Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to another episode of Stream Wars, our thought leader series where we learn from industry experts about the latest trends and challenges from across the convergent TV space. 0:16 Hosted by Michael Beach. Uh, today I'm joined by Frost Prileau. Frost is currently the founder and CEO at Simpli.fi. Uh, Simpli.fi, you know, one of the great stories, uh, in ad tech, you know, founded in 2010. 0:29 Uh, multiple exits to, to private equity, and yet the leadership is still there, you know, led by Frost himself. Um, 0:36 you know, many of you probably know, you know, Simpli.fi is the probably most successful local ad tech exit yet. Uh, but I'd, I'd say they're probably one of the most successful overall ad tech exits in recent time. 0:48 Uh, you know, we cover a lot of ground in our conversation. Um, you know, one, the overall unique needs of local advertisers, uh, Frost and team at Simpli.fi, uh, service a huge amount of advertisers. 0:58 And you heard me kind of talk before about the opportunity in the market to go, you know, beyond kind of the top 200 national advertisers, uh, and build more of a Facebook-type model. 1:07 Uh, they're, you know, kind of well into that journey. Um, and then the second thing which is unique, uh, they started off with, you know, search and search retargeting, 1:18 um, is blending the performance and branding aspect of CTV, and kind of CTV sitting at the, the middle where both performance and brand advertisers are interested in it, uh, and kind of, you know, driving value out of both. 1:32 So I thought that was a really interesting thing that, that we dug into. Um, so you know, please enjoy my conversation with Frost Prileau. Frost, welcome to Screen Wars. Hey, thanks, Michael. Great to be with you. 1:43 Absolutely. Uh, you know, you and I first got introduced to each other, uh, back in 2017 when I was getting CrossScreen off the ground, uh, and I've, I've followed Simpli.fi, you know, really closely ever since. 1:54 Um, you know, growth of the business has been tremendous. 1:57 Obviously, uh, you know, probably clearly the most successful local ad tech exit in recent time, but probably the, one of the top exits overall in the ad tech industry. 2:07 Um, you know, where did Simpli.fi start and how has it evolved over time? Well, gosh, uh, thanks, Michael, for the kind words. 2:14 So we started Simpli.fi in 2010, kind of right when, uh, real-time bidding and, uh, programmatic advertising was coming out, and our big, uh, founding thought at the time was, "Hey, everyone is..." 2:26 You know, real-time bidding is creating this fantastic ability to bid on each impression at the time. 2:31 But really all the platforms, uh, that were being, uh, invested in and started at the time carried over this legacy approach to targeting audiences, which was in these prepackaged audience segments. 2:40 And so the real thought around, uh, around Simpli.fi it, it was around what we call unstructured data, the ability to target, um, instead of, instead of, uh, uh, sort of bundles or, or audien- or audience segments, the ability to target people based on particular, uh, actions or that they had taken or particular pieces of detail. 2:58 So very much like search. If a local Toyota dealer is going to a, uh, uh, is going to Google Search, they don't say, "Hey, give me Toyota intenders." 3:06 You say, "Here's 1,000 keywords, and I want to target people who've searched on one of these." And that's how we started out, uh, with a thing called search retargeting down to the keyword level. 3:14 It turned out that, well, that, that sort of granular, uh, data capability could work across, uh, campaigns of all sizes. 3:22 It was prot- had some real advantages in, uh, campaigns of, uh, that were more localized because they could, uh, really target, uh, uh, custom audiences, create custom audiences very easily. 3:32 I always say, you know, the Toyota dealer in California has a lot full of Priuses or, or, uh, hyper- or, or electric cars. The Toyota dealer down here has a lot full of, uh, Tundra pickup trucks in Fort Worth, Texas. 3:42 So the, the differences in audiences are, is really good for local to be able to, uh, customize locally, and then also because the data was so granular, you could optimize on smaller run campaigns. 3:53 So it sort of evolved from there, uh, uh, from this focus on search, say, "Hey, we're gonna be the ones who really bring these programmatic capabilities to mid and long-tail advertisers," and that's been a bunch of the focus, uh, you know, since then. 4:06 Yeah, so I was in, uh, New York a couple weeks ago for Upfront Week, and I gave my normal spiel about how, you know, someone's gonna build the video platform, 4:16 um, to reach, you know, the one million local advertisers that are out there when everyone's kind of focused on the, you know, top 200 there, and I get my normal eye roll, like, "Here he goes again." But- [laughs]... 4:26 obviously you've done that at a, at a scale. I mean, k- kind of give our audience a little bit of, I mean, number of campaigns run per week and number of brands. It's a, it's a huge number. Yeah. Well, thank you. 4:36 Um, yeah, so we, um, we've got about 600 people in the company now. Uh, we, uh, will, in a typical month will run about 140,000 unique ad campaigns for, for somewhere 35,000-ish, uh, unique advertisers. 4:50 So yeah, so we have, and, and even in C- and those are a mix of CTV as well as display, uh, both mobile and desktop, and video of course. 4:58 Um, and if you look at, and CTV, uh, CTV is about a quarter of our business, and so you take those numbers, and we run a lot of $1,000, sub $1,000 a month CTV ads. 5:08 And I'm right there with you on the, uh, on bringing, there's a huge market out there, uh, that CTV is, uh, is making, uh, uh, the, a huge market out there that CTV is very appropriate for that whereas linear TV hasn't been an appropriate advertising tool for. 5:24 And, uh, and I'm, you know, excited, certainly excited about, uh, the ability to open up the market, uh, just as you are. 5:31 Yeah, I think, uh, you know, sometimes it's frustrating to get, you know, look at the audience and know that I've completely lost them, but then I'm also like, "Maybe this is just our little secret for, you know, a huge market," so- Yeah. 5:41 Well, you know what's also interesting to me is, um, uh, in so many things when we've been sort of more focused on, uh, on mid and, and mid-tail and longer-tail advertisers, so many things you'd say, "Well, hey, the national advertisers are doing this, so, um, you know, the local advertisers are gonna be a year or two behind." 5:57 But TV is an area I think where the local advertisers are a little bit ahead. They're not messing around with, um, you know, panel-based ratings. They're not messing around with... 6:06 They don't care about, uh, about all the travails of Nielsen and what have you. They're like, "Just make customers come to my website. Just make customers show up at my door." 6:15 Um, so they're performance-based, and, and I would think that is the way [chuckles]... 6:19 So they're actually ahead of the, uh, national advertisers in, in being really performance-driven and using TV as a performance, uh, medium, an accountable, uh, medium, uh, much more than the national guys have been. 6:32 Yeah, absolutely. So who, what, what's your ideal customer look like? Well, that, that's a good question. 6:38 Um, but typically, um, you know, we work with, uh, companies who have very, uh, specific, uh, targeting needs i- in many case- is the bulk of, uh, uh, but... So whether that is, "Hey, we want..." 6:50 We, we have a unique capability in having very precise, uh, data that can be optimized on the fly. 6:55 So s- typically that means someone who either, either has a, a, uh, specific targeting need, uh, whether that's location-wise, "I would just wanna target these ZIP codes or, or these peop- these types of demos within these ZIP codes," or m- multi-location-wise, "I've got... 7:11 I'm a grocery with 400 stores, and I really don't care about targeting people who are more than five miles away from my grocery or 10 miles away from my grocery store." 7:20 Um, and so, and so we do a lot of multi-location, uh, multi-loca- location customers. And then we have, um, uh... 7:28 And, and so people who, who, you know, who value this sort of more precise targeting and typically wanna see some, uh, performance metric other than, uh, just delivery or, or CPMs. Excellent. Where, like, uh... 7:40 I know we've talked about this before, but the obviously, uh, you know, heavy performance base to start, obviously getting into, you know, a tremendous amount of CTV now, how do you see those two blending together? 7:52 Well, I think, you know, again, Hugh, just like you have, uh, TV, uh, connected TV bringing, bringing, uh, bringing TV advertising to smaller advertisers, I think there's a whole host of performance advertisers, uh, that are using it. 8:06 We see this, you know, we bought, uh, this company Core Media Systems, makes software for linear TV advertisers, and so we have, uh, many customers who are used to linear performance TV. 8:16 Um, and they're a very interesting group. 8:18 They are very interested in, in high volumes of relatively, uh, this, and just speaking in general terms, but a lot of them are interested in, in what's worked in linear TV has been high volumes of very, uh, low-cost, uh, TV. 8:30 And so for them it's like, "Hey, let me, uh, let's, let's do, um, let's carpet bomb low cost, and then, then let's optimize around, hey, what sites are working, what time of day is working, and let's optimize using not so much audience data but more dem- more, uh, you know, uh, publisher-type data." 8:48 And then on the other hand, we have customers who are, have, sell very specific products, and whether that's in the B2B space or, uh, whether that's in, uh, you know, particular products at age groups or demo groups or what have you. 8:59 And they find that, uh, that targeting those groups, uh, with a CTV ad and then following up, 9:06 uh, with, uh, with a display ad of some sort, whether that's on a mobile or desktop, uh, device that was in the same household, uh, that has been super effective. 9:14 So we sort of see this, this, uh, this, um, you know, uh, barbell approach where we have some just give me, give me, uh, high quantities of fairly low-cost CTV, uh, that are, that can rival the cost, uh, the low cost of, uh, of, uh, unreserved linear. 9:30 And then on the other side it's like, "Hey, I wanna target my particular, uh, this particular customer base." You know, one thing I'm interested in your perspective, um, is that the same person, 9:41 uh, for your customer that is thinking about performance and brand, or is it, 9:46 uh, you know, 'cause I know at the national level you see these, you know, 1,000-person-plus agencies and they've got this division of labor and they almost can't think that way, right? 9:52 They thought, they talk about- Yeah... well, I'm top of funnel, mid-funnel, bottom of funnel. But do you find that you're, you've actually got a nimble enough customer where they, they could think both ways? 10:01 Well, I mean, what's interesting about the smaller agencies and the smaller advertisers is, is they're much less siloed, right? 10:08 So the, the larger, you know, the holding companies think about, hey, they've got a team doing local linear, a team doing national linear, a team doing, 10:15 um, uh, you know, a team doing search, social, programmatic, different teams. Uh, and so the cross-pollination there is a little tougher. 10:21 In many cases in a smaller advertiser or smaller agency, you're dealing with a media team of, of one to five people, and so they're swivel chairing between, between all these sy- all these systems. 10:31 And so in those cases, yes, you would, you might have the same if, if they're thinking that way, upper funnel and lower funnel. 10:37 But many cases, it, as I mentioned earlier, those smaller advertisers tend to think more lower, lower funnel or not just, or, or not thinking in terms of, uh, of upper funnels. 10:46 They tend to be in the bottom half, let's call it, if, uh, of the proverbial funnel there. With the Core Media system, you've got this, uh, you know, data set of all these TV advertisers and what they're doing. 10:55 You know, what's the opportunity with bringing them into d- other digital channels? I assume that's a huge opportunity. 11:00 Um, y- so yes it is, and, uh, and again, in, in some cases, you know, it's interesting we're dealing with silos. 11:06 In some cases, those are the same people buying performance linear who might have responsibility for buying if they've converged their media buying teams. 11:14 In other cases, those, those, that team buying, uh, performance, uh, linear TV are often a, often a silo, and they're not the ones at all who are, who are working on digital. So I would say it's a mixed bag. 11:25 I think, you know, we, we tend to think the, uh, the movement is going towards converged media teams, so you don't have... 11:32 Certainly we're seeing sort of the outset of that going to a converged video team where, where all video is bought, uh, uh, uh, on, with one group. 11:40 But over time we'd expect that to be a converged media team, uh, where digital and linear are, are bought together because there are just, you know, significant advantages to doing that, um, both on targeting, make sure you're getting unduplicated reach, as well as performance, so they're, they're using the same tools to see, well, you know, what's really driving performance. 12:01 Uh, you and I ran into each other, uh, a couple weeks ago at the Luma DMS Summit in New York. What was a key takeaway for you? Um, uh, let's see. 12:10 The key takeaway there was there's, to me anyway, was there's still a lot of... And, and sadly I didn't sit through, um, all of the, uh, all of the, all the things. 12:19 There's so much, uh, valuable, uh, interaction done outside those conference. But, um, but to me certainly retail media, uh, continues to be, you know, continues to be a big theme of the, of the s- of the space. 12:31 Um, and then CTV measurement continues to be. And that, there are a lot of, uh, big advertisers who, who wanna use, uh, something like a Nielsen tool or whatever the, whatever the follow-on's gonna be. 12:41 So measurement re- remains the, uh, you know, the, the discussion year after year, uh, there, and what's gonna be the right, uh, right measurement I think, uh, was, was, you know, continues to be an, an issue in that space that's probably keeping some budgets from coming over to CTV. 12:57 Uh, well, Frost, you and I ran into each other, uh, a couple weeks back at the Luma DMS Summit in New York. Uh, kinda what was your key takeaway? Well, um, you know, a couple things. 13:05 One, I think that, uh, that we're still talking about, uh, about, um, attribution and measurement in TV. So that is the gift that keeps on giving for panels. If you're putting panels together, that's always a hot topic. 13:18 And, uh, so there was still a lot, uh, a lot left in the air there, a lot of discussions, a lot of frustration about how, how long that, how long that's taken. 13:25 Uh, retail media was, uh, was a big topic, of course, is one of the sort of new three legs of the, of the stool of, uh, of sort of what's driving growth in programmatic. 13:34 Um, and then identity was, is also, you know, the gift that keeps on giving is how, how's the world gonna, uh, gonna continue on in the, in the post-cookie world. 13:42 Something that frankly doesn't impact CTV too much, but, uh, but that remains, uh, remains a good topic. Yeah, and, uh, two kind of takeaways. Um, 13:52 first, you know, that, uh, it was good to see both in the kind of presentation, uh, a local call-out on CTV, uh, which obviously showed the, the market growing, and then y- uh, your panel, I think you had, uh, someone from Madhive on there, so- Yeah... 14:05 you know, roughly, you know, 40% was local-focused. 14:09 Um, and then two is really the, you know, Terry's kinda always focused on CTV and a lot of the things that, you know, data and identity, uh, that I think have gotten a lot of attention over the years, but one thing he's talked about the last couple years is creative and creative technology. 14:22 Um, and he even used this kinda iceberg analogy to show, you know, what you see above, uh, the water even being the, you know, the data and targeting and measurement, and below is the, you know, creative and the messaging. 14:32 Um, why do you think that hasn't caught on yet with as many companies, you know, on the creative side making anywhere near as much noise as you've seen on the kinda measurement and, and analytics? Right. 14:43 Um, well, I think there's just a lot of work done, to be done on the infrastructure today to get those creatives delivered and measured and optimized. 14:51 I mean, there's one thing that, uh, it's one thing to create a whole bunch of creatives, and AI tools are enabling that, uh, today where you could make 1,000 or, or 100, uh, different types of creatives with different colors or features or taglines or what have you. 15:04 But to take those creatives and then, uh, get those stored up in the pipes, ready to, um, ready to deliver, uh, based on what the, you know, what the information around that particular impression is, whether that's around the show or the audience that's watching it, et cetera. 15:20 So to, to all that optimization needs to sort of flow, uh, you know, downstream through the programmatic pipes. And so there's a lot of work, uh, uh, to be done in that space. 15:30 Um, as, as I said on that panel, uh, I think one of the int- interesting things in, in the world as we've thought about it is you can either say, "Hey, I've got a fixed creative here, and then I'm gonna optimize my audience to meet that creative. 15:41 So here's my creative. I'm gonna go find the audience that really responds to that and is most likely to, to, uh, to buy or, or take whatever action based on that." And so there's a different way of thinking. 15:51 It's, it's, it's like, "Hey, here's my, um, here's my audience. 15:54 This is really who I wanna target, and I'm gonna go swap out creatives to find the ones that that audience responds to," whether it's taglines, colors, images, what have you. 16:03 And so that's a, that's a, a different problem, and it needs just to get worked through all the optimization algorithms and, uh, and ad serving and measurement tools that, um, uh, that are in the system to really make that, uh, make that, uh, be, be more widespread. 16:22 All right. Big-picture question here. Uh, you started the company in 2010. Uh, I think year 14 here. Where is Simpli.fi in five years? 16:30 You know, we're very-- we think there's a huge opportunity in this, uh, in the smaller agency and advertiser space. We work with about 2,000, uh, customers on a regular, on a regular basis today. 16:41 Uh, we think there's probably, there's probably a market opportunity for us with 10 or 12 or so, 13,000 customers. So we just continue to, uh, keep talking and keep looking at those customers. 16:50 Really we believe that, uh, the needs of some of these smaller mid-size, uh, advertisers and agencies are quite different from the needs of, of the larger agencies. 16:59 And so we continue to build out the feature set around, uh, around those customers, both omni-channel, uh, CTV, um, automation, uh, are, are all things that we look at. 17:10 There's, uh, just a still a lot of inefficiency in the system. 17:14 Uh, if you look at the time spent with a, in a media buy- in a media buyer's life, um, you know, sending out propo- sending out proposals, uh, uh, or sorry, sending out, sending out orders, um, optimizing, moving budgets between, uh, between different types of media that are performing and not performing, cutting and pasting, um, uh, spreadsheets together for aggregated reporting. 17:36 We just think there's a lot of friction in the system, so we're very much focused on, on, uh, how do we make life easier for our customers, uh, by, by automating and sort of aggregating these processes. 17:46 [chime] Excellent. Uh, well, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the local video space, what would it be? Um, so a magic wand in the local video space. 18:00 So I think really, uh, educating, uh, a, um, the, a lot of advertisers that, uh, CTV is very different, brings to, uh, new capabilities to the world of video advertising that, um, that they're not used to from linear TV. 18:14 So I often think, you know, we do my, a lot of car, a lot of auto ads, and typically auto dealers, they have a pretty big, pretty big marketplace within a DMA. 18:23 They could probably cover half a lot of DMAs or what have you. So there's little waste, but that might, but that might, that might work well. 18:30 Um, but if you think about, like, local restaurants, local service providers who really only maybe service an area of a few zip codes. 18:36 Uh, and so the ability to, for a local, local advertiser, and this could be a local advertiser, or it could be a, again, a chain store with 400 locations or 1,000 locations, and they really, there's a lot of benefits to be had of localizing, uh, delivery and optimization and budgeting around these stores, uh, because people g- especially stores, of course, that, uh, the people visit in person. 18:58 So I think really just the education that, uh, here's, there's a lot of the, of the, uh, the capabilities of CTV, um, and how that makes it very, very applicable to anyone who cares about, uh, who's, who's got a, really any advertiser who is, is working on people visiting a physical location. 19:19 Well, Frost, I'm grateful for your time, and I know our audience is gonna love this conversation, so thank you. Well, you bet. Happy to, uh, hap- great to connect. 19:25 [upbeat music] Thank you for joining us on this episode of Screen Wars. I hope you enjoyed the discussion. You can find out more about CrossScreen Media at crossscreenmedia.com. 19:35 Please don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, State of the Screens. You can find us on social media, @crossscreenmedia. Join us next time for more insights and analysis straight from the experts. 19:47 [upbeat music]
