Signal Break: Agentic Trading Is Here
- Jul 10
- 51 min read
This week, the future of digital advertising arrived.
Following Boostr and Vox Media’s landmark announcement of one of the industry’s first public agentic media buys using AdCP, Signal & Noise sits down for an exclusive conversation with Patrick O’Leary, Founder & CEO of Boostr, to unpack exactly what happened—and why it matters.
For months, we’ve argued that agentic trading wasn’t a distant vision. It was already beginning. This announcement is one of the clearest signals yet that AI agents are moving beyond copilots and into autonomous negotiation, with buyer and seller agents working directly together to execute media transactions.
This isn’t another AI hype discussion. Patrick walks us through the transaction in detail: how the agents negotiated, what humans still controlled, how long the process took, what the pilot revealed, and why this could fundamentally reshape the economics of digital advertising.
We also tackle the bigger questions:
Does agentic trading replace programmatic or evolve alongside it?
What happens to DSPs, SSPs, and today’s ad tech ecosystem?
How do identity, fraud prevention, brand safety, and measurement work in an agent-driven world?
Which companies stand to benefit—and which business models are suddenly at risk?
At Signal & Noise, we don’t do hot takes. We bring together the people who are actually building the future and give them the time to explain what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and what it means for the rest of the industry.
If you’ve been wondering whether agentic trading is real, this is the conversation you’ve been waiting for.
Watch the full episode and join the conversation.
🔑 What We Cover💡 Key Takeaways🎯 Why This Episode Matters
Read the full transcript below.
Brett House (00:01.69)
Hey everybody, welcome to Signal and Noise. This is Brett House, joined by my co-host Rio Longacre. Today's guest is Patrick O'Leary, founder and CEO of Booster, which you've run for 11 years now, so you've been there for quite a while. You were at Yahoo previously as in sales strategy and operations and a few other companies. The audience might know Autodesk and Seball Systems.
you're also a University of Virginia grad. I'm going way back. I usually I usually, you know, proud University of Virginia grad. I know you live in California now. and you have an interesting degree from from in that background, systems engineering and management. So we always like to dig into that because we end up talking inevitably to people that have a lot of liberal arts degrees in the industry, in the mark tech, ad tech industry. But it's it's cool to see systems engineering because it's certainly certainly you've put that to good use.
and your LinkedIn profile says one thing. I loved how your description, like right under your name, it says helping publishers drive profitable growth. And that's it. There wasn't like this long meandering, right? So so it seems like you've you've had quite a run. and for those that don't know Booster, it's what happens self-described from Booster when Media Execs design an ad sales management platform from scratch.
Rio (01:01.804)
They need it.
Brett House (01:16.448)
It automates, and tell me if I'm wrong, Patrick, it automates revenue forecasting alongs with thousands of other automated workflows. I've seen up to 2,000 automated workflows that really are for sales, ad ops, even finance professionals, right? to facilitate that entire ad buying process and processing, which we know is multiple, there's multiple steps along that process. so you guys describe yourself as an advertising management platform that includes CRM, OMS, which is order management system.
Patrick O'Leary (01:29.154)
Yeah.
Brett House (01:45.54)
proposal management and a bunch of other cool capabilities, including what you're calling the AI agent series, which helps publisher sales, RevOps, ad ops, and financial teams. So is that a is that a correct description for for what you guys do at Booster before I tell tell you what's some of the news that we're gonna be breaking on this on this podcast?
Patrick O'Leary (02:04.694)
Yeah, yeah, that that's right. Those are our main offerings and our our mission is is I have my LinkedIn profile. We're here to help publishers drive profitable growth because they really need that right now.
Brett House (02:15.374)
Yeah, no, and I love and I love the focus. And that all that being said, Rio and I were really stoked about a big announcement. I was actually reading John Ebert's tip sheet dot AI, great newsletter. He's the former founder of
Rio (02:25.87)
Yeah, I was I was walk just I was walking the dog and House saw this and te texted me and said, This is this is super cool. You gotta check this out. So I cut you off, but go ahead.
Brett House (02:33.942)
Yeah, yeah. He was the yeah, so Ebert was the founder of Ad Exchanger and now he's got this great site and newsletter called tipsheet.ai for all the sort of latest breaking news. And I saw this news and Rio's been writing a lot about ad CP and agentic media buying. We've been talking about it ad nauseum, but it's always seemed kind of a pie in the sky. And so the the announcement was that Booster in in Vox Media, which you guys made earlier this week, described as a landmark agentic media buying use case.
using ad CP, which is Ad Context Protocol, and one in which the buyer and the seller AI agents, so think it sync the seller is the publisher, the buyer is the advertiser of the agency, negotiated and sort of ran in to end a direct media transaction with no human involvement from beginning to end. and there are traditionally multiple steps from IO to negotiation to you know finalizing the deal to media activation in that process.
Rio (03:28.878)
And and even like the tra even even the trafficking and all the execution that's that goes after that, right? So it's super complex, very manual, lots of steps, and and it's been the pipe dream, right? Icogenic trading. Can we can this happen? So we saw this, we were really stoked.
Brett House (03:42.894)
Yeah In Vox Media for those that have been sleeping in a in a cave, is the y think of Espination, the Dodo, one of the
Rio (03:51.032)
Some people like caves, you never don't judge.
Brett House (03:52.418)
Yeah, New York magazines, The Cut Vulture. They also have one of the largest podcasts. I actually didn't realize the full extent of their podcast network. I meant Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, Touch More Criminal. So one of the I think it is the largest, if not one of the largest podcast networks in the country. So certainly big news for Booster. I hope I did justice to your story, Patrick, and welcome to Signal and Noise.
Patrick O'Leary (03:53.09)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (04:00.112)
Huge.
Rio (04:00.44)
Huge.
Patrick O'Leary (04:18.188)
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Brett House (04:19.733)
So so what what else did a what else can you tell the audience about yourself and sort of your what brought you to Yeah, you found you're what you're a founder, clearly. and and what you guys are doing and what this announcement means for your future.
Rio (04:24.76)
Or by booster, yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (04:32.896)
Yeah, I guess my my history goes back to when I was a Yahoo and we we I kind of bleed purple for publishers.
We just couldn't get the tools that we needed to operate a five billion dollar ad business. And I got frustrated with the stuff I could buy and customizing. So I said, I'm gonna go leave and build my own tools and build the tools I wish I had and make them turnkey, quick and easy to implement, with good support from people from the industry that actually know what a deal ID is or a PG or an IO. And like, you know, they there's a lot of lingo and it's a very complex ecosystem that we operate in here. So that's what we've been doing.
Brett House (05:04.248)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (05:09.796)
For 11 years. I'm particularly excited about what AI is going to unlock for our clients. Our agent series allows us to finally solve problems we couldn't solve before, which is really exciting and helped them drive a lot of efficiency at lower operating expense. And then the new agentic buying with Ad CP is a dream that we've had for years. I often thought we started the company. Elon built cars to sell batteries. I think.
We've built software to help better monetize the inventory. And ADCP is the unlock for improving their yield and helping them do that.
Brett House (05:43.373)
Yeah.
Brett House (05:47.725)
Yeah, reduce friction from a from an a a system that can have a lot of friction just built in.
Patrick O'Leary (05:51.35)
Yeah, I mean the the direct I.O. process is way too manual. Programmatic is way too manual. I think at CP is what programmatic originally envisioned to be. We get we gotta make sure it it's it stays in that lane and doesn't get to the state of complexity that programmatic is playing. Yeah.
Rio (05:52.448)
Yeah.
Rio (06:06.178)
Doesn't d doesn't get corrupted kinda like what happened to programmatic. Yes. So like we were really excited to to have that like as Brett mentioned, like we've been talking about ad CP, the different protocols for like agentic AI, as well as like how's this going to impact paid media for a while. And it's been this almost pipe dream that can buyer installer agents negotiate with maybe even no humans in loop at some point, right? To do to do a lot of these things for media buying.
Everything from all the steps you just you just mentioned, which are super manual. We've been arguing this is going to happen, but it really hasn't been happening yet. I know that at at Omnicom there's an announcement in I think it was Digi Day a couple weeks ago that we've been we've been experimenting with it using scope three as well as IDCP in order to look at s look at how this process would work. We've been talking to several publishers about having buy side and sell side agents communicate to do this, but this announcement, which I thought was a landmark one and got a lot of press this week.
Seemed to be the first time someone's actually done it like for an actual media buy. So we are really keen to dig into this. And, you know, with that l
Brett House (07:08.364)
Yeah, sometim sometimes those press releases stand out from the the massive press releases we all see, right? Where like they're like my god, this is this might be real. Let's do let's talk to Patrick and find out. Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (07:13.74)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (07:18.4)
It it is real. It it's it's really compelling and exciting. we did a a demonstration of it at our AMP up customer conference in May. And the room was shocked. They're like, is this real? No nobody believed it because it it it's so automated. it's a little disruptive. Yeah.
Rio (07:18.648)
Yeah.
Brett House (07:35.543)
Yeah.
Rio (07:39.16)
So walk us so walk us through it. Yeah, love like what what like what what what did you show them and like what is this? I mean, like love to hear like from your from your view what exactly is happening in this like agentic trading scenario.
Patrick O'Leary (07:51.456)
Yeah, so if if you're not familiar with agentic trading, ADC, it's basically a buyer talking to a seller agent and running through the entire direct purchase workflow in an automated way is the easiest way to describe it.
Ad CP is like EDI. If you're familiar with EDI from the 90s, Ice-build EDI systems for semiconductor companies out here in Silicon Valley. When I saw this, it's like, this is smart. This is like EDI for agents where you have standardized message. Yeah, electronic data interchange. It's like an 840 is a request for quote. An 850 was a request for order. That's what ad CP is, where there's a process. Say, hey, I'm going to RFP you with Git products. Tell me what you have based on my natural language description. I want to submit an order. It's standardized message.
Rio (08:17.634)
And that's electronic dot interchange, right? Just f just for the audience. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (08:36.528)
Message formats that make all these systems interoperable.
You know, what what you're using on the back end. so it's a really nice way to abstract and create very efficient communication. and what's great about the protocol is it's end-to-end and it's highly automated. So what we did is we built a seller agent using that spec, and it's tightly integrated with our order management system. And we believe that's the only way to do this, which we can go to later if you want. That you know, the reasons why single product catalog, single place to
Brett House (09:08.908)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (09:12.816)
Administer rate cards, plus we do all the human in the loop part of the transaction. So when this buy happened, a human's still overseeing it in particular spots in the workflow. And we wanted to make that configurable because there's a lot of fear. Use the word autonomous.
Brett House (09:27.863)
Yeah. It so something breaks, something goes like very wrong. The price is mis misrepresented.
Rio (09:28.622)
Yeah, of course. Or or or or what if what if this does crazy things, right? What if it starts selling the wrong things that you don't want it to sell or sell right, who knows, right?
Patrick O'Leary (09:32.322)
Yep.
Patrick O'Leary (09:37.304)
Totally. And so one of the gates that we firmly believe in is as soon as the agents have talked, so the buyer will come in, it's kind of like an RP. They'll say, Hey, I'm working for males eighteen to thirty five in the New York area who like sports. The seller agent will respond and say, Here's what I have.
Rio (09:52.14)
And this yeah, somebody the buyer s the so the buyer the buyer agent comes in and says, These are our requirements, more or less, right?
Patrick O'Leary (09:57.144)
There here's our requirements.
The seller can then respond back and say, here's all the different offerings and the prices. And then they can talk back and forth and refine that conversation down to like, you have that in CTV, how about audio? I have that in podcasts. Okay, well, how much avails do you have? And they can all this can go back and forth, which is what LMs are pretty good at. You know, all this is configured to behave within guardrails. And then when the buyer says, okay, I like what you've described for me, they could say, I'm gonna buy it.
Brett House (10:18.818)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (10:30.828)
And then they submit the equivalent of a media planner insertion order. And so that shows up to a human. So we we think that's an important checkpoint for humans to be in the loop and say, okay, th they want to buy this. I'm gonna prove it before I let that that transaction take place.
Rio (10:33.231)
Insertion order. Okay. Yep.
Brett House (10:35.171)
Yeah.
Rio (10:47.343)
Okay, so that's created by the seller agent, like the and it's in the OMS. So like we have a record of it.
Patrick O'Leary (10:51.81)
They send that into our OMS in a structured way, and that does a couple things. when a human gets to review it and say, like, can we actually transact with these people? One of the most important pieces is can I bill them and collect the money? So do we have the right relationship set up? is the buy structured properly? And do we want to take this buy? Because you don't you don't have to. the other thing is sometimes way.
Brett House (11:03.16)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (11:15.082)
A buyer's represented from the buyer's description isn't how the publisher has to set it up in one or more ad servers. and so we have some technology that helps do the translation and unpack things and do this orchestration. sometimes a human just wants to put a little more on top to just make sure the thing runs exactly the way they need it to run. so that's an important checkpoint in the process.
Brett House (11:21.709)
Yeah.
Brett House (11:41.732)
So did you guys you think of your your core competencies of business when you started this, 'cause it's probably a very different business today than it was eleven years ago. I think that's that'd probably an understatement. It's probably changed a lot in the last year. Your core competency in the business was really OMS, order management systems, you know, C CRM integration, payments and for ad ops and finance teams. Is that am I misrepresenting that or is that accurate from where you guys came from?
Patrick O'Leary (11:48.002)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (12:03.618)
Yeah, that's we s we started with a CRM and quickly added order management because you said, why isn't there a single platform that goes from pitch to to pay? And today we're the ones who do that still. we play nice with Salesforce, we play nice with op we'll we'll integrate parts, but over half our clients use the entire platform because it's kind of obvious, like like it work with one system and one vendor, and it's just more efficiency, better, you know, better solution for everybody. That's all we do.
Brett House (12:29.719)
And it's all for publishers. Yeah.
Rio (12:32.694)
Okay. So you mentioned ad servers. So like one critique of agentic trading, or I guess not critique, but one one argument I've heard that why it may not take off is the dominance of GAM, Google Ad Manager, like their their pup their ad server for publishers, is that they're they're going to insert some of these tools in there anyway, and it's gonna be very difficult for anyone outside of that to do that. So it sounds like you have your own ad server.
Patrick O'Leary (12:56.29)
We don't. I I would be surprised if Google doesn't put a seller agent in front of Gam at some point.
Rio (13:04.782)
They're starting to. Yeah, they're they they've they've included some DSP light capabilities now inside. My guess is the next step they try to start to identify that. That's just a guess.
Patrick O'Leary (13:13.036)
I think so they're gonna quickly find out you gotta build order management like features. Like they don't have the concept of rate cards, products. They just have ad units and placements. It's not they're missing so much. That's why you need an OMS in front of this. And most of our clients run multiple ad servers.
Brett House (13:19.788)
Yeah.
Rio (13:21.165)
Mm-hmm.
Rio (13:30.275)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (13:30.38)
So this is this is why I think they got out of the DSM XXM OMS game, is you got a lot of people who are we have a lot of clients who use GAM for display. They're using megaphone or Ad Swiss for streaming audio, podcasts, free will for video. So you can go to GAM, but that's only part of the puzzle.
Brett House (13:43.022)
Yep.
Rio (13:48.642)
Okay. That's interesting.
Brett House (13:49.336)
Yep. And and so so what happens when this process what happens if there's a change, like a change order, during this negotiated process and you've got to go back and update what was the original agreed upon IO. how is that managed in the system? Is it is it a conversational interface that kind of initiates that change?
Patrick O'Leary (14:03.306)
The the protocol supports that. So if a buyer is they're running the campaign, they can look at the delivery in real time and see performance stats, delivery information. If they want to change it, they can issue a basically a revision to the I/O through the agents, and that'll get sent into the seller and they they just process it. they the publisher can decide how if they want that to be hands-free or with a human in the loop to review and approve or not.
Brett House (14:26.221)
Yeah. And I and I
Brett House (14:34.477)
Yeah, and it's it's it's funny, we're making light of that, but that whole process of negotiation of the manual process you described, which is multiple steps, all the way through revisions and updates and make goods, it's very complex, it's very FTE driven, right? Human capital based. I mean, how much time and sort of savings do you think that you're actually driving with a process that cuts out a a lot of that that manual arduous work?
Patrick O'Leary (14:41.997)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (14:49.068)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (15:02.806)
almost all of it.
Brett House (15:04.375)
Yeah
Rio (15:06.0)
It's a lot too.
Patrick O'Leary (15:06.272)
Yeah. The the buy we did with Vox, a human was involved in two steps. They looked at the media plan and approved it, saying saying, yes, we can take this business. This is good. the second time they intervened.
Brett House (15:11.598)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (15:20.716)
was when the agent said, Hey, I've sent the I.O. to the ad server. I've uploaded and trafficked all the creative and the tags. And then a human goes in there and clicks the approve button. We still think that's important to make sure that the ad server is set up correctly because that's where a lot of make goods are born where like pixels aren't there, tags are misconfigured or absent. So like literally the whole thing took about two minutes.
Brett House (15:36.984)
Yeah.
Rio (15:41.176)
Something got screwed up, yeah.
Brett House (15:42.423)
Yeah.
Brett House (15:45.783)
Yeah. And and would that ordinarily well j just just double click before you ask real like so so would that ordinarily I mean that's multiple teams. You've got a finance team, you've got an ad ops team, you've got a media buying and placement team, I guess, or media
Rio (15:46.562)
So c so quick go ahead.
Patrick O'Leary (15:59.48)
Yeah.
Rio (16:00.302)
Strategy team, yeah.
Brett House (16:00.641)
right. Yeah, like yeah, so that you're dealing with multiple people in this process that you've just suddenly who is the who is the person that that like in what function are they that actually manages this? The person that's that sort of can hit go that starts this process. Is that someone that lives in AdOps? Where do where does that person live?
Patrick O'Leary (16:19.736)
So we we did this with Learn Winners at Vox. She's the head of revenue operations.
Ultimately, I think this is gonna look like programmatic where you have these programmatic operations specialists. There will be this is a new buying channel. There will be a channel manager or channel partner whose job is to manage this buying channel and look at the buys that come in. there's also an element of tuning the agent and the data around the products and the pricing to help it respond more effectively over time. And that so what's gonna happen is people's jobs gonna switch to being a little bit more creative and strategic and
Brett House (16:32.599)
Yeah.
Brett House (16:51.094)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (16:56.24)
Instead of just turning the wheels. And so it's like, how do I, how do I increase my sell through on certain products? How do I emphasize them when certain kind of requests come in? How do I get the sell through up? That's gonna be the new game. And then on the back end, instead of all this time setting up the campaigns and trafficking, it's be like, how do I actually get the thing to perform the way they originally asked instead of just trying to get it to run? And so everybody's jobs can actually change.
Brett House (16:58.157)
Yeah.
Brett House (17:17.324)
Yeah, and that and that's the tuning the tuning and what what I think the the tech folks call nudging, right? There's that that takes a skill set. You've got to know how to manipulate and and push the agent to do exactly what you want it to do in a structured way, right? Which is that's really interesting. It is a change of job type, right? Rhea, sorry.
Patrick O'Leary (17:33.037)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (17:37.644)
Yeah, the job's gonna change pretty pretty dramatically once this hits critical mass.
Rio (17:43.353)
So one thing that's been very appealing about agentic trading, Patrick, from both a publisher perspective as well as a brand and agency perspective, is that in theory, and there have really been two arguments for like what does agency trading look like? One argument is we everything stays the same, but you build an agency layer on top of it that hops over things. And I think that's the that's a a less appealing version. The more appealing version is what what we're what I think you're describing here, where you have buyer and seller agents and you're really bypassing most of existing ad tech.
And for those who who who are at tech nerds, a lot of our listeners, but for the some of these acronyms, they can know these acronyms for those who are I'm gonna I'm gonna be r listing off a lot of things. That would include SSPs, ad exchanges, that would include DSPs, that would include ad verification, brand suitability. There's a lot of different tools that go in it. All of these tools, they take tolls. There's a take rate that each of them take out. And at the end at the end of the day, a dollar goes in.
Publisher might only get thirty-nine, forty, maybe fifty cents on the dollar because of all these intermediaries who are who are providing actual services are extracting. So that this becomes very appealing for publishers. For brands, it becomes appealing because more of their money is going into working media and not going to intermediaries from agencies. It's for the same reason. They get to manage all the ad spend without having to to dole out half of it to other companies. So very appealing for all parties involved. Obviously for ad tech companies. So it sounds like you're describing the latter. So that's my question number one.
This this is the second scenario. And I guess the question number two would be: there are many things that these tools actually do that that are pretty useful, like DSPs in terms of pacing, budget planning. They're not doing MMM, but you they're different tools for that. But actually in terms of allocating your budget and decide how it's spending for bid management, for creative management, for for for identity, for I mean it's a bunch of things that DSPs do that that are pretty important and they've evolved over the years. So like
How is some of those things being being accounted for? Or is does this just specifically apply to certain deals that don't need some of those things, like frequency caps, for example?
Patrick O'Leary (19:48.022)
Yeah, so let me let me hit those those are all the right questions, by the way. the first question, yeah. The the last stat I read there's twenty eight billion annually in ad tech taxes going to middlemen. a lot of that's gonna get wiped out. A lot of Yes. This this is why I'm so excited because like you said, like you know, a publisher used to get a dollar.
Brett House (20:00.024)
Okay.
Yeah. And it it is that part of your mission statement to really Yeah, yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (20:11.862)
Now they get pennies on the dollar. I wanted this one like the more we can get you closer to dollar, the healthier you are and you're profitable and growing. Yeah.
Brett House (20:13.88)
Yeah.
Brett House (20:19.2)
And and the healthier our media ecosystem is, and our media ecosystem for everything from news journalism to th things that we take for granted, it's critical to kind of a functioning democracy. And it's it's we talk about this all the time and it sounds like you
Rio (20:31.747)
You heard it here, hear it here, folks. Like this is what we're like this is gentic trading, this is it's a scenario number two, which is like your agents buy and sell site agents cutting at all these toll takers. That would be great for publishers, Brett. I totally agree. And Pat you keep going, I cut you off.
Patrick O'Leary (20:44.812)
Yeah, it's great. I think if you fast forward three to five years, you won't need DSPs and SSPs. Some of the stuff around that TBD, you know, frequency capping, identity management, MMN, viewability fraud, all those are starting to get baked into the protocol.
Brett House (20:51.34)
Yeah. And for the for the audience, yeah.
Brett House (21:06.125)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (21:06.498)
I think for now we're the maturity of it, it's awesome for replacing direct IOs, both guaranteed and non-guaranteed, using publisher-first-party data. The spec is now starting to include third-party segments and all you know, some of these other elements that DSP LiveRamp and SSPs are good at. as that becomes more mature.
I don't I don't know I don't know why you'd need an SSP except for people who want to do curation across mass scale, but the spec, this is the beauty of the spec.
Brett House (21:37.664)
You're s you're saying all those rules w that'll all be baked into Ad C P, right? That'll be
Patrick O'Leary (21:41.804)
It's baked in, yeah. Like the the ad networks came about because the public or the buyers couldn't go RP 1500 or 6,000 long tail websites. Well, guess what? Now you can. You can actually you can go find them and pay them directly and bypass all the middlemen so they get more of the working media to create the content that we all want to consume instead of paying for ad tech people to have yachts and can.
Brett House (21:51.062)
Yeah, it was to scale across the open web. Yeah. Yeah.
Brett House (22:07.308)
Yeah. That's a that's well I've got I we wanted to say I was like, is that that thesis that that Rio laid out, like does that resonate? And it clearly is the driving principle behind, you know, that statement you made on your LinkedIn account, like we're helping publishers make more money, basically. So I mean, clearly this isn't just an a workflow automation tool. This is you're you're arguing that agents become kind of a new you kind of said it, a new transaction lane for for premium maybe not just premium, but we'll say premium direct demand.
Rio (22:09.551)
They're nice shots.
Rio (22:34.531)
Long tail two, maybe, yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (22:36.374)
I I it it can support guaranteed non-guaranteed, so it over time it will consume the entire programmatic ecosystem. I b that's my prediction.
Brett House (22:48.364)
you're you're well positioned. And so how did you s how did you ink this deal with Vox? I mean clearly, you know, Booster's been around for a while. You guys see a lot of of traffic. I mean I think you do you see what ten billion dollars worth of of right of ad spend going through your pipes. How how did you guys ink this deal with Vox and what does that relationship look like and how has it evolved over time?
Rio (22:49.828)
Yeah it's
Patrick O'Leary (23:10.504)
it started over a conversation at dinner that we had and
Lauren Winters who leads RevOps. She and I were sitting there and we were talking about this. I said, Hey, we're have you heard about Ad CP? we've been building in age. This has been my side host a little booster. I'm a CEO and founder, but I've been doing all the product management for ad CP because I just nerd out and I love it. And I see that this potential, like, I'm like, this could be the future. And I want to understand it, I want to be part of it. So I've been leading the charge on a lot of our team. And I talked to Lauren, I said, Hey, you know, we're almost done with.
Rio (23:32.975)
Go into founder mode, right? Yeah.
Brett House (23:34.604)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (23:46.64)
MVP would you guys want to do a buy on this and be you know the guinea pig here and she was like yeah let's go that's that's where it came from
Brett House (23:52.312)
Test it out.
Brett House (23:56.076)
Yeah.
Rio (23:56.432)
What was the scale of the buy and like how long did that negotiation back and forth take?
Patrick O'Leary (24:00.674)
it was a smaller buy. Yeah, this this is, you know, a test to validate everything works, you know, the wiring and everything. it was the you know, the the entire process took about two minutes, the campaign ran for about two weeks.
Rio (24:03.951)
It was it was a it was a test. Yeah, no, we get it, just curious.
Brett House (24:17.462)
Yeah. So so this is
Patrick O'Leary (24:18.092)
It was a it was a basic display campaign using Vox first party data, ran across the Vox properties in Eater. great. Basically what a direct eye it would have you know would have taken somebody three to six weeks to do this non-agentially, the the human way.
Rio (24:28.643)
How to perform.
Rio (24:37.337)
Yeah. How'd the campaign perform? Curiosity. Okay.
Patrick O'Leary (24:41.57)
Great.
Brett House (24:43.234)
So so what are the what are the biggest technical and operational challenges? I mean, you know, you having your finger in the in on the product management and build side with the I C P play, that that still need to be solved for this to to go to scale across the industry? You think it's ready? You know, it's we're not in prototype mode here anymore. This is real hardened, a hardened solution that's being used currently with Vox. I mean, how do you see this expanding and are there any challenges or any innovations that have to to happen to make that happen?
Patrick O'Leary (25:12.694)
Yeah, there's there's a couple things. The the Agentic Advertising Organization has been revving a spec pretty rapidly. we're now currently we're now getting compliant with three dot one. there's a big switch over in the security.
That happened from two to three, which we're just now upgrading to the new model, which is really important. I think security is is critical to this. People need to understand that these are valid actors who are coming in and trying to purchase media and that they have contractual agreements and you know the the proper things to do business. that's a piece that over time needs to get more automated for for
Brett House (25:39.767)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (25:55.468)
Buyers really for sellers to do business with net new buyers. because one of the big benefits for them is inventory discoverability instead of the same 200 that keep buying. And so that's the part of the promise is new budgets show up. And so, how do you onboard these buyers rapidly with as minimal administrative overhead as possible? I think that's scenario where this is going to keep evolving. and then there's a lot of work to do.
Brett House (26:00.096)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (26:23.522)
To switch all the programmatic demand over, there's a lot of work around what's called the signals protocol and the trusted match protocol, which is bringing in third-party segments to use within the publisher's environment, handling the frequency capping, and some of these things. I'm a little less familiar with the buyer agents and the consoles and
Brett House (26:28.599)
Mm-hmm.
Patrick O'Leary (26:45.546)
I imagine it's gotta be kind of like a a DSP like where you can, I issued a buy, here's all the agents that responded. I'm gonna cherry pick and buy this stuff. How's it working? Do I need to reallocate budget from publisher A to publisher B? Like all this, you know, a DSP kind of just does that in the background in a very black box, non-transparent way.
Rio (27:04.143)
They they also pay a lot of they'll they also pay a lot of the other parties and float the money too. Both D S Ps and SSPs do that. So I guess that's one thing. But but your point I guess your point is that they're just for fewer moving parts. There's not as many parties need to pay anyway, right?
Patrick O'Leary (27:08.77)
The the yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (27:14.286)
There's fewer moving parts. There's a little bit on the, I think the buy-side tech probably needs to evolve a bit too for this. but the scope three has a new solution called interchange, which is gonna do some of the clearing house and payment clearance processing for people that don't wanna have a direct payment relationship.
Brett House (27:33.813)
Yeah. And and so do you do you see scope three as a is a partner or a competitor? Are they doing some of the same things? They've made a lot of pivots in their last three or four years of existence.
Rio (27:34.032)
Probably many people. Yeah, that's
Patrick O'Leary (27:42.01)
TBD. we may be co-opetors on the seller agent side, but I think on the administering the ecosystem, they're partners. look, I the more the better. we welcome competition. The spec allows for a company like Vox to use multiple seller agents. So if they want to use us for like turnkey media and somebody else for like custom sponsorship, that's possible. we support both in all formats, but
Brett House (27:50.924)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (28:09.25)
Yeah, look, the the more the faster we get money flowing through these pipes, the healthier the publishers are gonna be and we we need that.
Brett House (28:15.755)
Yeah, no, for sure, for the open web. And and you mentioned security. I wanted to kinda go back to that point 'cause you said that that's an area that that you know, s to ensure that these it's it's sort of a governance layer, right? Between buyer and seller.
Rio (28:25.345)
And Brett, that's been one criticism too, of of of like of I've heard that a lot. well this just is gonna be another way fraudsters can commit fraud, so
Brett House (28:31.999)
Yeah. The the the news today was that MFAs are actually increasing, when you know, despite Doctor Fu out there in in the A but the ANA actually reported it and it was pu it was published this morning and I was like, have we still not
Patrick O'Leary (28:32.77)
That's
Patrick O'Leary (28:37.634)
Yeah.
Brett House (28:47.381)
conquered this problem? It just seems but but to to the point about about security and understanding that you've got buyer buyer agents that are legitimate, seller agents that are legitimate and and that these things are governed, and there's protocols that that you know they have to go through t in order to kind of pass the sniff test. How how does that technically work?
Patrick O'Leary (29:08.416)
Yeah, it it it's it's it's approving like every month. So the the main mechanism is if you're familiar with ads.txt in the programmatic world, there's a thing called brand.json in ad cp. That's hosted on everybody's website and it's publicly available to go verify. So the initial transaction when in when a buyer agent first contacts a seller agent.
Brett House (29:17.173)
Yeah. Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (29:33.91)
The seller agent will go look up their brand's JSON and start to validate, like, are you who you say you are? Like, are you you at Nike.com slash brand JSON? Like that's hard to fake. and there's a bunch of detail.
Brett House (29:39.798)
Yeah.
Brett House (29:44.598)
Yeah.
The spo the spoofers can't fake that, is is what you're saying. It's it's
Patrick O'Leary (29:49.912)
Well that I think that's that's what we're all betting against. there's a new zero trust authentication layer being added right now that we're adding for three dot and three dot one compliance that uses some dual encryption and they've upgraded how the key the key management works. So you know, right now it looks pretty hardened. Like are you who you say you are and do you have the keys to to interact with me? I mean, you're basically talking through APIs. So that's
Brett House (29:52.843)
Yeah.
Brett House (30:11.201)
Yeah.
Brett House (30:17.74)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (30:19.65)
That that's really important to make sure that's really hardened.
Rio (30:23.843)
What pr like it's I would imagine some deals or types of deals lend themselves better to this initially, right? I mean, like homepage takeovers, maybe live sports, PG deals. I don't know, there's probably some and there are probably some that maybe lend themselves less well to this, but I think your argument is over time most deal like many of the t the buys we have today will transition to this model, which I think is is is certainly possible, right? What what percentage do you think is is it true that certain deals lend themselves better to this?
Patrick O'Leary (30:34.35)
Yeah.
Rio (30:53.517)
And then what percentage like of of of transactions or of overall volume do you think are traded agentically o within the next like couple of years?
Patrick O'Leary (31:03.638)
I think direct IOs and PGs are like ready to go. That it's perfect. non-guaranteed buys that look kind of like PMP deal ID based stuff, depending on if the ad server can support it, is
Good to go. we did some research recently about the programmatic ecosystem and what we found. I'd be curious if you guys you know find some numbers. only 11% of the programmatic ecosystem is currently open RTB. The rest is what we classify as direct sold. It's either PMP or PG. And that's in terms of like dollars. so that that 89% is really s in the sweet spot for ad CP.
Brett House (31:36.577)
Mm-hmm.
Patrick O'Leary (31:50.166)
It doesn't have really it doesn't really support open RTB like immediately biddable. They're adding some some agents to do that, but like why bother? Like let give the eleven percent to the to the DSPs and SSPs. I most of that inventory is garbage anyways. the real the quality stuff is PG and PMP at this point, which PG is an I it looks like an IO. It just runs yeah. So this this brings back direct sold too. I also think
Brett House (32:08.629)
Yeah. Which is private marketplace and yeah.
Rio (32:09.486)
That's that's that's safe to say, yeah. Yeah, no disagreement, yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (32:18.274)
We'll see agentically supported direct sold, kind of like PG. If you go see it sell a PG deal today, it's not like a media plan just gets sent to you magically and you decide to take it. a seller goes out and sells a campaign, and then at the end they find out, I'm gonna send this to you on a PG request or I'm gonna send you the I.O. They often don't know until the end of the process. I think that's gonna be prevalent in agentique too, or it's like, hey, let's create this sponsorship for you that's custom and bespoke, and we do some unique things. The protocol supports that so you could
say hey agent call us and I'll have that prepackage as a media plan and I'll respond and you can just buy it. And you bypass all the middlemen. Like the the the fees on this are very small.
Brett House (32:55.999)
Yeah. Yeah.
Rio (32:57.038)
It's like back to the future. Brett and I actually first started, we worked at a small kind of tech company, media agency w way you way back the twenty five years ago. I remember we had a a file cabinet full of insertion orders, right? That we would fax over, fax back, place pixels, it's funny. So it's kinda go you know, go back to the future, but obviously you know, with with with the Gentec technology, being able to do this at a scale and speed that would would have been impossible with even armies of humans before, right?
Brett House (33:12.075)
That we fax.
Brett House (33:23.703)
Yeah. And then and then what we learned just a funny aside, what we learned is that the MBPS internet speed that we had then with fax machines, remember that, was about the same as what we had in southern France and Cannes International Alliance in two different locations in the in the press room one point eight BPS
Patrick O'Leary (33:24.738)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (33:31.884)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (33:36.749)
Yeah.
Brett House (33:41.44)
I was like, how is this possible? This is the advertising industry. But just a funny ascent. So so one question I just wanted to get some some clarity around this. So sort of agents are are negoti negotiating on behalf of publishers. The publishers, I'm assuming, are defining all the rules, everything from pricing floors to package eligibility to brand safety on behalf of their clients, right? To creative specs, right? Is that all happening within the publishers?
Rio (33:44.76)
That was crazy.
Brett House (34:06.345)
And how do they set the rules in in is it all through conversational interface where they're where they're sort of or or you're uploading specific docs to basically create the the the structure around the the the the placement?
Patrick O'Leary (34:20.002)
with our solution, they do that in our OMS where they do it for the their direct channels already. So it's it's the same interface. You could go and say, the beauty of it is you can say I can create a product catalog just for ad CP and say these are the one products I'm gonna make available. or I can make them all available and I can structure them different.
Brett House (34:29.033)
Yeah. So they're doing it through an order management system and then they're just allowing it
Brett House (34:37.963)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (34:41.89)
Based on how over time the agents want to buy things. But all those rules and controls are part and parcel to what they do for Direct and PG, anyways. So it's very easy to expose that. And we've we've added some other capabilities, like you have to do things around your creative formats, because the agents will come in and say, Well, here's my requirements. Then they might say, Okay, what formats do you support? What kind of sizes? All these other questions. And so all that's set up so that the agents can go discover it, answer these questions, and
Brett House (34:51.244)
Yeah.
Brett House (35:05.611)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (35:11.916)
basically self con it's it's like self serve, right? It's like
Brett House (35:14.453)
Yeah, it's like you're p you're pointing them to the OMS, the connector's there, they're they're reading all of that information which is already built in, and every publisher in the world uses an an order management system, right? So that information is easily translated. You don't need a human to do that that process. Okay.
Patrick O'Leary (35:24.205)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (35:27.914)
No, we've added a bunch of features to kinda add CP, turbocharge it specifically for agents to to make it better.
Brett House (35:37.142)
Yeah.
Rio (35:37.573)
Looking at brand safety, I I know publishers would love it if we could kind of wipe out the current system, which is bec b I mean between keyword and domain blocking, probably blocking about I think forty, fifty percent of all news news web pages are blocked. you c you can't monetize, which is just absolutely insane to me. So I publishers would be thrilled. But I think looking from the brand side, how do you put in how do you make sure though? Like as soon 'cause you're not gonna have pre build pre bid or post bid. I mean it's kind of crazy, like the current
Patrick O'Leary (35:49.218)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brett House (35:51.115)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (35:54.283)
Same.
Rio (36:04.73)
Rupe Goldberg machine that r it is ad tech today, right? But like you won't have all of those checks and balances, regardless of whether they're working well. You won't have those checks and balances you have today in this system. How would that work? How how could brands be sure that the ads that they're buying and they're providing creative for are not gonna like s be served up in a someplace they don't wanna be?
Brett House (36:27.179)
Very good question.
Patrick O'Leary (36:27.244)
That's an evolving part of the spec. You know, that you have everything from that to like competitive separation where you know I can't show a united and a delta ad sequentially, all that.
Brett House (36:31.136)
Yeah, yeah.
Brett House (36:38.389)
Yeah. And can you build all that to your point in Ad C P to so that you've got rules around where they want to be served, what they should be blocking. we want no, you know, MFA sites that are identifiable, all that sort of stuff. And then and then the brand either brand safety issues or brand competitive issues, right?
Patrick O'Leary (36:54.752)
Yeah. A lot the publishers manage some of it, some of it the buyers manage. the spec that's an area where it's it's it's in early days still.
Rio (37:06.032)
Well what internet is there within the ad CP protocol? Like how would the like would the would they be able to build applications on top of that that would that would be able to well I I guess I let me cut myself off. So I guess one advantage of this is you have the agents representing the publishers themselves, right? So they know the in theory, they know the inventory, right? And they're able to negotiate directly with the buyers and sellers. You're not dealing with platforms that have scaled supply that's may maybe jump through a couple intermediaries, where it becomes very difficult. So you need these complex
checks in there in order to ensure in order to even understand where you're serving up ad. So it's in in in the in theory it does simplify it to a certain extent. But I th but as this scales, as you start to connect to to your point earlier, the long tail, I think that that does need to be solved, would be my guess.
Patrick O'Leary (37:51.424)
Yeah, I I think some of that decisioning is gonna need to happen on the buying side because if you go broadcast like this is what I'm looking for and you get all these answers back,
The buying agent and I I think a human over there is gonna need to have some heuristics and rules of like we kinda like this content or we don't wanna be adjacent to that. and there is content targeting and so I think you know the decisioning that decision is gonna move into some of these newer tools and there'll probably be some protocols that get added to to set up rules expose like, you know, I'm I don't like guns or alcohol or whatever, you know, there's certain content I just don't wanna be near. and and that's where the
Brett House (38:30.003)
Yeah. Yeah and that
Rio (38:31.737)
Is that
Patrick O'Leary (38:32.63)
the ad tech players will continue to have a role.
Rio (38:35.214)
Okay, so does ad C P cover all that or d is or is there also U C P or th is there or is that or is there not or is there not sufficient like language or protocols to to account for all that metadata and contextual information today?
Brett House (38:35.414)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (38:48.056)
There some of it is available today and it it keeps growing in terms of the metadata to describe all this to the buyers.
Brett House (38:58.591)
Yep. So it's it sounds like that that's it's it's embryonic, we'll say, and it's not really quite ready for prime time in terms of some of those controls, right? So you you there's still gonna be a need to to
Patrick O'Leary (39:03.01)
Yeah.
Brett House (39:08.885)
depend on these providers, right? Whether it's the double verifies, the IASs and other players that that help some of this stuff. you know, and I think that leads me to to that, you know, and Rio, you've made this argument. You just recently published on Signal and Noise.ai a good ar a good gentic trading article that that you don't think this is kind of a question for Rio but it's also a question for Patrick that that RTB needs to rip and repl that that it needs to be replaced, you know, to fundament to fundamentally reshape digital advertising. Right? And and
Patrick, are you do you agree with that? Do you think that this is something that can fit into the existing you know RTB sort of tech ecosystem, or do you think it is going to be more of a rip and replace moment that will that will just shift the industry radically over the next couple of years? Like a new operating model.
Rio (39:56.814)
First, Patrick?
Patrick O'Leary (39:58.486)
I I think it is a new operating model. I think over time it w it has the potential to replace it. I it's not really there's some new stuff in the spec that's more open RTB oriented where the stuff is layer on top of the current SS DSP SSP infrastructure. Why? I don't know. Like just leave it alone. It works fine, despite all its issues. I would just I just kind of leave it alone and it it serves its place for
scale large buys, but I mean most of the publishers don't like the pricing they're getting and they have zero control over
Brett House (40:32.884)
Yeah. It's the take rate issues. Yeah.
Rio (40:36.015)
Yeah. I guess my thought on that would be don't disagree with with it what what you just said. I think that you you know taking the walled gardens aside, 'cause Wald Gardens, you know, they they have their own way of making money and they they're going to continue using auctions and that's not going to change, right? They figure out a way to but I think looking at the open web, I think that I would imagine in like in if in coming months as this rolls out and it's going to roll out, anyone who thinks it's not going to is I I I don't know what they're thinking they're not paying attention.
Patrick O'Leary (40:51.18)
Yeah. Yeah.
Rio (41:05.755)
Gonna roll out. And I think certain deals immediately, this will make so much more sense for. There'll be more money going to working media. There's gonna be better results. And as technology gets better, as the level of comfort grows, it's but gonna become more automated. There's gonna be humans in loop initially, but as people get used to things, they're just gonna let it rip. And I mean, programmatic was that way when it first started, right? My guess is the two systems run in parallel for a while. I don't know what percentage ends up going directly to agentic trading, probably at least half quickly, I'm guessing.
Brett House (41:33.652)
Yeah. People will follow the increased margins, the increased dollar amounts that they're getting paid.
Rio (41:35.045)
Then there will be
Yeah. I it's
Patrick O'Leary (41:38.7)
That's the real reason to do this.
Brett House (41:41.204)
Yeah. Yeah, people will go where they can make more money. and and and clearly it's an issue with the long tail of of the open web. Also
Rio (41:49.138)
Yeah, and then will DSP has evolved so they take us up some of this decisioning, which you to your point is gonna be very important. Like to still you still need still need to have that. In recent years, the decisioning layer has been migrating more towards supply side because the inability of DSPs to ingest rich signal from supply and actually make intelligent decisions for targeting or for a lot of other things, right? So I think the and bid mat and bid management. So I think as I mean, in theory, a lot of inventory is not gonna be biddable anymore, right?
Patrick O'Leary (42:05.878)
Green.
Rio (42:18.985)
given a scenario, it'll just be direct sold deals and it'll be less biddable. But there will still be a lot that is because I think the Wall Gardens have proven that is a way you can effectively run advertising, right? And make money both by you know, from a publisher perspective. So I think that remains for a while, but I mean over time, as this gets better, you know, maybe I I don't know. I think this two systems run in parallel for a while, but you know, th this could overtake it completely over time.
Patrick O'Leary (42:19.212)
I yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (42:46.092)
I totally agree. It's gonna run in parallel. which is why I'm so bullish on this. That you know, if you're a publisher, you're gonna have to do agentic channel, the I.O. channel, the PG channel, your DLID PMP channel, your open RTB. And eventually it's just gonna all start funneling up into the agentic. the R the RTB probably less so. but it does support bidded purchases, you know, as long as the publisher's ad servers can support that. So
Brett House (43:08.331)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (43:16.332)
You know, the the complexity then goes back to the buyer to manage, you know, what are their bid prices across publishers, what's my fill rate, what's the performance on that. and I think they're actually gonna have more control because they're gonna actually see where this stuff's running.
For the first time. Like if you're in a DSP environment doing OpenRTB, you know, the the machines are making decisions about where this stuff gets executed. Whereas now you could say, let's say I got 10 publishers that I've sent a non-guaranteed or biddable request to, and these are premium. I can actually see what's happening with each one of them.
On a it publisher by publisher basis. And you might be comfortable saying, you what, I'm happier to pay them an extra 50 cents because it's running on Vox. It's real. I I want them, I like their journalism, I want them to survive. Or Axios or NPR. Like, I think the buyers might for the first time realize, like, this is where my money's going. I can now dial it up or dial it down and pay them, you know, a fair rate.
Brett House (44:06.016)
Yeah, I don't know.
Rio (44:17.681)
Yeah. And yield management totally changes too if you're a publisher, right? You're you're you're gonna be balancing yield across these two channels that are gonna be running in Power Line looking, okay, like how are we making monetizing our inventory and our audiences, you know, the right way? And we'll give them more transparency into that, which I think will be very interesting.
Patrick O'Leary (44:20.152)
Mm-hmm.
Patrick O'Leary (44:33.686)
Yeah, I think this to be exciting for transparency as well, because you can the the buyer actually is in control about where they want their stuff to run, unlike today.
Brett House (44:43.882)
Yeah, so s yeah, well and so and so yeah, so you're you're saying that there this isn't a black box, right? By definition. And and how do they get that visibility when they're doing when agents are sort of doing this work? Can they can agents sort of provide logs and reports back on exactly what happened and full transparency into the process?
Rio (44:43.953)
I'll I tell where you're guessing, right?
Patrick O'Leary (44:45.826)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (44:49.889)
It's not.
Patrick O'Leary (45:01.132)
Well yeah, well even in the front of the process, one of the the spec requests is tell me all your properties and channels and formats. So you can get a like say you call Yahoo! Cellar agent, you can come back and say, like, I see they have finance sports, especially like I don't want anything on finance or I don't want anything in news. so they actually have more control and and visibility and directability about where the buys go.
Brett House (45:19.178)
Yeah.
Brett House (45:25.694)
Yeah. And and this is being
Rio (45:25.979)
Plus supply supply path is clean, right? There's like it's not like you're going hop and hop and hop and this is like it's just th there are two agents transacting. You have the ad server, right? You y y you you have the buyer and the seller. I mean, it's much it's a much cleaner supply path just by definition.
Patrick O'Leary (45:29.13)
It's a Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (45:39.502)
I mean th this is kinda what SPO strives to be. It's direct.
Brett House (45:44.522)
Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah, it's direct and it c and a and you can ask it you basically can ask it questions in real time while it while a buy is being executed to get full detail. I'm assuming that's all conversational with the with the agent to get full insights and details to everything that's happening, so you've got full transparency. Whereas before is you you'd place it and it was just gone. Right? There go there goes the buy.
Patrick O'Leary (46:05.004)
Yeah. You have full transparency. One of the things we built into our solution is we log all those conversations between the agents and feed them into another agent to give recommendations to improve the effectiveness of how the agent responds. So
If they keep asking for stuff you don't have or they can't find, but you have it, like it'll say, like, create a product that looks like this, and you know, your hit rate's gonna go up. So kind of the e-commerce abandoning shopping car problem. so all these systems are gonna get smarter, more agentic over time, which it's gonna just drive more, more money coming to these channels.
Rio (46:41.755)
Yeah, people don't realize like that the AI we have today is the worst AI we'll ever have. It's going to get much better.
Brett House (46:41.779)
S so
Brett House (46:46.709)
That's a really good point, Rio. It seems so magical, and revolutionary, but but you r we're at the v the early innings. I mean six yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (46:48.088)
Well, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Rio (46:52.773)
And think about how much better it is than three years ago or even six months ago, right? And like we're it's gonna be much better in three or four years. Like probably
Brett House (46:59.057)
Every every update that happens to Claude that I see, I'm on Opus four point eight now and i you just you see these these incremental improvements. Sometimes significant improvements. Yeah. Yeah. Just in terms of its reasoning, decisioning.
Patrick O'Leary (47:02.424)
Yeah.
Rio (47:06.843)
They're more of them incremental. These are some of these improvements are like exponential.
Patrick O'Leary (47:10.976)
Yeah. A year ago this would I would say we're not ready.
Brett House (47:14.695)
So let me ask you this, Patrick, about your so you've talked about how it works, you know, the ecosystem in in general and and the changes that are gonna happen as a result of this over time. when you guys when you look at like how you got to this point, how has it transformed your own organization in terms of the type of talent that you've had to, you know, the full stack developers, whatever it might be, that are behind the build? Have you had to kind of re engineer your own org to align to kind of a a different thinking developer type or
Product lead type?
Patrick O'Leary (47:46.488)
We did. It's a fundamentally different software development lifecycle process. So we have our core products with our CRM and order management. and that's that's a well-oiled machine. It's very high quality, high performance. It has a very defined flow. We so I took a couple of product managers and engineers and just pulled them off and we created a separate team. And it operates like a startup. We have less process, less overhead.
Brett House (48:10.643)
Yep. Yep. Like an incu like an incubator group that that yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (48:16.3)
This is the to me, this is like day one when I started booster, like there's like eight of us. We're just off, we don't interact with anybody else. We just go heads down and build shit and iterate and ship and find out what works. Because part of this is these tools are so new. Not only the LLMs, but the underlying toolkits and the infrastructure that run and like run this stuff in the cloud, it's all pretty new. And you run into a lot of limitations where the documentation and the tech don't match, or it just doesn't do what you like. It should connect to the data.
Brett House (48:25.833)
Yeah.
Brett House (48:37.78)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (48:46.364)
Through JDBC or through the VPN that we and it doesn't. And so there's a lot of workaround management. But we we operate very differently. We operate at very high velocity and we work with partners who want could could deal with that kind of product development. It's we amongst our peers, we're the ones have a bunch of working agents in production. And part of that was picking the right partners who are risk tolerant and forward-thinking and like trying and testing new stuff. I mean, it breaks.
Brett House (48:49.972)
Yeah.
Brett House (49:13.993)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (49:16.144)
But they're innovating and they're seeing gains very rapidly.
Brett House (49:21.161)
Yeah. And if you have you see so so th that whole product lifecycle approach, and I deal with a lot of product leaders that that talk about this all the time 'cause the tools are so new new and you know, we had waterfall and then we had Agile and Sprints. Right now it's getting even faster than that where it's just instant prototypes, like within hours. and yeah, and you're saying that there's a there's a lot of you gotta do a little bit of education in terms of people expecting
Patrick O'Leary (49:39.756)
Hours. Yeah.
Brett House (49:46.131)
like these outputs, they're kind of surprised by I'm assuming that that it's happening so quickly. D has it changed your roadmapping strategy and your roadmapping approach, right?
Patrick O'Leary (49:55.37)
It yeah, yeah, it has. We've
We finally hit the turning point with all of our engineers being AI-driven coders. the next step is dealing with QA because we're now pumping out so much code. How do we make sure it's high quality? And so we're gonna solve that problem. and then next step, which we've we're starting on, is starting to merge our teams back together and helping the core products, PMs, and engineers do more agentic workflows. Because I kind of look at two categories of agentic AI systems.
Brett House (50:24.682)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (50:29.033)
you have agents that run
Through a very, you know, a tool skill. It's a it's basically just some software architecture. They're they're kind of micros or standalone microservice type pieces of software. And then you have these like monolith type systems like we run. and so how do we do agentic workflows where it makes sense for the user? as well as building these separate agents off to the side. So, for example, we have a a trafficking agent that when a publisher, tell you when you sell direct.io, the buyer sends
Brett House (50:36.522)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (51:01.836)
You the tags in email, and they give you a tag sheet, and it's horribly nondescriptive. And our agent takes that, it figures out what tags belong against which lines in the I.O. It wraps it with pixels and verification and other macros. it gives it back to humans. Hey, did I get this right? And if so, yes, it sends it in the ad server and sets it live. So that's usually like hours per campaign for a human being that's now been collapsed into like a couple minutes.
Brett House (51:29.546)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (51:31.748)
And so that's some of the stuff we're really excited before you just couldn't do this stuff reliably. and so it's part and parcel, not only to order management system, but we get to reuse those agents in ad CP where we need to traffic creative. Great. We have an agent. So we have a bunch of microagents that the main agent operates as an orchestrator. It says go call the traffic agent, go call the QA agent, go call you know the campaign reporting agent to send them delivery stats. All these smaller parts become subsystems in a way.
Brett House (52:00.873)
Wow, that's awesome.
Patrick O'Leary (52:02.338)
Yeah, it it's super fun. I I'm having a blast working with our Yeah.
Brett House (52:05.309)
Yeah, and and i being a product guy, I mean it sounds like it it sort of keeps you on your toes, right? You probably are are doing more creative stuff from an engineering and product build stuff than you've done in I'm assuming a few years.
Patrick O'Leary (52:16.598)
Yeah, it's it's it's so fun. Like
Rio (52:19.45)
I'm having the most fun I've had it work in a long time for similar reasons. I mean it it's just being able to focus on the things I want to do and the things that I didn't like to do. I mean like I give like yes funny, yesterday I had to I finally did my canned follow up Brett and I had about thirty, forty emails to send out. I was like, I'm just dreading it and I like, you know what? I'm just gonna use AI, crank these out, I'm dictate them and then just have it j just
Patrick O'Leary (52:22.872)
Yeah.
Rio (52:45.082)
I finished in a half hour what would have taken me a couple days. It was incredible. Like and like I I and I was able to like put in my notes from the meetings, put in like dictate next steps and just have it write out in my voice something really quickly. I edited everyone, obviously, but it the fact that it's just saves so much time and then I could focus on instead of a whole day pounding at emails, I I could focus on like actually building building a new offering in one or two or doing something much more much higher value to my job and my role. So this isn't and
Patrick O'Leary (52:48.651)
It's amazing.
Brett House (52:48.66)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (53:13.654)
Yeah.
Rio (53:14.618)
Yeah it it's it's made me ha much happier at work and I know not the only
Brett House (53:18.481)
Yep. That's awesome. So should we move to quick hits?
Patrick O'Leary (53:18.551)
Yeah.
Rio (53:22.962)
Let's do
Brett House (53:23.667)
Yeah. so quick hit. So I'll start. one word to describe the or maybe a few words to describe the future of of a gentic trading. Agentic trading two point What what do you think that looks like?
Patrick O'Leary (53:23.886)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (53:39.436)
Mm.
Patrick O'Leary (53:43.949)
I I think this is the unlock to the future of a lot of publishers who could benefit from some some extra budget coming to them. I I think the the headline for this is gonna be agentic buying is the predominant buying channel. I I don't know if it's two years, three years. I I wouldn't give it much more horizon than that. It's
Brett House (54:05.588)
Yeah.
Brett House (54:09.471)
Yeah, nothing seems to have that much that much horizon nowadays.
Patrick O'Leary (54:11.298)
The the promise is so compelling financially for all parties. Once we're just in this state with the tech just needs to get a little bit more, and then the adoption will just take off.
Rio (54:22.972)
Yeah. I like you said that. I had a dinner with the Hearst executive team a few weeks ago. Is it possible? And I remember sitting at them and they were asking everyone for the predictions. And I said, very similar to what you said, I said within the next couple of years, gonna happen sooner than you think. Programmatic is gonna be completely rewired and it's gonna benefit publishers. This is your chance. And so I love I love that you're saying that 'cause it would be amazing. They need it.
Patrick O'Leary (54:35.79)
Yeah.
Brett House (54:44.191)
Yeah, and and he they were so happy with that comment that they invited us to r to partner at Cannes. So we actually partnered at the Hearst House. If if you didn't know, and we had a Sigma Noise plus Hearst. I'm like this these this little publisher with this giant mega fourteen billion dollar business and we had a podcast studio and so it was it was phenomenal.
Rio (54:47.282)
They were.
Patrick O'Leary (54:53.026)
amazing.
Rio (54:56.146)
Yeah.
Rio (55:00.24)
Yeah. Yeah. It was awesome. All right. So looking at the current ad tech ecosystem, what's the first category that gets nuked by this?
Patrick O'Leary (55:13.472)
the the the D S P SSP cohort is most at risk.
Brett House (55:19.473)
Yeah, under yeah, my this is a disruptive play here, right? It's right. And and can they let me ask you a follow up question. Can it can they adapt or adjust or change their operating models, or do you think that they're they're just too entrenched and you're gonna fall you're gonna fall into an innovator's dilemma type of problem?
Patrick O'Leary (55:37.132)
I think they're gonna fall in there. They're they're all trying to put a an agent on top as like a rapper, but like why do you need an SSP agent that's just calling all the the publishers with take rates with leftover you can go direct to the publisher. Like you just don't you don't need them.
Brett House (55:53.076)
Yeah. Yeah. And it seems like the whole trend right now is go a i is i i go direct to the publisher, leverage all the rich data and insights they have around their audiences, and cut out the metal minimum it. That seems to be the the the prevailing trend that we're seeing. It hasn't happened yet, but but the disintermediation's sort of well on its way, it seems.
Rio (56:09.788)
Yeah. Yeah. I think DSPs can potentially adjust and survive by taking on some of the decisioning that they've I think not done a great job with. But I think SS my my opinion, SSPs probably should go away. May may go away after this. I don't know. I'm gonna probably get a lot of hate mail because of this, but I I think this puts their business model most at most at risk.
Patrick O'Leary (56:31.118)
It's at risk and provocatively, I think the brands are gonna look at the role of the agency with this new capability and see, well, I've been paying you all this money to operate the DSP. I can now do this agentically myself and get more wiki media.
Brett House (56:38.26)
Yeah.
Brett House (56:44.468)
Yeah.
Brett House (56:48.445)
And get more working media, right? More
Rio (56:49.742)
Okay. Well I work at I I work at a I work at an agency, so I'm obviously a little biased. But I do think though having scaled aggregated demand actually favors the agencies in terms of building these agents. like and like 'cause th who would be able to work with a different publishers. So actually think this really benefits agents agencies. Like in certainly in the short term and probably in the long term too, but could be wrong.
Patrick O'Leary (57:12.758)
I I think you're right. I think the agencies are gonna struggle with a do I build or buy these these buying agents? And the brands are gonna put pressure on them on the economics because they will have some leverage, say I can be a buyer too with without all this investment. so you know, how do they have a more value-added offering in addition to just buying? you know, the agencies do a lot more, but I think that's gonna put pressure on the the whole part of the market.
Brett House (57:22.836)
Yeah.
Rio (57:37.81)
Yeah. Well I think agencies become more focused just on the financial aspect, being you know the being being the clearinghouse, being the one who makes all the payments, right, which a lot of to a lot to a large extent they are really today. So I think that becomes more important. I need to find different ways to make money, not just like squeezing it out of working media, which is which is or that's already happening anyway.
Brett House (57:38.122)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (57:44.067)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (57:49.23)
Sure.
Patrick O'Leary (57:53.89)
Yeah.
Brett House (57:56.711)
Yeah, so what's the what's the biggest misconception you think people have about the the news? I mean the gentic media buying in general, but the news between l that you guys just announced. The the biggest blocker
Patrick O'Leary (58:08.748)
I there's a lot of skepticism like is this real? Is this gonna replace my job?
Brett House (58:15.976)
Yeah. Yeah, those are i it's it's yeah, th this is the so part of it's proving it, proving it in real life, proving the economics. It's an economic argument for sure. it's it's removing friction from a system which is always a good place to start. Right? and then and then just overcoming the sort of perception battle, right? The which which is a big one and especially with AI is people think like, you know, they they get defensive.
Patrick O'Leary (58:30.008)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (58:40.706)
Yeah, they do. I mean we're still on that hype curve.
Brett House (58:43.123)
Yeah.
Rio (58:45.136)
I don't know my my thought on that is I think any job that r relies on repetitive, like rote, brainless activities is gonna go away. That but that was gonna happen anyway. I don't see many jobs going away. I mean the reality is we're gonna have more people working in digital media because it's gonna become more effective and just gonna be doing different things. So that yeah they won't be sitting on platforms messing around with dot knobs and dials, but it's it's ridiculous they were doing that t in the first place. So I just think it changes.
Patrick O'Leary (58:55.395)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (59:10.88)
Yeah, I agreed. I think the the outsourcing teams are most at risk here.
Rio (59:17.338)
They should be, yeah. Finish the sentence. Five years from now, we'll look back at this moment and say
Patrick O'Leary (59:26.924)
Why didn't we all go faster?
Brett House (59:29.95)
Can we go any faster, Patrick? I feel like I'm running at a million miles an hour. but yeah, but you're right. It's like i or or why maybe why didn't this happen sooner?
Patrick O'Leary (59:34.05)
Yeah.
Brett House (59:38.867)
might be might be the right? 'Cause you just think like how did you know, because it has put a big a lot of pressure on the on the entire open web and everything is moved towards these walled ecosystems and it's threatening the open publisher ecosystem, which is which is vital for news, for information, for the general public. Yeah, so so I think we all agree on that. And it it's this is a continuating theme that we've been covering. And and thanks, Patrick, for joining us today. This was great. I you know, you turned it around really quickly, you made yourself
Patrick O'Leary (59:38.926)
Yeah, yeah.
Rio (59:39.847)
Yeah.
Patrick O'Leary (59:56.462)
So critical.
Rio (01:00:05.466)
It's amazing.
Brett House (01:00:08.87)
Available just from we saw the news with Fox Media. Congratulations, by the way. You guys are doing a lot of really interesting stuff.
Patrick O'Leary (01:00:13.912)
Thank you.
Rio (01:00:13.99)
Yes, huge news. I h I hope I hope your phone is ringing off the hook and your email and your inbox is blowing up. Should be.
Brett House (01:00:18.92)
Yeah, you know, booster not being on in embedded in the publisher side, the booster product line and capability set wasn't like top of mind. So you're y so this is a pro probably a very big outside of the publisher ecosystem, a very big brand awareness builder.
Patrick O'Leary (01:00:19.434)
Thank you.
Patrick O'Leary (01:00:32.92)
Yeah.
Brett House (01:00:33.016)
for you guys, right? So congrats on that. Thanks for joining us today and for everybody that that made it this far you can see this episode published on YouTube, Spotify Apple Podcast, as well as wdeb.signal and noise dot ai. and also check out our article section. Rio just wrote a really good article on a Genticar TV. you're Rio, you've gotten very productive. You're pr you're just churning out these articles. And we've got a bunch of guests, executive guests that are writing a a ton of interesting articles as well. So thanks everybody and we'll we'll see you next time.
Patrick O'Leary (01:01:02.658)
Thanks for having me.
Rio (01:01:04.091)
Thank you.