Why Most Media Buyers FAIL - Secrets From Industry Legend

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Media Buying Podcast. I'm just so excited today. I have Bob regular. He's been one of the people. I've been wanting to get onto the show for quite some time, and it's taken us a bit of time to pull it all together. Bob, it's great to have you on the show today.

Bob Regular [00:00:16]:
It's a pleasure to be on with you. I'm excited that you're excited. So that's great.

Jim Banks [00:00:20]:
It's always a good nostalgia trip to meet up and talk to somebody who's been in the industry almost as long as I have. And I guess we can, we can say we've, we've. We've helped create the industry that exists today. In, in a lot of regards.

Bob Regular [00:00:33]:
100% it is. I first dipped my toe into digital in 1995, the year I graduated from Penn State and started building a website development company with one of my best friends at the time. And it's been all digital since then. And it's really been watching the birth of an industry that's taken over the world. It's really completely enveloped the world in every dimension possible. And to be a part of it, it's been really, really cool.

Jim Banks [00:01:00]:
Yeah. And it's. I think for me it's. People say, oh, you've been around for such a long time. You must have seen so many things. And we have. I think the thing that always amazes me, I always say to people, yeah, I'm such a smart guy that I didn't create Facebook, I didn't create YouTube, I didn't create Instagram, Pinterest, all these companies that started long after I came up, came, came into the industry. But, but I think what really brought it home to me, remember walking around central London one, One weekend and I looked around and there was all these people from all over the world and visit London was one of my biggest clients at that particular point in time.

Jim Banks [00:01:34]:
And I looked around, I thought, I bet you like most of the people that are here from Italy and France and Germany and Japan and what have you, they're here because they saw one of the ads that I'd placed on Google back in the day, and that's why they were there. And I think if you look at it, everyone that goes to an airport, if you're involved in travel, there's every likelihood that somebody saw an ad that you, you wrote that kind of brought them to, to kind of get to that point.

Bob Regular [00:01:57]:
Listen, we've all had our impacts in the industry, right? And a common thing that happens when you're an old timer like we are and we're going to try to avoid the old rocking chair sitting on the port park bench. Right. Effect. But one of the things that happens is you, you become nostalgic about all the things along the, along the experience. And the thing I remember in the last 25, 30 years since I've been doing this is there have been hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of companies and founders that have failed while trying to build something in digital. Right? There's been many horse and buggy whip building companies in digital over the years and we remember today the hyper successful ones, right? We remember our Amazons and we remember our, our Facebooks and what have you. And for every Facebook there was 20 other social networks that didn't quite make it. So there's a lot of pioneers out there.

Bob Regular [00:02:49]:
There's a lot of folks that took their shot. They didn't quite make it necessarily. But you know, it's, it's, it's been. While it's been an amazing road, it's been a hard road. It's been a hyper competitive, incredibly innovative, fast moving, changing space. Right. It is not for the light of heart. It looks like all boats were lifted, but in reality there's, there's been a select few that have found success like yourself and, and, and there's a lot of folks that just didn't make it happen.

Bob Regular [00:03:20]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:03:20]:
And it's always interesting when I, when I get guests on to talk to me, I always look at their sort of background and where they've come from and what they're doing now and also what they've done historically. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but your profile reads as though you've got three jobs now, right? So you're the CEO of Infolinx, you're the founder and managing partner of Delivering Yield and you're the publisher owner of Aditas. Right? Like how do you juggle all that? Right? How can you actually juggle three main roles at the same time?

Bob Regular [00:03:49]:
I'm an aspiring musk addict. The man has more jobs than he probably he has, he has children. No. So I, I would say it's very challenging to juggle those things. And my hyper focus is on Infolinx and it has been definitely the, the baby that you're raising and you're growing up and you're launching and I'm in love with Infolinx and I'm having a great time building the company. It's a very special company. It does, it does A lot of very unique things and I'm enjoying cultivating it and making it an icon in its own right. It's, it's, it's a challenging, it's a challenging thing to do, right, to build something that endures in this industry.

Bob Regular [00:04:25]:
But Infolinx has been around since 2007 and I acquired the company in 2018 from somebody that I knew in the industry also for 25, 30 years. And I've been working with my team and, and, and, and building the company from really, from a sort of a nascent level back in 2018 to it's, it's, it's becoming definitely its own, its own juggernaut in our particular genre of the space. Delivering Yield for me was an entity I created because as you build and you're an entrepreneur in this digital marketing industry, you encounter lots of other entrepreneurs and you get excited by their ideas and their visions and things that they want to build and you sometimes you think they can really achieve that and you. I've, I've angel invested in different businesses along the way. I would say that's also an incredibly difficult thing to do. Right. It's a little bit like trying to bet, bet at the Las Vegas casino tables, but nonetheless, I've done a fair amount of that. And adotus, I would say it's something I've gone pretty dark on.

Bob Regular [00:05:29]:
Many, many years ago, I bought Adotis from a gentleman, the name Pesach, and he had done a pretty amazing job of building Adotis as a digital media trade publication.

Jim Banks [00:05:42]:
Yeah, I remember it back in the day, it was, it was like again, one of the kind of few subscriptions that I had came into my inbox every day. And again, he's, he's Pace Latin's gonna, been one of those guys again, ubiquitous in the industry a long time.

Bob Regular [00:05:55]:
And he's come back and, and, and he's, he's relaunched a dotat, which is always amusing to me, right? He, he wanted the dotis back and.

Jim Banks [00:06:03]:
And we didn't just went one letter, one letter passed it. Right.

Bob Regular [00:06:06]:
One letter changed, one letter changed. But I acquired that from him. Many, many, like 2004 I think it was. And, and, and, and every day I would be the editor of that and I would talk to industry people all the time, do interviews, write articles. And I'm so passionate about the industry. I really love the content of the industry. I, I enjoy the cycles and I enjoy the leaders in it. So I, I, I spent years really publishing and, and distributing and many years and then I think I reached this moment.

Bob Regular [00:06:36]:
I remember it was like five or six years ago was the summer and I literally hit a burnout point where I just couldn't, I just couldn't write another word. I couldn't write another word about the industry. I couldn't hear any more, any more stories that sounded familiar, that sounded repetitive. I could, I just had reached, after 10 years, right, of inhaling it and, and, and contextualizing it, I just had burned out and I just, I, I just really need a break right from this. And I really hunkered down and focused on, on the core businesses that I was building and, and really went down that tunnel vision of operating. And I didn't want to be on the stage anymore at like ad techie type conferences. I didn't want to do speaking anymore. I just really went dark, to tell you the truth.

Bob Regular [00:07:22]:
And I really wanted to just operate. And as you probably know, digital media, ad tech, martech, it's an industry in hopes of being Hollywood, right? It loves glamour, it loves glitz, it loves to come up with three three letter word acronyms. It loves to talk about the next best amazing thing that's going to change the world. And I've been through so many cycles of it. I think I had just gotten to a point where I just wanted to not participate in the media portion of that and contextualizing it and decontextualizing it and just wanted to get down into the, the nuts and bolts of operating the business. And I've loved it. I've really enjoyed the last several years and maybe I'll come back to that. Pesach is doing a very interesting, provocative job.

Jim Banks [00:08:06]:
That's, that's his way and always his way, wasn't it? And always his way. And he's never going to change, right? He's never going to change his kind of, his methodology. There's always going to be the same controversy.

Bob Regular [00:08:17]:
So yeah, and listen, it's, it has its place just like in our normal media sphere, right? You, you have people that are sensational, right? You have folks that are provocative and sensational and thoughtful, right? And sometimes part of their provocation is they push their sort of thumb on a particular topic and keep pushing. And that's his nature. And I think he's really good at it and he knows it. And sometimes he rubs folks really the wrong way. And it's been going on since I've known him from way back in the beginning. And at times, really he really provokes a lot of interesting thought, right? Where you stop and you ask yourself, huh, maybe he's onto something here. And other times it's all just BS and he's just making a lot of noise and it's just being a lot of fun and creating a lot of, a lot of smoke. So good.

Bob Regular [00:09:03]:
Like a good entertainer mixed with journalist, right? Provoc. Provocateur. So that was never my way with Adonis. I was much more about the nitty gritty of what really as I do an interview with someone like you or an operator of a particular business, where's the sauce? Where's the real differentiation? Where, where's the go to market? I, I really like the, the nuts and bolts. So just different styles for sure. But those are three areas that I've, I've played in and, and really enjoyed over the years. And now I think we're moving into a whole new tectonic changes in our industry again.

Jim Banks [00:09:38]:
Again.

Bob Regular [00:09:39]:
And it's, it's, it, it's, it's scary and exciting, right? It's scary. And AI is our new buzzword that everybody's dropping left and center. But I think it's a real thing. It's a real disruptive thing.

Jim Banks [00:09:52]:
Yeah. I think that I've always maintained this. There's a, there's one thing that you can't, you can't fake, right? And longevity is the one thing that you can't fake, right. So for me I, again, I always take my hat off and full of admiration for anyone that has been doing what we're doing for as long as we've been doing it. Because again, most people I know with, with my father, grandfather, it was a job for life. He finished school, you kind of work for the Same company for 40 years, you retire, you do 10 years and then you die. That was how it was supposed to go. But I think if you look at it now, I think the, certainly the younger people of today, they're far more transient.

Jim Banks [00:10:29]:
They're quite happy to jump around all over the place with different jobs. The resumes look like a complete paper mache of just, it's just a mess. Right. But, but they don't seem to care about that whole building up a history of sticking with something for any given length of time. And, and again, I don't, I don't know if that's something that is, is part of what, what is going to cause the next sort of change. I think, I think you mentioned there about AI and yeah, AI is definitely. It's become ubiquitous in such a short space of time. I remember, I remember Traveling to the States, I think it was like year before last, and I went to an event in Park City in Utah, right? And there's a guy who was calling himself an AI sort of guru, evangelist type of thing.

Jim Banks [00:11:12]:
And I'm sitting there going, I was really skeptical at that particular point in time, but again, it's become so ubiquitous in everything that I do is involved with it. So much content now is. Is produced using it. I like a lot of stuff on the podcast. Like, once I kind of finish recording podcast episodes, I'll send it to one place to give me all the titles, the descriptions, the summaries, the transcriptions. It'll analyze it all and give me points from that. I can send the video to another place where I can get it all chopped up into small sort of YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and things like that. Just from one kind of piece of content, which, which will be this, this particular episode.

Jim Banks [00:11:50]:
And I was just curious, like, in. In terms, from a media buying perspective, right? What, what do you see some of the challenges for media buyers about that, in terms of where things are going?

Bob Regular [00:12:03]:
I do think that it's important to acknowledge with AI, we are probably entering a completely new period. It's going to take a minute, but we're entering a completely new period where these AI tools, there's a lot of terminology for it, agentic AI and other sort of optimizational capabilities. But these tools are going to essentially do the buying and do the optimizing and do the selecting and do the reporting. And essentially the bots are going to be in control. Right. It's moved from many series of innovations like machine learning and now moving into AI, but ultimately at a very high level, we are going to have a much more cohesive workflow, simpler methodology of buying. It's going to be less like operating a 747, and it's going to be far more like putting it on autopilot. And I think the reality is that AI is very capable of thinking in multidimensional ways better than people.

Bob Regular [00:13:04]:
And it's going to. Again, I want to. I want to reinforce. We often. This is like a comma, right? We often like to think these things are going to happen rapidly. And while I do think it's going to be disruptive and it's going to move quickly, I think it will take a lot more time than we give it credit for. And that just like anything else in life, whether it was machine learning or other things that have been innovated over the years, it takes time for it to truly perfect and be learned and be refined. It takes people to refine it to make it better.

Bob Regular [00:13:40]:
And it will take time but in that time it will just get really smarter at buying media multi cross platform in sort of an omni platform way. Which is very frustrating today because today you go into Facebook and you go into TikTok and you go into Google and you go into Programmatic systems and you're in, you're in a multidimensional world where you're, you're logging in the multi platforms trying to do multiple things, right, that have different workflows and methodologies using different attribution methods. It's it, it is career creating because the complexity is created careers because they only people can handle, right. Managing all these systems to some sort of outcome. And I think that AI will start to inject itself by creating simplification. You'll have these AI agents that will log into them for you, that will operate them for you. They will synthesize the information, they'll synthesize the workflow and they'll just make things ultimately easier. And I think that it's important to appreciate that when that finally happens, it will really beg the question of what is it that this person that typically operated these tools, what is it that they're contributing and offering now? What is their value? Add in a maturing of AI process and if everyone's using the AI tools to do this right, then there's this commonality and then it really comes back to your ability to out strategically think your marketing, understanding your audiences, understanding your messaging, understanding where your differentiation as an advertiser product or con or service really, really is to get an edge.

Bob Regular [00:15:27]:
Because if you have, if you have these brilliant tools and it's easily democratized right across a massive swath of advertisers, then where's the edge? Where's the edge to drive outcomes? And that was always, that was always.

Jim Banks [00:15:44]:
The thing that I, that I looked at when like the, the I'm trying to think the name of the company but Terry Kwaja, the guy that comes up with the Lumascapes, sure, right. And he had the one for basically Programmatic advertising. And I looked at it. I remember when I got into Programmatic for the first time. Yeah, I got into it back in 2009 because I sold an affiliate network I had to an ad sales house that was like a, that they were working with big publishers and you know, and that was my introduction to programmatic advertising in terms of how it all got put together. Because I Think the co founders of the company I sold it to were two of the co founders of OpenEx. And what really kind of like came came across to me was that there was an advertiser on one side, a publisher, like a publisher on the other side. And this whole ecosystem had just blossomed in between those two points, right? It was just like, I'm selling something, I'm buying something, right? And all of a sudden everything got blended into the middle, right? You had all the yield optimizers that were there to maximize the, the RPMs for publishers, right? Instead of an ad being shown permanently, it would show for six seconds and then rotate another one out and rotate another one out.

Jim Banks [00:16:59]:
And certainly if you're buying ads, you wanted to make sure were you above the fold and if you work like it. So there was so many components that kind of went into it. And I thought what was really interesting, we were looking at topics of what we could discuss. One of the things that we came up with was this topic of clean supply paths. So for the benefits of maybe people like, who are listening in or watching in, perhaps you can explain what clean supply, clean supply paths actually looks like and why it's important 100%.

Bob Regular [00:17:28]:
So in programmatic location, where you have a very fragmented market, which is what you're referring to, you have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of web publishers. You have a large number of app, mobile app publishers. So you have inventory, ad inventory coming from many, many, many different sources in many different ad types, display, native video and other things. And so this creates a huge selection of options, right? It is one of the world's largest buffets of inventory. And so on a demand side, if you were a buyer, if you're an advertiser and you're operating a platform, let's say trade desk or DB360 or stackadapt, something like that, you're trying to buy the most efficiently that you can. Not because you have some virtue about efficiency, right? But because the theory is that if you're buying efficiently, then you're getting the best price. You know, if you have many intermediaries and everybody's taking a cut, you would, you would make an assumption that probably you're paying too much because you're paying everybody in between. So there's a, there's a theory, and it's a good economic theory, is that an efficient, transparent pathway to the inventory is going to get you the best price and the most effective results.

Bob Regular [00:18:48]:
So I would say I have billions and billions and billions of ad impressions under My experience, and I know many pathways and I would say mostly that's true, but not always is that true? Right. There's no hard reality that is always true. It's sometimes true. And in the Infolinks case, and what we've decided to do in my approach to that problem has been if I can only work directly with publishers, only directly with publishers and create our own ad units that we place on the publisher or lock down specific ad units that the publisher has and we only auction those proprietary placements which Jounce Media, which is a third party metrics body, evaluates us as a proprietary placement supply source, then I can have a direct relationship with the publisher to create direct inventory for the purposes of one, transparency and two, performance outcomes effectiveness. Because when you're direct, you've got the best, best access to the quality inventory, you're creating the highest quality inventory. And then when we auction our inventory from, from the publishers that we work with, which is exceeding right now 20,000 individual domains, what we do is we auction it through multiple pathways to try and find the advertisers. Because the advertisers are, are available in multiple pathways. Some love Google, some love Trade Desk, some love stackadap, some love Simplify.

Bob Regular [00:20:16]:
They're everywhere in many, many different platforms and many different pathways. And that logically should be if you have the publisher and the inventory and you have someone like Infolinx, which is essentially securing that inventory and we're selling it upstream through pathways to the advertisers, that is a very, what's called supply path optimization. That is a very transparent direct supply path. Why does that matter? It matters because you have very few taking a cut in the middle, number one. Number two is there's transparency of information of what it is about that publisher. And the last is you get a fair auction. You get a fair auction. We found that to be the best, the best methodology is secure the inventory, the best inventory.

Bob Regular [00:21:07]:
We don't secure all the inventory with a publisher, we secure a very specific placement because that placement, we've determined using our own tools is the highest performing placement on the publisher. Maybe it's one, maybe it's two, but it's the highest performing placement on the publisher. So we don't want necessarily the other less performing placements, we want the best performing placement. And then we make those best performing placements in our auction for the buyers to optimize and buy against. And that transparency gives them a very safe, what's called clean, well lit direct path to inventory. And, and we found that to be a very successful way of working with advertisers to get and help them hit their goals and a very good way to help publishers because we secure that inventory with the publisher and that's, that's the nature of how we're doing it with Infolinks.

Jim Banks [00:22:00]:
And that was always the thing that, that I found so conflicting because as an advertiser, an agency that worked with various brands buying their media for them, right, we would, we would run Google display network campaigns and we'd be buying all the GDN traffic. And what would, what we would do is we would, we would identify specific placements on the GDN where we got good returns, right? We got, we were profitable. And again, completely contrary to what's acceptable practice, we, we would then approach that site directly to ask to buy the media directly from them rather than doing it through Google. Technically we were breaking the rules of the, the kind of, the contract between Google and, and the client, right, but, but ultimately what we were trying to do is secure more money for the publisher, right, because if we were able to pay more than, than they were getting from Google anyway, right, and also try and cut out as much of the competition as possible by, by knowing if we, if we had a specific placement on a particular page that we knew if we could put an ad slot there that we would do incredibly well. That'd be good for us as the advertiser agency, good for the publisher because they're making more money than they would be. And the only kind of injured party in this would probably be Google because they're not, they're not taking their share. And, and to me, I, I think that's where I, I hoped everything would, would ultimately end up. And it certainly sounds from what you, you're describing, but that's like the ecosystem that is coming to, to, to, to bear now because all of the nonsense that used to happen in between, as you say, everyone's taking their, their sort of their rake off the table in terms of I want a piece of this, I want a piece of this.

Jim Banks [00:23:36]:
That was always the thing that amazed me when I went to work in house with this as sales house. They had a rate card. So they'd be working with fairly big sort of brands that had lots and lots of impressions and they would have a rate card that would start at say 30 bucks and they would try and sell as much inventory as they could at that level. Some agencies would be quite happy to pay $30 because they're working with big brands. They wanted to come in Guaranteed placements on certain sites. Great. But there would usually be a massive amount of unsold remnant inventory that would just not get sold. And they would like tie a bow on that, throw it across, across the GDN or something like that, just to try and make as much money as they could.

Jim Banks [00:24:16]:
I kept thinking that was like a really inefficient way in which it was done using people. And I always remember been sitting in the office, I think sort of quarter to four on a Friday afternoon, somebody came up and said, this particular advertiser wants to buy a spot on here. The rate card says at the time it was, I think, 25 bucks or something like that. What's the best you can do? Could you do it for £2 or like $252.50, something like that? And the person went, yeah, okay, I can do it for that. So they were basically getting a tenth of what they should have been getting for exactly the same inventory as somebody had paid $25 for. And. And for me, I just thought that is inefficient. It's not good for the publisher as it.

Jim Banks [00:24:56]:
As in they're making a fraction of what they could be making if it was done on a proper auction basis. There's probably an advertiser that would quite happily pay more if they knew that inventory existed and just trying to open up the. The opportunity for them to be able to find it and then bid on in a programmatic way. I guess that's where the sort of the evolution of some of the trade desks and so on that have kind of like morphed from there, really. Yeah.

Bob Regular [00:25:21]:
The efficiency of inventory is a very complicated conversation because there are so many dimensions to what makes inventory effective. There's the placement, there's the frequency, there's the number of units on a page, there's how many uniques versus how many impressions. There's a lot of dimensions and then there's all kinds of sub dimensions around. Is the user really on the active tab or they're not on the active tab? Is the user really engaged or did they go up and get up and leave and have a coffee? There's. There's so much around. Audience attention, engagement, density, ad density. All those things we evaluate when we pick the placement that we decide to take a relationship or partnership for and create that proprietary placement on the publisher and we're evaluating. See, the underlying thesis for me, Jim, is going back to what you said was I spent tens of millions of dollars buying media on behalf of advertisers.

Bob Regular [00:26:17]:
Sometimes that could reach in the hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. And what you would assess is that it's very, very difficult to find consistent targets that consistently work and that you get real value out of long term. But the consistent thing that we noticed, or I've noticed over those years is if you, you set a certain number of placements with a certain amount of behavior, you had a high degree of performance consistently. And so I turned that really into a business by taking that placement model with the behavior of our unit model and placing it on the publisher. And then it became about scale. I started the same way you did, which was acknowledging if I bought something from a particular website and it worked, I would go to the website and I would say, can I work directly with you? And the website would say, yes, but a seller was selling it for a price much larger than GDN was selling it for to me for. And then you had this inefficiency of price, right? That didn't make sense because there was a seller in the middle of the conversation. So there and then you had all these unique things going on with the auction where when GDN was giving it to me, it had determined using data, this was the best time to give it to me.

Bob Regular [00:27:29]:
And that's why it worked. But when I worked directly with the publisher, it didn't necessarily work. And so you all, you have all these moving dimensions. And so it wasn't as simple as disintermediating the folks in the middle and just going direct. It was about it's the right placement, it's the right time, it's the right location, it's the right behavior. And all these together, it's the right.

Jim Banks [00:27:51]:
Day of the week, time of day.

Bob Regular [00:27:53]:
It'S all this stuff, right? It's a multi dimensional problem. And so we basically wanted to create a private market, right, by going to a large number of publishers for scale to put what we knew to be the best ad experience, the best ad unit on the publisher, that the placement that we knew generated value for our advertisers. And so we've created essentially this marketplace of inventory with that purpose. And now with spo, our mission has been very much, especially this year in 2025 and going 26, selling directly to the advertiser, working directly with the agencies and the advertisers to give them access, to give them direct access. I would say we're in an era of mass disintermediation. And so everybody looks towards their future success as can I get closer to my Endpoints, Can I get closer to my demand, can I get closer to my supply? And this hopefully will solve the inefficiencies, right? Because we, we seem to be in an era where efficiency is, inefficiency is evil and we need to move towards efficiencies. So that, that, that's been our focus. But I do think the wrinkle thrown into this era now is the AI part of it, right? I, that AI has come out of left field last two years.

Jim Banks [00:29:11]:
I think this, because this must be hitting publishers pretty hard like the, the onset of AI and, and what impact is having because a lot, a lot of people, even when you have like really well written editorial pieces, right, Everyone will just assume that that's been written by AI and you know, and again, I mean from a publisher standpoint, it must be really difficult to maximize your revenue. Some of the, the big publishers that kind of have existed are really struggling to reinvent themselves in this kind of AI world.

Bob Regular [00:29:41]:
I have so much to say on that topic. So the, the publisher is really hurting. The publisher is really taking it on the chin. AI is definitely without a doubt affected publisher traffic, affected user engagement. And so we definitely do see publishers are seeing a reduction of traffic because AI has not only changed the search referral traffic because that's a real thing, but it's also changing user behavior. Where are they spending their time? They're spending their time in ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude, whatever it is, and they're spending their time there learning and consuming and less time on the open web. So we definitely have seen in the last year a decline in traffic on a number of different publishers on the website. I would say that it seems like it's coming to a flattening period.

Bob Regular [00:30:30]:
I think a lot of the impact has been, has been disruption isn't realized. I think there will be more, but I think the tectonic disruption now, I think it will just be a slow. Right, receding. And now we're moving to an era where it's all about building a relationship with your customer. If you're a publisher, whether that's through newsletters, text messages, social and what have you to bring them back to the web environment to get something special. I do think that there's this halo effect around AI right now and that's fine. I do think the consumer will miss the experience. The experience or the experiential experience of coming to a new site.

Bob Regular [00:31:14]:
Right. Looking at the pictures, looking at the, the editorial the way that they do. So I think that we're in this halo moment, people are spending and consuming in the AI a lot. I think they will come back to the web a little bit and we'll find this buffering period. But I think publishers are definitely under, under strain and, and it's, and it's hurting them and they really have to, it's easy to lecture, right? And I don't like to lecture because I think it's easy to lecture. But they really have to find ways to build a relationship with their audience in order to create endurance. And that endurance is, is consumers are going to have to type in their www.whatever.com and go visit them. Right? That's, that's literally what's going to need to happen because I don't think the AI agents are going to want to send much traffic out.

Bob Regular [00:32:04]:
I think Google.

Jim Banks [00:32:05]:
No, I mean, there's, there's so much. I, I think if you look at it, I, I've talked to loads of people who are they, they made historically most of their money through SEO, right? And they're, they initially were like worried about like the, the onset of AI impacting everything. And what's typically happening is there's a dramatic drop in the amount of referral traffic that's coming from traditional search, but their lead volume has not dropped hardly at all, maybe a tiny bit. So maybe the traffic volume from organic search is down 40%, but the lead volume is down like 2%. Right. And you're, you're going, that's probably in between, right? But there's no attributable kind of source for that. Right. Even, Even the, the LLMs are not doing a particularly good job of raising their hand and saying, yeah, I sent that to you.

Jim Banks [00:32:52]:
Right? And that's probably because they can't, they can't, they can't say who sent it to them because in a lot of cases there'll be 12 different citation sources. And then based on that, that's when people will decide where they want to go to. And they may go direct to go direct to Google, type in the URL and click away. Right. I think somewhere along the way, traditional SEO best practices will probably bubble their way back. In the same way that I think as much as all these lms exist now and they're, they're a huge amount of money piling into them, at some point in time, the people that have invested the money into them are going to go, where's the money coming out of it? And I know that sort of OpenAI are now trying to sell product directly and you Know, and I think again, I've always maintained, you know, you gotta just stick to, stick to your own swim lane, stay with, stay doing what you do best, right? And their business will not be defined by doing E commerce. They just don't think that's it. In the same way that you look at Google back in the day they had finance sites, they had travel sites and Google were, I worked in travel and spent a ton of money in travel and Google were always the biggest competitor that we had because they could offer the Google flight search and it would have all the roots and everything else.

Jim Banks [00:34:04]:
But I think generally speaking people, again, people were probably less trusting in Google as they were of a specific travel site like an Expedia or something like that. Trustpilot. And again, it's just trying to position yourself in a way that people will go to you rather than going to somewhere else where it's an aggregation of the information that's available.

Bob Regular [00:34:25]:
It's all going to coexist. The web is not going to go away. Publishers are not going to go away. Traffic will find its, its waterline and the LLMs will be useful or, or not useful for certain things. We haven't really figured out what yet. Will people really want to go shopping through an AI agent? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe some will, maybe 10% will, maybe 80%, 90% will say this is an awful experience. I'd much rather go and do it the way I always did it.

Bob Regular [00:34:56]:
I think it's still unclear, right? The user experience is still unclear. I do think that the consumption of knowledge, information, right? Just straight up information, news, learning about something, getting an interpretation of something, I think that's transformed. I really do think that now it is. So it's almost to the point where it's just so addictive to just be told by the LLM what it thinks about what it is you asked instead of having to go to read critically, think, write, assess, read something else critically, think, assess and put it together. The LLM just tells you what to think, what, what it think and, and that, and that's a hard thing as a publisher to compete with. So the type of information that I think publishers will have to benefit from to keep consumers interested in them will have to think about that. How do you compete with that in gaining attention? So there will be a balance and I think that that balance is going to ultimately end with all of us coexisting, right? We're going to have publishers where you go to destinations and I don't think this is a good corollary but I'm just using it because it came top of mind. There are still magazine stands in the airport.

Bob Regular [00:36:12]:
Okay. Not as big as they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Right. Where they took, they, they dominated a tenth or, or a third of a, of a Hudson News, let's say as an example in New York. But they're still there. And there may not be 150 titles anymore. There may be 25. Right.

Bob Regular [00:36:34]:
But they're still there. And so there will be a coexistence for sure.

Jim Banks [00:36:41]:
Yeah. And there's, there's some people that they're not, they're not into technology. They don't understand LLMs or things like that. They want to be old school. That was for me. I, I used to be a sort of high volume emailer and me, I used to love like people that had a Yahoo Doc Yahoo email address or an AOL email address because I knew that they were an old person. Right. They didn't understand how to set Google as the default search engine on their browser.

Jim Banks [00:37:05]:
So they would still use Yahoo as their, their kind of browser of choice. And we did very well on the back of understanding that we were focusing our efforts towards a particular demographic in terms of age, gender and monetary value. They all had lots of money, disposable income because they were at a later stage in life. Probably the sort of age I'm at now. I keep thinking maybe I'm the kind of guy now that's the old AOL person of days gone by.

Bob Regular [00:37:33]:
You're the AOL email address now.

Jim Banks [00:37:36]:
Exactly.

Bob Regular [00:37:36]:
Snuck up on you, right?

Jim Banks [00:37:38]:
Yeah. It's funny, I got grand grandchildren, right. And like I go and see my grandson, he's heavily into Snapchat and I've never understood Snapchat at all. Just don't get it, don't understand it, don't understand how it works. But he uses it and his font is so small I can't even see it. It's just amazing to spend time with, with a Gen Z that kind of just understands, he understands technology far better than I probably ever will.

Bob Regular [00:38:03]:
Because he was raised with it.

Jim Banks [00:38:05]:
He didn't have to do the old way of calculators and things. Like everything's done on a mobile phone.

Bob Regular [00:38:10]:
Absolutely. He was raised with it and you learned it, you were part of the building of it. But he, he's, he's enveloped it as a part of his growing up and his lifestyle. No different than we did versus our parents when it comes to computers. So it's, it's similar, I think Digital media, though, is, is transforming in such a really interesting way for media buyers because now with the on vent of all these, what we call walled gardens, the Snapchats and whatever the world you have, you have a lot of different environments to buy media from and it is very complicated to assess where do you spend your budget to get your best results. But the beauty of it is that it's all designed around outcomes, performance, it's all designed around that. It's all trying to move you in that direction.

Jim Banks [00:38:55]:
And I think really, it's always been that. I know that obviously if you buy media from Facebook, you're buying it on a, you know, CPM basis. Right. But ultimately people want performance. Right. Back in the good old days, when I was working with this sort of ad sales house, back in the day, right, if, if we had a, an approach from an advertiser, they would buy a million impressions on a particular site on a particular day or whatever it might be. We deliver the million impressions if it didn't back out for them, quite that on the advertising side, we used to just probably throw another 500,000 impressions at it just to balance everything out.

Bob Regular [00:39:27]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:39:28]:
We'd be, we'd want it to perform at a certain level. They would have an expectation of it performing at a level. And if the two didn't meet, then, you know, somebody was going to either compromise, you're either going to go, I'll throw some more traffic at it and, and see if that works. And if, if you didn't, then they wouldn't come back and buy from you again. Right. So you were in a position where you had to do something to try and keep them on the books, really. So.

Bob Regular [00:39:50]:
Right. 100%.

Jim Banks [00:39:51]:
And I'm, and I'm sure that sort of thing, if, if, if AI and the agentic AI doesn't incorporate that, that sort of, that, that allowance for that, that anomaly, you'll probably end up where a lot of advertisers will pull budget. I know a lot of the advertisers that I've worked with in the past have pulled a lot of spend off Facebook because it's just become not a particularly profitable platform for them. Yeah, right. And I think there's a, there's a correlation between the onset of AI and the demise of a lot of the Facebook reps that they used to be. Right. You just don't have the access to the people to be able to say, what do we do here? Oh, we just trust, trust us, we know exactly what's going on. It's the data doesn't tell us that you know what's going on. Some somewhere along the way there's got to be a kind of a readjustment.

Bob Regular [00:40:36]:
I think that's a very, very good point which is the, the evolution of agentic or magentic AI as a buying methodology and as a buying bot is going to require a tremendous amount of trust. You go in today to Google or to Facebook or or and programmatic systems and you have a certain sense of control. But when you turn on that auto optimizer and say let it rip, oftentimes you're disappointed because the outcome is not what you needed and you don't have control. And so now with AI, with the AI concept we're suggesting that you will have no control, that you will just really just let the system be smarter than what you could be and decide for you. So like a performance max kind of effect right on the Google side or what have you. So I think that all of this is going to take time. I keep saying that because there's a lot of folks alarmingly saying this is going to happen overnight and lots of jobs are going to be lost. And I think it's a nice process that we have to go through in order to build trust where it actually works and it actually delivers the outcomes.

Bob Regular [00:41:42]:
And you don't have the folks that you know, know how to turn the dials today saying eh, it's not very good. I'm able to do it better by turning the dials the way I always did. And so it's going to be a transition for sure. I know what we try to do on the infolink side is we're now putting AI tools on top of the inventory to learn the inventory better, to understand sentiment better, of the consumer, to understand behavior better. It just can think faster. Right.

Jim Banks [00:42:09]:
And understanding, I mean we're trying to use automation layering. So we'll layer on our knowledge and what we know about the customer, the end user. Right. And we'll incorporate that into this day is a good day, this day is not a good day. So again we will layer in the knowledge that we have based upon the demographic of the kind of the customer, customer information. Again, I'm always amazed how many advertisers don't want to share any of their information with Facebook or Google or what have you. And I'm like, you're just missing the opportunity. The more you share with them, the better their algorithms are at finding more of those types of people.

Jim Banks [00:42:47]:
But if you don't tell them what's going on. And that's, that's for me, one of the challenges, I think people keep thinking that the, the onset of. Here in the uk, we've got gdpr, right, which, and, and ultimately you've got cookie consent and everything else. And people assume that when you get the accept reject, if you reject that, you don't get any advertising. It's. No, that's not how it works. What will happen is you'll just get advertising. It just won't be personalized to your particular sort of situation.

Jim Banks [00:43:15]:
So you'll get ads for all sorts of different things, not specifically for the interests that you have. And I've spoken to quite a lot of my friends and they now accept cookies and because of that they're now getting a much better user experience. So I think somewhere along the way, part of our job has got to be to continue to try to educate the end users that the whole onset of advertising, you're going to pay for it, right? One way or the other. I've chosen recently to, to pay Paramount. I think it's like 4, 450amonth not to receive ads, right? Because I, I value my time sufficiently that it's worth 450amonth for me.

Bob Regular [00:43:53]:
Trader. Trader Jim.

Jim Banks [00:43:54]:
I know, I know. I, I did it more for my, my wife's benefit, right? Because she kept saying, is it your turn to make tea? When the advert break would come up and I'd have to get up and go make a cup of tea. So I thought, you know what for the sake of four, $4 50amonth it's worth.

Bob Regular [00:44:08]:
You're a subscriber to save your marriage. I love it.

Jim Banks [00:44:12]:
Oh yeah, you have no idea, Bob. It's, it's amazing. I. Happy life, happy wife thing, right?

Bob Regular [00:44:18]:
100%. I, I think we as an industry lost, personally, I think we lost our mind with all of this concern over privacy at the depths that it went to to put a consent screen on every single website and every single entity on multiple visits. I think that it's a cause looking for a purpose. And it's a nice idea to say that we should protect our privacy and I like that. But we're increasingly in a world where we're surrounded by cameras, we're surrounded by phones, we're surrounded by devices, we're being recorded all the time, we're being listened to all the time. We go to the grocery store, they're scanning our coupons. The concept that we're going to have a consent screen on a website is somehow going to give us any insulation of privacy is almost ludicrous. And I think it was just a bad implementation for a good purpose.

Bob Regular [00:45:12]:
And now everybody noted.

Jim Banks [00:45:15]:
I mean I'm spending so much time with enterprise level businesses trying to get to grips with the whole like cookie policy permissions and how to configure it on screen. Do you have it bottom left, bottom right in the center. And I keep thinking, but all this is doing is it's just getting in the way of the end users having the experience that they want to have. The first, first thing you offer them is give me, give me permission to like show you show. To basically put cookies on the site which will make your experience better. But I can't spell it out that clearly for you. I have to use generic wording rather than specific wording. But to make it.

Jim Banks [00:45:52]:
And when you have this kind of customize and then it shows you all the dropdowns of these are all the cookies and that if, if you use TCF, it's 894partners and it's who cares. I always used to, used to make me laugh when, when you install Ghostery on, on a, as a Chrome extension and see on a site like you go to one of these big sort of publisher sites how many kind of cookies would fire in the background. You're like, that's amazing. How many are going, not going on in the background. But, but at the end, like I.

Bob Regular [00:46:20]:
Said, we're never going to help consumers want to do that. Right. Because by nature the consent screen gives you the impression with a reject or allow button that it's safer to hit the reject button because you don't know what allow mean. Just to assume that you have a transparent transaction there where the person is unbiased. I'm going to hit a reject button on everything all day long if I don't know what it means to allow it. So I think it's, it's silly to think that lots of people are good with it.

Jim Banks [00:46:51]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and, but, but at the same time it's like in, in some regards it's better that they make an accept or reject decision rather than no decision at all. If they make no decision at all, I don't get any data. Right. Whereas at least accept reject. I can get some sort of model data at the end of it. Right. Which is half better.

Jim Banks [00:47:10]:
Is, is half better for me as a, as an advertising agency. Right. To support the clients I'm working with. I've got a better understanding of kind of what's going on, right? Whereas if, if there's no decision at all, right. And there's no, no barrier to the person accessing the site, they can just scroll around, do whatever they want, right? And that banner will constantly appear and it will just get in the way for them. Right? So particularly on mobile, I mean on mobiles it's there all the time, right? So if they don't make a decision, they get the pop up every single page. They go to accept, reject, except reject, except reject and eventually they'll make a decision. Right.

Jim Banks [00:47:42]:
But you know, but by then it's too late. You've lost the, the first maybe five or six pages, right?

Bob Regular [00:47:47]:
And think of the number of publishers. This happens to me a lot on e commerce sites where you have the consent screen and you then have a modal that comes up looking for your, for your email sign up, right? And so now you've got, within five seconds, within five seconds you've got two clients off. That's right. In order for you just to see the homepage.

Jim Banks [00:48:07]:
Yeah.

Bob Regular [00:48:07]:
You know, it's, it's, it's, it's almost, if you use the method, use the analogy, right, it's almost like you're, you're, you're walking into a store and you're being assaulted, right, With a questionnaire, a survey before you're allowed to go in and look around. And then the next person, after you get across the first survey, the next person stops you, right, and says, would you like a discount? Sign up for this coupon. But you haven't even gotten into the store and found whether or not there's something there of interest yet before you've been completely maligned. And so it's so bizarre to me that the, the policymakers thought this is all very brilliant, that we should do that.

Jim Banks [00:48:45]:
But anyway, I think things, think things are getting even worse. I know in, in Germany and they've taken things to a completely new level now. And things like Google Tag Manager is completely, almost banned in, in Germany now. And you're thinking, this is crazy. Again, people assume you put everything in Google Tag Manager, it's going to slow your site down. It's. I'll tell you what's not going to slow you. If you put 50 particular pieces of code directly on your site instead of in Tag Manager, your site will be a lot slower.

Jim Banks [00:49:11]:
They're always not really comparing one to another. That always amazes me.

Bob Regular [00:49:14]:
I did not know that about Germany. I wasn't aware of that.

Jim Banks [00:49:18]:
Yeah, I mean it's, it's. But but for me, and I think what's happened is there's probably two or three court cases that have happened right where people have been complaining about this whole privacy and blah blah, blah that, that's become a big deal now in Germany which for me is again, it's just madness. Again from my perspective it was like everyone says I want to run traffic in Germany. I'm like no, not interested. It's not my bag. I want to end. I've got a couple of things I want to kind of get, get your opinion. First off, I saw on your LinkedIn that you went to Programmatic IO.

Jim Banks [00:49:51]:
How was that link that a good show?

Bob Regular [00:49:53]:
It was a good show. It was a good show. It's a really good venue for in many respects the folks that are on the Lumascape to come together. It is, is more of the middle. I would say that the folks that are acting as whether it's optimization tools or data targeting or, or sellers or, or what have you, it's the folks that are part of the gears of the everyday part of making adtech Martech work. It's a lot less of. I would, I, I would say our advertiser or advertiser agencies, in fact I would say they steer away from it a little bit because it's, it's vendor centric. But it was, it was, it was pretty positive and I think it's a good show.

Bob Regular [00:50:29]:
It reminds me of the old ad tech show from the very beginning which was always the better, better shows. Really sad that that show went away. Yeah. Funny.

Jim Banks [00:50:37]:
I remember going to ad tech in New York the, the year I think it was like they had a sort of big, big hurricane and I think everyone got all their booth were in a basement and got flooded and, and everything else. And I think, I think the reality of it was is that the, the ad tech in New York, I'd come over from the uk I don't even know how, how I got on a flight to get in, but I got in. I turned up at my hotel just expecting it was all there and, and they were like we only got a certain number of rooms. I managed to get a room. I walked over to, to the Javit center where it was right and there was, it was just dead. There was hardly anyone there. A lot of the advertisers or lot of the exhibitors had the option with insurance to not go right and get their money back. So a lot of them did that.

Jim Banks [00:51:18]:
And I think the reason that the ad tech show died at. Died of death Was at the ad tech shows is usually when probably about 80% of all the exhibitors go, go to the sales stand and they have the layout the following year's show, here's the booze, here's where it's going to be. And most people, they probably get like an 80% re, repeat kind of booking rate for the show. And because 75% of the advertisers didn't go, they didn't get that repeat booking. And it just died to death as a result of that.

Bob Regular [00:51:49]:
Wow.

Jim Banks [00:51:50]:
Which was very sad.

Bob Regular [00:51:51]:
I did not realize that it was, it was, it was the industry show of the time. Now we're fragmented into multiple shows. One of my, one of my memories is in the early 2000s going to AD tech in China. It was the first ad tech show that was put on in China.

Jim Banks [00:52:05]:
Was that in Shanghai?

Bob Regular [00:52:06]:
It was in Shanghai, yeah.

Jim Banks [00:52:08]:
And I went to that one. I think that was 2006. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bob Regular [00:52:11]:
Somewhere around that. And I remember at the time being baffled because I, I, I would meet the folks that were displaying or, or they, they were lecturing on the stage. And it dawned on me that in China they sold based on time, much like you do in television. They weren't selling based on CPM or impressions. So everybody was talking about the ad servers selling based on time. And, and, and how, how much time did you want to buy on, on the site? And I just thinking, what do you mean how much time? And, and how many impressions? No, no, we don't sell an impressions. We buy in time. You can buy three days, you can buy five days, you can buy a week, anything by day, whatever it is.

Bob Regular [00:52:51]:
And I thought what a, what a, what a quirky, what a quirky world that was there. And then the last thing I remember from that show was I remember going to an ad agency because we were selling at the time there and I was pitching this ad agency advertiser and they were talking about how they would use people on bicycles to deliver their product in China. And so in order for them to count a conversion at the time when they put a digital ad on, when the bicyclists would come back after delivering the product, they would type in onto the website that they had, they had delivered the product so that they could correlate an attribute from the bicycle. Genius, right? That, that an E commerce transaction would happen because nobody used credit cards there. They weren't comfortable with it back then. So they would take cash, the bicyclists would take cash when they deliver the product and when they Come back with the cash they market on the website and then they do attribution to the ad.

Jim Banks [00:53:41]:
Yeah, it's funny, I remember that show like I turned up at Shanghai Airport and somebody said, you want to get the train into, into town, right? Because it's really quick. It's 400 kilometers now. Yeah, I'll do that. So I managed to find the train, got on the train, got to where I, where, where it dropped you off. I got out and I have no idea where I am at all right? So I got back on the train, went back to the airport and got a taxi, right? And fortunately everything in, in Shanghai or everything in China at that particular point time was all QR codes, right? If you wanted to go for a dinner reservation, you speak to your concierge in the hotel, they would give you a QR code that would then give you, you could scan that onto the QR code reader in the taxi. He would know where to take you. You go to the restaurant, they scan the QR code when you know you spoke to the maitre d, that would then give the attribution to the concierge. So they would get their commission for the information.

Jim Banks [00:54:36]:
And you think that was 2006. You look at QR codes are pretty ubiquitous now. There was this really lean spell between then and probably about three or four years ago where nobody used QR codes. And I'm like, why not? To me, they were so smart.

Bob Regular [00:54:52]:
They, they are very smart. I think they're brilliant. I love them. They have a, it's funny that they're everywhere now, right? On everything.

Jim Banks [00:54:59]:
Yeah.

Bob Regular [00:54:59]:
Go to any event and you have a QR code. Even the menus are still holding on to the QR code model. But yeah, China, China was way ahead in many things and some things that, boy, they were super far behind back then. But of course, course they've, they've caught up and they're, they're their own juggernaut in their own way today and how they, how they operate. They're probably one of the largest sources of mobile app creation out there and so they certainly have caught up really fast.

Jim Banks [00:55:26]:
Big time. Bob, this has been brilliant. I've loved having you on as a guest. Unfortunately, my, my co host Rob has missed out on the opportunity to come and view the Breeze with you. Obviously all your contact details will be available on the, the website page after, after we come off here. It only remains for me to say thank you so much for being such a great guest. I really loved the conversation.

Bob Regular [00:55:46]:
Thank you, Jim. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me. It was fun.