Madhive’s Post

Transcript

Hi. Hi, this is Evan Shapiro, your media cartographer from here at Cannes Lions and I'm talking to a bunch of big brains about the media. I'm here with Spencer Potts, yes, the CEO of Madhive, who's actually our host in this space. Pleasure. I'd like to assume that our audience has no idea what the heck we do for a living. So what is Madhive? So Madhive is a software platform. So we started an enterprise software, and the whole idea is to bring local businesses into the streaming ecosystem. So Adam Helfgott, founder with another gentleman. Embolic, who came out of Zynga, who saw the entire, I think digital ecosystem and television is more like a multiplayer video game, said, hey, can we figure out a way to kind of bring very local businesses that want to market in very local spots, let's say a ZIP code or two or even half a zip code, find very differentiated audiences and find the inventory, right? So as I'd like to say to friends at home, we try to put the local pizza shop or the local dealership on Hulu, right? And So what that takes is. A decisioning engine, a device graph and then a series of inventory providers. So we've been able to put that all together and call a full stack and be able to put local businesses on streaming television. Yeah, I think there's this, I don't know, bias or this just ignorance of the importance. There's this small and mid sized businesses, but then there's the Super local mom and pop shops who actually power a tremendous part of our tremendous share of the advertising economy. Yeah, and we've always. I believe that, you know, our original partner was the company that's was part of Tegna, right, The broadcast, Yeah, that's one out of Gannett and it's called Premium. Premium. As a matter of fact, Jim Wilson just joined us as president. So it's a little bit of a full circle and to get him back into our environment. So the whole idea was, yeah, there's so many local stores that are trying to market and reach their audience and it just kind of bubbles up into some of the regional players and the SMBs. And then of course, we have the national brands. So I think, again, the power of the local economy, the power of the local merchant. The ability to now find their audience, where their audience is going, it was really a powerful story for us. And the trick was, if you will, and it was built by people far smarter than me, is to be able to do that at scale, right? So at any point in time, Mattyb is running 2030 thousand campaigns, 20 or 30,000 campaigns. And what's the average size of a campaign? We know the average size is $4000. That's $4000. That's a conversation I had with these big sellers is like you're focused on these eight figure. Deal. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. But you know, 60% of the advertisers in the United States only by YouTube. That's right, That's right. And they're buying at $1500 levels. Yep. So with those kind of clips. And so that was the real, I don't know, enjoyment and excitement about just powering the local economy. And we did make a bet on connected television, right. So that was like five years ago where Adam and Tom sat and said all right, we're going to make that bed, unfortunately came fruition. So we're excited to kind of lean in and really the larger vision for us is to be able to. And I think you and I spoke about this earlier, start to really localize national because there is of course that national blanket, there's gonna be localized national. Thank you for asking. It means really taking the idea of moving budget nationally around to local levels as they see their over and under penetration for where they want to be. So for example, if you're a large national brand and you see that you really want to kind of target Detroit because all your data shows up. Listen, you want to get your stores going and try to figure out how to kind of get the consumer to buy more of your product. Well then do you have to go everywhere? Well, if you want to focus on Detroit and then you hit the KPI in Detroit, which is what our platform allows you to kind of see and measure, then you can then move the budget. So that's the idea is to like get really the efficiency of spend play in the conversation, which is I think a term that I'm starting to hear efficiency has been efficiency of spend. It's every marketers dream. If you can get the most outcomes for the least amount of capital, you'll probably get 2 extra bonus. You're also going to get, I mean, if you contextualize your messaging around the local lives of your. You're also gonna build, I think a better brand affinity at the end of the day with the consumer themselves. They understand me well. Yeah, well said. I mean, we want to have a certain creative for a certain audience at a certain place in the economy and also a certain place in the country and spiel make that dynamic at all times, right? Because regardless of the product, you're going to be looking at it differently depending on culturally, where you're from, how you see it, how you're kind of networking environment is around you. So we believe in all of that. Again, precision, all of that customization and the way that the technology is building out, you can have all those creatives and all those dynamics and kind of move them around. So we really appreciate all of the, I guess, dynamic nature of the local economies and how they get marketing too. So if you back up five years, you all placed a lot of chips on CTV. Now if you go out five years and look back to today, you're making a bet on a company you just acquired called Frequence. Yes, thank you. So what do they do and why this bet? Now and where do you see that paying off in five years? I appreciate that question. So you know, frequency is a business that upon being in the marketplace with connected television, we ran into a couple of times, not really from a customer overlap perspective, but from really reputation. They were a local again though, now Omni channel, right? So they were using connected television, but they're also search social, digital, out of home, etc, truly interoperable, interoperable and what they decided to do and this is what I was telling someone. Earlier this week, Mount Hive is a technology company because we had to build the decisioning engine, the stack and again, to get all those campaigns at scale, it's very deep architecture technology. They built the workflow, workflow software platform that's Omni channel and they would hook up to technology pipes like Matt Hive. So there's other DPS out there they would use. And so when we saw them in the local marketplace and we saw them doing something that we believed in, which is not only offer connected television to your point, but offer all the other digital mediums. Our larger vision is to be the digital advertising. For SMBs. So this is a next play for us looking 1218 months out on our road map. We saw Omni channel is something we wanted. The capabilities they have the software platform, which is a wonderful campaign management tool. And then we have the DSP that can kind of connect, whether it's display, connected, television, digital, out of home, etc. So that marriage right there made a lot of sense. And then we met the gang and they're just terrific people, culture. So culturally we just kind of sat there. I mean, they've been in business for I think now close to 15 years. And just been exceptional talents and finding the local consumer and at the same, I'm sorry, and the local effectively market and being able to offer all these tools. So they have the tool set for the smaller guy, if you will. Yeah. I think people, you know, there's that old phrase and I can't remember who said it, but culture eats strategy for breakfast. Yeah, Yeah. And I think people sleep on the importance of culture. We all seem to have a really innovative culture. Appreciate that sign there, especially I think the the focus on, you know, there's a small and midsize businesses, but then there's the mom and pop micro businesses as well. I think really brilliant and I think future looking appreciate that. How do you how do you see us all as an ecosystem collaborating better around the use of data to just make everything more enjoyable for the advertiser on one end, but also for the consumer on the other? I appreciate the question. I you know, for data for us and this is where when the management team would frequence and the leadership team at native sat down, you know the ability for them to bring 15 years of data around their Omni channel campaign management and our data connected television that marriage through our device graph. We saw the way to to find the fidelity and the measurement of that data to be somewhat unique because it never has to leave the ecosystem right, We can keep it within the Matt hive now fold. We also believe in, I think what you're hearing in some of these new companies that are being developed, kind of the futuristic nature of having a Federated network where data can actually be queried and we can start to access companies we've never been able to access before because you can do it in a privacy compliant way. So I think it's our responsibility to your question to figure out ways to get the best, most precise first party data. Yes, make sure you can prove provenance. Yes, make sure that there's privacy and also make sure that there's value attribution so people will actually be empowered. And feel responsible to share their data as long as they check the privacy box and check their provenance box. And candidly now have new compensation rails. So there's some really innovative companies out there. Yeah, you change the incentive, you change the behavior. That's right. And so that's the I think that's the future. I think it's a step forward from even the current clean room system. And I think there's companies that are bringing that kind of that data. And I think Matthew wants to be in the center of that conversation. We're working and partnering with companies to figure out how quickly we can get there so that we can. During the most precise audience segments to our customers and make sure that they get that targeted message to the right people. Yeah, I think there's this. When you talk about localizing national, there's this great phrase, think globally, act locally. It is that the piece of advice you would give to big brands in the world, right? There's no better, no better line that I could end with. And I really appreciate it because that's exactly where I think we should be, you know, as a society is to make sure that everybody, regardless of their size and stature gets the message that's right for them to kind of help empower their own environment. I think it's wonderful. It's great talking to you, talking to meet you.