Welcome to the Blood, Sweat and CPMs Podcast presented by Freestar.
Our host, Jeff Kudishevich is here to add levity and provide helpful pointers for anyone navigating the world of Ad Tech. Each episode, Jeff will interview thought leaders across the industry to get their perspective on what matters most to them, often times bringing in guest experts from the Freestar team. Follow along on our Blog for show notes and associated links to each episode. Enjoy!
Episode 7
Matt Hogg (Criteo) on Career Development & Professional Growth | Advertising vs. AdTech, Protecting Your Site and Content Syndication
In this episode of the Freestar Blood Sweat and CPMs podcast, Jeff and Andy discuss the differences between Advertising & AdTech, protecting your site, and Content Syndication. They also talk to Matt Hogg, Vice President of Publisher Partnerships at Criteo about career development and professional growth.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, now!
About Our Guest
Matthew Hogg leads Publisher Partnerships at Criteo, based in New York. Prior to joining Criteo he held a number of leadership roles at LinkedIn including launching their programmatic business and the integration of one of their largest acquisitions, the marketing platform Bizo. Matthew’s has a wealth of experience prior to LinkedIn at large media businesses like ITV where he launched a Video on demand platform in Europe, a TV channel in Asia and the world’s first live stream ad insertion technology. Matthew is passionate about leadership, innovation, and the future of advertising.
Find Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthogg1/
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What your company needs to happen, what needs to happen to make your company or your part of business successful and what do you really want to be doing and what your passionate about? Find a happy intersection of those two things. It’s usually a good thing to push on and do.
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Welcome, welcome, welcome.
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This is the Freestar Blood, Sweat and CPMs podcast. And I’m your host, Jeff Kudishevich.
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Hey, I’m Andy Forwark, your co-host here, navigating you through this wild world of ad tech and we got a great episode today, or, of course, going to start with our Reddit add ups threads of the week. And then we have our special guest, Matt Hogg from Credico. We have a really great conversation with him. I’m excited to share with our listeners before we get into that. Andy, I have a really important question for you.
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OK, I’ve heard through some rumors that you might have finally started the best recommendation you’ve ever received in your life. If you want to give our listeners a little bit of insight into this topic that I’m referring to. Yeah, I believe you’re referring to The West Wing, a show piloted in 1999. So it’s twenty one years old. It’s incredible. I’m through about 10 episodes now, I think, and I probably haven’t even gotten to the best part yet, but written by Aaron Sorkin, incredible talented cast.
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So yeah, I’ve been pretty intrigued by it.
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And it’s taken me, what, three solid years of beating down your TV show doors to get you to finally start the West Wing?
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Yeah. Speaking of three years, your your three year anniversary is coming up. And that’s when I met you. And it was shortly after.
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Ah, not too long after that you said I think it was right before, like right around the holiday break, you know, when we’re kind of working from home and everybody’s busy with the holidays, maybe just, you know, watch the West Wing or something. And I was like, no, I’m not going to watch the West Wing. For me, it’s not very political.
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I mean, yes, they’re in the White House. Sure, there’s politics. But for sure, I think just like any Sorkin show, it’s sort of this shows you the behind the scenes, but it’s more aspirational than anything else. And I can jump into it at any point. Anyhow, I wanted to ask you to speak publicly about that, so I’m glad that you did. That was the biggest thing on top of my head. Andy do you have anything on your side?
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Oh, well, we finally started back up with the NBA and the LeBron Jameses is, as I like to call them, have the number one seed. So that’s pretty good.
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Not not trying to gloat being from a Los Angeles native, but we’re finally back in it.
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Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s you know, I’ve hated the Lakers my whole life. But now that LeBron is on the team, I got to like them so.
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Well, you’re you’re both sons of Akron, Ohio. So I definitely understand. All right, Andy, I think we’re going to jump into our reddit ad ops Threads. What do you say we talk a little add ops now? Let’s see what they’re saying out there these days, huh?
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All right, Andy.
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Now the moment of truth. Our time to break down the top rated ad ups threads of the week, in case you don’t know, which I would imagine most don’t. I actually started the ad ops, sub reddit in 2012 and it’s now somehow become one of the leading ad ops’ communities in the industry. What do you think, Andy?
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Yeah, it’s a great community. Happy to be a part of it. I’m excited for this segment to just run down all the different threads that we see over the weeks and give our opinions on it.
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Awesome man. All right, Andy, our first thread from Reddit today is entitled Question about Unwanted Tags Present. When my ad is served, this user is on the buy side. They’re sort of asking in two types of paths. So one is via programatic and one is via direct to publisher. Why there may or may not be extra code or extra pixels firing when their ad delivers. So do you want to start off on the programatic piece of this and then we can touch on the direct side as well?
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Yeah. So, you know, on the programmatic side, you’re going to be likely buying through some platform DSP. I think Google’s is DCM. You know, when you’re basically getting your ad built from your agency and then you say, OK, well, I’m going to go buy it on some websites, that DSP is going to be going through several layers. Right, of of ad surfing. So the DSP is got to get to the SSP. The SSP gets to the to the publisher and then we have an ad served.
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So there’s a lot of things that can come in between you and your ad being served to the point of this question of like, how do I know what else is there? Well, you know, first check with your DSP, see if they’re using any other technologies that you might be tracking the campaign or whatever the DSP kind of might be doing things like double verify, come to mind or moat, you know, these tracking technologies that companies might use to get additional metrics about the ads that are being served on the websites that they’re targeted to.
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Yeah, on the on the direct side, I can see why a buyer might be more concerned where it feels like this should be a one to one relationship. There shouldn’t be anything between my ad and the website, which is typically the case. But coming from the publisher side, you might see any types of technologies being run in conjunction with even a direct Sold ad. So you could see things like Andy mentioned Moat or integral ad science or even double verify.
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But you also might see things like a pixel from clean.io or ad Lightning or Confine or any of these other technologies that are looking to sort of protect their own inventory. You can always ask your partners and see what other technologies are running. Most of the time it’s tracking brand safety concerns. That sort of thing is is fairly typical, especially for a publisher direct. I think that probably covers most of the things that they might see even if you considered them unwanted.
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It’s just sort of the cost of doing business these days. The next thread is entitled from the agency to publisher. This user is, I guess, just asking, hey, how do I get started? They’re sort of asking, hey, I want some help to sort of understand the publisher team, what’s header bidding and that sort of thing, and asking where to start. Usually when I deal with newbies in our part of the industry, I typically have them start with places like ad exchange or digitaday.
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There’s lots of. Really good resources, Digitaday does a nice series on WTF is header bidding or cookies or anything like that. They have really nice articles around that. They give you a nice grasp of this part of our business. The other place I would look is at Ops Insider from Ben from Zander. He doesn’t keep it up to date these days, but there’s still really good content there that Ben spent a good amount of time writing, which includes understanding what header bidding is in general understanding client side versus server side, understanding time outs and all different types of features of pre-bid from both an ad ops and a product perspective that I think are really nice.
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Yeah, I mean, I think they’re starting at the right place. Right. Come into the ad ops sub reddit like this is a good space that has a large growing community. I think you also have to get a little bit more specific to the question. And, you know, like what what is the role that you’re looking to take at this monetization company? Like they mentioned a publisher team. So if they’re going to be on the publisher team, then, you know, what is it that they need to be talking to the publishers about, which, you know, probably is really just the the basic concepts.
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So, like those resources that you’ve listed out are really good. But if there’s any more technical stuff that you need to get into, then I would point everyone to go to prebid.orh. That website shows and teaches you about how prebid work in order to talk about it. It’s really good to have an understanding of how it conceptually works. And I think there’s a lot of good examples on that. It gets a little bit technical, but can can give you a lot, a lot more under the hood there too. Next thread is just entitled The Truth.
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We try to stay away from Meems or visuals just because it’s a little tough with the audio medium that we use. So I’ll do my best. So the top image is what appears to be a zoomed in. Let’s call it a video still of a prince with a sword on a horse. So the title there is again, this is the zoomed in version when you tell people you work in advertising. So this is this prince on this cool horse. And the sword yes, sword is just big elemental he looks and his hair is phenomenal.
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I wish I had the perfect hair then the next still below it is. But you are actually in ad ops and then it zooms out. Same gentlemen on this now what appears to be just the head of a horse with a stick. So he’s essentially riding a stick instead of actually riding a horse. I just love this this little meme. Anybody who’s been doing this long enough, when you when some people hear advertising, they think Don Draper, they think Mad Men, that sort of thing.
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But the reality is, especially when you’re talking about goons like Andy or I who have been doing this over a decade, the glamour has never been here. But if there ever was any glamour, it’s been a long, long, long, long gone.
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Yeah.
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And you always kind of feel like you’re less of a horse less of a horse anyway. When you’re not upset, I think you’re always up against some kind of battle. We we get ponies at at best and they’re usually sick. Andy the next thread is about affiliate marketing, which I have a pretty strong background in. So if it’s all right with you, I just kind of want to take this one on my own. The title here is called Is This Common or Sketchy?
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Basically, what the user is saying is they’re getting into a lead gen company and trying to figure out what is going on in the affiliate space, seeing a lot of one page fake story type websites, if you want to call them that, just to do lead gen. What I’ll say is it really goes back to the affiliate network. So think of our kind of standard display space where we have asked ad stock be a lock and a key and we’ll talk a little later to the affiliate
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Space doesn’t necessarily have that same sort of overarching mechanisms. So it really does come down to the affiliate networks and what kind of technology they have. So you might have a situation where the affiliate network Andy’s my affiliate webmaster, I gave him access to my affiliate network. He said his site that reviews shoes is Andy’s shoes.com. Great. Andy, here’s some advertising to put on to Andyshoes.com. And hopefully if you get a click over to my affiliate network and people buy shoes, you’ll get a share or spiffed per.
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Lead or spiff per sale now? I trust Andy, Andy’s an upstanding citizen. Of course, he would just do what is expected and what we agreed on, but maybe times are a little tougher. And Andy starts opening up these one page websites talking about the latest in shoe technology where people can fly. Well, if I don’t have any checks and balances to ensure that Andy is not just running my affiliate ads on Andyshoes.com bunnies running it on all of these weird one page sites, he’s sort of breaking the trust of the of the affiliate agreement.
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But if I don’t have anything in place to automatically vet for this type of thing, then he can kind of run rampant with all of these one page shoe controversy sites. So getting back to the user here sorry, Andy, about running your name, man.
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So is it sketchy? Sure. I think that’s I think any of us would agree. It’s it’s a bit sketchy now. Is it against the T’s and C’s? Is it is it outside of the scope of the affiliate networks agreement with the affiliates that I think is is dependent on the affiliate network? If I was running it for sure, I would want the site that I agreed to serve my affiliate ads on to be the only site that I get traffic from and potential leads.
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So that’s sort of my vantage point. I’m sure people in this space might have a little bit of a difference of opinions, but the reality is it kind of comes down to just being a good client. And if you’re not sure about your clients, well then have some technology to help you. The next thread is called Pre-bid.JS, All Caps Top Performers.
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And we wanted it. We wanted to touch on this, even though it is clearly a very basic generic questions he’s asking. The user here is asking for success or horror stories. There’s not there’s not a whole lot there. Obviously, the horror stories are when SSP goes out of business and owes people money. And that that’s terrible. And we hate when that happens. But the reality as far as like success stories go, it’s gonna vary so much pub to pub, really.
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I would say the only consistency, so to speak, are more than likely the biggest players. Your Rubicon and your index exchanges of the world. Those are likely to be big players for everybody. But outside of those kind of top brands, so to speak, it is sort of going to vary based on your inventory.
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Yep. Yeah. So, Jeff, I think you’re right. It’s going to vary by website your users, you know, depending on what kind of website you run, you know, if it’s blog with content, maybe it’s some kind of tool, but you’re just going to have varying degrees. So, you know, the best thing to do is just test all of them that you can get and see who performs the best and move on from there.
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Andy the last item I want to talk about was spoiler alert, not a Reddit thread, but it was actually stemmed from some internal conversations we have on our company slack. We just thought it’d be nice to throw in a random topic from there. So this is actually a digitaday article where Chegg talks about cleaning up their supply path with their ads.txt And essentially, the gist of it is removing resellers and leaving direct only and seeing what happens where we’re friends with the folks at at Chegg and have been for many years.
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Personally, I love Emory’s approach to this and just testing it out when he asked his demand partners, which we’ve done the same. And clearly we have different business models, but it’s almost like nobody can ever really say what happens if you remove the resellers from your ads.txt When I see in ads that texte that’s 10 lines long and it’s all direct, I don’t know why, but I kind of feel warm and fuzzy inside. Andy what’s your take?
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Well, I’ve hated this thing since the beginning. I kind of understand where they’re going, but this kind of more further proves, you know, maybe like the validity of ads.txt in general, like, yeah, maybe Google is enforcing it and they have some things. But, you know, you work with Google directly, so you’re not going to ever take their line out of their ads, ads.txt configuration, but really speaks to like the rest of the partners here.
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And just looking at ads.txt. Yeah, I mean, it’s like maybe 20 lines, maybe ten lines without spaces. So it’s very clean and, you know, kind of makes me happy to see it that way. But in reality, like, you know, whatever whatever we can learn from this, I mean, if we can if there’s a definite takeaway and other publishers start adopting this trend and seeing the same things, then, you know, I think that’s just important to make our our sites look a little bit cleaner rather than having hundreds of lines of reseller entries and, you know, overlap and mix match here and there.
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It’s just. It’s a lot of a lot of words. For sure. I guess not a lot of words on a document.
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A lot of words is right. Well, Andy, I think we’ve spoken a lot of words. What do you say we switch gears and chat with our special guest today? Yes, sounds good. Let’s see what Matt’s got.
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And now we get to chat with our special guest, Matthew Hogg from Criteo, Matthew Hogg leads publisher partnerships at Criteo based in New York. Prior to joining Criteo, he held a number of leadership roles at LinkedIn, including launching their programmatic business and the integration of one of their largest acquisitions, the marketing platform, Bizo. Matthews had a wealth of experience prior to LinkedIn at large media businesses like ITV, where he launched a video on demand platform in Europe, a TV channel in Asia and the world’s first live streaming ad insertion technology.
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Matthew is passionate about leadership, innovation and the future of advertising. Welcome, Matthew, to the show. Hey, guys, thank you for having me. Absolutely. So we’re going to go go ahead and get things started. Matthew, can you start us off and let us know how you got into ad tech in the first place? How I got into adtech I don’t know if I yet realize I’m in ad tech,first time someone’s asked me that but I guess I guess I am.
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I thought of myself as more of a technologist. I love being in and around technology. I love the idea that you can build solutions to two problems. I’m I did aphilosophy degree, so I’m not claiming to be an engineer by any means, but just being in and.
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Hold on.
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You got another philosophy degree over here, too.
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And there we we’ll talk talk some Niche after the show, I’m sure.
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But I really found a lot of enjoyment in the early stages of my career kind of building technology and solutions. And mostly it was in the TV business. So building things that would help entertain, educate and inspire people. But what I realized was a lot of the money flowed from advertising. Everything that was paying my mortgage wasn’t kind of the purity of building a video on demand platform.
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It was really the ads that would run in those nasty little ads, help keep the lights on.
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And I wanted them to keep more lights on for me, I guess. So I found a company in linkedin a big TV company called ITV in the UK, and I found a job at LinkedIn that let me kind of dip into more of that purity of kind of advertising in the advertising technology, space and programmatic. And I guess the fast forward kind of five, six years, I guess. Yeah. Like you guys say, I am now Adtech after after that many years.
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Right.
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I think you’d find a lot of us kind of have a similar background of how do we get to ADTECH. We just kind of fell into it.
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You fell in backwards too.
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Yeah. So Matthew, while you’re at LinkedIn, they were went through a large acquisition by Microsoft. I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what that was like going through the transition of a company acquisition.
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It was, frankly, and it was fascinating. I was been involved in and seen a few different mergers and acquisitions over over the years. And I’m definitely the School of thought. And I think this is quite popular in business journals now that a lot of mergers and acquisitions actually destroy value for shareholders. The bringing together of those two entities is super complex, is a lot of cultural, technical, operational considerations that make it really hard to be successful. We knew that from LinkedIn, from companies that we’d acquired as well, and who was being straightforward and easy as some others.
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And so in a big company like Microsoft, a giant company like Microsoft comes in and there were lots of ex Microsoft employees and ex Skype employees. People are like, oh, this is not going to go great.
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I think people have a lot of respect for Satya, but he wasn’t as well known then as he is now. He had quite that amount of time to kind of turn around Microsoft’s reputation. But all those fears didn’t materialize and actually turned out to be, to my mind, to be one of those acquisitions that helped accelerate value for both of the organizations. And a big part of that, I think has to be put down to Satya. And so, Jeff, when it kind of worked out the deal and I was involved in that level of work, they came out with a position that let LinkedIn continue to operate on its own independently and just naturally find areas of opportunity for collaboration across the two companies not to try and force anything.
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And so what it really meant, I use that expression at the time, is kind of like having a rich auntie. Or rich uncle
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And all of a sudden everyone who was thinking about six months or one year plan, they were thinking about three or five year plan. And what’s the investment to like, not like grow 10 percent every year and grow 40 percent every year? Yeah, it’s like some throwing fuel on a good a good fire really, but put even more fuel on it.
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It was really exciting acquisition and then I, I wish moved on since then. But like I think it still continues to add value for both companies.
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And Matthew, from what I know from our previous conversations. Sort of during some of this time, right, you also kind of uprooted life from from U.K. and moved over to New York. And, you know, you’ve sort of gone through ad ops rules, revenue operations roles, dealing with partnerships. Can you kind of talk us through sort of how you’ve been able to navigate those different types of disciplines and all the same time uprooting your life from from one country to another at the same time?
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Yeah, I don’t know if
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I’d recommend it from my perspective on career growth and development is is to try and look for and understand two things. One is what’s your company need to happen? Like what needs to happen to make your company or your part of your business successful? And what do you really want to be doing and what are you passionate about? If you can find a happy intersection of those two things where they’re saying you really care about and is going to be really valuable for your company.
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It’s usually a good thing to push on and do. And so I never worry too much about what the function was. Right, whether it’s outside up sales partnerships. I was more worried about having an impact and it being something that I really cared about and thought that we should definitely, definitely do.
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What I recognize is that I’m frankly not that great at any of those things, but I really enjoy identifying a strategy and then working with people to achieve that. And that’s my skill set. And so I feel that that’s quite transferable across those different disciplines. As long as I respect that there are people who are deep experts in those fields and that you need to then be successful.
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And so you always have people around you that you felt like, OK, if I if I don’t know that answer, I know this person, that person, they’re here to help if if shit hits the fan proverbially.
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Absolutely. And I’ve been super fortunate. I’ve worked with a lot of really bright, capable people and a lot of different projects that have made those projects successful. I’m very grateful for that, for the effort they’ve put in. And I managed an Ad Ops team, right, for a few years and I’ve never seen a DFP. I don’t know.
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I don’t know. But are you sure you want to admit? I don’t know yet. But, you know, I was really fortunate.
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I had incredible managers, great team working for those managers. And some super talented people are going to do really big things in their career since then. So we managed to be a pretty successful outfit. So it’s more like you said, Jeff, that idea trying to find people who are great things and then put them together and let them do great work by doing that and transitioning country at the same time is very hard, though. So like I said, I would definitely not necessarily recommend throwing in that much change all at once.
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But it’s good fun when you come out the other end.
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So along those lines, I mean, you’re leading a team at Criteo. You guys have a large volume of Publishers’ that you’re dealing with, probably on a weekly and monthly basis. So how do you prioritize which projects you want to work on as opposed to some that you’re going to delegate to the team or maybe along the lines with the last answer you gave, like maybe you guys work together?
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We’ve been pretty fortunate. We’ve built out a pretty scaled publishing business. I think last count, we had a little bit over forty five hundred direct partners and in the media space so that that starts to look like a pretty big ecosystem that the team is managing. Right. And a lot of complexity and a lot of differences in that. And so we we look a lot at how we can best service support and grow that ecosystem on a on a very regular basis.
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I think something that I like to think about, I don’t know. Do you guys use, like the Eisenhower matrix two by two of spending your time on things that are both important and urgent? And so I love that like and for me, I’m a visual guy, so I want to try on a white board. We often use it for checking accounts to prioritize what’s our likelihood of success on axis and then what’s the the value on the other axis?
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What’s the potential value? And you you kind of want to stay in the top right corner. You got high likelihood of success in high value. And I think if you if you try and do that, most of the time, you’ll find that you kind of can have have a good deal of impact over the time. But it’s when you find yourself doing the low likelihood of success, low value things, that’s often when you get frustrated writing and where you don’t get to cut through you want.
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And so I think trying to be smart about being really proficient in choosing what not to do and making sure you communicate that effectively is also a big kind of liberating factor.
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And focusing on those kind of visualizations of it sounds like it’s often better to say no than to say yes in certain situations. Right. Like who you. Don’t work with is just as important as who you do want to work with. Yeah, definitely. And I think there’s this Flavors in between that, right? So you would say I think currently we are operating. We have five service tiers. Right. So this from A to E and I think that isn’t quite like saying no to to the Es right, but to say you guys aren’t going to get quite the same level of attention reporting and on one hand support just because that would be unsustainable for us as a business.
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And and I think that type of segmentation is pretty valuable in business because it creates the ability for you to be efficient and choose those things that you really want to invest in, that you really want to do. I’m sort of always curious to see what are the types of things that people are kind of proud of and proud of the work that they do. Right. So is there any specific tech or process that you’ve sort of helped institute at Criteo that, you know, when you look back on or when you see it in action, you’re like, yeah, I did that.
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Or I or I let that or, you know, and really bring you kind of personal pride in. increasingly I’ve found it’s the people side of things that I get more of that reward from, I think. And the other side of my career is like, oh, we launched that product or we got to a million dollars a day of revenue. And these kind of big milestones, which I think obviously really enjoy but, the more rewarding stuff is the more long term people development.
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I think we did a couple of things that helped open that up. We shifted the team from being purely based on that account size to really being about. So what’s the vertical that that publisher operates in? Are theu a news publisher, are they a broadcaster, are they an app only player, a gaming one? And try to build some kind of excellence of really understanding that business segment.
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Right. What does it mean to be a news publisher in the digital sphere today? And there’s actually a lot of similarities, right, between Washington Post, New York Times, etc., and how these different properties operate and how they look at their businesses. And so we went about hiring and developing some heads of industry to lead those specific verticals. And so I’ve been really proud of the talent that we’ve got into those roles and the impact they’re having on their customers business by being able to understand them and help grow things across that of the industry and then also the impact they have on all business.
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And the second part of that is I really wanted everyone to feel a sense of ownership. I have a view that if you want to implement change and be successful as a fast moving company, you really have to have devolved ownership to every level in your organization. Why people feel compelled to make changes and make things better for the company and for that team and for that part of the business. And so we tried to make a big cultural push for people to feel that kind of ownership and empowerment that they can they can improve our business.
[00:30:57.700]
And so we also instituted that everybody has some kind of project that they’re trying to drive something forward for themselves, for their team or for the business. But they have that ownership to to really make a difference to how we operate as a group. So I’ve been really pleased with the fact that people are doing it. And it seems to be really positive so far.
[00:31:16.690]
Yeah, I mean, to me, I love the sound of both of those sort of initiative. It’s not necessarily process or tech specific. It’s sort of kind of bringing people together and putting them in a place where they’ll be successful and they can also be an expert at something. And hey, that’s mine. I I’m kind of the guru on that. If you want to know about it, you can kind of come to me and I’ll help you.
[00:31:40.540]
That desire for mastery is really quite important. Motivating factor for a lot of people. I think particularly I’ve found people in spaces like ops and engineering and tech love to really understand something. And then obviously part of the upside of understanding something is being someone who explains it and can share that knowledge with a bunch of other people. Right. I think that’s kind of a cool thing that we all like to have every now and again.
[00:32:06.850]
Yeah, it’s really important. So we talked about a lot about like people and and growing them. So somebody that’s looking to level up in their career, is there any advice you’d give to them? And kind of a follow up on that is, you know, is there anything different that people should be aware of if they’re in the US or the UK?
[00:32:29.140]
Let’s just assume everybody is pretty intelligent, has a high degree of personal motivation and that they are reasonably personable. So let’s just assume that that’s true. And I I think we’re quite fortunate in our industry. In the main, all those three things are pretty true. There’s a couple other areas I think really help people unlock that potential. One, when I was quite early in my career, I think I often would just take an initiative and go really hard at whatever the first idea that appeared.
[00:32:57.210]
Which is good, right? Sounds like a good sort of idea to have, but I think as things get more complex, more scaled, I think what’s really important and I see to be a big differentiator in kind of managing senior managers, directors, I might hire is. They able to take a step back and evaluate the options available and then choose what is going to be the optimum, what’s going to be the best option and not just act on a knee jerk reaction is to like this is the first one I thought for the first answer.
[00:33:28.800]
There’s a big maturation point. I think when people really start doing that proficiently in their career and is a standard way of operating right, don’t just react. Think about the options first and choose the best one. Do it quickly, don’t get me wrong I’m not suggesting that anyone should wait too long. But do you think about choosing that best path, not just the first path.
[00:33:47.280]
The other one I like to think of is when someone asks you to do something to do it better. Like if you need to 100 to 110 percent and always just be whatever the expectation that is, you should haggle and try and get the expectations set low so you can just easily hit one hundred dead at that point.
[00:34:06.540]
Yeah, but that’s that’s just part of the game. But like I think that idea of like whatever the goal, the target is like always trying to trying your hardest and your smartest to exceed that is a pretty consistent way of moving your career and moving it quickly. If you are seen to be someone who always over delivers, you’re going to go places pretty quickly.
[00:34:24.540]
Kind of. The last thing I’d like to touch on is if you have any predictions for the future. I like Reid Hoffman’s line that the future is much weirder and much sooner than you think. Things are definitely going to be strange and I think that we’re kind of living in that right. So the future got accelerated and it’s happening a lot quicker and a lot more condensed from from kind of recent events. So there’s a couple of trends in that you can already start to see.
[00:34:50.760]
Right. Consolidation, Stephani, accelerating privacy concerns, are they going to increase? There are going to be more large scale Chinese originated businesses that operate in our ecosystem in the US, which I think adds a different dynamic which is super interesting.
[00:35:07.320]
If I look a little bit if I can toss out a little bit longer than five years, the thing that I’m super excited about and I think is really interesting is, is at what point does wearable technology allow you to have a more kind of mixed reality experience on a regular basis? When I see everyone who buys a pair of airPods that I know comes back with the review that they love them. And I’d never heard that about a piece of headphone except for some incredible some incredible audiophiles might say that.
[00:35:40.860]
But like most people, just like these my headphones or just headphones, what’s the big deal yet? Right airpods? No, I love them. And they make you feel really connected to a podcast, to a phone conversation, whatever it is. And I think that plus what you’re starting to see come out of some of the VR companies makes me feel like we we’re away off of it. Yet I think in that five year plus horizon, we’re going to be starting to see and integrate more and more experiences across a kind of mixed, mixed reality, more instant access, whether it be voice touch enabled into Internet, into the World Wide Web like this is happening.
[00:36:18.900]
It’s going to come. So I’m excited about that. Do you guys have any any big predictions? I certainly think about automation a lot. And I, I often think, what do I actually know? What what can I actually provide to make sure I’m I’m always going to be considered an operator of an automation and not getting phased out by one because there’s always going to be the next technology and the next this. Then you keep at the top of the pyramid.
[00:36:50.940]
It’s really hard.
[00:36:51.900]
And I think I’ve seen. Automation programatic, you would say, is just this is automation for buying and selling of media and data. It’s something that’s a wave that’s hitting every industry. It’s totally unavoidable. So I think it’s really smart if you think, OK, well, I want to ride that wave rather than be kind of consumed by it. And that’s really down to people skills and their ability to then reinvent those skills over time.
[00:37:18.090]
Sort of to your point earlier about ad ops versus rev ops versus partnerships, I think just even having that flexibility to sort of balance between the different disciplines and still still do it with excellency. All right. Well, Matthew, really appreciate the time and letting us pick your brain and get some awesome answers. Really appreciate you joining us on our podcast. And thanks again for for lending us your your time. Thank you for having me, guys, and enjoy the rest of the night.
[00:37:49.450]
Thanks, Matthew. Well, that was a great talk with Matt from Criteo, I think it was fantastic being able to learn about his journey, hearing the different phases in his career. What do you think, Andy?
[00:38:03.750]
Yeah, it was really nice to have him. So cheers to that.
[00:38:07.500]
A reminder for everybody that the links for the Reddit threads we discussed will be in the show notes if you want to check them out afterwards. Thank you again for everyone who made it this far, for the Freestar Blood, Sweat and CPMs podcast. If you do have a spare moment, please check us out on Google Play or iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us for review and subscribe to make sure that you get all of this high quality content directly into your ears.
[00:38:33.570]
For feedback or suggestions for guests, you can reach us at a podcast at Freestar.com Special thanks to Matt Heinlein for our music and to Caroline Romano and Paolo Battista for helping with editing and production and making sure that people know this podcast exists until next time. Don’t forget to add your macros. Later, alligator.
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