Larry Allen, VP/GM, of Data and Addressable Enablement at Comcast Advertising joins me for a detailed discussion on how the shift in viewing habits to all screens is making it difficult to provide cohesive cross-media measurement. We discuss the impact of the loss of third-party cookies, the challenges and opportunities that exist with measurement at scale, including with FAST services, and the potential role of AI tech to fill in measurement gaps. Finally, we highlight why the industry needs a clear set of guidelines on how the industry wants to approach measurement across inventory owners and distributors to provide a common language for measurement cross-platforms.
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
Larry Allen, VP/GM, of Data and Addressable Enablement at Comcast Advertising joins me for a detailed discussion on how the shift in viewing habits to all screens is making it difficult to provide cohesive cross-media measurement. We discuss the impact of the loss of third-party cookies, the challenges and opportunities that exist with measurement at scale, including with FAST services, and the potential role of AI tech to fill in measurement gaps. Finally, we highlight why the industry needs a clear set of guidelines on how the industry wants to approach measurement across inventory owners and distributors to provide a common language for measurement cross-platforms.
Podcast produced by Security Halt Media
Welcome to this week's edition of the Dan Rayburn podcast, the show that curates the streaming media industry news that matters most, unvarnished, unscripted and providing you with the factual data you need to know, without any of the hype, the pulse of the streaming media industry.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I'm Dan Rayburn for a special podcast today of my executive interview series where I interview an executive from the industry to talk about a certain segment of the market. Today we're going to be talking about advertising with Larry Allen. Larry is the VP and GM of data and addressable enablement at Comcast Advertising.
Speaker 3:Thanks, dan, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2:So, for those that haven't heard one of these podcasts before, mark Donovan and I do a weekly podcast recapping the news, but I also like to bring in industry leaders, executives in the industry, to talk about very specific facets of an overall topic, in this case advertising, so that they can really tell us what they're seeing in the market. They talk to a lot of customers, many times talking to a lot of different people than I am, so bringing in another perspective, I think is super important, especially when it comes to advertising, where there's so much going on on both the business side, the technology side, the fragmentation in the market with CTV how thing is how advertising is measured viewership. So we've got a lot to cover today, larry, but really what I wanted to jump into was the current state of the ad market today with regards to growth in the industry. But before we do that, just give listeners just a little bit of background in terms of what you're doing over there at Comcast.
Speaker 3:Sure Happy to. So I lead our data monetization business within Comcast Advertising and that really encompasses two facets. One is licensing Comcast data, primarily around TV viewing, to measurement companies to really help bolster the innovation and measurement. And the second component is addressable enablement, where we're taking advantage of the customer relationships that we have both with traditional television but also from a streaming perspective in our broadband homes to help programming partners, inventory owners, really bolster the connectivity to the household so they understand how they're reaching an audience and how to effectively target a household within the fragmented media.
Speaker 2:And does that include Peacock as well?
Speaker 3:So Peacock is a customer absolutely within our footprint.
Speaker 2:Okay, good. So both the traditional pay TV side, the CTV side, as well as far as streaming. So let's start with the top line question that we're discussing as an industry right now, and the answer to this depends on who you talk to, but again, I like looking at data, which is the business that you're in. So, regards to the growth in the industry, the advertising overall advertising market combined whatever form of advertising you want to look at pretty much had a rough year this year. We've talked about this before last year, but we're starting to see some signs and by signs I mean some actual data from Roku and some others who are selling a lot of advertising on the streaming side that they think things will get a bit better next year. Still early to know, but what are you seeing from your side, talking to so many advertisers and so many brands, where you think 2024 is going to land?
Speaker 3:Yeah, look, nobody has a crystal ball, but I agree with the kind of the sentiment from Roku that things do look like they're turning. From a research perspective, we've heard from buyers that they're using fast and 48% of them think that they're going to increase the use of that, which is a good thing. We see the same on the addressable side. Advertisers are looking to increase budgets, moving into 24, using addressable, and that's primarily because of this fragmentation problem and, in some cases, the reduction of advertising available to them, advertising inventory available to them. Because of the evolution of consumer behavior, as people are leaving pay TV and moving to streaming, there's less quality inventory available for them to purchase. So that's a bit of a concern. But when you think about the ability to target, that gets them excited because now they can confidently reach audiences and they don't have to take kind of a spray and pray approach where reach was the only option for them.
Speaker 2:Which makes sense. But let's talk about fast for a minute, because you brought it up. I didn't really have it on my list until later, but maybe I'm the only one who doesn't quite get this in the industry, because I don't understand it. I don't understand all this hype around fast. We see all these charts even more that came out today that said well, here's the number of premium subscribers for SVOD streaming services and here's the number of households using fast. I'm not sure why we're comparing something at $15 a month to free. It's not the same. One has might have sports, one doesn't.
Speaker 2:The other thing with fast is when I talk to a lot of the fast channels, you've got 90% of their content coming from 10% or less of their channels. All right, google has over 600 channels now, okay, I'm already lost. And nobody not a single company tied to fast, is putting out any numbers on revenue, profitability, cpms. So I get that advertisers are interested in fast because, to your point, it's another place to put inventory. But it also comes down to reaching the right user and the right device at the right time with the right content. So much of the fast content we see is just I'll just call it what it is. It's garbage. Nobody's watching it. So do you really think fast is an opportunity to take dollars away from another distribution medium, or is it just another pool you can add to?
Speaker 3:So I think there's a couple of things there. One, you have to think about the consumer behavior. So, to your point, they're going to take advantage of fast channels that interest them. There is fragmentation within fast, to your point, but I do think, like all media, there's kind of a head and then there's the rest of the body, right, and the head is usually where people spend the maximum amount of time and where the more higher quality content is, and I think we're seeing that in fast.
Speaker 3:So you think about you look at what Tubi's doing and what Pluto's doing and what we're doing with ZoomO. There's a lot of quality content that's being put into fast and that's going to aggregate viewership. That's a free service, right. So there's a lot of consumers in America that are going to choose that option and they're going to supplement their two or three S-VOD services with fast. So I think of it as almost as the kind of replacement for broadcast, in a way, in the streaming environment, where broadcast had a lot of content that happened overnight, daytime, that had lower viewership or was reruns or, you know, wasn't for everybody, but there was a niche audience there and where there's an audience, the advertisers want to be and then on the, the advertiser side, I think you're absolutely right. They're looking for long-form quality environment where the owners of those channels are kind of protecting their interests, if you will, with regard to context and policies.
Speaker 3:So I think we're reinventing TV in a way, with with fast as a incremental opportunity. You know, the, the paid ad supported premium services Are just that they're premium and so they're the number of ad opportunities that are going to be available there Are going to be few and far between and are likely going to be priced in a way that you know not every brand can afford. And so that if you look at fast as kind of the longer tail opportunity, that creates an environment for a lot of additional advertisers who otherwise couldn't afford To be in premium television content, an opportunity to get in front of audiences with sight-sounding motion. That's a better experience than what they might get from kind of a newsreel, kind of feed, kind of environment Like you get from the social platforms.
Speaker 2:So I agree with that and with that shift in viewing habits is really what you're talking about. Across screens, we obviously have the fragmentation, the lack of standards, formats, agreed upon, methodology. So what is the challenge here that the industry can hopefully get past in terms of it's a lot more difficult to provide cohesive cross measure, cross-media measurement. Has the industry get past that when no one's agreeing upon almost anything as far as a definition, codes?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean this is.
Speaker 3:This is the crux of the issue that everybody's facing right as, as consumer Experiences fragment, it's really incumbent upon the owners that inventory to participate in a standard approach, but we're really pushing the, the measurement companies, to help us there, and I think one of the main items that the measurement companies are Grappling with right now is not necessarily the fragmentation of the inventory itself, it's the underlying identity of the households that are consuming the content in these various services, and and that's an area that I think is is really ripe for for innovation, because we do have privacy Guidelines that we need to follow and you know we're a big supporter of, you know, protecting the consumer and their data but there are mechanisms now that kind of Collaboratively between measurement companies and owners of first-party customer data, we can actually triangulate on those households in a way that meet the privacy guidelines but also provide for the re-aggregation of the media and the inventory so that buyers can get a sense of what's actually happening and then link those ad exposures across fragmented media to Attribution.
Speaker 3:And that that's really what needs to happen in my opinion, because if you are Kind of buying within, you know closed environments or even the open environments where there's no signal fast, as a great example of that, where you know it's a free, you know ad-supported service, where registration isn't required, you need another mechanism to bring those audiences into the house, whether that's a panel, you know, which you know are gonna be a thing, most, most importantly, for calibration purposes around Ethnicity and demo and things that aren't available necessarily in the kind of digital signals that you know we're getting now, given the privacy regulations and do you?
Speaker 2:see? I know you're not gonna call out any company by name. I would not assume not. Do you see, though, these data measurement companies, let's say, in the last Two years, are they getting better to work with? Are they listening more? Are they being more open to how it's collected and how they're using your data? Because still, they haven't gotten together to create any Real standard, and there's a whole bunch of different bodies out there now that you know are doing different things or pushing different things in the scape, or you have a lot of them, but do you see them sort of changing their mentality and being more flexible?
Speaker 3:I Would say Absolutely okay so we spent.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we spent the last few years at Comcast really promoting innovation measurement, and Part of that was, you know, we issued a RFI where we collected information back from a number of measuring companies. We then issued some guidelines back to those companies on things that we saw and heard From the marketplace where they needed to improve. We started being more aggressive in licensing data to those Individual companies in order for them to harden their measurement approach with consistency. And, given that there are more of these companies now Attacking the problem, it's applying pressure to some of the larger Measurement companies that you know some would say had kind of been resting on their laurels a bit, and they're now, you know, actually making, I think, big strides, really even in the last year, if you look at some of the announcements these companies have made, they're being much more aggressive in improving their feature functionality. They're thinking about how to satisfy, kind of both the planning and measurement components of the ecosystem, if you will. And and then you know, the other area that you know I think we are also seeing more Kind of thought is with these industry bodies, like you mentioned.
Speaker 3:You know I'm on the board of Sim and they're doing a lot of work to focus on. What are the issues in Measurement that need to be addressed most critically? You know they're they're holding a bunch of these companies feet to the fire and saying you need to be thinking about these specific issues, whether it's identity or Standardization, the ability to bring in data from multiple sources in a consistent way, so that's cost effective for each of the measurement companies, right? So both on both sides of that right, the people who are providing the data, but also the people who are capturing it and then measuring you know there needs to be some consistency. The JIC is is pushing on that as well from a streaming data standpoint, you know. So I think there's a lot of activity here, which gives me Kind of a lot of encouragement going into 24, that things are changing for the better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, things are definitely changing. You talk about that. Let's talk about one of the changes the loss of third-party cookies. How big of an impact is that? Because it depends who you ask in the industry, and I am no expert in terms of third-party cookies and this is what you're doing all day long. So big impact, not a big impact something we can get through pretty easily and quickly.
Speaker 3:So it's definitely a big impact for the digital publisher. I think, when you think about video publishers in particular, it's not just the loss of the cookie, it's the lack of signal in a number of these platform environments because of lack of registration or the fact that the OEM is a kind of individual platform that isn't part of a standard.
Speaker 3:I mean, the one benefit in the digital ecosystem was, you know, pretty much everybody used one of two browsers and cookies were standards between them right In the video ecosystem you have different platforms and operating systems that operate more like closed environments in a lot of ways, and so the lack of signal in a variety of video streams is a bigger problem, which is why I harp on this identity issue all the time at the household level, because I think that that's where you know we can make a lot of progress and there is mechanisms for kind of linking those streams back to households in an aggregated way again that are privacy safe.
Speaker 3:So the place where I think the cookie deprecation becomes a big, big issue for folks is with regard to attribution measurement. And so you know that was kind of the way a lot of these companies were linking kind of between ad exposure and you know attribution outcome, which was, hey, I'll drop a pixel with a creative and then I'll drop a cookie with that pixel, and when the ad exposure happens and then I'll map that back to an activity that happened on the client's website or a sale occurred, I can use that cookie to basically, from a third party perspective, link those two actions. And the reality is that you know that won't work anymore. So we have to find other mechanisms to make that linkage happen. The good news is there are other ways of doing it and I think the household address and the fact that there are companies who own first party data that can contribute and collaborate is a path forward.
Speaker 2:Okay, good, so it won't stop the industry, it won't be a barrier, maybe just a hurdle to get across.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it'll be a new sense for sure in the near term. And I do think that there are some publisher types that are more impacted than others. I mean, if you're primarily kind of a digital display oriented publisher that operates pretty much exclusively in a browser, yeah, you're going to be massively impacted. But if you are a kind of multi-device, multi-OS publisher that kind of has, you know, media assets that span multiple environments, I think it's less hurtful because there are other mechanisms to, you know, provide signal.
Speaker 2:Got it Okay. Good, thank you. That's helpful. Let's talk about scale for a minute. So many listeners may not know that 2023 marks the third decade of stream media technology from when it was started 30 years ago, and we saw some of the first live events in 94, 95. There was one in 93. Something, what I remember was really kicking off with videos around 1998. So let's talk. You know, about 25 years now.
Speaker 2:We've been talking about advertising, pre-roll, post-roll and streaming page, however you want to define it.
Speaker 2:But anything we're talking about this industry, we have to talk about scale, and scale obviously has been a big component of the entire video stack glass to glass, as we call it and now I think, just when it comes to things like storage and delivery and coding and playback, a lot of those services now are just, they're not commoditized. It's a commodity in terms of how it's offered, but it's no longer what we're really struggling with in the industry. Now let's focus on measurement of what you're doing every single day at scale, because the number of ads that are being delivered across so many different devices, formats, platforms, like you said, browsers Are there two issues going on here in the industry. One, just all the measurement how it's measured, what's measured, methodology, what to agree on? But also, is there a scale problem here of doing all that at scale and also then having the intelligence built into it where you can actually go and make changes to your campaigns in what I would call near real time?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. You know I think we sit at an interesting vantage point. You know we have the freewheel ad tech platform kind of within our Comcast advertising kind of business units and you know we're providing a big service for these companies who are really building scale, as we speak, in the streaming environment and so they're serving billions of impressions and providing the kind of underlying ad exposure related data that can then be fed into the various measurement companies to do the types of measurement that I think you're, you know, asking about. And having no-transcript All of the kind of video ad inventory digitally delivered gives you an advantage of near real-time feedback mechanism that can then be fed into a measurement system that can be used for kind of advanced planning.
Speaker 3:Ultimately, optimization.
Speaker 3:Some of that optimization is happening real-time and I think the other benefit of kind of IP delivered video ad inventory is really that a lot of it can then be programmatically bought and that also adds another layer of optimization.
Speaker 3:So not only can the kind of owner of the inventory do optimization on behalf of their clients for what I would call direct sold campaigns when that inventory is being purchased programmatically, even though if it's being done kind of on a programmatic, guaranteed or a PMP basis you know, private marketplace basis the buyer has the ability to kind of optimize globally across multiple sellers of that inventory, which I think all of a sudden starts to really take away some of these challenges with scale, because that fragmentation no longer exists then, right, because now all of the inventory is being fed into kind of a single buying environment and the output, kind of after the ad has been delivered, is kind of in a standard log format, so that standard log format can then again be kind of fed into the measurement system.
Speaker 3:Now there's lots of complications that we're kind of still solving through the identity being a big one, right, because if I'm buying from a fast channel and a paid ad supported environment and a, you know, paid TV environment, now maybe the identity is different in those three environments. So I have to resolve that, which is what we talked a little bit about earlier. But I think generally we're at a point now where having digital delivered video gives us the opportunity to overcome the scale challenge, because ultimately they're being delivered through the same platforms and there's fewer of them today than there were 25 years ago, I would argue, because it was at a point of innovation, right, you know it was always scale at that point.
Speaker 3:It wasn't at scale, but you had, you know, probably 25 companies that were all kind of pushing the envelope, trying to create new opportunities, and now there's consolidation. Right, there's, you know, really two main kind of sell side platforms. There's only a few buy side platforms that are really kind of at scale, and that then creates some opportunity for efficiency, but then also that standardization you talked about.
Speaker 2:But are there still too many? You know one of the questions I was going to ask and you brought this up there used to be more vendors in the space, but there's still too many vendors today. There's far too many vendors in the market can support and the amount of money they're raising. You know, video amp just recently raised another round at $150 million, which is, man, that's hard to do in today's market but also just the interest on that is very expensive.
Speaker 2:Not a great time to raise money, but there's too many players in the market all claiming to do stuff that when you talk to advertisers it's like well, it doesn't really work like they say, or it's in beta, or it doesn't do it at scale, or I don't have access in the dashboard, or I can't pull it into what I want. I can't process for all logs as fast as I want to. There's still so much fragmentation from a vendor standpoint and vendors nearly all of them are out there in the market saying that they can solve every problem you can possibly think of overnight with AI or some other technology and part of it. I feel like you know my opinion, larry, you can tell me how you feel is. I almost feel like the industry still has a little bit of just snake oil salesmen. You know to it because everyone's claiming to be able to do everything, but when you talk to advertisers and brands they're like no, that doesn't actually work. So how do we get past that as an industry?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, look, choice ultimately is good, and in some ways you have to be careful what you wish for. You know we Always do this to ourselves. You know we had a kind of very good working system that everybody complained about. It's effectively a monopoly and measurement. But we all said we need innovation, and so the way to get to innovation is by introducing more, you know, companies and ideas into the ecosystem, which then creates fragmentation, which creates kind of a different kind of pain.
Speaker 3:But I think at the end you know the marketplace will find an equilibrium, you know a balance of the right number of companies and the right number of solutions so that there is choice, so that you don't feel like you're locked into a single company. But I agree with the point that you know an individual company with an individual kind of point solution and having to stack seven, eight, nine, ten of them together in order to get a comprehensive solution that really works for a marketer that doesn't stand the test of time. We've seen that kind of over and over again in the last 30 years of kind of the, you know, from the beginning of the internet, if you will. You know there's always this round of consolidation that happens. That I think is natural and required, but I don't think we've gotten to that state of maturity yet. With regard to measurement, I think we'll end up there in the not too distant future.
Speaker 3:Yeah so two or three companies is my guess.
Speaker 2:Right, I think there has to be a couple.
Speaker 3:Yep, that's right, I would say. The place where I may disagree is with respect to attribution, in particular, because certain categories, there's maybe not a lot of data available or there's only one company that has the best data in that category, or there's only a few right. So, in political, there's really two companies that have accessed all the data around politics and they tend to be, you know, linked to one of two parties. And the similar thing is in pharma right, there's only a couple of pharma companies that really have access to the scaled, you know consumer information about, you know their, you know medical history that can be used in a, you know, privacy, safe way.
Speaker 3:Similar in the auto business right, there's, you know, one main company that captures all the registration data. So, again, I think, by category there isn't a lot of choice, but I think that's okay. But if you look broadly across the category and attribution, you're going to be like, oh my God, there's 30 attribution vendors. But when you really look at it, if you're an advertiser in CPG or an advertiser in auto, there's only a couple of choices and so that's okay and you look at the one that aligns best to your business and what your kind of objectives are and you lean into that one and I think that's natural and that's okay.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I didn't realize there was only some limited amount of companies collecting data in certain industries.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that makes sense, yeah.
Speaker 3:When you talk about it, it's certainly political. Yeah, yeah, two parties yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, we're running out of time here, Larry, and obviously there's so many different ways. We could go with additional questions, but I think I think I want to end on just AI, because there's so much talk about AI specific applications. I think our industry focuses on AI a little too broad and high level and I think, when it comes to talking about AI, which is a technology, it's not a service or a product. It's part of a larger platform. I think advertising is one of those facets of AI where we can actually drill down into how can it help. And today it's still early, but when we're talking about filling in measurement gaps and some of these other things, what are you guys working on right now that you can talk to? Tied to AI? Where do you see the industry, even outside of Comcast? Where do you see the industry moving to in terms of how the technology will help?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure it's interesting. It's an industry where we're made up of a bunch of ad salespeople who love buzzwords, and AI is kind of the newest buzzword that everybody wants to include in their deck because they think it's going to get them bought, it's going to help move media. But I think, in all seriousness, there's a lot of opportunity with AI. We've, I think, generally struggled with optimization at scale, and that's an area where being able to process large amounts of data, identify patterns and then give more than just the data scientists, people inside of the business, whether they're the salespeople or the operations people or the yield teams or finance teams the ability to interrogate the data and look at different outcomes based on kind of different optimization techniques and be able to kind of naturally kind of do that based on business acumen as opposed to technical acumen, I think is a big opportunity for us because it's an untapped area of improvement, I think for our clients, where we can basically make the inventory work better, work harder for them, but also for the inventory owner.
Speaker 3:I think about yield management in particular. Pricing and how we price inventory is going to become more important for inventory owners than ever before, given the dwindling kind of supply that's happening, just the natural kind of change in how consumers are engaging with the content, I think, how inventory gets utilized and price is going to be paramount moving forward, which then leads to the next component of that, which is really forecasting. So being able to take these large sets of data again, identify patterns and forecast what's the kind of consumption it'll look like next week of a particular audience segment or a large group in general of viewing audiences, I think is Important and that could feed other areas of the business too. We'll kind of content to produce, how to promote content in order to, you know, identify areas for you know, further Kind of exploitation from a yield standpoint.
Speaker 2:So there's a bunch of areas. How quickly do you think yourselves and others in the industry are actually going to start utilizing it, you know, in production at scale?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean we're kind of within both our free will business unit and our effective business unit. We're testing and deploying different AI models today free will is doing it, yeah, from a optimization standpoint.
Speaker 3:You know, I think a lot of it starts kind of behind the scenes. How do you come support the network first and how do you make sure that you know we're we're forecasting kind of overall viewership trends so that we're prepared for big spikes and you know large events and things like that? But then there's the, the nuance of just managing overall Inventory and thinking about the plug-in to programmatic and where there's opportunity, and then you know within the effective business similar it's like you know predicting demand, understanding kind of how we match up supply and demand appropriately. So again comes back to kind of this yield management Use cases, I think a really big one that the industry needs.
Speaker 2:So it sounds like predictability is a lot of what it's going to be doing.
Speaker 3:I think at the start, and that'll be the. You know, that's the beginning right. You always have to kind of identify one use case and then you know, ladder up from there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure that would solve help solve, though, a big problem, especially because you mentioned there, okay, now, what type of content to produce based on what's being sold. Again, I think that's Interesting when you're thinking about, you know, netflix spending roughly 18 billion dollars next year on Creating content what I always want to know, I'm sure others do which they never break out. Nobody does, neither does Disney is okay, I would add 18 billion. What percentage is going towards kids? Contemporary man to comedy, documentaries like action, like be interesting if, over time, advertising starts driving those decisions like content, yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it, I think it can, I think there's. We should be careful, right, because you know there's the creative side, there's the human element, right, that is unpredictable and you know, a lot of times surprise is also important in in that environment, you know, to keep people delighted and coming back for more. If you become predictable, because it's what the advertiser wants, um, that might not be good for the consumer. So it's a balance, but I I agree that there should be some of that, like there should be data provided To help people. You know, steer, I think you know the, the digital publishers have done that. But again, the danger there is made for advertising content like nobody likes that, you know, it's just like it's not, it's not that high quality and it's just trying to, you know, make a buck.
Speaker 3:Um so I think we have to be very careful that we're putting the consumer first as we're making these decisions, but using the data to our advantage, obviously.
Speaker 2:You. You bring up a good point. I'm glad you mentioned that, because I've always been one that's felt that no technology will ever take place Of what can be accomplished by people you know in person together. It just won't. So to your point, I think there's a good balance there that you have to look at, which is important. So we're running out of time here, larry, so let me just ask uh, you know, maybe the last question to you here around education.
Speaker 2:One of the things I've been pushing on for a long time and will continue to, is how people in the industry, whatever fast or vertical market they're in, can continue to educate themselves. There's a lack of education or market of people who actually work in this industry. I'm shocked, but just how many people don't know which companies are profitable or not profitable? They don't read balance sheets, they don't look at earnings, even for some of the you know they work at the company and they don't know if their company's making money or not. When we're talking advertising now, we're talking a facet of the overall market, but one that just so much news comes out every day. Things move so quickly, like you mentioned all the different things being worked on. So what are some of the best ways that you keep yourself up to date, or resources, or just anything you want to share with the audience.
Speaker 3:I think one be part of the conversation. Right, you have to put yourself out there. Um, networking is strange as that sound is important, right, having a dialogue in the industry and and that's not only one on one, but participating at these events. There's a ton of webinars, you know, meetings that the various you know bodies put on. I mentioned sim before. That's an excellent place. If your company is not a member, you know they should look at that because there's that for them.
Speaker 3:Sim, it's the coalition for innovation and measurement, cim, m, m, and so you know that's. That's one area. Uh, you know the other one that we're involved in is go addressable. That's a new trade organization and there's a number of guides and videos. They do multiple webinars throughout the year, they hold an event and it's specific around this topic of kind of addressable Advertising and measurement and the relationship of data and media. Um, so that's another another great place, that one you can go and meet people live in person but also Partake throughout the year in, you know, content that's published and and webinars.
Speaker 2:Good. Thank you, that's helpful, and if people want to reach out to you directly, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, linkedin is probably the best way Um you can reach me at larence allen on linkedin.
Speaker 2:Great. Thanks very much. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have any questions, please reach out to me. If you can't find larry on linkedin for some reason, should be able to. But you can always reach out to me Dan at danreberoncom, phone numbers also listed on the blog and on the podcast as well. Thank everyone for listening. We'll be back in a. I'll be back in a couple weeks with another executive interview. Uh series, uh, haven't haven't decided who that will be yet, but I have another one coming up in the hopper. Until then, thanks very much everyone. Have a great week.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed the show, send it to a friend. Have questions for dan or mark, connect with them on linkedin at any time and be sure to check out dan's blog at streamingmedia blogcom.