[upbeat music] This episode of the Rebooting Show Riviera Edition is brought to you by KERV Interactive.
KERV is an AI powered video creative technology that creates shoppable and immersive experiences within any video content.
It is the only platform that uses machine learning techniques and AI to recognize depth, dimension and objects within any video in real-time and more accurately than the human eye.
Recently, KERV launched the KERV Active Attention Index, which measures the quality of deterministic user actions as they engage with KERV powered videos.
What this allows you to do is to better inform media buying strategies, smarter in-flight creative optimization, deeper content analysis, and of course, improved user experiences.
You can learn more about the Active Attention Index and download the free guide to it by visiting KERV.ai. That is K-E-R-V dot A-I. Or you can request more information by emailing attention@kerv.ai. Thanks so much, KERV.
[upbeat music] What do you end up saying to people who are worried about AI replacing them? Because the numbers are pretty alarming. AI will create a tsunami of crap that ultimately won't be high quality protein.
[upbeat music] So welcome to the Rebooting Show Riviera Edition. I'm Brian Morrissey. Cannes is closing down soon.
The beach apparatuses will come down, the carnival will leave town, and the poor people of Cannes can return to their daily activities without having a ton of people in the advertising, media and technology world getting in their way.
The visitors will trundle off to the airport or spend a few more days here in Europe, which I'm personally going to do because I'd like to get into the sea at some point.
We did a great event this week called The New Attention Economy. We had over thirty speakers from so many great brands, and I want to thank KERV for their support for this event. They hosted it at the KERV Cafe.
We did it for three days and three hours each day, and we're gonna have videos from it. And I've been doing some of these daily podcasts from KERV as part of the event, and that's what this conversation is.
It was a conversation I had at The New Attention Economy where I was joined by Christine Cook, the Global CRO at Bloomberg Media, to discuss her optimistic outlook for the media industry as it confronts both near term economic challenges that we all know about and the uncertainties of a shift to a new era of technology.
And if the past has taught us anything, it's that any new tech paradigm change causes both tremendous opportunities and tremendous dislocation. That is the nature of disruption. Winners and losers.
Even if it's often marketed as a magical process where everyone wins, life tends not to work out that way. So I hope you enjoy this final conversation from Cannes. Thank you again to KERV for the support.
And please do send me your feedback on these extra episodes. And if you have, and I hope you have, the newsletter that I've been producing here all week, been helped out by Mike Shields from Next to Me.
I appreciate that, Mike. I don't plan on shifting to a daily format, mostly because I would probably perish if I had to take on that publishing workload.
But I do plan on here and there doing daily coverage of these kinds of events on the calendar. So love to hear your feedback on that. My email is brian@therebooting.com. Now on to the conversation with Christine.
[upbeat music] [audience cheering] So I started the conversation at the table by asking people for, you know, a reason that they're optimistic about media.
Obviously, there are a lot of changes going on, and the economy has been a little, eh, a little weird, and nobody's quite sure about the second half either.
And then with AI coming down the pike, there's a lot going on right now. So give me your reason for optimism.
I'm optimistic about media because I think that anytime there is massive expansion, if you look at the arc of digital distribution in media, we had websites that went into micro blogs and there was this massive expansion.
There's typically a retraction. And so the expansion, I think, created a lot of dilution, lack of clarity. While it might have introduced some niche, it just got a little diluted.
This is part of what it feels like a consolidation which will increase quality, increase what we're able to deliver to audiences, regardless of what angle you're coming from, financial support and perspective like Bloomberg Media or, you know, NBC with entertainment.
Yeah. So I think one of the questions with, you know, came up last night with generative AI, right? And particularly with it changing the search experience and also just the tools of it.
You know, I've seen like studies that ninety-eight percent of content is gonna be synthetic or just like created by AI. And you know, when, like in the previous panel, like frictionless and free always win, okay?
And when you can like take away the friction of creating, quote-unquote, content, like there's gonna be so, so, so much of it. I would think that brands are gonna become...
And maybe this is, I'm too optimistic 'cause I've been here for three days now, but that brands are actually gonna become more important in this, what Peter Kovget called on a podcast I did with him, like a tsunami of crap.
Go with it. Well, I think your question underscores a version of where I was going. Okay. You know, AI will create a tsunami of crap that ultimately won't be high quality protein.
And I think that people will become in search of a higher resonance, and that they'll see that a lot of potentially what is being created is dilutive.
But if you go down a level, you know, next year, how we're talking about AI, I think will be materially different than how we're talking about AI right now.We're afraid. A lot of people are scared.
They're talking about it replacing humans, replacing jobs, you know, creating art, creating content but two or three levels down, if you really look at the supply chain of what AI brings as a tool set, it creates a transformation which actually makes the best journalists smarter.
You have speed to get to source material, as an example.
And then I think to the blog example that I started with, consumers may, for a minute, have a thousand points of contact, but I think that when it really matters, you'll see them going back to, hopefully, you know, well-sourced sources instead of synthetic sources.
Yeah. So I mean, in this world, is scale even more important? Well, actually, another trend that I've seen here is a real desire for community. You did it- Yeah...
last night at dinner, and we were all so excited to not have the biggest dinner party. I didn't, no. But because- That was on purpose. Exactly.
And because it was, you know, a specific gathering, the value for all of us was so much higher. Yeah.
And I think that brands are moving towards those higher value moments, and at the same moment that we're talking about generative AI creating more content and potentially replacing people, this sense of community and live experiences, Cannes is our version of a trade live experience.
We're all so lit up because we have moments of serendipity that we won't get in digital, won't get in the metaverse to the same level that we're experiencing now. Yeah. It's funny you say that about Cannes.
I wonder, like, do the dentists have their convention, annual convention, like? Yeah.
The first job I had was the National Association of Convenience Stores conference in Las Vegas, which was four days for owners and operators of convenience stores. Okay. Yeah. So dentists also have their convention.
Yeah, yeah. Usually in- But not here. No. Cannes beats Vegas, I gotta say. Nothing against Vegas. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting what you say about that because, like, there is...
I think most technologies begin with a lot more excitement, I feel like, than AI did broadly, and I think because the stories we've told ourselves over generations about the machines replacing us, and we've sort of come face to face with that and have to grapple with the concept that, oh, this isn't, like, just like a science fiction.
Like, these machines are gonna be better at a lot of human tasks that we thought before were unique to humans.
Like, we were okay when the automation came for, like, blue collar jobs, but when [laughs] it starts to come for, like, you know, people with second homes, then all of a sudden it's like, "Wait a second.
We gotta shut this down before we figure out what's going on." [laughs] Well, I think business is also like water in a balloon.
When you squeeze it, you know, it, it goes away from the places that gets constricted, but then it does move into other- Yeah... dimensions. I mean, in the arc of probably our career, you see this move- Yeah...
from, like, how print-centric people transitioned to video, and now you don't even really think about it anymore, the ease with which you move across platforms, or, you know, why by default it's important to know so many distribution points.
But yeah, I-- anytime anybody ends up coming out of a either blue collar or white collar, it will be a reset moment, and then out of that, like, phoenix from the flames. It's a regenerative- Yeah... process.
[laughs] I like it. I like that. That's nice. Yeah, I remember just, like, with the programmatic, you know, early days of programmatic, you know, there's people telling me, "There's gonna be no media agencies.
There's gonna be no sellers. There's gonna be no this, no that." Let me tell you, there's a lot of sellers around. There's a lot, [laughs] there's a lot of people.
Kirk McDonald was here talking, like, Group M's got seven thousand people in North America alone. These things generally are additive to some degree. Well, so a couple of things.
You know, do you remember, I, well, I don't even know how many years ago this was, where the agencies weren't gonna exist because the consultancies- Oh, yeah...
right, remember that was- And then an in-house then became a thing. Right. Well, then everyone's gonna in-house programmatic, and then that didn't work, and then a little bit of both happened.
From the exercise of trying to in-house, brands understood maybe how to work better with their agencies.
By consultancies coming in and looking at the, you know, martech layer that came in fast and furious for marketers, media agencies evolved more quickly.
You know, the way Kirk continues to reorganize his agency holding company is, you know, I'm sure in significant response to better service of his customers in that same way. Yeah, it's like the water in the balloon.
Yeah. And but there's still a lot of... I feel like we're between eras in some ways, and there's a lot that needs to change in the media business.
What are, like, the sort of three top areas that you think need to be, like, reformed to some degree? I mean, we're looking at, like, the Ad Tech Harbor, so let's start there.
One of the things that's really interesting to me is the connection between supply path optimization and sustainability. Okay. So- Is that real, or is that just, like- Well, interesting to me...
the Trojan horse to, to fix the, the real problems? Well, I think it highlights that... It highlights all the hands that are in the pot in between.
So the faster you can get from point A to point B without having to pay so many tolls, you know, what's the E-ZPass version of being able to move fluidly?
And then if it's true that it requires all these server hits to have all that in between, then- Yeah... you know, that's one, I think that's interesting.
Two, I think is we are all still very enamored with data and, but we still have this problem that it's too much to probably get the signal to noise.
I mean, I think that in a lot of places, we probably could move a little further away than continuing to layer data on data to try to reach audiences 'cause I think it starts to create paralysis, and then you're not measuring maybe exactly what matters.You're sorting through the data, and you miss the qualitative, which gets to the human factor.
Yeah. And they should be in balance, and it feels like we still haven't gotten at least to fifty/fifty on that. Yeah.
I mean, one of the things w- I think it's interesting with programmatic is, I mean, you guys, like, cut off the open exchange, right?
Explain the thinking behind that and what, if any, impact you could sort of see from it. It starts with our consumer first.
The-- We were going from a place where we were dependent on a lot of third-party sourcing for our advertising revenue in addition to our direct sales team, and the website design had just gotten to a place where there wasn't enough balance for the consumer.
It was too much, so we were cleaning up the design of our- But that's o- But why is that an open exchange problem? That's- Well- -a way to transact. Because all of those units were very much often- Fair enough...
being monetized by a third-party outsource. And so in that cleanup, we also cleaned up our tech, and we started to focus on direct sales with fewer of our ad placements.
So I think the second thing is that when you're dealing with a third party, the ads that show up are not in context to the environment that you have.
You have limited and less creative control in those situations, so we're not opposed to programmatic delivery as a ad-serving- Yeah...
mechanism, but with fewer people that we know are right for our customers instead of more random stuff for which we don't have any control and lowers the consumer experience. And we have a paid consumer experience.
We have an obligation to make that- Yeah... relevant.
[gentle music] Yeah, and it's always a trade-off, right?
And a lot of times in digital, the trade-off has gotten out of whack.
Like, and I understand the reasons for it, and there's a lot of finger-pointing stuff, but publishers run their own businesses, and they make business choices, and they need to sort of own the choices that they make.
I understand it's a difficult industry, and, you know, loading up the autoplay at the end of the quarter is a choice, but it is a choice at the end of the day, right? Depending on what your business model is- [laughs]...
I think some people have to make that choice. Right. But, you know, the role that Bloomberg Media plays in the larger Bloomberg LP business ecosystem, we're probably in a little bit of a different situation.
We can make different decisions because of how we complement the core- Yeah... business. So that's the thing. It's like, is the...
Are the decisions that you end up making at Bloomberg, 'cause, you know, people outside Bloomberg are like, "Well, I mean, okay, but, like, you know, you've got a terminal business, like, in the back that's we do not have."
I remember actually Justin one time coming to, uh, our event at, uh, my last company, and he was like... I was like, "Well, you got a terminal." And he's like, "Well, yeah, but you have these events."
I'm like, "Not the same. Not the same."
[laughs] They are different, but, you know, but so are the audiences between the terminal and our website, and I think that, you know, there is overlap, but then there's non-terminal users who do come to us. Yeah.
Oh, but I mean, I mean that you can do things as a business- Oh. 'Cause we are-... that others cannot do.
It's not like I don't know Mayor Mike myself personally, but I don't think, from what I know and I've read about him, he probably doesn't seem like a guy who likes to lose money. So, like, you gotta be profitable.
[laughs] It's true. It's true. That is- We, we don't have a, an open, um- No. [laughs]... card. We do run on a business model for sure, but I, I think what I'm saying is that- Yeah...
because of the structure in which we operate, we have a longer playing field.
And I think getting back to the business models, depending on where you are, if you have a short running field, you might do some things in the near term that are gonna not serve you in the long term because you're just trying to hit Q2.
We're playing a longer game in that and are happy to have that runway.
It doesn't mean that we're not held accountable, but it does push us to make decisions that are gonna pay off a year or two years and not just hit one quarter in particular. Yeah. So, like, over...
It's so funny 'cause there's so many different conversations a-a-at that happen in Cannes, and, like, just because we're, like, facing, for those listening to the podcast, we're facing the Palais des Festivals, which is where the heart of the creative side of the industry is, but then next to it is, like, where the ad tech companies are on yachts and stuff like this, and, like, these two sides that should be talking, like, are literally segregated from each other.
But over there, I know the conversation is around, like, probably, like, seventy-five identity solutions that are out because the deprecation of the third-party cookie.
And so last night at the dinner, I asked, you know, how many people, and we had, you know, people from great publishers there, are focused on the deprecation of the third-party cookie and concerned about this, enough of this optimism.
And mostly it was, "It's a great opportunity."
It's a great opportunity, especially 'cause so much of us have started to either have a paywall or a firm registration and are accumulating our own data, and then it gives us the opportunity to control that system.
And, yeah, I think it does open up, you know, closer, more strategic relationships than, you know, you don't have control of what somebody's doing, or, like, someone's just serving whatever they want.
It allows us to have, you know, a closer relationship. So I think the cookie, it did what it needed to do. It took us...
It was like a one point O version for the industry writ large, and I think it's time for it to move on.
But, like, speaking of, you know, one point O and two point O, Yacht Row and the Ad Tech Row started when the smaller ad tech companies didn't have the money that, you know, Facebook, Google- Yeah...
that was on the beach. And now look at what has happened. There's a very significant well-established publisher who is anchored at the end. You started to see, uh- What? The Journal? Yeah.
Large- Although they're losing that spot apparently. Ben, I don't know if Ben is here yet, but Ben reported that, uh, they're making room for the super yachtsTerrible...
large entertainment companies have their super yachts in there. I, the point I'm trying to make is- Yeah...
I think that the complexion of who's decided to be there now, like the water balloon example, I don't think the ad tech companies are gonna go away, but they- No...
might get squeezed out of Yacht Row, and then it'll become Yacht Alley or Old Town Yacht- Oh, that'd be terrible... or something. Yeah. Well, they tried to make the cabanas happen one year.
I don't know if they're still... Yachts are better probably than cabanas. And then we have the new cabanas that have expanded beyond registration.
So I mean, this move towards Old Town is, you know, shows the health of this industry writ large.
To your point about the people in the Palais and the creatives not talking, I do think that for consumers, for content, and for the business, they should have more space. Yeah.
They should be more part of our conversations because they are looking at AI in new and different ways. They are creating emotional connections with consumers.
And, you know, I was at a panel discussion at LinkedIn actually, and they had a Harvard professor there talking about a case study of what really does sell. Is it sales-centric selling?
Is it marketing-powered selling, or is it product-powered?
And ultimately, it's product-powered, but the, some of the most successful product campaigns that they talked about were Google Search, which a creative agency made emotional. The guy searching for- Yeah...
the place in Paris and then buying the crib for the kid, or- And they also have a de facto monopoly. I- But the point is that the, the, it's the creatives that were involved in that campaign- Yeah...
that we can't gloss over. Sure. And so you can talk about product selling, which is the most successful way to do it, to sell most things, and we need the creatives in that it isn't just data targeting that is- Yeah...
gonna sell that. It-- and that's where I think that balance is out of whack, and how do we bring these people whose festival we are all over more into our conversation? Yeah, for sure.
So we ha- we, we hear a lot and we talk a lot about AI on the creative or the journalism side of these businesses.
I don't think enough is, like, talked about on the revenue operations side because, you know, AI is just a tool, and a lot of the uses for AI, at least that, at least I'm finding, are l- really less on the sort of creative side.
You might wanna, like, throw some headlines into ChatGPT and stuff like this, but being able for it to, like, do things like prospecting and analyzing, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that goes into the sales process, the revenue side, operations side, that is very manual and ripe for making, you know, that area far more efficient.
So you're talking about the, you know, the front end, the sales end, and I could agree with you. Yeah. But I think that the most powerful part of the sales enablement process that could use AI would be planning.
So when we get a brief, and we need to make a media recommendation to have a, a more accelerated than manual process to make recommendations or placement, ad ops, optimization, l- taking the, you know, and the people that do those jobs would be probably really happy- Yeah...
to let AI take over. Those kind of things create efficiencies for us, which allow us to put money and investment in other parts of the business. As far as, you know, the prospecting, sure.
You know, I think a lot of mature media companies, you have a set, you probably- Yeah... have a pretty good set of clients.
It isn't as much about finding net new companies, but how to increase the share of the investment that you have, and I think in that regard, it wouldn't be necessarily prospecting a new company for us. Yeah.
But it would be what is it that brand has been doing with you [chuckles] that- That's true... could justify more- It's very authentic for the podcast... that the garbage can is, um- Yeah, the garbage [laughs]... dumping.
Yeah. It, it's, it shows that we're in France, that we're not just making it up. Well, this morning I was having a discussion on a terrace near the Gutter Bar while they dumped- [laughs] Oh, yeah...
all of their recyclables, so- It's always fun... there's something that I'm not entirely proud of that- It's-... it's thematic in the conversations I'm having today. [laughs] Exactly.
They're, it's like following you around.
[gentle music] But yeah, that's exactly really what I meant was that, you know, it can, like, this, the revenue side, there's so much that goes into the publishing function, and we, we end up, like, talking about the most visible parts, but underneath, like, the surface, the, it's, like, really complicated, and the more the publishers have to do as a business, the more complicated their organizations get.
I always, like, point to, I mean, there's financial complications, and there's operational complications, but, like, as I was thinking about, like, Vice's, like, crazy corporate chart.
But, like, simplified businesses going forward I think are, like, better.
Well, you know, the thing right now that really makes cross-platform successful, so we sell television, podcasts, radio, websites, social, newsletters, all completely different platforms.
So the thing that makes it easy to be cross-platform right now are people that have to do work in so many different systems, and we're starting to get some of those systems to come together.
That's why I just talked about the planning process, but I think you're absolutely right. Significant people hours and inefficient, you know, some places I've been, you know, you're on spreadsheets, you know- Yeah...
shared spreadsheets which- You know, I'm, I've always wondered what the largest business that is just run on spreadsheets. It seems like that was FTX, but they're no longer around. I don't know.
You would know that better than me. I don't know. We might be, like, painfully surprised to find out. No, you could have a very large business that's purely on Google Sheets.
I think you should ask for people to write in suggestions to you on what they think the largest business- Yeah... is that's run, yeah. So how are you personally using AI to be, like, more efficient, effective?Productive?
I haven't as much. I'm actually surprised I haven't done it as much. It felt a little bit like a sh- little shiny object, new search, power search. I... Not as much as I probably would like.
I think my husband has this thing whenever a new tech comes out, a new TV or whatever, he's like, "Don't buy the most expensive one. Buy the one right underneath of it." And so- Oh, yeah...
I'm kinda waiting for the one right underneath all this melee that's happening right now. I am listening.
I'm learning a lot how our organization is covering it because in service of our core clients, they wanna understand AI. So- Yeah...
we aren't talking about that second, third level, like how it's impacting hardware businesses- Yeah... and things of that nature.
And also, I mean, it's outside of your organization, but like, you know, Bloomberg GPT, it just shows the...
Everyone thinks about, like, I feel like generative AI is like a centralized technology, but there are going to be variations of all these LLMs that are more verticalized, and if you have a ton of data, like, you're in a good place because you just shut that off and make it yours.
In our situation, we're very engineering centric, and so if you have a new naming construct [chuckles] on something that was already happening, I think, you know- Okay...
you know, we're always looking for more efficient...
Like, look, at core, the company was founded to create transparency and access to multiple data sources to help move markets, to help traders, so everyone had access to make faster decisions.
And in some ways, philosophically, AI writ large is bringing that to a ton of different industries, right?
So I think the entrepreneurialism that Mike Bloomberg started in the terminal and then has added as the media division that gives, you know, context to the data, we're in a really exciting place, and, you know, I've only been here not four months, but- Yeah...
I just am so excited for where that goes forward from here. So final thing is, like, what do you end up saying to people who are worried about AI replacing them?
Because it is a normal, it is a real fear out there when you see a lot of these demos of things it can do, and some of the reports that come out are like, you know, I don't know how they forecast, like, how many of these jobs are [chuckles] gonna be eliminated, but, uh, the numbers are pretty alarming.
I think generally from a career management perspective, if you're doing a thing that is just one thing, then you're at risk, and it maybe isn't just because- Yeah... of AI.
[chuckles] So you should be a student of whatever industry you're in, but also the adjacent industries because for some other force, which could be market changes, it could be technology changes, you should be prepared to provide that pivot.
It's the inevitability of our generation of careering, not the one that was like our grandparents. You know, they would get that job.
And bless to the people who do land a job and hold it for a long time, but I think even within big companies, they wanna move you around between different disciplines as part of succession planning, and those are healthy, interesting companies.
Even if you don't get to work in one of those, you should s- do that for yourself. Okay. We got the recycling going on across. [chuckles] We've hit the trifecta, Christine.
So final question I've been asking everyone is what is a company, a person, a book, a thing that has your attention at this moment in time?
I'm rereading Measure What Matters 'cause I'm starting this new job, and I'm trying to make sure that we're identifying the right things that are gonna move our business forward.
So I've been studying the business that we're in, learning, you know, where our opportunities are.
And even though my title is chief revenue officer, I firmly believe that if you just put a revenue number as your target, it's gonna be harder to hit it. It's really unpacking what- Yeah...
is underneath that to help you get there. Yeah. So... And revenue is a lagging indicator, I always say. I don't know if that's in the book, but that's my own little management maxim. You wanna end on that?
I don't get it. I don't know what it means, but it sounds like it sounds [chuckles] smart. All right, Christine, let's end on that before- Thank you so much...
you do the recycling [laughs] Yeah, before more garbage comes through. [chuckles] Thanks so much. [upbeat music] Thanks so much for listening, and we will be back tomorrow actually with a new episode.
Thank you to Jay Sparks for producing this podcast. If you have a podcast that you're considering making, you should check out Podhelpus and what Jay can do for you. Go to podhelp.us.
[upbeat music]