And we're back. Uh, we had to take a brief break because we were all laughing so hard at the, uh, the history of metamarkets and real and Jim Payne. Um, but let's get into the news of the week. So we have a, we have a bunch of stuff here. Uh, late breaking, I guess, um, a few minutes prior to recording, uh, are and I got an email from last week's guest Alex, which by the way, I mean, everybody loved and, you know, continues to talk about saying that, uh, Google has released a response to basically the IAB's comment on privacy sandbox. I was like, Oh, this is awesome. I'll take a quick look and then we'll do this episode with Mike and open it. And it's 34 pages long. So I

didn't do anything. Um, sounds like you might have done a little bit more. I have it out. I'll throw it to you. I haven't had time to really do it, but I think it kind of tracks against some of the things that I mentioned in our newsletter last week. I'll, I'll give you a quote. This is Google responding to the IAB. The analysis contains many misunderstandings and inaccuracies, which we considered important to correct in order to provide accurate information to the ecosystem. And then the next paragraph here, the privacy sandbox provide building blocks, blah, blah, blah. They are not designed to offer one to one replacement for a third party cookies or cross eyes identifiers. Um, I think that's a key point because what the headlines from last week, that only a small number of the 44 use cases are supported. And I don't think anyone should assume that the privacy sandbox is going to replace every single use case. So I'm going to read this and maybe put some of this in the weekly newsletter that comes out on Monday, but I'd probably encourage people to check it out themselves as well.

All 34 pages. Um, Mike does privacy sandbox and, you know, all of this like insanity that's happening in ad tech, even though you're like, ad tech is a customer base for you, you're not in ad tech. Does this stuff do you look at this? Does it matter significantly to, to real? Is it on your radar or is this just like, you know, completely secondary?

I think anyone that's in the business of, of managing or working with, you know, customer data, this impacts. So what I observe is that part of what's going on is this is a, it's a little bit of a, um, there's a walled garden play here that's happening where I saw our fellow ad tech exec, Kamakshi, um, sold her company quietly to snowflake, yep, um, to build their privacy offering. I think it was Samua was the name of the business. So I think it's actually what the customers are asking for, but I also think there's an element here where if you can play the privacy card, you can start to say, okay, all, all of their data needs to be inside our privacy sandbox. This is the safe place to share data with your partners. And it's, it can be a very effective way to, I think, prevent customers from using, you know, other platforms. So that would be my read on it. But, uh, I think it's important for sure.

All right. Let's talk about, I was going to say MFA news, but it's a little bit more just like inventory quality news. So it's three, three pieces that came out this week. Uh, the first one was, uh, double verify is apparently now going to market with a tool that classifies MSA in some sort of, I think three step system, you know, red, yellow, green, one, two, three, bad, super bad, awful. I don't know exactly how it's being done, but I thought it was interesting. There was a good write up in, uh, at exchange or on this one. I'll borrow it to you. Uh, Ari, what do you think of this idea of, you know, basically there's shades of gray

in MFA and it's not just all binary, like it's MFA or non MFA. It's kind of connected to how Chris from Jones thinks about it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. Uh, Chris, uh, did a really good job of talking through that. I think it was interesting that the DV conversation included some phrases about, um, these sites may still drive some performance when I think most true MFA sites would not drive performance, except through, you know, some sort of misguided attribution system. So I think that DV as a measurement provider is finding itself in the situation where they have to keep the customers happy and some customers want to continue to get the reach and use these sites and some don't. Um, it's a tough position to be in and some vendors, some DSPs are cutting them off entirely and maybe that's not in the client's interest in all cases.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Um, you know, again, it's almost back to the Chris conversation where MFA is sometimes not exactly what we all think about it in terms of classification, where it's a random page that, you know, buys traffic on Facebook and just like stuffs, a hundred ads and 30 video ads in a user session. It could be just a site that is not arranged correctly, perhaps maybe has like one, too many ads on it, doesn't load. So it's like, you know, there needs to be, I think more, um, more science to, like, understanding what good publisher UX is. And maybe this is a step in that direction. Yeah. Great. So somewhat related and, you know, this was one that, you know, a lot of conversation on was, uh, there's a new product from trade desk called, I think TD 500 or SSP. Literally S and P 500. All right. Cool. Good for them. So it is a, uh, a collection of 500, uh, presumably premium publisher properties, not science, but like properties or media sellers that they are basically creating a, you know, meta PMP or an ad network or some way to very quickly sort of get, you know, some sort of aggregated reach or cross 500 publishers. What do you think of this? All right.

Well, this one really has the Tinfoil hats coming out a lot. Half the people on X are like, Oh boy, you created a list of 500 publishers. Congratulations. Uh, put out a press release, which is a pretty good reaction. And then the other reaction is, um, sort of, wow, Jeff's done it again. This is brilliant. This is going to clean up the ecosystem. And then there's kind of the third level reaction, which is this is step one to forcing everyone to use open paths because you'll have to use open path to be one of these 500 and we're going to eliminate all the SSPs. So I don't know. I, I think it's, it seems like just a little bit of a marketing gimmick to me. By the way, S and P stands for seller and publisher, not like standard of course. I, I'm left a little unenthusiastic.

What do you think, Mike?

Well, I, the only common I'll make is on the previous, on the previous MFA observations is that I, I do think that maybe it's been discussed on the, on the architecture podcast already. I do think that the big risk right now, systemic risk to this industry is AI, um, search and things like perplexity because so many of the ways in which I consume MFA sites is frankly recipes, you know, searching for a recipe to cook. And I think a lot of these, um, sites have had an unhealthy relationship with Google who obviously benefits tremendously from, you know, those, uh, the, the ad load. And I think that, yeah, the AI content, uh, is a systemic risk to a lot of the MFA stuff.

It depublishes more broadly, potentially.

You know, bringing this back to men and markets for a minute. One of the reasons why people love menor markets was because it contrasted the sort of DSP, SSP reporting, which might be updated every couple of hours and might have weird aggregations and stuff in menor markets. You could see in near real time where your ads were running and you just add, add the domain as a field and boom, you'd find some weird ass domains that you shouldn't have been there and add them to exclude this right away. And that's like the kind of on the wire trading that people want in digital that they haven't financed to be frank. And meta markets really was the first tool that let people do that.

Very true. You know, there was one thing Jay Friedman, uh, we've had on the, on the pod before, a CEO of, of Goodway Group that, you know, he commented on this whole SSP 500 thing, which I thought was interesting was, you know, basically like, you know, there's, uh, some, you know, curation happening or curation products that are being done, you know, by agencies or agency like companies that this is, you know, basically going to aviate. So, you know, maybe it's like, you know, one step closer to a little bit more transparency, a little

bit, you know, less, you know, sort of like blind markups on, you know, what is aggregated inventory. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah. I have big news this week, which is that, um, Jeff Green responded to a comment of mine on like Dan. So actually, yeah, I know I'm not going to wash my keyboard again. Like that's like the big, big moment for me.

What did I say?

He said something about like astute analysis, but I don't agree entirely about the stages of grief for my last article.

That's amazing. One final point, I would encourage everybody to read the deep dive on analytics that James Hercher from Ad Exchange or did. It was, it was pretty awesome. All right. Moving on. So CTV, couple of actually three, three cool things in the CTV land. So first more on TTD, TTD's open path is now in CTV starting with, or including Visio and Cox, important, significant or, you know, just incremental. What do you think, Ar? I think it's an important step

and I'm not sure how well it's going to work out. I think the CTV, CBMs are so high that taking out a, a hop there could be very meaningful in terms of the amount of money that goes to the publisher and how the working dollars work. The thing that makes me a little skeptical is how complicated the CTV ad decisioning process is in terms of pods and competitive exclusions and all those sort of things. And I'm unclear exactly how the trade desk would be able to handle those if they're sort of acting like a dumb pipe from the publisher to their trading system. But I'll wait and see and hear more as it develops.

Yeah.