Thanks again to Dan Primak. We'll be right back with Bennett at Evans, but first a word from a sponsor. Bennett, you tell me how you introduce yourself either on a business card or an email or on Twitter.

Well, yeah, we were joking earlier. I should say I'm an influencer or a think fluencer or something. The sort of pedestrian description is analyst. I try and explain, understand what the new important questions or trends or sort of thematic shifts are going on in tech and in the things that tech is changing. So what is generative machine learning, but also how does the stuff that we were excited about 20 years ago flow through into media or retail or advertising today? Sometimes I sort of call myself think of it as sort of translation. So I sort of translate between what are the kind of the hardcore fundamental things that are coming out the Silicon Valley and what does that mean for a big Japanese retail or big European media company?

What's the kind of the backwards and forwards of all of those shifts? Who's paying you these days? Are there consumer electronics companies that want your insight, investors? Yeah.

Well, so

I think Mark Andreessen called Andreessen Horowitz a media company that monetized pre-veg capital, and so I do fundamentally I do three things. So I have a weekly newsletter and then the sponsorship and that and then I also do a premium pay version of that. And then I give presentations at events and board meetings and things and then I've got some sort of advisory relationships and things. I'm a venture partner with an early stage fund in London called my Zarek and I do a few other things like that.

You were for Mark Andreessen. I want to talk to you about that. But first I want to talk to you about a presentation you do yearly as sort of here's your big thoughts for the year. This is free. It's on your website. You guys can Google it. You can say that you read it. It's 104 slides, but it's pretty easy to consume. And if you say you read it or if you have read it, you will sound smarter. But I did want to dig into some ideas with you that you brought up in this. Sure. In the presentation that are specific to media. You have a line in here called rent advertising and pricing where all separate budgets. Now they're going into one. What does that

mean? Well, so there was a line a couple of years ago that rent is a new CAC, rent is a new customer acquisition cost. And I think the way to sort of maybe two ways, two levels of abstraction to think about. One of them is that today a brand or a retailer will ask themselves, should we put our money into search advertising or brand advertising or free shipping or lower prices or advertising on Amazon or better returns policy or should we open stores and maybe you've already got stores, should we open more stores? And so you can say today, should we open stores in that state or just advertise there? And that wasn't a question you could ask before the internet.

There was a version of it, right? Which is paying for shelf space at a retailer. That's an

old. Yeah. So and that's sort of one way of thinking about what Amazon advertising is, which we can maybe come on to. But I think the core of it is that you have sort of two, you have kind of two fundamental things you're trying to do. And there's a kind of logistics problem, which is how does the customer physically get the product? And there's a discovery suggestion recommendation product, which is how do you suggest to them that they might want it? And obviously some kinds of retail mainly exist to tell you that you might want the product. I mean, famously, Apple retail is basically a marketing operation. I think when they were disclosing the numbers, only about 10% of Apple revenue was actually coming from the stores. The purpose of the stores is marketing is to tell people that Apple product is great. And so is that and as opposed to kind of the other extreme where the some kinds of retail that are entirely exist as the end point to a logistics chain, like, you know, your local grocery store is not really there to market the products to you. It's there to be the most convenient place to get a bag of rice or a bottle of milk. And there's a sort of a vast spectrum in between that. And, you know, do you put your money into slotting fees? Do you pay to be put on the end cap? Do you pay Amazon to put you at the top of the search results? Do you do a TV campaign? Do you have lower prices? Do you do a marketing campaign with Walmart? Do you build your own retail? And all of those things that are sitting once in a spectrum and that the barriers between those used to be a lot less fluid than they are today because, you know, you have this op, you know, do we have a physical store with actually a question now in a way that it wasn't in the past? Obviously, of course, should we have our own stores or other people's stores with also a question? So Nike has shifted to, I think now 40% of Nike brand sales go through Nike's own channel. I think there's a sort of a higher level point here though, which is you've got this sort of interesting like sort of philosophical challenge as a consumer or as a brand now, which is that there's basically infinite product and infinite media. So you know, in the past, you know, go back before the internet, there's only a certain amount of space in any given retailer. And there's only a certain amount of space in Vogue or Car Magazine or the New York Times or whatever it is for the editorial ads. How many of a second ads are there? Yeah, how many? And then of course, there's only 70 people that can afford to buy the back page of Vogue or do a buy a nationwide TV campaign. So you had these sort of fundamental filters or constraints on like how much product there could be and how much stuff there could be. And you know, you can, you know, you can argue against this. You can say, look, supermarkets have 50,000 scoops. So that's not much of a constraint, but it is still kind of a constraint. There's still

a there's there's still only a certain amount of square feet.

Yeah, there's a certain amount of square foot. There's a certain amount of shell space.