(click) >> Stu: Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special on-the-ground here at the VTUG: Summer Slam 2019. It's the 16th year of the event and unfortunately it's actually the final event. I've been to a few of these in Maine. I've been to many more of them at the Winter Warmer at Gillette Stadium and welcoming back to the program someone that's been to many more of these that I have, Chris Collotti, who's a principal technologist today at Cohesity but you know, who is doing many other jobs and actually used to live here in New England, southern New Hampshire before. >> Chris: That's right. Chris, welcome back. >> Chris: Thank you, good to see you as always. >> Yeah, give us a little bit of your history with these events and you know, what you've been seeing at you know, user groups and regional events and what brought you back for the final one. >> So this one was interesting cause even last night when I showed up for the night before, I think I knew everybody in the room, it was all hugs and you know, it's just, it's all about the people, I mean, this is all the same people that we've had up here. But, yeah, I grew up in southern New Hampshire, since moved to Tennessee five years ago but I was actually at another event before this and when we found it was the last one, well, Cohesity has always sponsored it but I actually decided to fly over here, being the last one cause knowing the Harneys really well and see all you guys it's just, it's kind of an odd thing to have the curtain go down. >> Yeah, you talk about the people and communities, Chris, I think back to the earliest days that I came to this event I'm like, there's that guy on stage, he's almost always wearing a Patriots jersey there and >> (laughs) I did make that famous. >> Figuring out it was I believe P90x and some of the other things there so, you know, what's the workout regime today? >> Uh, this morning I actually jacked up my neck, um, back in to lifting heavy a little bit but yeah, it was always great to be the guy who always came up on stage and always had a Brewsky jersey on or something. I remember the one year that someone told me they were practicing that year and I was in the middle of the presentation and I was, you know, conflicted on what to do but, um, no I think it's always been good to come back and talk, not just about technology, but I've had so many conversations over the years about where my career's gone and the changes and it was always that opportunity a couple times a year to figure out what changed for everybody. And even now, I mean, there's guys that I've seen that have different shirts on that we're, you know, I have one different from last year when I was at the Winter Warmer. >> Yeah, 16 years it's safe to say almost everyone here has changed what logo they had here. Many of the companies >> We've lost a little more hair, we've got a little more gray. >> So a lot of changes. One thing I tell you, 16 years has been a good run for the Patriots over the last 16 years >> People don't like us when we talk about that for some reason >> We're here in New England, we're allowed to talk about it. >> That's true, that's true. >> At this event, Chris, it's The Cube, you always like talking about sports and if they don't like this piece of it that's all right but, you know, I tell you talking to the vendors here, they're always hiring, like, SEs, technical people, you know, if they understand that latest in technology, usually they can find a job here. What else are you seeing? What are some of the you know, kind of in-demand jobs, of course, you know, the space that your company is playing in, data, is at the center of so much of what we talk, >> Absolutely. Data protection, data management, is a super hot space. >> Yep. I think, I've definitely seen a lot of, all the new companies are always hiring SEs, right? They got to get their sales up and running. For Cohesity, it's a bit similar. I mean, we took over another couple of floors in one of the other buildings in San Jose, which is great, the growth is unbelievable. For people who don't know, you know, we've got a truck rolling around the country that John Hildebrand and I personally, pretty much built over the course of a couple a months, but I think that speaks to it. There's all this stuff happening and everybody's trying to find a different way to get out in front of customers, right, whether it's a salesperson, whether it's the marketing, whether it's creative videos or something else and we're always trying to figure out what's the next, well, not even technical ability, but what's just the next ability you want to hire, right, is it a coder, is it, I mean, we always have developers, we're always hiring developers, but around here, I've been out of the area so much I'm really not sure, like what the hotbed is right now around the Boston area and southern New Hampshire. >> Boston's such a hotbed lately for, you know, everything that's going in IoT, of course, Cloud's having an impact, those people that hadn't been to the Seaport District, oh my gosh, it's great to see those buildings go up. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, not just, you know, Red Hat put in a big facility there, AWS and Amazon, of course, has a strong presence, but between Cambridge and Boston there's so much growth here. Chris, want to give you the kind of final word, as you've been at more of these events than many people, you know, what's it like to see kind of the end of an era and any final memories you have from these shows. >> The only, and I've been talking about this memory, and you may remember this one, and Ed Hartley would too, I think, Tex, he will, when my Challenger broke down. Were you here for that one, when I pulled into Gritty's? That's my worse memory of these but it's the one that always comes up when I come back and everybody saw it on the flatbed driving by, you know, Luigi and everybody. What made it interesting was a horrible situation for me because I drove up here but it speaks to the community because everybody ran out to ask what happened, do you need a ride home, what's going on? And I do think the Harneys have done such an incredible job over the years just bringing all these people together. It's a little bit sad I think, you know, my wife came up for this, Julie actually flew up because she knows everybody and being the last one. She also won't turn down lobster, at all. I'm happy for them though, I think, a lot's happened in their lives in the last couple years and to finally get down to Florida and spend more time down there, I'm happy for them, I think it's great, I think they've done a, they've left a legacy, really I think, I don't think anybody can match up here. >> The intersections of great information, great people and you throw in >> Great food. a great New England Lobsterfest, you really can't go wrong with that, Chris, thank you so much for sharing the update. Always great to catch up with you. >> Yeah, great seeing you again. We'll see you tonight at the bake. >> All right and we'll see Chris and many others at VMWorld later this year as well as lots of other shows. Be sure to check out thecube.net. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thanks for watching. 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>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is special On the Ground of theCUBE here at the VTUG Summer Slam 2019. We've had the pleasure of knowing the VTUG team for quite awhile back actually, when it was the New England VMUG was when I started attending. When it switched to the VTUG at Gillette Stadium's when we started doing theCUBE there. And happy to bring back to the program first, Chris Harney, who is the one who created this as a true user event. And joining him is his wife Dawn Harney, who we know is behind the scenes organizing all of this event. So, Dawn and Chris, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing this community and educational process with all of us. >> Thanks Stu, it's been a pleasure. >> All right, so, Chris, we really want this, it's a celebration. Sixteen years; back in 2003 the number one movie of the year was actually Finding Nemo. Of course we waited a long time for there. It goes without saying that all of us were a little bit younger. And boy, in those days, I started working with VMR in 2002, so that journey of virtualization was real early. There was no cloud talking we had kind of the XSP's and some of the earlier things. But so much has changed, and what I have loved is this journey that the users that are attending here. We're actually here in the Expo hall, and if you look, why are there no people in here right now? Because they are all in the break out sessions understanding what are the skill sets that they need today and tomorrow to help them in their journey; virtualization, cloud, DevOps, all of these changes there. Chris, you started this as a user to help share with your peers, so, we've had you on the program many times, bring us back. >> Yeah, so think back to 2003. There was no way to share information. There's no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook groups, Meetups, no Game of Thrones. >> We had to go to books and stuff like that. >> Exactly. >> Read the paper. >> So white papers, those were the big deal. You had the Microsoft books that were two inches thick and glossy. >> Yeah, I wonder how many of our younger audience would know the acronym RTFM? Read The Fine Manual please, is what we're doing. Dawn, this event, as I said, we've been at the winter event at Gillette Stadium, you brought in some of the Patriot players we've had the pleasure of interviewing. This Summer event is epic. I know people that come from very long distances to swim in the community, get the information. There's a little bit of lobster at the end of the day. >> There's a lot of lobster at the end of the day. >> So give us the community that you look to help build and foster, and what this event has meant to you over the years. >> For me it's really a place for everybody in the community to come together and share their knowledge with their peers. Something may work for me maybe it will work for you. Let's get together and talk about it. The best way to learn something is from somebody that may have done it, or done it, messed it up, learned something, like to share it with you. So, it really is about working with your peers, learning something from your sponsors and all these companies that you work with everyday. What's new, what's going on. So this is the place to go to get all that. >> Wait, Dawn, I thought you weren't a tech person. >> I'm not a tech person. >> That answer was spot on because one of the things I loved about the virtualization community, is we were all learning in the early days. And it required a little bit of work. There's this theory known as the IKEA effect. Sometimes if you actually help build it a little bit, you actually like it a little bit more. And this community really epitomizes that in the virtualization community and cloud. We've been talking about cloud now for a decade but it's still relatively early days on how this multi-hybrid cloud fits together, how operations are changing, so, Chris, bring us through a little bit of that arc. >> Well, I'll think about it, back in 2003, there was only VMwire. There was only one virtualization platform, if you didn't use VMwire, you were doing bare metal Windows install or Unix install on physical servers. Well, back when we changed, there was Hyper-V, that was coming out, AWS was just coming out, so that's when we kind of made the jump from just being a VMwire user to a virtual technology. So we could talk about the cloud, we could share those experiences and have that same journey together, and hopefully learn and lead, get smarter together as a group, you can learn faster as a group than you can by yourself. >> Yeah, and as we know, Chris, and we've talked about this, the IT industry is never "Hey, give me a clean "sheet of paper and we'll start everything." We know it is additive and all of these things go together, so cloud did not obviate the need for virtualization, so all of these things go together, and how do I make sure as my job doesn't get completely eliminated or, I was talking to somebody who said "If I've been doing the same thing for 10 years, "will I be out of a job?" They said, "Well hopefully you really really like "what you're doing cause if you think "you can keep doing what you're doing, "that is all you will ever be able to do." And I thought that was a very poignant comment. >> Yeah, Matt Broberg's talk this morning about what's your next job going to be, what skillsets do you need to be relevant in 10 years, and it's the same thing, I mean we said the same thing 10, 15 years ago. You can't be a Windows admin anymore, you can't be a VMwire admin anymore, you can't be a cloud admin anymore in five years. >> Yeah, so Dawn, give our audience a little bit of the scope of this event, as I said, I know people that have flown in from the Carolinas, from Colorado, from all over, from California and the like, 16 years of this event, this community is not just New England, it really has had a broad impact. >> Right, and it's huge, people plan their vacations around this, I've had people come from Europe, they fly over here, stay in the state of Maine, they go to L.L. Bean, they do all those things because they plan their vacation, they know they need to be here for the VTUG event, so it's meant a lot, because you do get so many different variety of people, you have the sponsors, you have the end users, you have media, you have bloggers, you have pretty much just everybody comes together to really be that community, so it's meant a lot to me, it's been a long 16 years but it's meant a lot. >> All right, so the question people are asking, this is the final VTUG, so no more winter event at Gillette, this is the final event tonight at Gritty's, so explain to us how that happened. >> It is the final event, 16 years, we're all getting older, it's bittersweet, but we've just realized that it takes a lot of time to put these together, it takes a lot of sponsors, it takes a lot of users, the users continue to come, but unfortunately the sponsors pay for it, and really don't have that following with the sponsors that we used to have, unfortunately. >> There are a lot more events, there are a lot more ways to find customers, so they're going to the meetups and they're doing their own events. >> Yeah, to your opening point Chris, 16 years ago it was much tougher to find sources. Now the challenge we have is there's too many options out there, there are too many events, trust me, I go to too many events, but this one has always been one that we've always looked forward, so please from the community, want to say thank you so much, it has always been one of our favorite things to kick off the year with when we do the winter one, and the summer one, I've made this trip a couple of times, it is a little warm in here, I think brings back to the roots of this event, remember it was four or five years ago it was 110 degrees out, and then you switched to this facility, so of course the air conditioning decides to go out, because we know in IT, sometimes things break. >> Start in the heat, end in the heat. >> So Chris, want to give you the final word for the final VTUG. >> You know, I'm just very proud and happy with this community, it truly is a community, it wasn't us, it wasn't theCUBE, it wasn't the vendors, it was everyone working together to make a community that helped each other out, so thanks to everyone. >> Chris and Dawn, thank you so much, we're happy to be a small piece of this community, and look forward to staying in touch with you in your future endeavors. Thanks so much, I'm Stu Miniman, we have a full day of coverage here, keynote speaker, some of the users that have traveled around, really focusing on the community here at the VTUG Summer Slam, as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.

>>what? Hello, I'm john free with the cube. I want to welcome Conrad Feldman, the founder and Ceo of Kwan cast here to kick off the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The events called the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. The changing advertising landscape, super relevant conversation just now. More than ever. Conrad welcome to your own program kicking this off. Thanks for holding this event. It's a pleasure. Great to chat with you today. So a big fan been following your company since the founding of it. Been analytics is always the prize of any data driven company. Media. Anything's all data driven now. Um, talk about the open internet because now more than ever it's under siege. As I, as I mentioned in my open, um, we've been seeing the democratization, a new trend of decentralization. We're starting to see um, you know, everyone's present online now, Clay Shirky wrote a book called, here comes everyone in 2005. Well everyone's here. Right? So you know, we're here, it's gonna be more open. But yet people are looking at as close right now. You're seeing the big players, um, or in the data. What's your vision of this open internet? >>Well, an open internet exists for everyone. And if you think about the evolution of the internet, when the internet was created for the first time really in history, anyone that had access to the internet could publish the content, whatever they were interested in and could find an audience. And of course that's grown to where we are today, where five billion people around the world are able to engage in all sorts of content, whether that's entertainment or education, news, movies. What's perhaps not so widely understood is that most of that content is paid for by advertising and there's a lot of systems that support advertising on the open Internet and some of those are under siege today certainly. >>And what's the big pressure point? Is it just more control the data? Is it just that these walled gardens are wanting to, you know, suck the audience in there? Is that monetization driving it? What's where's the friction? >>Well, the challenges is sort of the accumulation of power into a really small number of now giant corporations who have actually reduced a lot of the friction that marketers have in spending their money effectively. And it means that those companies are capturing a disproportionate spend of the ad budgets that fund digital content. So the problem is if more of the money goes to them, less of its going to independent content creators. It's actually getting harder for independent voices to emerge and be heard. And so that's the real challenges. That has more power consolidates into just a limited number of tech giants. The funding path for the open Internet becomes constrained and there'll be less choice for consumers without having to pay for subscriptions. >>Everyone knows the more data you have the better and certainly, but the centralized power when the trend is going the other way, the consensus is everyone wants to be decentralized more truth, more trust all this is being talked about on the heels of the google's news around, you know, getting rid of third party cookies and others have followed suit. Um, what does this mean? I mean, this cookies have been the major vehicle for tracking and getting that kind of data. What is gonna be replaced with what is this all about? And can you share with us what the future will look like? >>Sure, Well, just as advertising funds the open Internet is advertising technology that supports that advertising spend. It supports sort of the business of advertising that funds the open Internet. And within all of that technology is the need for different systems to be able to align around um the identification of for example, a consumer, Have they been to this site before? Have they seen an ad before? So there's all of these different systems that might be used for advertising for measurement, for attribution, for creating personalization. And historically they've relied upon the third party cookie as the mechanism for synchronization. Well, the third party cookie has been in decline for some time. It's already mostly gone from actually apple safari browser, but google's chrome has so much control over how people access the internet. And so it was when Google announced that chrome was going to deprecate the third party cookie, that it really sort of focus the minds of the industry in terms of finding alternative ways to tailor content and ultimately to just simply measure the effectiveness of advertising. And so there's an enormous amount of um innovation taking place right now to find alternative solutions. >>You know, some are saying that the free open internet was pretty much killed when, you know, the big comes like facebook and google started bringing all this data and kind of pulls all sucks all the auction in the room, so to speak. What's this mean with cookies now getting, getting rid of um, by google has an impact publishers because is it helpful? I mean hurtful. I mean, where's the where is that, what the publisher impact? >>Well, I don't think anyone really knows right now. So first of all, cookies weren't necessarily a very good solution to the sort of the challenge of maintaining state and understanding those sorts of the delivery of advertising and so on. It's just the one that's commonly used, I think for different publishers it may mean different things. But many publishers need to be able to demonstrate the value and the effectiveness of the advertising solutions that they deliver. So they'll be innovating in terms of how they use their first party data. They'll be continuing to use contextual solutions that have long been used to create advertising relevant, relevant. I think the big question of course is how we're going to measure it that any of this is effective at all because everyone relies upon measuring advertising effectiveness to justify capturing those budgets in the first place. >>You know, you mentioned contextual come up a lot also in the other interviews we've done with the folks in the around the internet around this topic of machine learning is a big 12 What is the impact of this with the modernization of the solution? You mentioned cookies? Okay cookies, old technology. But the mechanisms in this ecosystem around it or not, it funds the open internet. What is that modern solution that goes that next level? Is it contextual metadata? Is that shared systems? What's the it's the modernization of that. >>It's all of those and and more. There's no there's no single solution to replace the third party cookie. There'll be a combination of solutions. Part of that will be alternative identity mechanisms. So you know, you will start to see more registration wars to access content so that you have what's called a deterministic identify there will be statistical models so called probabilistic models, contextual has always been important. It will become more important and it will be combined with we use contextual combining natural language processing with machine learning models to really understand the detailed context of different pages across the internet. You'll also see the use of first party data and there are discussions about shared data services as well. I think there's gonna be a whole set of different innovations that will need to inter operate and it's going to be an evolutionary process as people get used to using these different systems to satisfy the different stages of the media fulfillment cycle from research and planning to activation to measurement. >>You know, you put up walled gardens. I want to just touch on the on on this kind of concept of walled gardens and and and and compare and contrast that with the demand for community, open internet has always fostered a community vibe. You see network effects mostly in distinct user communities or subnets of sub networks. If you will kind of walled gardens became that kind of group get together but then became more of a media solution to make the user is the product, as they say, facebook's a great example, right? People talk about facebook and from that misinformation abuse walled garden is not the best thing happening right now in the world, but yet is there any other other choice? That's how they're going to make money? But yet everyone wants trust, truth community. Are they usually exclusive? How do you see this evolving, what's your take? >>Well, I think the open internet is a, is a forum where anyone can have their voice, uh, put their voice out there and have it discovered and it's in that regard, it's a it's a force for good look. I think there are there are challenges, obviously in terms of some of the some of the optimization that takes place with inside the walled gardens, which is, is sort of optimized to drive engagement can have some unintended consequences. Um obviously that's something that's, that's broadly being discussed today and the impact on society, but sort of more at a more pointed level, it's just the absorption of advertising dollars. There's a finite amount of money from advertisers. It's estimated to be $400 billion this year in digital advertising. So it's a huge amount of money in terms of funding the open Internet, which sounds great except for its increasingly concentrated in a tiny number of companies. And so, you know, our job at Quan cast as champions of the free and open Internet is to help direct money effectively to publishers across the open internet and give advertisers a reliable, repeatable way of accessing the audiences that they care about in the environment they care about and delivering advertising results. >>It's a publisher, we care a lot about what our audience wants and try to serve them and listen to them. If we could get the data, we want that data and then also broker in the monetization with advertisers, who might want to reach that audience in whatever way. So this brings up the question of, you know, automation and role of data. You know, this is a huge thing to having that data closed loop, if you will for for publishers. But yet most publishers are small, some niche. And even as they can become super large, they don't have all the data and more, the more data, the better the machine learning. So what's the answer to this as it goes forward? How do we get there? What's the dots that that we need to connect to get that future state? >>So I think it takes it takes companies working together effectively. I think a really important part of it is, is a more direct conversation with consumers. We've seen that change beginning to happen over the past few years with the introduction of regulations that require clear communication to consumers about the data that's captured. And y and I think that creates an opportunity to explain to your audience is the way in which content is funded. So I think that consumer that consumer conversation will be part of the collective solution. >>You know, I want to as we wind down this kickoff segment, get your thoughts and vision around um, the evolution of the internet and you guys have done some great work at quan Cast is well documented, but everyone used to talk about traffic by traffic, then it became cost of acquisitions. PPC search. This is either mechanisms that people have been using for a long, long time, then you know, your connections but audience is about traffic, audience traffic. If this if my family is online, doesn't it become about networks and the people. So I want to get your thoughts and your vision because if community is going to be more important than people agree that it is and things are gonna be decentralized, more openness, more voices to be heard. You need to dress ability. The formation of networks and groups become super important. What's your vision on that? >>So my vision is to create relevance and utility for consumers. I think that's one of the things that's often forgotten is that when we make advertising more relevant and useful for consumers, it automatically fulfils the objectives that publishers and marketers have, everyone wins when advertising is more relevant. And our vision is to make advertising relevant across the entire open internet so that that ad supported model can continue to flourish and that five billion and hopefully many more billions in the future, people around the world have access to high quality, diverse content. >>If someone asked you Conrad, what is quant cast doing to make the open internet viable now that cookies are going away? What's the answer? >>So well, the cookie pieces is a central piece of it in terms of finding solutions that will enable sort of planning activation and measurement post cookies and we have a lot of innovation going on. There were also working with a range of industry bodies and our and our partners to build solutions for this. What we're really trying to do is to make buying the open internet as straightforward for marketers as it is today and buying the walled gardens. The reason the walled gardens capture so much money is they made it really easy for marketers to get results, marketers would like to be able to spend their money across all of the diverse publishes the open internet. You know, our job at Comcast is to make it just as easy to effectively spend money in funding the content that they really care about in reaching the audiences that they want. >>Great stuff. Great Mission. Conrad, thanks for coming on. Conrad Feldmann founder and Ceo here at the cookie conundrum recipe for success event, Quant Cast Industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. Thank you. Conrad appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I'm john ferrier, stay with us for more on the industry event around the middle cookies. Mhm Yeah, yeah, thank you. Mhm. Welcome back to the Qantas industry summit on the demise of third party cookies, the cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. I'm john furrier host of the cube, the changing landscape of advertising is here and shit Gupta, founder of you of digital is joining us chief. Thanks for coming on this segment. Really appreciate, I know you're busy, you've got two young kids as well as providing education to the digital industry, you got some kids to take care of and train them to. So welcome to the cube conversation here as part of the program. >>Yeah, thanks for having me excited to be here. >>So the office of the changing landscape of advertising really centers around the open to walled garden mindset of the web and the big power players. We know the big 34 tech players dominate the marketplace so clearly in a major inflection point and we've seen this movie before Web mobile revolution which was basically a reply platform NG of capabilities. But now we're in an error of re factoring the industry, not re platt forming a complete changing over of the value proposition. So a lot at stake here as this open web, open internet, global internet evolves. What are your, what's your take on this, this industry proposals out there that are talking to this specific cookie issue? What does it mean? And what proposals are out there? >>Yeah, so, you know, I I really view the identity proposals and kind of to to kind of groups, two separate groups. So on one side you have what the walled gardens are doing and really that's being led by google. Right, so google um you know, introduce something called the privacy sandbox when they announced that they would be deprecating third party cookies uh as part of the privacy sandbox, they've had a number of proposals unfortunately, or you know, however you want to say they're all bird themed for some reason, I don't know why. Um but the one, the bird theme proposal that they've chosen to move forward with is called flock, which stands for Federated learning of cohorts. And essentially what it all boils down to is google is moving forward with cohort level learning and understanding of users in the future after third party cookies, unlike what we've been accustomed to in this space, which is a user level understanding of people and what they're doing online for targeting tracking purposes. And so that's on one side of the equation, it's what google is doing with flock and privacy sandbox now on the other side is, you know, things like unified I. D. Two point or the work that I. D five is doing around building new identity frameworks for the entire space that actually can still get down to the user level. Right? And so again, unified I. D. Two point oh comes to mind because it's the one that's probably got the most adoption in the space. It's an open source framework. So the idea is that it's free and pretty much publicly available to anybody that wants to use it and unified, I need to point out again is user level. So it's it's basically taking data that's authenticated data from users across various websites you know that are logging in and taking those authenticated users to create some kind of identity map. And so if you think about those two work streams right, you've got the walled gardens and or you know, google with flock on one side and then you've got unified I. D. Two point oh and other I. D. Frameworks for the open internet. On the other side, you've got these two very differing type of approaches to identity in the future. Again on the google side it's cohort level, it's going to be built into chrome. Um The idea is that you can pretty much do a lot of the things that we do with advertising today, but now you're just doing it at a group level so that you're protecting privacy, whereas on the other side of the open internet you're still getting down to the user level. Um And that's pretty powerful. But the the issue there is scale, right? We know that a lot of people are not logged in on lots of websites. I think the stat that I saw is under five of all website traffic is authenticated. So really if you if you simplify things you boil it all down, you have kind of these two very differing approaches. >>I guess the question it really comes down to what alternatives are out there for cookies and which ones do you think will be more successful? Because I think, you know, the consensus is at least from my reporting, in my view, is that the world agrees. Let's make it open, Which one is going to be better. >>Yeah, that's a great question, john So as I mentioned, right, we have we have to kind of work streams here, we've got the walled garden work streams, work stream being led by google and their work around flock, and then we've got the open internet, right? Let's say unified I. D to kind of represents that. I personally don't believe that there is a right answer or an endgame here. I don't think that one of them wins over the other, frankly, I think that, you know, first of all, you have those two frameworks, neither of them are perfect, they're both flawed in their own ways. There are pros and cons to both of them. And so what we're starting to see now is you have other companies kind of coming in and building on top of both of them as kind of a hybrid solution. Right? So they're saying, hey, we use, you know, an open I. D. Framework in this way to get down to the user level and use that authenticated data and that's important. But we don't have all the scale. So now we go to google and we go to flock to kind of fill the scale. Oh and hey, by the way, we have some of our own special sauce, right? We have some of our own data, we have some of our own partnerships, we're gonna bring that in and layer it on top. Right? And so really where I think things are headed is the right answer, frankly, is not one or the other. It's a little mishmash of both. With a little extra something on top. I think that's that's what we're starting to see out of a lot of companies in the space. And I think that's frankly where we're headed. >>What do you think the industry will evolve to, in your opinion? Because I think this is gonna, you can't ignore the big guys on this because these programmatic you mentioned also the data is there. But what do you think the market will evolve to with this, with this conundrum? >>So, so I think john where we're headed? You know, I think we're right now we're having this existential existential crisis, right? About identity in this industry, because our world is being turned upside down, all the mechanisms that we've used for years and years are being thrown out the window and we're being told they were gonna have new mechanisms, Right? So cookies are going away device ids are going away and now we got to come up with new things and so the world is being turned upside down and everything that you read about in the trades and you know, we're here talking about it, right? Like everyone's always talking about identity right now, where do I think this is going if I was to look into my crystal ball, you know, this is how I would kind of play this out. If you think about identity today. Right? Forget about all the changes. Just think about it now and maybe a few years before today, Identity for marketers in my opinion has been a little bit of a checkbox activity. Right? It's been hey, um, okay, uh, you know ad tech company or a media company, do you have an identity solution? Okay. Tell me a little bit more about it. Okay, Sounds good. That sounds good. Now can we move on and talk about my business and how are you going to drive meaningful outcomes or whatever for my business? And I believe the reason that is, is because identity is a little abstract, right? It's not something that you can actually get meaningful validation against. It's just something that, you know. Yes, You have it. Okay, great. Let's move on, type of thing. Right. And so that, that's, that's kind of where we've been now, all of a sudden The cookies are going away, the device ids are going away. And so the world is turning upside down in this crisis of how are we going to keep doing what we were doing for the last 10 years in the future. So everyone's talking about it and we're trying to re engineer right? The mechanisms now if I was to look into the crystal ball right 2 3 years from now where I think we're headed is not much is going to change. And what I mean by that john is um uh I think that marketers will still go to companies and say do you have an ID solution? Okay tell me more about it. Okay uh Let me understand a little bit better. Okay you do it this way. Sounds good. Now the ways in which companies are going to do it will be different right now. It's flock and unified I. D. And this and that right. The ways the mechanisms will be a little bit different but the end state right? Like the actual way in which we operate as an industry and kind of like the view of the landscape in my opinion will be very simple or very similar, right? Because marketers will still view it as a tell me you have an ID solution. Make me feel good about it. Help me check the box and let's move on and talk about my business and how you're going to solve for my needs. So I think that's where we're going. That is not by any means to discount this existential moment that we're in. This is a really important moment where we do have to talk about and figure out what we're going to do in the future. My just my viewpoint is that the future will actually not look all that different than the present. >>And I'll say the user base is the audience. Their their data behind it helps create new experiences, machine learning and Ai are going to create those and we have the data you have the sharing it or using it as we're finding shit Gupta great insight dropping some nice gems here. Founder of you of Digital and also the Adjunct professor of Programmatic advertising at Levi School of Business and santa Clara University professor. Thank you for coming dropping the gems here and insight. Thank you. >>Thanks a lot for having me john really appreciate >>it. Thanks for watching. The cooking 100 is the cube host Jon ferrier me. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Hello welcome back to the cookie conundrum recipe for success and industry conference and summit from Guanacaste on the demise of third party cookies. Got a great industry panel here to break it down chris Gunther Senior Vice president Global Head of programmatic at news corp chris thanks for coming on Zal in Managing Director Solutions at Z axis and Summer Simpson. Vice president Product at quan cast stellar panel. Looking forward to this conversation. Uh thanks for coming on and chatting about the cookie conundrum. Thank you for having us. So chris we'll start with you at news corp obviously a major publisher deprecation of third party cookies affects everyone. You guys have a ton of traffic, ton of audience across multiple formats. Um, tell us about the impact to you guys and the reliance he has had on them. And what are you gonna do to prepare for this next level change? >>Sure. I mean, I think like everyone in this industry there's uh a significant reliance and I think it's something that a lot of talk about audience targeting but obviously that reliance on third party cookies pervasive across the whole at tech ecosystem Martek stack. And so you know, we have to think about how that impact vendor vendors, we work with what it means in terms of use cases across marketing, across advertising, across site experience. So, you know, without a doubt, it it's it's significant, but you know, we look at it as listen, it's disruptive, uh, disruption and change is always a little scary. Um, but overall it's a, it's a long overdue reset. I mean, I think that, you know, our perspective is that the cookies, as we all know was it was a crutch, right sort of a technology being used in way it shouldn't. Um, and so as we look at what's going to happen presumably after Jan 2022 then it's, it's a good way to kind of fix on some bad practices practices that lead to data leakage, um, practice or devalue for our perspective, some of the, you know, we offered as as publishers and I think that this is a key thing is that we're not just looking to as we look at the post gender world, not just kind of recreating the prior world because the prior world was flawed or I guess you could say the current world since it hasn't changed yet. But the current world is flawed. Let's not just not, you know, let's not just replicate that. Let's make sure that, you know, third party cookie goes away. Other work around like fingerprinting and things like that. You know, also go away so philosophically, that's where our heads at. And so as we look at how we are preparing, you know, you look at what are the core building blocks of preparing for this world. Obviously one of the key ones is privacy compliance. Like how do we treat our users with consent? Yeah, obviously. Are we um aligned with the regulatory environments? Yeah. In some ways we're not looking just a Jan 2022, but Jan 23 where there's gonna be the majority of our audiences we covered by regulation. And so I think from regulation up to data gathering to data activation, all built around an internal identifier that we've developed that allows us to have a consistent look at our users whether they're logged in or obviously anonymous. So it's really looking across all those components across all our sites and in all in a privacy compliant way. So a lot of work to be done, a lot of work in progress. But we're >>excited about what's going on. I like how you framed at Old world or next gen kind of the current situation kind of flawed. And as you think about programmatic, the concept is mind blowing and what needs to be done. So we'll come back to that because I think that original content view is certainly relevant, a huge investment and you've got great content and audience consuming it from a major media standpoint. Get your perspective on the impact because you've got clients who want to get their their message out in front of the audience at the right time, at the right place and the right context. Right, So your privacy, you got consent, all these things kind of boiling up. How do you help clients prepare? Because now they can go direct to the consumer. Everyone, everyone has a megaphone, now, everyone's, everyone's here, everyone's connected. So how are you impacted by this new notion? >>You know, if if the cookie list future was a tic tac, dance will be dancing right now, and at least into the next year, um this has been top of mind for us and our clients for quite some time, but I think as each day passes, the picture becomes clearer and more in focus. Uh the end of the third party cookie does not mean the end of programmatic. Um so clients work with us in transforming their investments into real business outcomes based on our expertise and based on our tech. So we continue to be in a great position to lead to educate, to partner and to grow with them. Um, along this uh cookie list future, the impact will be all encompassing in changing the ways we do things now and also accelerating the things that we've already been building on. So we take it from the top planning will have a huge impact because it's gonna start becoming more strategic around real business outcomes. Uh where Omni channel, So clients want to drive outcomes, drew multiple touch points of a consumer's journey, whether it has programmatic, whether it has uh cookie free environment, like connected tv, digital home audio, gaming and so forth. So we're going to see more of these strategic holistic plans. Creative will have a lot of impact. It will start becoming more important with creative testing. Creative insights. You know, creative in itself is cookie list. So there will be more focused on how to drive uh brand dialogue to connect to consumers with less targeting. With less cookies, with the cohesiveness of holistic planning. Creative can align through multiple channels and lastly, the role of a. I will become increasingly important. You know, we've always looked to build our tech our products to complement new and existing technology as well as the client's own data and text back to deliver these outcomes for them. And ai in its core it's just taking input data uh and having an output of your desired outcome. So input data could be dSP data beyond cookies such as browser such as location, such as contextual or publisher taking clients first party data, first party crm data like store visitation, sales, site activity. Um and using that to optimize in real time regardless of what vendor or what channel we're on. Um So as we're learning more about this cookie list dance, we're helping our clients on the steps of it and also introducing our own moves. >>That's awesome. Data is going to be a key value proposition, connecting in with content real time. Great stuff. Somewhere with your background in journalism and you're the tech VP of product at quan cast. You have the keys to the kingdom over there. It's interesting Journalism is about truth and good content original content. But now you have a data challenge problem opportunity on both sides, brands and publishers coming together. It's a data problem in a way it's a it's a tech stack, not so much just getting the right as to show up at the right place the right time. It's really bigger than that now. What's your take on this? >>Um you know, >>so first >>I think that consumers already sort of like except that there is a reasonable value exchange for their data in order to access free content. Right? And that's that's a critical piece for us to all kind of like understand over the past. Hi guys, probably two years since even even before the G. D. P. R. We've been doing a ton of discovery with customers, both publishers and marketers. Um and so you know, we've kind of known this, this cookie going away thing has been coming. Um And you know, Google's announcement just kind of confirmed it and it's been, it's been really, really interesting since Google's announcement, how the conversations have changed with with our customers and other folks that we talked to. And I've almost gone from being like a product manager to a therapist because there's such an emotional response. Um you know, from the marketing perspective, there's real fear there. There's like, oh my God, how you know, it's not just about, you know, delivering ads, it's about how do I control frequency? How do I, how do I measure, you know, success? Because the technology has has grown so much over the years to really give marketers the ability to deliver personalized advertising, good content, right. The consumers um and be able to monitor it and control it so that it's not too too intrusive on the publisher perspective side, we see slightly different response. It's more of a yes, right. You know, we're taking back control and we're going to stop the data leakage, we're going to get the value back for our inventory. Um and that both things are a good thing, but if it's, if it's not managed, it's going to be like ships passing in the night, right? In terms of um of, you know, they're there, them coming together, right, and that's the critical pieces that they have to come together. They have to get closer, you got to cut out a lot of that loom escape in the middle so that they can talk to each other and understand what's the value exchange happening between marketers and publishers and how do we do that without cookies? >>It's a fascinating, I love love your insight there. I think it's so relevant and it's got broader implications because, you know, if you look at how data's impact, some of these big structural changes and re factoring of industries, look at cyber security, you know, no one wants to share their data, but now if they share they get more insight, more machine learning, benefit more ai benefit. So now we have the sharing notion, but that goes against counter the big guys that want to wall garden, they want to hoard all the data and and control that to provide their own personalization. So you have this confluence of, hey, I want to hoard the data and then now I want to share the data. So so christmas summer you're in the, in the wheelhouse, you got original content and there's other providers out there. So is there the sharing model coming with privacy and these kinds of services? Is the open, come back again? How do you guys see this uh confluence of open versus walled gardens, because you need the data to make machine learning good. >>So I'll start uh start off, I mean, listen, I think you have to give credit to the walled gardens have created, I think as we look as publishers, what are we offering to our clients, what are we offering to the buy side? We need to be compelling. We shouldn't just be uh yeah, actually as journalists, I think that there is a case of the importance of funding journalism. Um but ultimately we need to make sure we're meeting the KPI is and the business needs of the buy side. And I think around that it is the sort of three core pillars that its ease of access, its scope of of activation and targeting and finally measurable results. So as I think is us as an individual publishers, so we have, we have multiple publications. So we do have scale. But then in partnership with other publishers perhaps to organizations like pre bid, you know, I think we can, you know, we're trying to address that and I think we can offer something that's compelling um, and transparent in terms of what these results are. But obviously, you know, I want to make sure it's clear transparent terms of results, but obviously where there's privacy in terms of the data and I think the form, you know, I think we've all heard a lot like data clean rooms, a lot of them out there flogging those wears. I think there's something valuable but you know, I think it's the right who is sort of the right partner or partners um and ultimately who allows us to get as close as possible to the buy side. And so that we can share that data for targeting, share it for perhaps for measurement, but obviously all in a privacy compliant >>way summer, what's your take on this? Because you talk about the future of the open internet democratization, the network effect that we're seeing in Vire al Itty and across multiple on the on the channels. Is that pointed out what's happening? That's the distribution now. So um that's almost an open garden model. So it's like um yeah, >>yeah, it's it's um you know, back in the day, you know, um knight ridder who was who was the first group that I that I worked for, um you know, each of those individual properties, um we're not hugely valuable on their own from a digital perspective, but together as a unit, they became valuable, right, and got scale for advertisers. Now we're in a place where, you know, I kind of think that each of those big networks are going to have to come together and work together to compare in size to the, to the world gardens. Um, and yeah, this is something that we've talked about before and an open garden. Um, I think that's the, that's the definitely the right route to take. And I and I agree with chris it's, it's about publishers getting as close to the market. Is it possible working with the tech companies that enable them to do that and doing so in a very privacy centric >>way. So how do we bring the brands and agencies together to get ready for third party cookies? Because there is a therapist moment here of it's gonna be okay. The parachute will open. The future is not gonna be as as grim. Um, it's a real opportunity. But if managed properly, what's your take on this is just more first party data strategy and what's your assessment of this? >>So we collaborated right now with ball grants on how did this still very complex cookie list future. Um, you know what's going to happen in the future? 2, 6 steps that we can take right now and market should take. Um, The first step is to gather intel on what's working on your current campaign, analyzing the data sets across cookie free environment. So you can translate those tactics eventually when the cookies do go away. So we have to look at things like temperature or time analysis. We could look at log level data. We could look at site analytics data. We can look at brand measurement tools and how creative really impacts the campaign success. The second thing we can look at is geo targeting strategies. The geo target strategy has been uh underrated because the granularity and geo data could go down all the way to the local level, even beyond zip code. So for example the census black data and this is especially important for CPG brands. So we're working closely with the client teams to understand not only the online data but the offline data and how we can utilize that in the future. Uh We want to optimize investments around uh markets that are working so strong markets and then test and underperforming markets. The third thing we can look at is contextual. So contextual by itself is cookie free. Uh We could build on small scale usage to test and learn various keywords and content categories based sets. Working closely with partners to find ways to leverage their data to mimic audiences that you are trying to target right now with cookies. Um the 4th 1 is publisher data or publisher targeting. So working with your publishers that you have strong relationships with who can curate similar audiences using their own first party data and conducting RFs to understand the scale and reach against your audience and their future role maps. So work with your top publishers based on historical data to try to recreate your best strategies. The 15 and I think this is very important is first party data, you know, that's going to matter more than ever. In the calculus future brands will need to think about how to access and developed the first party data starting with the consumers seeing a value in exchange for the information. It's a gold mine and understanding of consumer, their intent, the journey um and you need a really great data science team to extract insights out of that data, which will be crucial. So partner with strategic onboarding vendors and vet their ability to accept first party data into a cleaner environment for targeting for modeling for insight. And lastly, the six thing that we can do is begin to inform prospect prospecting by dedicating test budget to start gaining learnings about cookie list 11 place that we can start and it is under invested right now is Safari and Firefox. They have been calculus for quite some time so you can start here and begin testing here. Uh work with your data scientist team to understand the right mix is to to target and start exploring other channels outside of um just programmatic cookies like CTV digital, out of home radio gaming and so forth. So those are the six steps that we're taking right now with our clients to uh prepare and plan for the cookie list future. >>So chris let's go back to you. What's the solution here? Is there one, is there multiple solutions? What's the future look like for a cookie was future? >>Uh I think the one certain answers, they're definitely not just one solution. Um as we all know right now there there seems to be endless solutions, a lot of ideas out there, proposals with the W three C uh work happening within other industry bodies uh you know private companies solutions being offered and you know, it's a little bit of it's enough to make everyone's head spin and to try to track it to understand and understand the impact. And as a publisher were obviously a lot of people are knocking on our door. Uh they're saying, hey our solution is one that is going to bring in lots of money, you know, the all the buy side is going to use it. This is the one like I ma call to spend um, and so expect here and so far is that none of these solutions are I think everyone is still testing and learning no one on the buy side from our, from our knowledge is really committed to one or a few. It's all about a testing stage. I think that, you know, putting aside all that noise, I think what matters the most to us as publisher is actually something summer mentioned before. It's about control. You know, if we're going to work with a again, outside of our sort of, you know, internal identifier work that we're doing is we're going to work with an outside party or outside approach doesn't give us control as a publisher to ensure that it is, we control the data from our users. There isn't that data leakage, it's probably compliant. What information gets shared out there. What is it, what's released within within the bid stream? Uh If it is something that's attached to a somewhat declared user registered user that if that then is not somehow amplified or leverage off on another site in a way that is leveraging bit stream data or fingerprinting and going against. I think that the spirit of what we're trying to do in a post third party cookie world so that those controls are critical and I think they have those controls, his publisher, we have collectively be disciplined in what solutions that we we test out and what we eventually adopt. But even when the adoption point arrives, uh definitely it will not be one. There will be multiple because it's just too many use cases to address >>great, great insight there from, from you guys, news corp summer. Let's get back to you. I want to get your thoughts. You've been in many waves of innovation ups and downs were on a new one. Now we talked about the open internet democratization. Journalism is under a lot of pressure now, but there's now a wave of quality people really leaning in towards fighting misinformation, understanding truth and community and date is at the heart of it. What do you see as the new future for journalists, reward journalism is our ways their path forward. >>So there's uh, there's what I hope is going to happen. Um, and then I'm just gonna ignore what could write. Um, you know, there's there's a trend in market right now, a number of fronts, right? So there are marketers who are leaning into wanting to spend their marketing dollars with quality journalists, focusing on bipac owned and operated, really leaning into into supporting those businesses that have been uh, those publishers that have been ignored for years. I really hope that this trend continues. Um We are leaning into into helping um, marketers curate that supply right? And really, uh, you know, speak with their dollars about the things that that they support. Um, and uh, and and value right in market. So I'm hoping that that trend continues and it's not just sort of like a marketing blip. Um, but we will do everything possible to kind of like encourage that behavior and and give people the information they need to find, you know, truly high quality journalism. >>That's awesome chris Summer. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight on this panel on the cookie list future. Before we go, just quick summary each of you. If you don't mind just giving a quick sound bite or bumper sticker of what we can expect. If you had to throw a prediction For what's going to happen in the next 24 months Chris We'll start with you. >>Uh it's gonna be quite a ride. I think that's an understatement. Um I think that there, I wouldn't be surprised if if google delays the change to the chrome by a couple of months and and may give the industry some much needed time, but no one knows. I guess. I guess I'm not except for someone somewhere deep within chrome. So I think we all have to operate in a way that changes to happen, changes to happen quickly and it's gonna cover across all facets of the industry, all facets of from advertising, marketing. So just be >>prepared. >>Yeah, along the same lines, be prepared, nobody knows what's going to happen in the future. Uh You know, while dancing in this together. Uh I think um for us it's um planning and preparing and also building on what we've already been working on. Um So omni channel ai um creative and I think clients will uh lean more into those different channels, >>awesome. So we'll pick us home, last word. >>I think we're in the throwing spaghetti against the wall stage. Right, so this is a time of discovery of leaning in trying everything out, Learning and iterating as fast as we possibly >>can. Awesome. And I love the cat in the background over your shoulder. Can't stop staring at your wonderful cat. Thanks for coming on chris, Thanks for coming on. This awesome panel industry breakdown of the cookie conundrum. The recipe for success data ai open. Uh The future is here, it's coming, it's coming fast. I'm john fryer with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Welcome back to the Quant Cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. The cookie conundrum, a recipe for success. We're here peter day. The cto of quad cast and crew T cop car, head of product marketing quad cast. Thanks for coming on talking about the changing advertising landscape. >>Thanks for having us. Thank you for having >>us. So we've been hearing this story out to the big players. Want to keep the data, make that centralized control, all the leverage and then you've got the other end. You got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. Uh what's what are you guys doing to solve this problem? Because cookies go away? What's going to happen there? How do people track things you guys are in this business first question? What is quan cast strategies to adapt to third party cookies going away? What's gonna be, what's gonna be the answer? >>Yeah. So uh very rightly said, john the mission, the Qantas mission is the champion of free and open internet. Uh And with that in mind, our approach to this world without third party cookies is really grounded in three fundamental things. Uh First as industry standards, we think it's really important to participate and to work with organizations who are defining the standards that will guide the future of advertising. So with that in mind, we've been participating >>with I. A. B. >>Tech lab, we've been part of their project Triarc. Uh same thing with pre bid, who's kind of trying to figure out the pipes of identity. Di di di di di pipes of uh of the future. Um And then also is W three C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium. Um And our engineers and our engineering team are participating in their weekly meetings trying to figure out what's happening with the browsers and keeping up with the progress they're on things such as google's block. Um The second uh sort of thing is interoperability, as you've mentioned, there are lots of different uh I. D. Solutions that are emerging. You have you I. D. Two point oh, you have live RAM, you have google's flock. Uh And there will be more, there are more and they will continue to be more. Uh We really think it is important to build a platform that can ingest all of these signals. And so that's what we've done. Uh The reason really is to meet our customers where they are at today. Our customers use multiple different data management platforms, the mps. Um and that's why we support multiple of those. Um This is not going to be much different than that. We have to meet our customers where we are, where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who contrast is innovation. Uh As you can imagine being able to take all of these multiple signals in including the I. D. S. And the cohorts, but also others like contextual first party um consent is becoming more and more important. Um And then there are many other signals, like time, language geo location. So all of these signals can help us understand user behavior intent and interests um in absence of 3rd party cookies. However, uh there's there's something to note about this. They're very raw, their complex, they're messy all of these different signals. Um They are changing all the time, they're real time. Um And there's incomplete information isolation. Just one of these signals cannot help you build a true and complete picture. So what you really need is a technology like AI and machine learning to really bring all of these signals together, combine them statistically and get an understanding of user behavior intent and interests and then act on it, be it in terms of providing audience insights um or responding to bid requests and and so on and so forth. So those are sort of the three um fundamentals that our approach is grounded in which is industry standards, interoperability and and innovation. Uh and you know, you have peter here, who is who is the expert So you can dive much deeper into >>it. Is T. T. O. You've got to tell us how is this going to actually work? What are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to help with data driven advertising in a third party cookie list world? >>Well, we've been um This is not a shock, you know, I think anyone who's been close to his space has known that the 3rd Party Cookie has been um uh reducing inequality in terms of its pervasiveness and its longevity for many years now. And the kind of death knell is really google chrome making a, making the changes that they're gonna be making. So we've been investing in the space for many years. Um and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investment. So one of them is in how as a marketer, how do I tell if my marketing still working in the world without >>computers? The >>majority of marketers completely reliant on third party cookies today to tell them if they're if they're marketing is working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily and statistical techniques which are closer to kind of economic trick models that markets are used to things like out of home advertising, It's going to establishing whether they're advertising is working or not in a digital environment actually, >>just as >>often, you know, as is often the case in these kind of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And you know, digital measurement has often mistaken precision for accuracy. And there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees if you like. And start to come with better methods of measuring the affections of advertising without third party cookies. And in fact to make countless other investments in areas like contextual modeling and and targeting that third party cookies and and uh, connecting directly to publishers rather than going through this kind of bloom escape that's gonna tied together third party cookies. So if I was to enumerate all the investments we've made, I think we'll be here till midnight but we have to make a number of vestments over a number of years and that level investments only increasing at the moment. >>Peter on that contextual. Can you just double click on that and tell us more? >>Yeah, I mean contextual is unfortunately these things, this is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, hey, trust us, this dissipated about CVS to what's possible now and has only really been possible the last couple of years, which is to build >>statistical >>models of the entire internet based on the content that people are actually consumed. And this type of technology requires massive data processing capabilities. It's able to take advantage of the latest innovations in there is like natural language processing and really gives um computers are kind of much deeper and richer understanding of the internet, which ultimately makes it possible to kind of organize, organized the Internet in terms of the types of content of pages. So this type of technology has only been possible the last two years and we've been using contextual signals since our inception, it's always been massively predictive in terms of audience behaviours, in terms of where advertising is likely to work. And so we've been very fortunate to keep the investment going um and take advantage of many of these innovations that have happened in academia and in kind of uh in adjacent areas >>on the ai machine learning aspect, that seems to be a great differentiator in this day and age for getting the most out of the data. How is machine learning and ai factoring into your platform? >>I think it's, it's how we've always operated right from our interception when we started as a measurement company, the way that we were giving our customers at the time, we were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business insights into who their audience was, were, was using machine learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been, has always been machine learning from from before. It was cool. A lot of our kind of, a lot of our core teams have backgrounds in machine learning phds in statistics and machine learning and and that really drives our our decision making. I mean, data is only useful if you can make sense of it and if you can organize it and if you can take action on it and to do that at this kind of scout scale, it's absolutely necessary to use machine learning technology. >>So you mentioned contextual also, you know, in advertising, everyone knows in that world that you've got the contextual behavioural dynamics, the behavior that's kind of generally everyone's believing is happening. The consensus is undeniable is that people are wanting to expect an environment where there's trust, there's truth, but also they want to be locked in. They don't wanna get walled into a walled garden, nobody wants to be in the world, are they want to be free to pop around and visit sites is more horizontal scalability than ever before. Yet, the bigger players are becoming walled garden, vertical platforms. So with future of ai the experience is going to come from this data. So the behavior is out there. How do you get that contextual relevance and provide the horizontal scale that users expect? >>Yeah, I think it's I think it's a really good point and we're definitely this kind of tipping point. We think, in the broader industry, I think, you know, every published right, we're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world, all the way through to my mom's vlog, right? So we get to hear the perspectives of publishers at every scale. I think they consistently tell us the same thing, which is they want to more directly connected consumers, they don't wanna be tied into these walled gardens, which dictate how they must present their content and in some cases what content they're allowed to >>present. >>Um and so our job as a company is to really provide level >>the playing field a little bit, >>provide them the same capabilities they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let's give them more choice in terms of how they structure their content, how they organize their content, how they organize their audiences, but make sure that they can fund that effectively by making their audiences in their environments discoverable by marketers measurable by marketers and connect them as directly as possible to make that kind of ad funded economic model as effective in the open Internet as it is in social. And so a lot of the investments we've made over recent years have been really to kind of realize that vision, which is, it should be as easy for a marketer to be able to understand people on the open internet as it is in social media. It should be as effective for them to reach people in the environment is really high quality content as it is on facebook. And so we invest a lot of a lot of our R and D dollars in making that true. We're now live with the Comcast platform, which does exactly that. And as third party cookies go away, it only um only kind of exaggerated or kind of further emphasizes the need for direct connections between brands and publishers. And so we just wanna build the technology that helps make that true and gives the kind of technology to these marketers and publishers to connect and to deliver great experiences without relying on these kind of walled >>gardens. Yeah, the Director Director, Consumer Director audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for for that's happening in this new world? How do you ingest the content and just this consent uh signaling? >>Uh we were really fortunate to have an amazing, amazing R and D. Team and, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you need to realize our vision. This has meant things like, you know, we have crawlers which scan the entire internet at this point, extract the content of the pages and kind of make sense of it and organize it uh, and organize it for publishers so they can understand how their audiences overlap with potential competitors or collaborators. But more importantly, organize it for marketers. So you can understand what kind of high impact opportunities are there for them there. So, you know, we've had to we've had to build a lot of technology. We've had to build analytics engines, which can get answers back in seconds so that marketers and publishers can kind of interact with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that's compelling and help them drive their strategy as well as their execution. We've had to invest in areas like consent management because we believe that a free and open internet is absolutely reliant on trust and therefore we spend a lot of our time thinking about how do we make it easy for end users to understand who has access to their data and easy for end users to be able to opt out. And uh and as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted adopted consent management platform. So it's hard to tackle one of these problems without tackling all of them. Were fortunate enough to have had a large enough R and D budget over the last four or five years, make a number investments, everything from consent and identity through context, your signals through the measurement technologies, which really bring advertisers >>and Publishers places together great insight. Last word for you is what's the what's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform, uh what's what are you guys seeing as the highlight uh from a platform perspective? >>So the initial response that we've seen from our customers has been very encouraging, both on the publisher side as well as the marketer side. Um I think, you know, one of the things we hear quite a lot is uh you guys are at least putting forth a solution, an actual solution for us to test Peter mentioned measurement, that really is where we started because you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Um so that that is where his team has started and we have some measurement very, very uh initial capabilities still in alpha, but they are available in the platform for marketers to test out today. Um so the initial response has been very encouraging. People want to engage with us um of course our, you know, our fundamental value proposition, which is that the Qantas platform was never built to be reliant on on third party data. These stale segments like we operate, we've always operated on real time live data. Um The second thing is, is our premium publisher relationships. We have had the privilege of working like Peter said with some of the um biggest publishers, but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across um over 100 million plus web and mobile destinations. Um and you know, as you must have heard like that sort of first party footprint is going to come in really handy in a world without third party cookies, we are encouraging all of our customers, publishers and marketers to grow their first party data. Um and so that that's something that's a strong point that customers love about us and and lean into it quite a bit. Um So yeah, the initial response has been great. Of course it doesn't hurt that we've made all these are in the investments. We can talk about consent. Um, and you know, I often say that consent, it sounds simple, but it isn't, there's a lot of technology involved, but there's lots of uh legal work involved as it as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, very good response. Initially >>democratization. Everyone's a publisher. Everyone's a media company. They have to think about being a platform. You guys provide that. So I congratulate Peter. Thanks for dropping the gems there. Shruti, thanks for sharing the product highlights. Thanks for, for your time. Thank you. Okay, this is the quan cast industry summit on the demise of third party cookies. And what's next? The cookie conundrum. The recipe for success with Kwan Cast. I'm john free with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm