is I did a post a few months ago announcing that we were in the outcomes era. And actually, what spurred this post was an Omnicom earnings call in which CEO John Wren was talking about their acquisition of the commerce media company Flywheel. And it really struck me, given that, as Arez says, this has sort of been a paradigm for like 10 years, that John was saying, it's all measurable now. I remember he specifically said, I think that or something very close to that. And it did strike me as odd that he would add that sort of recent temporality to it. But I think it's, again, due to the flywheel acquisition and the ability of hold codes, which have historically been associated with brand advertising, big brands, frequency and reach, those kinds of KPIs to drive sales and to grade their work on that basis. I think, however, that the holdcos, as I just mentioned, being like sort of figures of brand advertising, are not actually the paradigmatic drivers of the outcomes era. I think that's Google and Meta, who have obviously built the biggest media businesses of this era, you know, search and social combined roughly $500 billion category for some, you know, sense of scale, like CTV is a $30 billion market linear is like 60. Right. And so my argument is that we are essentially in the era and in the industry that Google and Meta have built. Now, how have they built that giant business? By driving outcomes or by claiming to do that. Google and Meta are the titans of the industry because they're the ones who can go to advertisers, especially performance advertisers, e-commerce brands, millions of SMBs, and just say, give us your money and we will drive sales, which I think is the ultimate outcome that advertising exists to facilitate. However, I would say the outcomes era thesis is not just limited to the bellwethers of Google and Meta. If you look at the two fastest growing channels in digital advertising, it's commerce media and CTV. Commerce media is essentially an outcomes channel, right? It's now becoming more full funnel. But the reason it's ballooned is because the commerce media owners, e.g. retailers or a company like Uber or PayPal, they are close to consumer transactions. And so they are well positioned to drive transactions, which is the outcome that really matters, which is sales. And CTV, same thing. CTV is about bringing the digital capabilities of targeting and measurement to branding's favorite channel, historically speaking, which is TV, to do what? To better target consumers and drive sales. And now we see with performance TV and the rise of companies like TV Scientific, Vibe Mountain, TV moving even more in the performance direction. And so my argument is that if you look at the industry across all these different spaces, you know, the Walled Gardens, the Holt Coast, Commerce Media, CTV, everyone is talking about outcomes and everyone is measured on their ability to live up to that standard. One final thing I will leave you with is that LiveRamp did their earnings call, I think yesterday or the day before. We're going to have to, we'll release this next week. So it'll have been the previous week. And the outcomes era was central to CEO Scott Howe's remarks. And they were talking about how they are able to put together the full picture of consumer behavior and therefore enable their customers to drive outcomes everywhere. So the outcomes era is ascendant. But if you'd like to make your rebuttal, you can try, Haraz.

All right, let me try. So I think if you're reading corporate websites, press releases, and listening to earnings reports, it totally makes sense that you're going to conclude that we're entering the outcomes era. But for a lot of people that have been in this industry for a while, and I think the conversation started for a while ago, but what you continued and we saw online, there's sort of two camps. And what I think is the common thread for a of people that believe we're entering or should enter the quality era, it's people that have been in this space for so long and have seen sort of the corruption of it because of this obsession on outcomes. how do we actually move towards an honest outcomes space where we don't lose sight, where everyone can just say the word outcomes, and hope that no one else asks too many questions about what does that actually mean? What is an outcome? And does that actually translate into the business results that someone really cares about? And is that someone actually just taking credit for an outcome that was going to happen anyway, or that someone else contributed to? And so I think that's where maybe a little bit of the differences and why you see two different camps and some people that have been operators sort of in the underbelly and seeing campaigns work and not work and really violating, in my view, what I saw given my time at Google and elsewhere is the violations of fundamental sort of marketing principles and fundamentals. And a lot of that being driven by this obsession on quote unquote outcomes.

Like point to examples of what you mean by like the underbelly or some of the things that are going on that, you know, the listeners might not be as familiar with and if they're not, you know, hands on keyboard.

Yeah. So I can give a little bit of a background because I think this also explains, you know, my biases, which I, you know, readily admit to. So this is why I came to this conclusion. But, you know, I've been in this space for a while and was at Google for a very long time. And the last decade that I was at Google, I sat on two different roles for the most part. I was on the Addicts Buy side, and then I was working with all the DSPs that plugged into our inventory. And then I was on the DV360 side where I worked with all of the SSPs. And so the lens that I had was really micro and macro view of supply, supply that was getting plugged into the ecosystem. And to borrow the phrase from Chris Kane that I love, I was seeing what DSPs were eating and not eating. And I'm a naturally curious person. So I was always seeing them like, why is it all this app inventory that no one is touching? Or why is this all this new inventory that's coming in that DSPs are eating, buying a lot of and paying a lot for? And so I saw all these anomalies. And over time, I was sort of raising these and saying, hey, this seems like a risk or an opportunity to Google, to our customers, whoever it was. And as I continued to sort of pull on those threads, I understood, I think, one common theme for all of them, which was the supply side was evolving and innovating rapidly over the last decade plus. New formats, new environments. The buy side didn't really adapt that much. The buy side said, oh, what do we need to do to make sure we're ingesting? Oh, it's an audio format. But we didn't really change the measurement. We didn't really change how we were going to understand the value of certain media. And I think that's where those inconsistencies started to come in. And I tried to correct them where I could within sort of the context of Google. I can give one really clear example because it's the most important one for me. It's probably the first one that I noticed and it only got bigger. It was the one that I couldn't solve my whole time. And that's on video. And so, you know, when video started on the web, it was YouTube and Vimeo and Dailymotion. And it was sort of in stream, right? There were video sites that you'd go to and you would see video ads in stream before, during, and after the video ads that you went to watch. What we saw that evolution and really great innovation was the format called Outstream. And that came in various different formats, app interstitials. But the one that came in really, really dominant was the small little video ads that you see in the bottom corner of a page and teeds and things like that. And the problem was as those grew, the buy side continued looking at viewability and completion rates as their primary metric to value media. And so what we saw over time is that more and more spend moved towards these outstream formats and valued them the same, paid the same amount as they were paying for in-stream. And that was sort of the degradation that we saw of the video market. And so that's just one key example of why I think this focus on outcomes because completed views were an outcome and what buyers were getting. And ultimately, maybe that was the outcome or maybe a view through conversion that later happened that they could tie to that impression was the outcome. And since that's all they focused about, they didn't really look to see, hey, was this really worth the $10 CPM that we were paying?