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[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. Today, I'm joined by James Capo. James is the CEO of Omida.

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Omida is an audience data platform used by publishers to better understand their audiences and hopefully build connections with them.

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James is himself a former publisher, and I think he has a unique point of view on this moment of time in this industry, and, and how the publish-publishers need to change, and I think they are, broadly speaking, James, changing.

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We had a breakfast yesterday with a, a great group of publishers, and, you know, I think a lot of the things that I heard there do thankfully square with some of the things that we're talking about all the time.

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And a lot of that is around making this transition from, you know, a traffic-based page view system to one in which loyalty and direct connections to the audience are paramount. This is easier said than done.

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And I thought, uh, you know, a, a great frame came from Sean Griffey, who is a board member of yours at Omida and the former CEO of Industry Dive when he talked recently about this idea of a connection economy, and I think it sort of encapsulates where we're moving to.

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The transition, however, is messy. But what does the connection economy mean to you? No, great to be here, Brian. I really appreciate obviously you having me on the show.

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Sean obviously has been incredibly successful in how he thinks about the business, but also as a, has been a longtime friend of mine in the industry, and I, I truly...

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You know, when he, when he puts stuff out there, it's, it's, it's because of thought and he's, and he really sees things slightly different.

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It's also frankly how I've, we at Omida and I've been thinking about our interactions with publishers over the years, and when I was a former publisher, it was about building this connection or this relationship with the audience.

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And I think, you know, to call your other sort of podcast in here, People Vs.

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Algorithms, that really is kind of in essence also what, what publishing has been wrestling with for many years is we have been dialing, you know, turning the dials in so many different ways to get that one percent more or two percent more and, and you know, tricks and things.

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And what we've kind of lost sight of in many, in many cases is that the best media companies are connecting with their audiences in multiple ways, in multiple fashions, building a relationship with them, building that long, that li- uh, lifetime value, and they're doing it in ways where the, the audience feels seen, they feel that they are resonating with the brand and the content.

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A-and for us and for the clients that we work with, those are the most successful ones.

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And, and we've, we've been trading sort of in this, this world of, of, well, the platforms have all the, the data, particularly the socials. Well, what are the social platforms doing? They're building connections.

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They're building that connection and that relationship with the person on the other side, whether it's someone you, you used to know from high school or a family member you haven't seen in many years.

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So what they fundamentally do isn't any different than what media should be doing or has been doing.

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We've just kind of lost ourselves in, in always trying to get that one percent more rather than taking a step back and being like, "What do we have right in front of you, and who do you wanna be as a media company from here?"

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And so that's something we work with with our, with our publishers a lot, and it's...

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And when we, we think about it, it's, it's less about transactions, and then when I mean that is like the transaction in the, in the relationship you have through the platforms you use or through the, the technology you use, and it really is building that relationship with the audience member over time.

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And that is frankly core exactly to what Omida does, and, and I appreciate Sean. You know, he and I actually didn't even talk about this.

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He put that out there, and this was something we've been-- we have always said we'd do at Omida, and I think it's important for us as an, as an industry to be thinking this way from there.

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Yeah, that really resonates 'cause I think about, you know, a lot of like models were overly dependent on optimization and, and I think that's where you're-- It's like you go right to the, the activation piece or the transaction piece versus the more fundamental piece, which is, you know, before you get to activation or, or transaction, you know, you have to have some kind of relationship with, with the audience.

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And you have to build that by getting to know them and not treating the audience as a, a monolith- Mm-hmm... 'cause there's different people have different needs.

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And you know, but I think, you know, one of the things that came up a bunch yesterday at the breakfast was, you know, the challenges of falling back on the old ways and the old models because most of these businesses, unless they had, you know, started recently, need to operate kind of both models in some ways in that you're trying to operate the old model, it's in decline, you know, but then you have to be building the new model at the same time.

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I think one of the, the quotes that stood out for me was the, the talk, it's like, oh, you know, the leadership will s- will literally in the same sentence be like, "We can't, we can't just r- be, be about traffic and page views," and then it was like, "Well, why is the traffic down?"

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[chuckles] Like just immediately. Right. And, and that's just like a human dilemma, and it's also like an organizational challenge. Is that something you end up seeing in the market? Yeah. We see that. We do.

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And I think, I think we also get very focused, and, and again, I think this is a nature of, of how media sometimes thinks, but we get very focused on one channel.

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A-and when I think of media brands and the ones that I enjoy consuming, as an audience member, I may not be engaged on their website. I may not be engaged in their newsletter. But I might go to their event.

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I might subscribe to their magazine.And I think we sometimes use traffic, right, as this sort of, again, single North Star of how we are measuring our success as a, as a media company.

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I'm not saying that doesn't drive top of funnel if we wanna get- Mm-hmm... and drive new eyeballs, but that can't be the only thing we look at as a media brand.

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Because the audience members, they don't see you necessarily as just a website or just a newsletter or just an event.

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They see you as a brand that they are, they are migrating across and they're using your, your products, and that's how we think about it, that these are individual products underneath the overarching brand, and you need to be able to meet them in those environments and where that audience is.

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And so we see clients that are focused on website traffic, website traffic, and it's like, okay, but

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is that really driving your business and are you really connecting with that audience member in an efficient, and I would say, natural way? And many times they aren't.

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The audience is like, "Man, I'm, I'm really into this piece of your product, but you're still just focusing on feeding this beast, and I'm over here telling you this is where I am." Yeah.

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And we miss that sometimes from here. Yeah. And I think sometimes that is-- I think that in some w- in some ways that's a result of these businesses like, I mean, you talk about it all the time.

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Like it's, it's, these are-- m- it's a simple business to some degree, right? We c- we overcomplicate it. Right. But like, it's, it's your value lies in your content and your audience, right?

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And- Those are the two thing media companies have, right? You've heard me say it over and over again. There's content and there's audience. That is what we have as media companies are those two assets.

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And yes, the brand matters, but there-- I can also point to hundreds of brands right now that have come up over the last 10, decade, that had no brand, and have been incredibly successful because they've built the right content and the right audience, right?

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Skift, Axios, two right at the top of my head, Puck, that are being successful where there was no brand, you know, a decade, t- 15 years ago from there. Right.

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But I think as, as publishers move to become brands, right, they have to think o- of themselves as brands, and you're gonna reach your audience and build connections with them in a variety of ways.

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You know, there's a lot of people talking about liquid content and new, like, buzzwords and terms- Right... that people can then argue about what, what they mean.

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[chuckles] Um, I'm just gonna wait until they come to some kind of, uh- Definition of it. Sure...decision. Uh, yeah. [laughs] And then, uh, then I'll sort of pay attention. Yeah.

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But, you know, but I think it's like, you know, it's, it's putting a new term on, on the same thing. Ultimately, you have to serve your audience, audiences, audience segments, basically, in a bunch of different ways.

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And you have to have, you have to have an understanding of those different segments, but they're going to-- you're gonna reach people not just through the website. Like, people get value a, a bunch of different ways.

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And I think a lot of the challenges that I see with publishers in talking to them is the business is compressed, and they have to do more things, and those things don't necessarily cohere into a single sort of overarching approach.

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Just case in point, you know, yesterday we had a, a discussion about what is, like, the North Star metric of these businesses. Mm-hmm.

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And, you know, any-- I, I, I notice, you know, s- [chuckles] that, that there was, there was no, there was very little, like, agreement on, okay, it's ARPU, oh, it's, it's, it's LTV.

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Because there's always gonna be some outliers because the models, maybe by necessity, are, you know, kind of fragmented. Yeah, and I, I do think you need to have, as a media organization,

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w- you know, and I, I don't know if we'll have video on this, Brian, but I'm doing the inverted pyramid- Yep... for those who are, who, you know, are listening on their radio, so to speak.

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But the-- When you think about that audience, I do think there is a, a metric that organizations need to follow. Now, what that metric it needs for your, for your organization is, I think, dependent, to your point.

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Is it ARPU? Is it LTV? Is it time on site? Is it page? Like, there is a p- point there. But at least acknowledge what you're doing and what you're driving towards, and how that business is funneling to that metric.

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And I think we, we sometimes, and I think we, we also talk about media, and you, you and I have talked about this as well, as this monolith at times, and it's not.

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There are flav- how a hard news organization that, you know, is really looking at what I like to call acts of God, right? Where their traffic is, is spiked by things that happen.

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How they monetize and think about their growth as an audience is gonna be very different than a pure play, let's say, B2B company that's covering the HVAC industry, right?

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Or covering things like that, how they think about it.

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And I'm not saying it has to be this ho- homogenous metric, but let's just be, be clear on what we're doing and what that, what our products are serving, what they're trying to be, and not kid ourselves that we're, we're trying to be something we're not.

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And then we can be real about what's the audience metric that actually drives the business.

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And for a hard news type publication, it might be, listen, page views drive to a subscription or a known user/newsletter subscriber. Okay, got it. For a B2B media company- Mm-hmm... it might be, you know what?

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We make $5,000 anyone, someone, someone c- comes to our event, right?

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That, that event is incredibly lucrative for us, and we are going to create an environment where those connections matter there at the event level, and let's optimize for that.

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And I, I, I think we sometimes try to conflate-Media and the business models, and not step back as organizations and say, "Okay, what-who are we and what are we good at, and what are we trying to drive to?"

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And then let's layer in the metric that follows from, from there.

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And I think that's where we get some of that, you know, as an industry we had a, you know, obviously a diverse group of folks around the table yesterday from various organizations, and I think that's why we get a little confused sometimes on there.

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Now, the underlying issues are still the same across these organizations. Great content, audiences, being able to activate them quickly, understand who they are, are the same.

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But what you're driving to sometimes the m- the by financial metric can be different from that perspective. Yeah. I mean, you, you have experience in B2B too. I mean, you guys also have B2B and, and B2C clients. Yes.

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And I've always been struck over the years that how different the conversations I would have, like, internally versus when I was talking to a, a consumer publisher. Right, yes.

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It's like they would be talking about Comscore, I'd be talking about email. Right, right. Like, I literally wouldn't look at, at our, our page views. It just simply wasn't a metric that was important.

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They would be talking about programmatic, I'd be talking about events, you know? [chuckles] Right. Like, and, and on and on. And then what I've noticed is it's kind of, like, changed. Mm.

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Like, you literally couldn't have people in from, from the two sides. You might as well y- you would need to, like, have Esperanto as, like, a common language or something.

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[laughs] But now, like, people talk, you know, similarly because a lot of consumer models are moving to look... I wouldn't say look more like B2B, but they're, they're, they're closer together.

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I don't know if you're seeing that. 100% see that, and frankly, I find it exciting. So do I- I think it's-... 'cause now we're finally talking about stuff that- Yeah. We're talking about...

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A- and that's not to, that's not to say that the, the consumer side of, of media was doing anything wrong. They were doing what they knew they, they could do, right, at the time.

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And I think B- And responding to the incentives of the system- Absolutely... in which they were operating in. Yeah, absolutely. And I think B2B has its issues too, right?

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B2B, in my opinion, has underemphasized content and editorial, and I think that's an area where you see really great B2B companies doing well. Again, I've mentioned Skift and others over the time that have...

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They've really B2B, but are create incredible content covering that industry. Yeah. And, and kudos to Rafat for having, like, a, a, just like a, a fairly decent design, which I- Yeah. Right. I think-...

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not say it's great, but I'll just say, like [laughs] it's just, just I'll take good enough. Like- Yeah. And I think my, my, you know, I think it, my joke has been about consumer and B2B, right?

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Consumer, at least from the B2B perspective, was the sexy, you know, you live in Miami, Brian. It was the sexy restaurant on the corner of the street. Ev- line out the door, everyone to get in.

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But there were, you know, 50 people in the back making one cheeseburger. And B2B was kinda the shack on the corner with one person in the back making 50 cheeseburgers, right? Yeah.

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And, and, and now if you overemphasize on design and content for the B2B side... So there's this, what I'm seeing is exactly right.

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You, you, you're seeing this sort of this, the, the wall between hardcore B2B and consumer is breaking down.

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I still think you have another kind of piece on top, which are the big sites, you know, the, the, the New York Times and the- Yeah... there, there's gonna be a scale game that is always gonna be there. But if you are...

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You know, one of our clients is Milk Street. Milk Street out of Boston. Chris Kimball, he cover, he is, has a PBS show, has a great publication covering food and, and cooking, and has products he sells.

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And it's a, it's a consumer mag, but it's niche and they're very clear on what they do, right?

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Obviously, we know Craig Fuller at Firecrown, and, you know, yachting and boating and anything that you can put gas into, Craig is really [laughs] you know, that is, uh- Kinda like Seth's- Yeah. And that's-...

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his market... No, that's his mark, you know, from there.

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And then, you know, we, we work with Fast Company and Inc, you know, brands that are, you would say are these big consumer brands, but really you think about Fast Company and Inc, who are they talking to?

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The business owner, the folks that are trying to, um, innovate in their in- in their industries.

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And if you ask Fast Company and Inc, what they really mi- you know, kind of look at is using great editorial and content to bring it to their, their Inc 5000, to really create those connections of other business owners and other entrepreneurs within their, their audience to, to drive that, that environment.

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And if you were to take those labels off those companies and throw up, you know, Air Conditioner Monthly and, and m- you know, Manure Today, which our friends in Canada actually have, Annex Business Media, The, The Manure Show, like, this, what they're doing is the same.

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It's exactly the same. A- and, and that to me is where the fun, the fun gets to be, and we can really start to create some really cool things around that. No, I definitely see.

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And particularly, you know, and we talked about this, this yesterday, you know, I, I sort of break it down to, like, you know, what you know and who you know, and many of these businesses are moving into a who you know business.

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Yeah. And, you know, before in, in consumer, like, a who you know was, was about audience targeting. It was like, okay, well, I can, I can understand more about the audience so I can target them better with, with ads.

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I can sell intenders to s- to, to some, some segment to, to advertisers or maybe package it up and, and put it on an exchange. But I feel like now it's different.

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I mean, you're, you're, you're looking to activate high value audience segments and, you know, again, just to go back to the B2B to B2 versus B2B- B2C thing is, you know, in B2B you always had these small groups of your, of your audience were dispro- d- disproportionately valuable.

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Yes. You were trying to find, you know, if you had, if you have family offices and there's only 1,200 in the United States- Right...

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and, like, if you can find the heads of 1,200 family offices and get them to take an action and ideally show up in, like, o- one place at one timeThe unbelievably valuable In-incredibly valuable.

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Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think-- and it's sometimes fun when we talk to some of our, our B2B clients and they're like, "Well, I need more left-handed nuclear engineers." Well [chuckles]

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how many of those are there, you know? Well, there's ten thousand. Okay, well how many do you have on your audience? Nine thousand. Well, you know, we're not gonna-- for, for doing pretty good there.

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But no, you're exactly right. The-- there is, there is a difference in, you know, that uh, the smaller, smaller high value approach, right?

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Versus the scale and kind of, you know, anyone, you know, men over thirty-five who live in, you know, a top ten DMA, right?

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That is a different conversation with advertisers than the, you know, targeting that specific group that has a family office and, you know, this is who we're trying to go after.

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And y- and you can't-- the underlying fundamentals are the same, but how your sales team, how your marketing team, how you measure that types of conversations i-is different.

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And I'm not gonna say you can go sell, you know, a big consumer brand. You know, you can't go to Nike and say, "Hey, I only have ten thousand buyers."

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You know, to move Nike's stock price, they need to sell millions of shoes, right? That's kind of what they do and why they buy Super Bowl commercials and things along those lines.

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But it's not to say there isn't a very high value business around consumer at-- in a smaller scale e-environment. I think there very much is, and we're starting to see that with events.

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We're starting to see some of these connections we've talked about, you know, connecting audiences together, those types of things I think are what we're seeing more on the consumer side.

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So what are the-- we talk a lot about like audience for-first strategies. What are sort of the habits of, of audience first media companies that you see?

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Yeah, I mean, number one is, you know, and I will, you know, obviously uh, I'll say this selfishly, but to kinda step back for a second here, going back to what we talked about, there's content and audience. Mm-hmm.

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And it drives me crazy a-and having been a former publisher, our-- and you're, you're an editor, uh, you're a journalist at heart, Brian. Yeah. If I had to make you log into five different CMSs

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to create your content and put that out into the ecosystem, your heads would've exploded years ago, right?

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No one on the editorial side would have ever allowed us to build an infrastructure where the product, which is the content, and I have to do this across seventeen different platforms and log into seventeen different systems in order to, A, create my content, B, activate my content, and C, distribute that content in various places.

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We've solved that.

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What I fundamentally don't understand is if you, if you believe, and I think most people listening to this show would agree, that content and audience are the two assets that make media companies valuable, why do we continue to have ten different platforms, six or seven different platforms, and I'll use the Fast Company and Inc.

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example. They have seven-- they had seven different audience platforms managing their audience. I, I just don't fundamentally understand that.

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Like, and, and that is why I have built and created Omeda the way we have- Yeah... because it, it's like what are we doing?

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And so to answer your question, and, and all, and you know, self-servingly in many ways, audience first companies, and whether they're doing it with Omeda or they're bringing it together, they are absolutely creating an environment where they have access to their audience in a- Mm-hmm...

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single solution. Now, how you do that, happy-- you know, those conversations can be had a different way. But that fundamentally is like step one. You have to have well-organized, well-structured audience data.

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Otherwise, you start to create these ideas, come up with these ideas, and you end up going into seventeen different systems, trying to pull it down, finding a great audience segment for a great new newsletter you just came up with, and then having to roll that back up into- Yeah...

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all these other platforms, right? It takes time, energy, money, and it's not efficient from there. So the fir- I think I, I think I- The first step is that Yeah, I think I know why. [both laughing] Yeah.

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I know-- and, and this is my theory, is I think the, the root cause is that a lot of these organizations don't know who they are.

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Like, I think that there is an identity crisis that is very apparent and has been for a long time in that trying to serve so many masters at the same time and having such siloed organizations- Yeah...

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has led to a confusion about what, what, what they are and what they're after. I mean, just-- and, and as far as like different systems, like I once, I'm like getting like a twitch talking remembering this.

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I finally like I-- like we couldn't even normalize data at- Right... at Digiday, and I was like, "How are we collecting all of this?"

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And I did-- I just had a, a product guy do like an audit about all the different like ways we like collected da- just like the forms. Like literally- Right... the stuff you're ingesting data with.

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There were seven different like systems being used across a like sixty person company. [chuckles] I'm like- Yeah... pretty soon we're gonna have like one system for each employee. [chuckles] Yeah.

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And it's, and it's, you know, the SAS just kind of, you know, penetrates the entire organization. I'm from Atlanta originally.

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We, you know, Kudzu, if you're from the South, goes all over the state, and you can't get it out, right? And it's like, how the hell did we get all this in here? And, and it gets expensive, and it's hard to maintain.

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So I think, one, like from a pure strategy mindset shift, it, it's, it's really, and I know we've said it so many times over the last year, years, and decades here, but it truly is putting audience at the center of your organization.

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Now, the technology can flow off of that. The other thing I think I've seen, Brian, on, on audience first organizations, there is true buy-in, which goes off my first point, at the leadership level.

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At the executive level, there is buy-in that audience- Right... development and audience management is a significant asset within this organization.

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And many times at organizations, at media companies, the audience team or the traffic team or whatever team they were called at some pointTo your point, has been cobbled together from the, oh, they were the blog team, or they're the social media team, or now they're the newsletter team, and they're all kind of this mishmash of functions that aren't aligned around audience.

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And I think you and I- Yeah... have talked about this as well. I truly believe we are getting into a moment where that chief audience officer at an organization, at a media company is needed. And it's not the CMO.

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Marketing actually might report to the CAO in that environment. But it is companies that have a true leadership focus at the executive level, at their leadership, in their ELTs around audience.

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Those companies I see being successful as well. So those two things, everything else kinda comes off of that.

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We can sit here and say, "Oh, great audience companies, they ask great questions, they do progressive profiling, and they do all these other things." Those are tactics, right? That's just...

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That's stuff that like- Right...

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that's blocking and tackling, that you should have a web form up that asks, you know, these certain questions of your audience, or you should do it over time, or you should make sure this and that. Those things.

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Like, I'm sorry, but that's tactical.

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It all starts with at the top, and it starts with these organizations having a mindset shift that we are going to focus and invest in audience because it is what we are doing and who we serve as an organization- Yeah...

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from here. And I'm not saying it's easy, obviously. No, it is not. But at the same time, like I... It...

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Look at, look at The Atlantic and look at how they've managed to be successful, like compared to, say, The Washington Post. That's- Yep... what I'll say. [chuckles] Yeah.

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And I think what it comes down to, it's not just that they have a better billionaire than [chuckles] than the Post. My better- my billionaire is better than your billionaire? Yeah. Yeah. I mean- [laughs] Right...

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just on the record, it seems like she's more dialed in. I mean, I don't know. He's, he's in Paris for Fashion Week now. Sure. He's just in St. Barts. Does this guy ever work? [laughs] But anyway, and but the...

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I, I do think, you know, when it looks at like, they made some tough calls. Like, I think people don't like w- remember, but you know, in 2020, you know, they cut 70 people out of their organization- Yeah...

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and they basically, they went away from events in a way.

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Now, they went away from events of the Washington DC type small scale events, and they said they're gonna be audience focused, and subscriptions are going to be, for them, are gonna be the core of what they do, 'cause they saw it was taking off.

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And they weren't... They were doing a lot of these like video. They had a video unit that was doing more like documentary style videos and whatnot. And they have stockpiled talent, they have been audience l- Mm-hmm...

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focused, and that business is, is profitable and doing well. A- and you know, you, you see it in the numbers. You see what the New York Times was able to manage, right? And New York Times is a unique case, right?

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But I do think that there is something there that if you can get these models to be aligned around a goal that often is, [chuckles] you know, on serving an audience, there'll be some that are gonna shuffle off to the- Sure...

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what I used to call the SEO glue factory. [laughs] But [laughs] you know- Now, now it's gonna be the, the AI chat lounge, right? [laughs] Yeah, I don't, I don't know what it is. It's, it's definitely- Yeah...

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hospice care. But like, you know- [laughs]... if you're gonna have like a growth strategy, I don't see how you're gonna survive i- in this economy without being, without being audience focused.

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No, and it goes back- I do agree with that... to what you were saying. Like, The Atlantic decided that our core metric is going to be subscriptions, right? Great. Awesome.

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Now we can optimize the audience in our content strategy to driving that. That might not work, right, for, for a B2B media company, right?

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It, it might be a different thing that you're optimizing for, for that connection, right?

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Bringing that back into this conversation a bit here, they've decided to connect with their audience the most valuable thing they can do from a both, obviously a monetary perspective, but then for that, their audience is to create incredibly good content that drives to a subscription.

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I am actually, you know, having my... I've been... I started my career at the Associated Press in broadcast.

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So I've been on the television side and a little bit on the consumer side, but most of my career on the B2B media side, and now obviously in a technology company serving the media industry.

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What is fascinating to me a little bit here too, you talked about, is like, I think it's great that The Atlantic pulled back from those events.

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I see other companies in The Atlantic sort of sphere that are trying to do events, and those are gonna be hard, right?

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I think events that do well i- in my experience are when you're bringing these buyers and sellers together in that type of environment, and that's a very B2B. I can't say you can't do the festival route.

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That's a- Yeah... that's an interesting thing. But over time, you know, you look at who's sponsoring these. You know, it's generally the large, you know, financial organizations.

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It's the JP Morgans, or it's the Deloittes of the consulting, sort of these big what I call sort of, you know, horizontal ver- vertical companies.

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So everything that everyone buys, you know, for their, their business and their life, you know, HR platforms or financial services or healthcare, right?

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I don't care who you are, that's generally what you need in your organization.

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But over time, I wonder what they see the ROI on that from there, and, and is that really what these, these organizations should be, be- Yeah... over-indexing to from that. I 100% agree. Because I see...

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You know, I'm m- most experienced in, in events obviously on the B2B side, and B2B is like, you, you simplify stuff a lot. I remember you saying one time, you say, "It's a lead generation business."

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[laughs] I was like, I'm like, "Actually, that's true. It is-" Yeah... "lead generation business." I mean, at the end of the day, that's what you're doing.

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You're matching up a buy and a sell side, and, you know, the, the sell side, it needs leads. And sometimes those- Right...

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come in the form of email addresses and name, title, and company, and a lot of times, ideally, they come i- in the form of a, a, a... I heard it called a legacy human the other day. [laughs] Legacy human. Okay.

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We're, we're onto legacy humans. So- All right. All right, all right... legacy humans are still very valuable. Yeah, the robots haven't taken over yet. Yeah. All right. And that is like, and, and that is true.

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You know, you, you, you... That's what you, that's what you optimize too. And I think- Right...

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a lot of times-W- in, when people get, like, events fever, particularly who don't have experience in it, even if they touch, like, a business area, the way they do the events i- is, in my way-- i- in my view, like, off.

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Mm-hmm. I, I'm like, you can't... Like, I, I love, I love the concept of, like, journalism and whatnot, but it needs to be a-- y- you need to, you need to know the assignment.

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I, and I, and I do think there's an-- there is, you know, a m- a model there that can work, but I just don't know if that's where these [coughs] some of these organizations should be putting all their eggs, right?

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Oh, we're getting in the-- you know, it is-- can be lucrative, but it's gonna be primarily from ticket sales. Some of these are free, right?

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We're gonna get people in the room, and they're gonna hear, you know, Hillary Clinton get interviewed by so and so. Okay, cool.

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Interesting conversation from there, but w- how does that transpire from that event for the advertiser, right? What is their-- what's the goal that you're trying to, to connect?

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And, and if the connection is I just wanna bring, you know, and, and where The Atlantic, you know, use them for example, we'll, we'll continue to, to use them.

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I could see them saying, "Hey, our subscription actually includes," and they might already do this, "a, an invite," right, "to our invite-only, members-only," right?

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You get a members-only jacket, and it's an invite-only jacket and, and, and subscription to this, you know, annual thing we do for our readers, right? And it becomes that connection.

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So now I'm like, okay, now I get why The Atlantic might do an event, because they are getting their community together, and the value for the reader is I get to get-- meet other folks within The Atlantic community, get to connect with them, and hear a really interesting talk, right?

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That I can get my head around. The part where I get a little confused on those types of brands is, like, driving these sort of, these bespoke things that are-- that I don't know if it's just who they are.

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On the B2B side, yeah, it is lead gen. It is. And I would also argue the, the, the mechanics for a subscription and for a lead gen are exactly the same. One's just paying with data, and one's just paying with dollars.

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It's just the monetization of it. And then how do you take that audience asset and then what I also like to call is kinda resell the sawdust, right?

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How do I take that audience asset, that one individual, and monetize it, which is the LTV, across multiple ways, right? An event, a subscription, a, a, a webinar.

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That's where I do think B2B has done probably a better job over the years than consumer, is really thinking about reselling that sawdust from there. Yeah. It's almost like a price curve, like an LTV curve. Yeah.

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'Cause, I mean, you're gonna have people... And, and, you know, as, again, B2B is, is-- it's normal. Like, I mean, you have people in your audience that are worth thousands and thousands of dollars, you know?

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And it's, uh, uh, you-- it's not everyone in your audience. And, you know, you, you, you can make a lot of money.

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But I think that's also true with, like, how you think about subscriptions in that sometimes subscriptions are better to be for segments of the audience that you can monetize at, at thousands of dollars.

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Like [laughs]- Absolutely. And, and I, I mean, I do think where consumer is better, and I'm not saying that one better or worse, just different, is- Yeah... as I said earlier,

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the, the editorial content is, is in my opinion generally way more of a, a better than what you get on the B2B side.

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And I do think that's where B2B lacks, and where you see organizations have done very well over the years in B2B is 'cause they've had a, an ed- they've doubled down on the editorial. Right.

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That's a piece that we as-- when you get into just a lead gen game, you sometimes overlook the editorial, and that's a, that's the Achilles heel for, for B2B. Yeah. 100%. That- Yeah... and horrific design.

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They-- horrific design. Correct. [laughs] I think I could speak. I, I generally, I believe I'm-- there's, you know, B2B produces a rogue's gallery of, of, of designs, choices. [laughs] Agreed. Agreed. I'm not sure why.

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Yeah. There's a lot of good designers out there. They're not that expensive anymore. I, I 100% agree with that. Yeah. Spend a little money. It's worth it. Let's talk about AI. We're legally obligated to. Sure. Right?

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Yeah. Um, because you have a, you have also a differentiated view on, on how this is... 'Cause I, I think a lot of publishers to me are kind of a deer in the headlights with AI, right? They- Yeah...

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they're trying to fight the, the search declines, which, you know, AI overviews are a big part of it, but also a big part of it is just Google has, has, you know, decided to take more real estate off the, off the page for themselves.

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And that-- it's their, it's their web pages. That's, you know, they get to do that. And so, you know, the question is always, like, what, what does this mean for publishers, and what should they even be building? Yeah.

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I mean, so what I ha- what I [laughs] what I don't wanna see us do as an industry is repeat the sins of the past, and unfortunately, I think we are doing that a little bit already.

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That being said, AI, you know, I, I do believe is a game changer.

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I do believe it is going to fundamentally change things for us as an industry, as least obviously for, for me and my company in terms of, of software, what we're able to do.

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But I think we also can't ex- expect, you know, publishers... I, I just don't want publishers to repeat the sort of, you know, the search bar. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. Yeah.

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Search on a website is, is terrible, right? On a, on a publishing site, excuse me. Yeah. And no one ever uses it, and if you use it, you're like, "Why the hell did I use this? This-- I shouldn't have done this.

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I'm just gonna go to Google and search-" Yes... "because that is better." Just to underline- Yeah... that people who work for the publishers do not use their own search. Right. [laughs] Right.

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And I, and I-- the, the sites I ran, the sh- the search was terrible. So what I-- we're seeing now is like, "Oh, I'm gonna put a chatbot," or, "I'm gonna be like a ChatGPT experience on my website."

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And it's like, is that really what your audience is expecting of you?

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Are they really expecting to come to your, your site and have it, you know, draft an email for you, or ask questions [chuckles] of it, or those types of things?

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And I think we need to go back to what assets does the publisher have, and what utility can the AIYou-- be used for, for your audience.

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And, you know, we were, uh, you know, talking some about this yesterday, but I think these utilities, particularly in some markets, about connecting like-minded audience members.

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So one idea that we discussed, and you and I talked about this a bit, but, you know, if I'm on entrepreneur.com and, and you know, who, who, who we know very well, and I'm a small business owner,

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and I wanna network with other entrepreneurs or small business owners [coughs] in my type of industry, can I go to that site and ask it a question, "Hey, help me find Brian."

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And Brian has opted in, "Hey, I'd love to talk to you, James, on these types of things." I think there's ways to utilize AI for a utility that isn't just the like, the functions of what we have today in ChatGPT.

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And I know we are just trying to-- everyone's experimenting with this, but I would, I would challenge our, our, our the folks in the media companies to think about the, the utility that AI can bring to your audience, and less about trying to just re-recopy what you see OpenAI doing.

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I think there-- you can use the tech in a different way. What that might, you know, come out for, I'm not sure yet, but I do worry we're just gonna kinda repeat the sins of the past- Mm.

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-and just, you know, it's just not gonna be used.

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If I need a chat, you know, and ask, I wanna goo-google something or chat something or whatever, ask questions and have a debate with something, I might just use ChatGPT, but I'm gonna go to this website for this specific thing.

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How that transpires, I don't know, but I, I do, I do worry we're heading down at that, that path again. So how do you bake it into the Omida platform, though?

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Like, I mean, is it more-- is it like, I don't wanna say just, but it, you know, is it...

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Are you looking at using it on, you know, when you log into Omida, you know, you just do natural language, you know, saying, "Hey, this is what I wanna do."

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And like, and then to spin that forward is how much of this is going to become, quote unquote, "agentic"? Yeah. Right? So- Which is, which is always the dream, I guess, unless- Yeah.

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-it's your job that the agent is doing. [laughs] Then it's a nightmare. So for the Omida, for what we're doing, yeah, we, we obviously as a platform that manages audience.

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You know, we don't have a, a website, you know, the publishing website. Right.

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But yes, absolutely, we are very shortly here launching the environment where you can interact with that data in a more chat-like experience within Omida.

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Which would then also obviously continue to drive, you know, agentic campaign building and agentic pricing and paywalls and things along those lines.

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And what I see it as kind of this, you know, mission control operating system for the publishers.

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We're also-- And that's just from the day-to-day sort of activation of, of the, the audience data w-working within the Omida platform.

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What we're also launching and building here is what, you know, with folks who are following this, is an MCP layer, which will allow publishers to also build their own agents on top of the audience data.

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And this is where I think it does get interesting. There's gonna be, you know, you think of it almost like the App Store in a sense, like I... Omida helps organize all this data in a single platform.

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You know, we have an email system, subscription, and CDP all-in-one solution.

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If I can layer in kind of that MCP layer, I can start to expose some a-abilities for our publishing community to do really interesting things with the audience data that Omida has helped organize.

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I don't know what those might be.

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I don't have the, obviously the insight into the individual markets and verticals that the publisher has, but I can at least help them organize the data and then give them an access to it, so they can build their own unique agents on top of the dataset that Omida can help organize for them.

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That is-- So there's two sides to that, that we are, we are have invested in and also will be, you know, putting into market here i-in 2026. Right.

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So I mean, do you see agents like moving to like the decisioning like layer in that? Like cuz I mean- I-... I think that is the big question, cuz I was doing one on like more of the ad tech side, right? Yeah.

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Like in at CES, and you know, yes, workflow and efficiency, and that's where a lot of AI has been pointed- Sure. -within the enterprise. I do see it in terms of...

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Y- sure, the short answer is, you know, uh, it depends, Brian. Yeah. Obviously, I think there's a, there's a... But I do think there is a optimization.

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You know, you have an event coming up in the next, we'll stick on the event industry. In the next 90 days, you have an event coming up. Yeah.

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I would like my Omida agent to find the right audience members who might be most interested in this event, and I wanna create the proper flow that they are most likely to engage, right?

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So you might get five emails and an SMS. I might get an SMS and a pop-up. And so the campaign creation that's optimized for the marketer, I do think that is something that can be agentic in the sense of helping that.

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Now, the content, I do think that's a piece that obviously we, we've already seen that ability. There's some nuance there.

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I think when you get into editorial, obviously that's a different, entirely different beast when we're sending newsletters.

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I do think send time optimization and sort of optimizing when you receive that newsletter could be of interest.

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I think the con-connecting the advertiser with the right newsletter content is something agents can help with. But the writing of the newsletter and the content, obviously I'll leave that to the newsroom.

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But the-- we are gonna provide the tools to, for, for media companies to decide how far they wanna go with that agentic experience. Additionally, when you think about pricing, right? I have a paywall, I have a reg wall.

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When should you put that paywall or reg wall in front of- Yeah. -the right folks, and what price should that be, right?

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You know, can I charge you, Brian, significantly more than anyone else because you have a successful, you've shown, you've shown amazing interest in my product?

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Is there elasticity to your pricing that I'm able to push and that the agent is able to then put in front of you that's something else?

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So, you know, I don't wanna get into necessarily the airline pricing model and, you know- Yeah. -that gets people, you know, a little ticked off.

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But I do think there's ways to optimize and drive revenue and value through those types of things from there.Yeah. One person's revenue optimization is another person's price discrimination, I find.

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[laughs] Depends on which side of the transaction you're on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. Okay, so last thing, James. I haven't been, actually. I don't think I was invited last year. Maybe I didn't get invited.

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[laughs] You came two years ago. Maybe my invitation got lost in the mail. But you got a user event co- coming up. Yeah. And I actually, I, I liked your user event quite a bit. Thank you. It was really nice. Thank you.

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Right, that's, that's high praise- A trip to the aquarium. That's high praise coming from you. You, you- Well, I've been to a lot of events, so I do have- Yeah, no, thank you... I do have standards. Thank you.

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No, we-- And, and I think this goes back to the connections piece, right? We, we pride ourselves, we, we do care about this industry. I will, you know, say that. I grew up in it.

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I've-- You know, that's my background is media. We care about this industry, and one of the things that we, we did nine years ago is we started our, our, our client conference, user conference, the Media Idea Exchange.

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This will be our ninth one coming up in April, 27th and 28th, 27th to 29th here in Chicago. We get about three hundred folks, media professionals. We have us- folks from all over the industry presenting ideas.

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We introduce, you know, partners. Our, our partner ecosystem is there.

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And obviously, we also do a, a really great event, too, every year where we show people the, the sights and sounds of Chicago and everything it has to offer.

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So anyone listening who would like to, to come, please, you know, shoot me an email, my team. We'd love to have you, have you join us there. It's been... it's great. You were, you were there.

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Yeah, you interviewed Jessica Simley there a couple of years ago- It's true... for your podcast, CEO of Time.

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And it, it has become a-- Obviously, we, we show a lot of things we're, we're gonna be releasing this year, but also build the community and the connections because I think it is important we learn from each other on this and, and see how things are shifting and going.

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I, I'm very bullish about this industry. We sometimes are very good at, at beating ourselves up.

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Uh, but I do think, you know, we all-- there's an altruism that exists hopefully amongst media professionals that gets us up every morning to, you know, do what we do and, and I'm, I'm proud to support that a-and provide the, the services and software to do that.

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Yeah, hundred percent. Like, and Chicago is a, is a great American city. It is a great American city. You know? It is. It really is. It, it-- I've lived here for ten years.

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Again, originally from Atlanta, but it is a really [laughs] great American city. I, I really have enjoyed my time here. Yeah. All right, James. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks, Brian. [outro music]