you said this is the thing that you could ask us they would buy that's because in a market itself is perverse the the media publishers can't get an engineer to work for them they can't do it no engineer wants to work at a media publishing there's a couple there's a couple help letter I'm sorry they want to build shut they want to go work for you on musk and go live on Mars they want they go to school just killing time it but they look they go to school really great engineers go to school to build awesome things that the world has seen before it's very difficult to get an engineer to work on AD technology it's really really difficult so but they're working for you we're a real-time company so the the the publishers are kind of dipping their toe in the water in digital and they're only doing it halfway and they're getting really scared by it they're like I don't know what's happening I'm not making the kind of money I should I make more money on TV so let's just go back to TV let's just pretend that TV is going to be the future the agency's engineers don't want to work for agencies either so agencies are also that well we'll get you the best buys we're going to help you accept their multiples on their evaluation or 0.81 X for an agency for a buyer so the board is screaming at the CEO saying what are you doing we need more salespeople we need to get more sales because you're only earth what your sales are if you make a billion dollars in sales you're worth a billion dollars cash so go hire more salespeople salespeople there's no engineering working at these places so salespeople all want to take the most money away from you as possible cuz they're getting 20% so they're saying how do I get how do I get the buyer to spend more who cares whether it actually works for them so let's be clear when you guys are buying your ads you're not going through agencies now given your dis you can't you're not a friend you can't you can't go to them because they're not incentivized to do the right thing they're incentivized to spend the most money possible the publisher who is incentivized to not quantify their audience and the agencies and the publishers work together in that and the buyers and if there's any buyers in the audience they'll all agree buyers are universally unhappy talk to any buyer every buyer is unhappy with the market because because there's a there's a huge there's a push to avoid quantifying their media they want to actively avoid pricing their media they want to set prices out of thin air and say I have eyeballs and the buyers digital digital brakes that all down because they'll trackable you don't need to do that anymore and so but the buyers and here's the problem the buyers themselves the people with the money the people with the businesses and what drives me crazy about about this particularly is that the media companies typically the publishers typically don't have what I would call a real business the users that use their their their media don't want to pay them anything they're actively trying to avoid premiums that's the classic answer they're giving them their attend church well okay they're giving their attention but they're trying to get it for free period all right they want everything for free so the meet the media publisher depends on someone else who has a real business who actually makes money to give them money make me feel very nervous it sure because I work at a media guy yeah well you Japan you depend you depend on people who actually have something people want to pay for to give you money so they'll then you can have a business right I will point out many people here paid no that's I I and this is a great format to do that right to monetize but the digital media okay the buyers the buyers don't have the proper insights so if you talk to anybody who does any buying they're tired of fraud they're tired I mean some of the largest some of the largest publisher networks in the world I won't name names you can't even get country data from them and these are extremely large public companies where you say I want to buy an install front but let me go back and I want to finish with this I got the I want to fish this is super important it's really important because I think what we're seeing what what why media is kind of consolidating or maybe even collapsing in on itself is that there's a denial on what their business really is and what the true value of what their business is and they're doing everything possible to avoid real value real value measurement of what they do they don't want it and you heard it last night like we don't like the quote was I'm getting away from programmatic advertising to go native non skippable ads okay no one's going to buy that why why would anybody buy that when I can go to another Network get real measurement I can find out whether it worked or not and I can rebuy it it's get why would I go buy things like that so there's there but the the reason why all this is broken there's a final piece that the publishers don't want anybody to quantify anything the agencies just want the most money possible because they're multiples are terrible and the buyers there's nobody building software for the buyers so if you say I want to go out and do a sophisticated large-scale marketing campaign there's no help for you so the ad technology that helps the buyers is really poor again you're going to make me go backstage and cry and we'll just have to cut the you know one no it's no it's if it's the truth because I am a large-scale buyer I know what I'm talking about right but but here's the finish there is what's going to happen what's going to happen in this scenario is that buyers are going to become more sophisticated whether everybody likes it or not it's inevitable and everything's going to get repriced may I ask you a question yes you have this product that you said is this awesome product works great on the phone you can you can see the ad you can buy it I can start paying you within seconds lots of things don't work that way I can't go buy toilet paper and media as a matter everything at media will be quantified period so even though it is going to be there will be a leap from the product you've made which monetizes immediately to everything up the chain and you'll be able to track it at some point and demand value for this absolute hasn't happened yet just because everyone's lazy everyone hasn't happened because well it hasn't happened the look the largest the second largest company in the world is a performance marketing company Google Facebook is 300 billion dollars because their performance marketing company they don't want to say that but they are I mean the people who give them money buy it because its performance marketing yet media is actively avoiding performance marketing and they're wondering why their values are shrinking but for free it sprays clear spires right there they they don't want to say a lot of their direct marketing company their aspiration is we want we want to be selling Toyota ads we want to be moving up to brand so let's talk about that and there's there's a reason why the publishers want to work with brands and it's frankly because the brands are very unsophisticated and they know it so sophisticated buyers are very painful to work with because I'll go and say I'm not anymore you're painful I have to be I have to be I have to be because people want to steal from you okay they do there's a lot of fraud they don't want to give you insights into what's going on they actively avoid it and brands aren't smart enough frankly to know that they're getting ripped off so they write big checks and they actively avoid performance marketing but yet Google makes seventy billion dollars a year because they embraced it so you figured out performance marketing you figured out how to make it work on Facebook you figured out I make it work on the phone all these digital trackable places I get it I get that story and then last year I'm watch out as well there's Kate Upton ads totally untrackable seems like it's a vanity buy seem like you're just sloshing around money why are you spending so much money on non digital formats if you digital work so well so digital is buy so first of all television while I mean I hear last night 75% of the buys are the money television is actually really small in comparison to digital it's very very small small for you small period the audience is really tiny the response rates are really bad television is is just is something I wouldn't recommend television to anybody unless you were buying as much as you could on digital because the only thing that you really get out of TV because it's overpriced they're actively I mean I can go on and like I don't want to throw anybody under the bus but there's a lot of very expensive television out there that no one watches the commercials on and the buyers who are buying it don't know it because they're not tracking it so we know it we're buying in 50 countries on TV and we track everything that we do so we're very careful about what we do like and there's limited data so how can you track what about that limit is it's not that limited there's one the biggest thing that you see out of television is that it creates a halo effect we buy more than what you see on the impressions in what you get from the Super Bowl every day okay and but before you go on TV you're not a brand there is social power you sound like you sound like a traditional media there is social power to it but the value of what you get out of it is only really captured in digital this is what we've learned so if you buy television there is a effect on digital marketing meaning that you can measure the click-through rates your prices do go down when you buy on television but if you were to buy just on television you would probably go to business so I don't know what is our own Schwarzenegger get to be in a machine zonad what does he he gets to be in the lobby what do you pay him for that a weekly decanted it doesn't work for free right he's expensive does it work for you're all about efficiency you're all about figuring out how to how to squeeze this down of the exact penny it seems like hiring an X action star with a lot of a lot of plastic surgery there's probably a more efficient way to get some pretty mean he's not on stage so I could say what why go ahead and buy his services why buy Kate Upton services why switch from Kate Upton to Mariah Carey what drives those decisions when you're hiring celebrity talent for your yes we don't just use them for television we actually look at online more than we look at what how they're going to perform on TV to be honest so can you test out Arnold Schwarzenegger versus unfortunately you know he wouldn't let you but right but there's a lot of different ways to measure these things before he gets to so you didn't just arrive at Arnold Schwarzenegger because he was available you know Arnold Schwarzenegger is an international star I mean that's what people misunderstood about Mariah Carey she's number one artists in Japan we care a lot about Japan she's huge in South America so we think about the whole world we don't just think about the United States in those those those videos that the spots are very expensive so you have to be careful we're trying to market to everybody at the same time the whole world at the same time so you you so it you have to think about how are you going to create a message that will drive a response from everyone you've built this big apparatus that allows you this very sophisticated way of purchasing digital ads you say it works now on traditional media you keeping that all for yourself or is that become something you can license out to these B'nai 'td people who are stuck in the dark ice well he say stuck it's stuck in the it's stuck in the dark ages and once again they want to be I mean they really want to be there that it's scary to them to actually have to price their eyeballs because it's a lot nicer to just say I have five million people nobody knows what that means five million we're doing what what how much what's value do they do they actually buy things when they do they click on things are they real people so there's a like I said there's a real avoidance of that because the kinds of people that enter in those businesses aren't engineers themselves okay but some of them are gonna eventually go you know Gabe guy sounded pretty smart I want some of what he has can I do think I do think that the market is dying for sophisticated buyer to appear dying like I I think that the there is a real moment in time right now where if a sophisticated buyer appeared that the whole market might get re priced very very quickly because once people have insight into how they're spending their money brand marketing will completely disappear it will go away no one will do it anymore no one will be able to justify it because it'll all be jut you mean marketing will become a justified business you will have to justify what you're doing and because it's right because the logic should be Facebook saying well we have all that ability right right that data - you're saying they don't actually want that to happen they want people to eventually be know very branded they're embracing it but everybody wants their day to be easier right so it's it's not something that that the networks or the agencies will do on their own it needs to be a buyer a buyer has to do it and that's what hasn't appeared you haven't seen a sophisticated buyer appear because they're they break all the incentives that the other guys have because they're they're the ones with the money and what's really weird about the mark what what I think is very strange about the market is that the people with the actual business that customers pay for they're the ones financing all of this stuff except they don't work together they don't have any tools no one's helping them quantify their business really there are a couple people out there but they're not very good at it to be honest so as soon as the buyers wake up and say hey wait a minute we're the guys writing all the checks men are women writing all the checks why aren't people telling us what's happening with our money so you're as soon as that happens I think all of the money will start flowing if you want to be in that business do you want to but do you want it right now you sell games we absolutely do wanna sell other things we have to be in that business to run our business right even forced to be if there was a sophisticated buyer out there we would be using them right so do you want to sell things beyond games given your knowledge given the amount of technology not at the moment no no and then what about the the technology using to run the games is that something you can sell work really so what we say real time technology company what we what we've essentially built in houses were really a high-frequency trader so we've got an incredible platform that allows us to process a lot of data extremely fast so the marketing is our marketing looks more like running in as Nasdaq than it does a traditional marketing company the game is also ran on the same technology so the technology that we've made applies to I think every industry I don't think it applies to just gaming or just marketing I think it applies to anything with scale we have to make decisions really really quickly so that's that's mainly what our engineering efforts are put against and but yeah so this sounds to me like Amazon building AWS because Amazon needed that technology to run its business why became a business we wanted to build it we wanted to build a game that the whole world could play at the same time and then we realized we needed to market to the whole world to get them all played at the same time and then we realized if you're going to spend that kind of money you're going to need to manage it and if you're going to manage it there's nothing out there that allows you to manage that kind of money so do you want to sell that technology that you built no why I think I think we're working well for Amazon show it but what the interesting thing about it is is this is what people don't see you so you ask me a really interesting questions like do you get majority of your traffic from Facebook the way that people buy they essentially make their media more expensive by just going to one channel you have to work with absolutely everybody out there to get the best price because people aren't just on Facebook just on Google just on whatever else they're using multiple apps multiple websites so you can price your media more effectively if you make everyone compete with each other but the software to make everyone compete with each other doesn't exist and the networks don't want it to exist because they all create their own lock-in through this it's complicated kind of I've got this scheme I've got that scheme Google's got something different than everybody else and it makes it very difficult for buyers to say ok once they learn Google or like oh my gosh I learned Google it took me six months now I gotta learn Facebook that's going to take me six months so once the market gets centralized around the buyer because that's who matters once it once they get centralized around the buyer the people who are spending actually spending the money to grow their businesses then I think you're going to see first you're going to see compression on margins a lot of compression on margins but then you're actually going to see growth again I need a break and I need a drink somebody want to ask Gabe a question I see I see a couple sophisticated people coming up here Kiki hey parkrun introduce yourself mark Mahaney and Gabe enjoyed those comments when you think there's going to be a repricing I assume you mean a repricing down and the magnitude of that repricing would be one you don't think that they're any good buyer tools out there in the market now and then you're painting the picture of where there's a great opportunity for a disruptive networked publishing platform to come out and great buyer tools do you think there's any of the major platforms are willing to do that now or is it going to have to be somebody completely new so the repricing will I think eventually become very dramatic it'll be big because value will be discoverable are there any tools out there yes but you have to combine 50 different things and it's not workable I'm sorry I'm looking at a third question yeah every if you run a media company you should care a lot about performance marketing the more you care about it the more money you will end up making actively avoiding it is what's hurting you the biggest marketing companies in the world are performance marketing companies for a reason so this idea that you can just put up a CPM and say I have eyeballs it's not working and that's why you're seeing so much failure because it's just not working so really there is there's an opportunity for a startup to go work to create software for those media companies so they can actually begin to monetize at a higher rate or hopefully at least monetize at the correct rate which would hopefully be higher I am more wash subtract I'm really interested what is your average cost per install and then as you look at your customer lifetime value what percentage is that we don't share either I'm sorry okay well ideally in a world where you're promoting your app what would be an ideal rough and well ideally you would know under that well it's possible but once realistic it really that that really depends on your risk tolerance so another thing that hurts buyers is this is this is what really this is thank you for bringing this up buyers would spend actually spend a lot more money if they had tools to measure risk and they don't so you can move your payback periods around to whatever you want if you understand your risk so if media companies were actively helping on performance marketing side measure value and risk companies would be willing to invest more which is why they don't want to take risk on the CPM these magically priced CPMs so the real the real answer to that is is that it depends on how much you're measuring if you're doing if you're measuring everything you can take if you can if you can tolerate a five-year break-even period because you know that it's going to happen then you can pay as much as your five-year LTV right right and then I'm not a quick question there's now a movement to a cost per subscriber versus a cost per install sure are you doing a lot of work in that space um we well I I wouldn't I don't think there's much we don't do subscriptions but their's is nice upsell or in app purchase yeah it's all in app purchases you yeah yeah so it's it's it that's the part of the course yes everybody I think so yes okay thanks question here hey Ian duty from evolution media capital up love love these businesses and and they're so quantifiable and driven by metrics but I'm curious why the public markets in the US are kind of unfavorable toward this sector do you have an opinion on kind of why that is and why some of the public companies are challenged because they haven't seen direct response businesses at this scale it's a new thing so there's not a lot of historical context around worldwide direct response there just isn't I mean where direct response was limited to television and phone numbers some businesses like it Meteor whatever got really big on Google search so those got some stability but this concept of instant worldwide measurable distribution is five years old so the public markets don't understand how to value it yet that's that's what I would say rich do you have two shirts or does this the repeat this is a this is a new shirt two days of code Media two shirts right um I just want to clarify what you said Gabe yeah I think you said nobody should be buying TV unless they've maxed out digital is that what you said TV is very expensive and that's that's what you see if you start measure if you measure it from a digital impact you would probably be really disappointed if you were just doing you know measuring tweets or whatever I mean it's it's all it's really small people or skipping commercials so when you look at TV les Moonves says everything is great you know advertising is growing things couldn't be better really for television yes and that buying digital is kind of a joke it takes too many impressions to have an impact where's the disconnect between your saying max out digital before you buy TV and Moonves saying digital sort of irrelevant TVs all that matters well how do you guys--do not television they what are ad buyers missing by like why are they still buying TV if digital works so well in your mind why are they still buying TV because they don't have the proper tools when they have the proper tools TV will will have a its own reckoning okay you need to talk to one des Millar because I pretty angry at you yeah it's okay I am absolutely fascinated by your thought that brand advertising will disappear so my question to you is how are you going to create desire as a product or service offer if you do not understand that at the very heart of advertising is creating desire so the binary might write advertising my my what I'm saying is is that those things many things that aren't currently measurable will become measurable and they I'll rephrase what I was saying the current version of brand advertising will disappear and the new version will be highly measured so it'll be hard for a board this is what I'm trying to say a board that has to allocate funds to an investment it will be hard for them to allocate tor to investments that they cannot quantify as the market becomes more quantifiable so brand advertising as we know it will suffer because boards who allocate budgets won't be able to justify the spend when they can measure ROI positive spent on other channel and it says brands brand ever doesn't creates desire can you measure that sure absolutely absolutely I mean does desire is what at the end its sales it's conversation it's a lot of other things art sure advertising is art reliant creative creative isn't art but the mesh but you can measure the effectiveness of that art absolutely and we and we do and we do we you we do but barely and it's going to get a lot better and money will move money will move in ways in more predictable ways money will move in thoughtful ways there will be a lot less there'll be a lot less unknown risk taking because people will be able to measure risk that and there's no other way companies can function that's just what they're going to a window is going to tackle you if that's okay right one last question sure um my name is Brian Georgie from operative um I'm so appreciative of the Kate Upton commercials that I have to start arguing with you Jerry it's not even so much an argument just in terms of I think you probably have a roomful of publishers here yeah that collectively are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tech stacks in order to prove to you the buyer that they have an audience that they have a specific audience that that specific audience is behaving in a specific way way more than they ever spent before on radio TV newspaper and thing else combined so I guess where I'm taking exception is with your characterization that there's some kind of collusion between the publishers and the agencies in order to defer that affair because it's not standpoint and I'm not even there anymore it's weak the agencies in you are trying to screw the publishers for it so I understand that at the end of the day we write the check right so we're not we have to pay right you're trying to justify spend when you when you spend money so you say I'm going to spend money on this all the technology so when machine zone comes around they'll feel justified about spending money and they'll want to spend more right the problem is and this is this is actually the issue on the technology side for the people helping pub like the networks of the buyers they themselves usually 99.999% of the time aren't buyers and this is actually the biggest problem so a lot of the people making quote/unquote ad tech don't actually spend any money so they don't know what a spender someone who spends money really needs so there's so there's that Agrotech is built really that ad tech is built only to continue to follow the ever-changing metrics by which the publishers are held accountable which seem to change every three to six months yes so it's hard to pin anything down from a publisher's perspective right what are we now going to be asked to be accountable for next every night oh I'm getting that everything under the Sun but that we're once again it's the it's the customer right the customer is the is the person buying the media so they're going to ask for the Sun because they're gonna be able to get it right as you're writing a check that's your writing the chart we could keep this going I imagine many people want to talk to Gabe beforehand was saying I'm a little nervous about this I'm not sure how it's going to go that's obviously willing to talk to you there's coffee outside what anybody who buys media in this room agrees with carry this conversation outside we're going to come back here at 11:00 Tony Hales also going to talk about data from sharpie it's going to be awesome thank you thanks Gabe thank you

Channel: Recode

Views: 88,549

Keywords: machine zone, gabe leydon, kate upton commercials, arnold schwarzenegger, game commercials, best game commercials, annoying commercials, recode, re/code, code media, code media 2016, media people interviews, peter kafka interviews

Id: oXBqzpExvrk

Length: 39min 39sec (2379 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2016