The Activation Gap: Rob McLaughlin on Why First-Party Data Still Isn’t Moving the Needle
- Apr 27
- 41 min read
Everyone agrees first-party data matters. So why is almost none of it actually showing up in media?
In this episode of Signal & Noise, Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Rob McLaughlin, Founder & CEO of AUDIENCES, to unpack one of the biggest disconnects in modern marketing: the gap between data strategy and data activation.
Despite years of investment in CDPs, clean rooms, cloud migrations, and identity graphs, less than 3% of media spend is actually informed by first-party data.
That’s not a tooling problem. It’s a model problem.
Rob breaks down why the industry has been stuck—and what needs to change:
Why first-party data is widely understood… but rarely used
Where activation actually breaks (hint: it’s not just tech)
How data movement, cost, and org friction quietly kill execution
Why brands are still paying a “tax” to use their own data
And why the future isn’t more platforms—it’s less movement, more signal
Marketers didn’t fail to invest. They failed to connect.
Most brands now have:
Cloud infrastructure
Massive first-party datasets
Sophisticated media partners
But the “last mile”—getting that data into live campaigns—is still fragmented, expensive, and slow.
The result? Campaigns ship without it. Rob’s thesis is simple—but disruptive: Stop moving data. Start moving signals.
AUDIENCES flips the model:
Keep data inside the brand’s cloud
Activate directly from the source
Eliminate onboarding, duplication, and unnecessary cost
This isn’t just cleaner architecture—it changes:
Privacy dynamics (no data copying)
Cost structure (no per-record tax)
Speed of activation (real-time, not batch)
Forget the buzzwords. This is where it works:
Suppression → Stop wasting spend on existing customers
Seed audiences → Outperform platform-native targeting
Lookalikes → Scale what actually drives value
Retail media & supply-side data → Unlock real reach
And yes—brands are still getting retargeted with products they already bought.
This episode goes beyond tactics into structure:
Why the future agency looks more like an operating system than a service layer
Why identity + infrastructure is becoming the real differentiator
How the balance of power is shifting back toward data owners
And why agencies without deep data integration risk becoming assemblers—not operators
“CDPs are irrelevant in a cloud-native world.”
“There should not be a tax on activating your own data.”
“The problem isn’t that brands lack data—it’s that they can’t use it.”
CMOs and Heads of Media trying to unlock real performance from 1P data
Data & platform leaders stuck between cloud investment and activation reality
Agency leaders navigating the shift from services → infrastructure
Anyone tired of hearing “first-party data is the future” without seeing results
Explore AUDIENCES: https://weareaudiences.com Connect with Rob McLaughlin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robanalytics/
If you’re building at the intersection of data, media, and AI—this is your playbook.
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🔍 What You’ll Learn⚡ The Big Idea: The Last Mile Is Broken🧠 A Different Model: Signals, Not Datasets🚀 Where First-Party Data Actually Wins🏗️ What This Means for Agencies & HoldCos💥 Hot Takes from Rob🎯 Who This Episode Is For🔗 Learn More🔊 Listen & Subscribe
Read the full transcript below
Brett House (00:01.41)
Welcome back to Signal and Noise everybody. I'm Brett House. I've got my cohost Rio Longacre. And today we're talking about one of the most overused trite phrases in modern marketing and digital advertising, first party data. First party data, maybe even zero party data if we want to go down that path. But really from a very different angle. We've all gotten to the point, you know, we've all understood the point over the last 15, 20 years in digital advertising for those of us that came from this space.
Rio (00:14.744)
And there were many of them.
Brett House (00:30.604)
that first party data has sort of, it's considered to be critically important to brand success in the advertising ecosystem. And the real question I think is if it matters so much, why is so little that actually making its way into media activation? Shockingly little according to the thesis of Rob McLaughlin, did I pronounce it right or is it McLaughlin? Okay, McLaughlin with an F. Yeah, which is one of the theses of your.
Rio (00:45.88)
Shockingly little, yes.
Rob McLaughlin (00:52.123)
Yeah, perfect. Perfect.
Brett House (00:58.666)
new companies, I guess not new, you founded it in 2022, right? Audiences, which for those that don't know is a cloud native first party data activation application. And your big thesis is that the problem isn't that brands don't have first party data, it's that there are really not, there's something blocking their ability to actually activate that. And we'll talk about that, dissect this in this episode, but your background, Rob, great to meet you. You know, welcome to the pod.
I know you've spent years working at the intersection of data marketing activation at Sky, Barclays, and then you had an exit as well with Loop. Is that the name of the company? Loop in 2023? So that was a consulting and tech company and you exited that and then, but it seemed like there was a simultaneous play to found audiences, right around 2022. And tell us what you're doing there and tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
Rob McLaughlin (01:53.297)
thanks, Brett. And Rio, Brett, great to be here with you. So thank you. Yeah, I mean, most formative bit of my background was as head of data at Sky, so during the Comcast acquisition. we were the biggest media company in Europe of its type at that time. then becoming a global company with this sort of being gobbled up by the North American giant.
It was an amazing time. I was head of data across the buy and the sell side of media, which meant we had this incredible, incredible resource, which could be, could be purposed for many things. That's common for a lot of organizations, but kind of like the timing was pretty special. So that was around 2016, 2017. And Sky was doing something crazy then, but something which is very normal now, which was.
migrating all of its data onto cloud. So for them, it was taking everything from its on-premise data centers into Google Cloud. And as I say, very normal now. Very, very, very, very weird in 2020.
Brett House (03:00.363)
Hahaha
Rio (03:02.638)
But you're right, back then, that's when everyone was just starting. People don't realize the whole cloud, the transition of all these applications, data sets, that didn't really start until 2012 to 2014, very earliest. And I don't think it even accelerated until a of years after.
Rob McLaughlin (03:18.575)
You're absolutely right. I don't make a secret of the fact that when I took the job at Skype, no one told me that this was the plan. And I was very happy to be living in a world of enterprise data warehouse on premise, like EDW type language, leaning into the likes of the classical SaaS, like Adobe and that kind of stuff.
And then this happened, I was like, whoa, I don't even know what that is. Got to Google what that is. And it ended up very quickly becoming the most influential of force on my career. So the question was,
Brett House (04:03.49)
Yeah. It forced you to get technical and to learn this new domain, right?
Rio (04:09.07)
Yeah, whichever you're almost learning, right? mean, it's not like there was a big bench with experts with deep expertise at that point. It was a new thing.
Rob McLaughlin (04:09.151)
More than ever.
Brett House (04:15.479)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (04:15.675)
No, no, and even more than I would say because they're both worlds, three worlds existed on premise, data management, cloud data management, and then like this gray area in between of people who built up martech ad tech stacks from third party tech. And yeah, I probably sat in that in that middle of like a very happy buyer of lots of tech, probably also with that I came from the old school web analytics, digital analytics background.
So, you know, probably some chops. yeah.
Brett House (04:49.826)
Yeah, we had Adam Greco on the show a little while back. Yeah. Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (04:53.201)
Long time, long time, long time ally, long time fan. Love what they're over there as well. mean, yeah, very relevant. You know, we got, well, the team and I got a front row seat to how to use cloud compute and storage inside of a gigantic enterprise to support the buy and the sell side of media. And yeah, we were very lucky. So we built all this stuff on GCP and accelerated the business.
Brett House (04:56.889)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (05:23.007)
What we built there was in the UK and Europe was immediately adopted in North America. And we found we were in our thinking and execution 10 or 15 years ahead of a lot of companies because they all had started their cloud transformation. Just as Rio said, became the obvious and there a good thing to do. And it's funny you mentioned, was like, okay, cool. Well, we should go and help other companies.
make use of AWS, Azure, and GCP in the emerging snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery side of the world as well to feed advertising on the buy and sell side. That feels like something which people want to do and need to do quickly. So we left and started Loop Horizon, which was that consulting business, very relevant to our audience's story. Because 10 or 15 projects in, making good money,
People would pay us to tell them how to use AWS and Snowflake to pump data into Google Ads, Meta, the trade desk, cetera. I was like, now you make it new every time and get paid a few hundred thousand pounds of dollars to do it. maybe because we're recommending the same framework, maybe this could be great training wheels for a software. And yeah, I'm guilty. I can only do one thing at a time.
So once that I did.
Brett House (06:47.16)
You must be ADHD like I am, right? You gotta hyper, you gotta hyper focus.
Rob McLaughlin (06:51.335)
It's something like that, something like that, something like that.
Rio (06:53.442)
compartmentalize, hyper-focus and pivot, right? I mean, that's how to do it.
Rob McLaughlin (06:58.055)
I'm diagnosed, there you go. But once that idea got in my head, was, I knew that's what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to start a pure play software company and that's what Audiences is.
Brett House (07:00.216)
Hahaha
Brett House (07:12.397)
Nice
Rio (07:12.622)
Awesome. Well, that's exactly why Rob, we wanted to have you on here to have this conversation because as we know, this is an industry that for the last few years, we've been talking about first party data, first party data. I mean, I've probably been on 15 panels. We've talked about the value of first party data and first party signals and blah, blah, blah, right? I mean, it's been a big thing, but I mean, everyone talks about first party data. Like it is the strategy headline. It's not, but it's incredibly valuable.
And it can actually change your outcomes if you use it correctly. posted this recent case study in which this is for a CPG company, a seed audience that we use the first party data, outperform the platform native targeting by a wide margin in terms of new to brand customers, in terms of average order volume, the things the brand really wanted to focus on in order to grow their business as opposed to business as usual. So to me, that's the whole point. It's a reminder that when you're using it correctly, first party data signals
can be very valuable, more so than platform signals. And, but if this is true, like why aren't more brands using it? I just have been a big push, but adoption is still pretty low. remember even as recently as a couple of years ago, looking at, I think as one of the media clean rooms, only a single digit percentage of brand advertisers were actually using first party data to, for targeting or measurement, right? Which are the most basic or even basic use cases like suppression. So.
It's kind of shocking. like, it's been cool to see what you're building. We'd love to hear about that and like to understand, like audiences, your thesis seems to be the model itself, how I have to change, right? Keep that in your brand's cloud, move signals instead of data sets and reduce the privacy and operational friction that many brands are experiencing that has really slowed this whole thing down. So we'd love to unpack what you're doing, why it's important, what's working, what's not. like, where do you see things going? So with that, maybe first question is over to you.
Brett House (09:09.378)
Yeah, you you've worked at, we talked about it. You, you, you worked in a bunch of major brands and pretty complex data environments. You learned early technically how to do this sort of stuff. So what, what convinced you that like now was the time to develop the software and, what is, is getting in the way of brands, activating their first party data. It seems like everybody, you know, it's almost a common knowledge that everybody leverages this to, to some degree.
Rio (09:31.878)
at this point, yeah.
Brett House (09:34.84)
But you're claiming that that's actually not the case. mean, what's breaking in this process?
Rob McLaughlin (09:40.446)
Yeah. Well, you guys and Rio, did a great job there representing, it is common understanding now that using first party data in advertising is powerful. And, you know, at Audiences, we don't feel the need to tell people that very often. Yeah. Usually they want to do it. And yeah, they want to do it, whether it's for the buy side or the sell side.
Brett House (10:01.152)
It's like, duh.
Rio (10:06.274)
So you don't need to convince brands it's important anymore. think that are we past that or are they still arguing with you? Why should we do this? Okay.
Rob McLaughlin (10:11.743)
Yeah. No, we're, we're, we're past that. We're past that. And so, so, so there's a strong desire, whether you're an advertiser, you know, to be able to use it for acquisition growth, you know, cross sell upsell, exclusion, et cetera, or feeding algorithms. on the sell side massively, right? If you're a publisher or a data owner, being able to get that your, your, your signals to supply super, super, super powerful.
Originally, originally, our hypothesis was that it was a deadly cocktail of data privacy, data security, and the difficulty of doing anything regarding data and technology. Yeah, that was.
Brett House (10:56.386)
Yeah, well, especially with GDPR in UK and Europe in general, right? Much stronger.
Rob McLaughlin (11:00.595)
Yeah, GDPR, DCPA, all similar.
Rio (11:04.138)
alphabet soup of privacy laws and every country has them at this point. So yeah, makes sense.
Rob McLaughlin (11:08.755)
Really and then you know in big organizations once you know might you might be successful with talking to a DPA DPO sorry Then you're gonna have to talk to info sec so we take we spend a lot of time talking about privacy in ad tech and advertising But if you if you if you're interfacing with a large enterprise you have to do that, but then there's information security, okay?
Rio (11:36.62)
And maybe legal too gets involved, right? I've had that happen.
Rob McLaughlin (11:39.028)
Very much. In the end, these guys often sit within that part of the organization. yeah, absolutely. there are audiences that the guys in privacy and information security are often our allies, and that's great. But they've had decades of training in saying no. So they say no every day to live rank. Yeah.
Brett House (11:39.097)
Yeah.
Brett House (11:58.853)
Yeah, that's for sure.
Rio (12:01.55)
That's what they say by default, right? They say no and then OK, but here's what you need to do. Here are the boxes you need to check, right?
Brett House (12:07.906)
Yeah. And is there a lot of education about the technical elements of this? Because that's
Rob McLaughlin (12:07.987)
Yeah, and then.
For us, is. There's loads. They become our allies. I'll explain why. yeah, what we thought is against privacy and data security, there needs to be a solution which doesn't require the enterprise to copy their data and give it to someone else. And what we saw in the background, and we're lucky enough to have that front row seat to the transformation, was enterprises have quietly
Brett House (12:28.962)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (12:41.119)
built up this incredible capability using cloud infrastructure like AWS, Azure, and GCP, using data warehousing like Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery. They had built in the background the capability to store, manage, and process this data themselves. Fundamentally, we looked at SAS and thinking of the live ramps, thinking of the whole CDP space, and we said, yeah, they've got some cute apps.
Brett House (12:47.267)
Yep.
Rob McLaughlin (13:10.783)
But most of that is reselling storage and compute. So what about if we just did the Q app? And that's what audiences is by the way. And in that journey, as we found out, you know, as we, the app, the application, just creating the application, and then we give the application to run in the enterprises, cloud environment, in their AWS, Azure, GCP, or more recently, really exciting in their snowflake, their Databricks.
Brett House (13:21.496)
Just doing the what? Did you say that again? Yeah. Yeah.
Brett House (13:30.622)
Own data. Yeah. Native environment.
Rob McLaughlin (13:40.479)
and privacy and security.
Brett House (13:42.936)
Does this eliminate the need for data onboarding? Like with LiveRamp, that was one of our theses. Yeah, that was one of our theses at Newstar. were building native.
Rob McLaughlin (13:47.485)
Yeah, it's gone. It's over.
Rio (13:51.438)
Could be a pretty big cost too, right? mean, it's not inexpensive.
Brett House (13:55.001)
Yeah, no, exactly. It's a huge cost. It's a huge task. And in our whole thesis at Newstar, we were sort of competing on least the identity resolution and onboarding side of things in certain places with LiveRip was if you build this native within the environments, like the snowflakes was our kind of our first prototype. There is no need for data onboarding because you're doing the data matching and synchronization, unification, all that stuff within that environment, which is protected by the brand, right? Because they...
Rio (14:21.87)
You know, but it's funny, I've probably had a dozen companies over the years tell me, we have a live ramp takeout strategy. We're going to eliminate onboarding with some native identity solution. I've had CDPs say it, I've had different. So, so I have heard that quite a bit, but I guess, Rob, the question I really had here though is I know, I remember around 2018, 2019, I just, the concept of data clean rooms. I, you know, I got really excited about it for very similar reasons. Oh, wow. Brand should be using first party data.
And the ones I knew, and I found this as wild, I would talk to brands and hear the same things you just described. well, legal says you can't do it for whatever reasons. But then finding out like these same brands who were saying they protect their first party data, they adhere to privacy laws, are uploading audiences directly to DSPs, right? Just bypassing this, just pushing it up. we just sent her to DV360. I remember being shocked and realizing they were doing this because no one in the organization really knew, right?
Brett House (15:07.385)
Yeah.
Brett House (15:15.62)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (15:16.095)
It's really true.
Rio (15:16.974)
And then the DSP will say, you know, we only do the match. don't, we, we, we, we, we, we deleted afterwards. We're only keeping a match data and it's encrypted, but I don't know. I I wouldn't give, I wouldn't be given Google or the trade desk. Grady DSPs my first party directly. If I was a brain, I would do it zero copy. But I mean, is that what you've experienced in a, so I think that's where things were a few years ago. Then the data cleaning was kind of struggled to take off. So I'd like, love to maybe hear from you. Why do you think that was? And like, like what, what force
Brett House (15:39.843)
Yep.
Rio (15:43.692)
Like what caused that? think they're taking off a little bit now, but like where are things now?
Rob McLaughlin (15:47.967)
You know?
Brett House (15:48.089)
Taking off a little bit now, they've all been purchased, right? they're, right? mean...
Rob McLaughlin (15:51.776)
I mean, mean, it will be purchased before they hit critical mass and adoption. You know, bless them, know, bless them. Those businesses didn't deliver on the adoption, which they promised. Like these are not big businesses. Okay. They're really great people. I get why you might want to buy them and push them all into WPP. So you've got some people who actually know something about data. Like that's useful. Yeah. But
Brett House (15:58.821)
Haboo. Infosum.
Rio (16:09.346)
No.
Rob McLaughlin (16:19.167)
that technology has unfortunately failed to be adopted, failed to take off. Our view, and it's funny you said, Newstab and then LiveRamp, all of this very, very similar. So we had a fork in the road early doors where there was people saying, hey, one of the biggest problems is onboarding. Hey, could you help us onboard data into LiveRamp, into their DNP of choice, whatever it was, into a CDP, whatever. And we're like, really that's...
The value add, if all we were was a data on-boarder into somebody else's platform, that's not our mission. Our mission is to get data and then signal into advertising. We'd be stopping short. So we do on-board into those platforms, but what we thought was, and what we found very quickly was yes, privacy, yes, security, yes, like the difficulty of it, but...
the cost of doing this was escalating more and more. And people were doing very, very reductive things. So they were choosing what small selection of data they might onboard because the cost of onboarding data was so expensive. It's like, wow, okay, so all choosing not to...
Rio (17:29.326)
So they have this incredible data set, but they're saying, because it's so expensive, we're only going to take a small amount. Instead of saying we're going to put lot of it to see to unlock maybe things we don't know, the unknown unknowns.
Rob McLaughlin (17:35.327)
Small amount, small amount.
Rob McLaughlin (17:41.248)
And in this era of models and algorithms, is that humans shouldn't be curating and trimming the data, which is then going to be used by the models. We all know that. That was clearly, that can't be the future. And these escalating costs of like, I want to push more data. A sorry reality in advertising. And wait for a moment for me to finish this point. Advertising is the...
one of the most unrewarding places to push data to. If you've got data and you wanna get value from it, you use that data in direct channels like email and SMS to begin with. Believe me, you get response. Advertising, you don't get response. And the models of the data on boarders, the DMPs, the live ramps, the CDPs, they charge very, very similar rates.
for onboarding into advertising as they do into those direct channels. And we just said there's gotta be a way to change this. And what we found is in the solution where we run our app natively inside of the infrastructure of the client, where it overcomes the privacy and the security, it also just leapfrog the cost. Because all of the storage and compute is already happening inside of the client's infrastructure. There's no cost to pass on.
Brett House (19:07.97)
Yep.
Rob McLaughlin (19:08.361)
So we've got B2B clients that push tens of thousand records a day because that works for them. And we've got retailers who push 90 to 100 or more million records a day into the buy and the sell side of media. And the cost of is
Brett House (19:21.636)
You're not paying data in data out cost which sometimes can duplicate right you sent your data out gets on board you bring it back in and you get taxed both ways
Rio (19:27.618)
Yeah, Gerard, where are the big costs where brand might get hit? if they're, let's say they are uploading this, how are these cloud providers dinging them? And why does it add up so much?
Rob McLaughlin (19:39.028)
Yeah, I mean, it's the CDPs, it's the onboarders like LiveRAM and similar. They get charged in two ways, and they should talk for their model, but it's storage and it's compute. So it's number of records is the traditional way. And there's a lot of that still, understandably, because the more records you store, the more it costs and it's hard work. And then the processing. So then you want to push it to Google. Okay, well, I want to push 100 million to Google.
That's going to cost this. I want to push a hundred million to Meta. Well, that's all the work again, just for that next channel. yeah, then I want to push it. On average, our clients, what pushed the what 12 to 15 different channels and they want to push everything every day. So, you know, that's a gigantic amount of compute. and yeah, that, means large bills to those SaaS platforms. What we realized is because our app runs inside the infrastructure.
the cloud infrastructure, which the CTO has, the office of the CTO has already sanctioned. All of those costs are already accounted for. And actually they're very small. Actually they're very, very small. It's another secret of our industry or the ecosystem. The cloud storage and compute that a CPG or a retailer pays is on a much lower rate than the cloud storage and compute that a software company pays. Okay. You go and they can tell that.
Brett House (21:00.1)
Hmm.
Rob McLaughlin (21:03.499)
subs because if they know that your business is running a software company, they're going to juice you for it. If they think your job is selling fruits and vegetables. Well, yeah, you're getting a much, much better rate. So yeah, and yeah, just a spoiler. But yeah, that's why we go with a flat rate. You cannot onboard billions of records into the ecosystem for
Brett House (21:24.791)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (21:31.497)
for the same amount of money because I don't pay an AWS bill. Our organization doesn't have a Google Cloud license, which we run all of this on. So we don't have to pass on those costs.
Brett House (21:43.778)
And the no data movement process, I mean, not only reduces costs, but I'm assuming it reduces a lot of the legal compliance data governance issues that you might run into when you start moving between platforms.
Rio (21:44.046)
You a rabbit?
Rob McLaughlin (21:55.164)
are Brett, some of our biggest advocates are data privacy officers and InfoSec. And it's a long, long standing kind of joke or bet at audiences that I won't walk on stage next year at Adweek New York. I'll walk on stage at InfoSecurity World in, I don't know, Basel or somewhere like that. That'll actually be, because that's where I find it's a different, it's a really different crowd.
Brett House (22:18.957)
Yeah.
Rio (22:20.974)
It's a different crowd.
Brett House (22:22.457)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (22:24.233)
But well, yeah, they're the biggest fans. And this is direct quote. A DPO, Data Privacy Officer at a major retail in the UK said, you know, I'm used to just receiving the next madness, which marketing has dreamt up and having to say no. And for the first time, I can say yes. And these guys, you have met them, these guys love to represent the business. you know, they love to
Brett House (22:25.326)
You can make that crowd laugh.
Rob McLaughlin (22:53.343)
echo the corporate goals all around growth but also around responsibility. putting them in a situation where they can say yes is really cool.
Rio (23:05.079)
So Rob, I'm really glad you brought up the cost element or two of this. And I think there's maybe even another dimension. Love to explore this with you. So I've run into this when looking at, let's say, solutions for onboarding first party data, right? For media, not for other things, For, let's say, for advertising use cases. I think a common issue is the way that most brands buy media, they give their media agencies budget.
And then the media agency says, okay, we're going to take the budget. And yeah, obviously there's going to be tech taxes and other brand safety, ad verification taxes that come out of working media, but we're going to control all that. So I think the issue becomes, okay, if a head of media then finds, there's going to be additional costs for data onboarding, additional costs for this, additional costs for this, becomes, I don't even have a budget to pay for that.
You know, the agency is not going to pay for it, right? Cause they don't want it to come out of their body. It would literally come out of the bottom line, right? where does the money come from? And like, do you, is that an issue run into like who's going to like, not, it's not the amount necessarily, but like just what budget does it come out of? What P and L does come out of? Have you run into that?
Rob McLaughlin (24:15.037)
Yeah, well, we had to have a very clear line of sight of who pays for it. And for our business model, it's the data owner who pays for it. Okay, they're the ones who have to get comfortable from a privacy and security perspective. They're the ones who are going to receive the ultimate value from using their data in the buy or the sell side of media. So our teams interface directly with the advertiser.
or the publisher or the data provider. Whoever's data it is, they're our client. Media agencies are our best friends and they're great advocates for what we do. But we never have and probably within my tenure never will be paid via an IO. We never come out of the cost of the media.
Rio (25:04.94)
It's not just an additional kind of toll or tax that comes out working media. It's separate typically,
Rob McLaughlin (25:11.071)
Hey, mean, that was a great phrase coined regarding tax and we use that all the time. Yeah, we do not believe there should be a tax on activating your own data in media. Yeah, it should be a competitive advantage. This phase we've been through where you have to pay a toll in order to use the data, which you've already won the trust of your customers. You've already done the legal work.
Brett House (25:24.418)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (25:38.877)
you've already done, you've already built the infrastructure to house it and process it. This next era, you do not require a third party. And actually third parties are problematic in all of those areas, know, third parties are problematic for privacy, security and cost.
Brett House (25:56.141)
Yeah. And immediate efficiency, to your point about working media and how much is actually going to middlemen, like during that whole process, that's where you lose value because your dollars aren't going 100%.
Rob McLaughlin (26:02.366)
Yes.
Rob McLaughlin (26:06.431)
And you know, for publishers and data owners, it's even more acute, right? Because they're actually selling the data. So they're not using their data to sell more fruits and vegetables or more sofas or whatever it is. They're just selling the data. know, this is the data is the commodity. So they're hyper margin sensitive. And that's what that's been the most that's been actually the fastest growing part of our business in the last 12 months.
Brett House (26:11.864)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (26:35.935)
has been with publishers and data providers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Rio (26:38.19)
That's interesting. So you made an interesting point there. So I think like the data owner. So I think that if someone in media finds, okay, we don't have budget to handle this, but you're right, it's critically important. So I actually think it elevates it to not just in the media silo, but this is a general marketing issue, right? This should go up to the CMO and, you know, if they don't have the authority to do it, I mean, who's going to, right? So I almost think that it is that critical, but then maybe even going back to your like your initial
point earlier, you had mentioned there was a 3 % of brands or three, like the 3 % number. Maybe you can elaborate on that. Cause I fight, mean, I didn't find that shockingly low having worked in a space a little bit, love you to maybe explore that a little bit. And again, like how, like, you seeing needle move at all now?
Brett House (27:09.794)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (27:23.549)
Yeah, I mean, look, that's the state of the union. And we, we can see a lot of good work, both, you know, with our teams, our clients and the rest of the industry, which progress is being made at last. yeah, that, that's the, yeah, yeah. So we got it.
Brett House (27:38.318)
I want know where you got that stuff from. And it's just for the audience. It's 3 % of media spend is informed by first party data on the brand side, which is a minuscule percentage if you think about it in the larger scheme of things.
Rio (27:42.444)
And that's,
Rob McLaughlin (27:52.48)
It's absolutely the case and we heard it direct from the brands, but more importantly, actually, we heard it direct from the people doing the buying. So the guys at WPP, Dentsu, in publicist who account for that huge percentage of all media.
Rio (28:11.83)
And Rob, I heard two years ago, heard from about 18 months ago, I heard from one of the retail media networks that only 1 % of advertisers were using first party data in their cleanroom. And this is not long ago. It's going up from then. But this is for retail media, the most obvious place that you would do it, right? So the 3 % number of overall spend didn't surprise me. Keep going, I'm sorry.
Rob McLaughlin (28:35.005)
Yeah, and I look I
It's difficult because the truth is, and it's hard to say sometimes, the truth is the media is going to get bought anyway. Like the data is super powerful, but the game in media and marketing is to get the reach, meet those objectives. No campaign is going to be paused whilst they wait for the data to make its way to a DSP.
The campaign goes out the door every single
Rio (29:09.518)
I'd say almost to the contrary. I think that no one wants things to get paused. So not only will the campaign not be paused, but anything that creates or adds friction will be potentially not even considered or maybe deprioritized. Is that true?
Brett House (29:09.762)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (29:26.111)
friction and cost, which you guys represented earlier. that's where the office of the CMO is super important. Of course, they're the beneficiary of this. But the benefactor of these new models, especially where audiences plays is actually the office of the CTO. Okay, which is great news.
Brett House (29:48.45)
Yeah.
Rio (29:48.718)
That's a good point.
Brett House (29:51.204)
It's the technical application of the data and they're the sort of masters of that domain, right?
Rob McLaughlin (29:54.174)
Yeah. Hey, it doesn't mean that suddenly CTOs care about advertising. And it's okay. They don't. But what they care about is they made gigantic enterprise level strategy decisions to invest in cloud computing. And to date, the office of the CMO has barely been a stakeholder of theirs. Every time a marketing division buys another third party software,
Brett House (30:10.34)
you
Rob McLaughlin (30:23.721)
where the data needs to be copied and put somewhere else, the CTO has to make an exception to their enterprise infrastructure. And that kills them. And what's happening here is... and the dozens.
Brett House (30:31.128)
Yep. Yeah. And that can be in the dozens of platforms. I think the average CMO gets, has about 50 to 60 different point solutions that they leverage, which it's not all copying data necessarily, but still it's, it's numerous.
Rob McLaughlin (30:44.159)
There's a lot of discussion and research around the cost of all of those solutions. I don't think that that's obviously important, but breaking the strategy, breaking the enterprise strategy as marketers or people in marketing, we have a tendency to think that marketing is extremely important. In large organizations, the CMO is often not a real C.
Brett House (31:02.796)
What?
Rio (31:09.046)
It's sad. It's really a C-suite position. Many orgs have even eliminated it. They have like a VP marketing now, even some that have it, it's become less important or less powerful.
Rob McLaughlin (31:16.199)
It's just... I have!
Brett House (31:17.848)
You're a chief customer officer, chief data officer.
Rob McLaughlin (31:22.663)
Yeah, and I tell you what, they're not in the suite. They're not in the meetings. Contrary to that, the CTO always is. Okay, the CTO always is. And that's because real technology decisions, infrastructure decisions, impact risk and growth. And actually, I have to drop this point. The game changer is when we found is when you act as infrastructure. Very unsexy word.
Brett House (31:31.33)
Yeah.
Brett House (31:52.664)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (31:52.788)
But when you act as infrastructure for data activation, you get treated seriously.
Brett House (31:59.097)
Yeah, because you're coming in there and the CTO is coming in there and saying, hey, we're going to make this, our use of our data is going to be exponentially more efficient. We're going to be able to use this to create second party audiences, to expand our reach beyond our own first party data set. And we're going to be able to eliminate a whole bunch of our vendors, to your point around sort of the vendor bloat or the point solution bloat. There's an efficiency play and then I think there's an effectiveness play here that seems to be
Rio (32:15.768)
Better targeting.
Brett House (32:28.696)
like you said, in the hands of the CTO in terms of.
Rob McLaughlin (32:31.113)
And maybe I'm a gigantic multinational publisher. Maybe I'm a massive big box retailer. I want to get, they're so data rich, gigantic amounts of data. And if they have limited to no barrier to getting all that data, say to the supply side, like an index exchange or a trade desk, they can unlock those retail media strategies, et cetera, et cetera, which they've been after.
Brett House (32:56.173)
Yep.
Rob McLaughlin (33:01.631)
If it's working off like that infrastructure, which they've already built, nothing's a no brainer in large organizations. But what it is, it's tick, tick, tick, value. That's what it is.
Brett House (33:15.148)
Yeah. But how far away are we when you work with large organizations like that? Cause I've seen a ton of that in my career. How close are they to getting to that, that promised land of kind of unified data across very large siloed organizations with multiple data sources. I mean, are you finding that that's, we're getting closer and closer to two big brands getting more sophisticated in that, in that way? Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (33:38.496)
We are, we are. And I talk about it from data for advertising, right? So there are other use cases that can be more complicated. Honestly, I believe the last 10 years, there's been a lot of distraction. A lot of talk about, so one of my favorite ones is identity resolution. so look, I grew up in marketing and media. Media loves scale, because it loves reach, okay?
Brett House (33:48.803)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (34:07.199)
and it allows addressability. Identity resolution, in my view, is anathema to that. Identity resolution, look, and this is my point of view, identity resolution is about picking the one ID that you're going to use out of many IDs. Yeah, I'm not interested in that. I'm born out of media and advertising. As long as there's permission or you're comfortable to use,
Brett House (34:27.704)
Yeah, the most persistent of the IDs, right?
Rob McLaughlin (34:36.623)
with the permission for those IDs, we should use all of them. And then the demand and supply side will dictate what's useful or not. Don't worry about that. Don't waste any time doing that. Remove as many barriers between your data and the trade as possible. And you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded in that. yes, so actually, and Matt, my co-founder, often talks about this, there's been a
like a data inferiority complex in many organizations where they're like, no, but we've got multiple silos of data or we've got, yeah, we still need to clean up that data. Well, is it permissioned? Yes. Okay. Let's get to work and you can bring multiple sources of that. In the end, you can push, you know, many of our clients, you know, they're four or six or eight different divisions and they've been built through acquisitions. So they've all sat with multiple warehouse tables for each division.
Yeah, story is old as time. And they've had this confusion over the years of, hey, we should create a single customer view, bring it all together. But financing in these organizations will never finance a cross organizational project like that. So, know, years go by and still hasn't happened. If you remove the engineering and the cost of pushing, let's say, eight different data sets into the same DSP seat, for example.
And then the DSP does all of the resolution. You don't have to do it. And also,
Rio (36:10.734)
Well, it's interesting you're saying no, because like, think looking at marketing versus advertising, right? mean, and especially, also think it depends on the industry too, right? When you have additional compliance, like advertising, you don't need to be as precise, right? Like, if you're marketing to your own customers, you better know who everyone is, right? Better not, but if it's advertising and just trying to drive demand, you know, your fidelity doesn't have to be quite as precise, right? Because you're just...
Rob McLaughlin (36:23.848)
at all.
Rob McLaughlin (36:36.369)
In the campaigns that going out at any given point in time, the advertising in the advertising campaigns, any point in time, it's not, there are going to be far fewer customer targeted campaigns than there are acquisition campaigns. Okay, I'm sure someone will find an exception to that. But like if I walk into, you know, a telco and look at their campaign lay down, nine, 80 to 90 % of it is acquisition.
Brett House (36:37.934)
What?
Rob McLaughlin (37:06.483)
And then, yeah, 20.
Rio (37:07.47)
Right, which would be distinct from CRM, Or even service emails, right? I those you better get right, but you're right, for advertising, it doesn't matter as much.
Rob McLaughlin (37:11.263)
but it's completely different.
Yeah, that's not our job. That's not our job. And also for those people who doing their job. And another great thing that gets a lot of airtime at the moment, we talk about CRM managers being like the most one of the most undervalued roles in organizations, because they can bring everything they've been doing in direct for such a long time. Like, yeah,
Brett House (37:30.051)
Yeah.
Brett House (37:36.868)
But isn't customer growth as well as customer acquisition, isn't that all in a sense fall into the category of advertising, right? So if I'm a retailer and I'm saying upsell, cross-sell opportunity, you might also like suggestions that are being sent to me by email or whatever direct channel they've got with me. Isn't that advertising?
Rob McLaughlin (37:46.783)
in just a year.
Rob McLaughlin (37:58.846)
Yeah, that is, that is, that is. And you can do a lot of good work there. But what I, what we find over and over again is advertisers, the majority of their focus is campaigns, are acquisition focused and the role of data, the way, is gigantic in those. So first exclude all your deterministically exclude all of your existing customers. Everyone feels smart and clean and clever after they've done that.
Brett House (38:13.602)
Yeah.
Rio (38:26.686)
We suppressed our customer list. Great. That's something that people were decades ago.
Rob McLaughlin (38:28.567)
my god!
Brett House (38:28.695)
No!
Rob McLaughlin (38:32.735)
They have but not in advertising man, not in advertising not an avatar you I don't know whatever you're getting ads for them on you know in the open internet in the wall gardens and on CTV all day, okay
Rio (38:38.19)
You're right, direct mail industries like that has been doing, but right.
Rio (38:48.664)
But you're right, like, no, you're totally right.
Brett House (38:48.78)
Yeah, yeah. Isn't this an identity resolution problem?
Rob McLaughlin (38:52.595)
Yeah, well, no. Yeah, nice. They're not suppressing and they're wasting money talking to existing customers. And there's a massive customer experience problem in that as well because you're showing offers which are not eligible for and piss you off.
Rio (39:03.284)
the worst is retargeting when you've already bought something. When like the same pair of sneakers follows you for weeks and you're like, I bought this, this is crazy, right? I mean, retargeting is maybe the, you know, the scale is not as big, but it's a lot of money that's being wasted.
Brett House (39:05.963)
yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (39:06.399)
exhibition.
Rob McLaughlin (39:15.325)
It's a lot. we just find in the first month or so of working with a client, suppressing existing customers for acquisition, super powerful. Super powerful. sounds boring. Yeah. then obviously, for lookalikes. Whatever your version of a good looking customer is, get that into the channels and keep refreshing those as much as possible.
Rio (39:22.53)
That's huge. But it's so easy. It's so easy. The fact they're not doing it's crazy.
Rio (39:36.994)
But you know what else is good? I've seen to Rob is that like, not only can you, but then like, but that's only just the most basic stuff with first priority. Then when you pull in lifetime value, average order volume, things that you know, because like they're customers, then you can begin to do really amazing things. are our best customers really look like? What customer should we be marketing to? Right. And then like, how do we take these and then extrapolate these from seed audiences to bigger audiences that are out there? I mean, I think that's something very few people are doing. I'm sorry, I cut you off, but I got excited.
Rob McLaughlin (40:04.767)
where very people, not enough people are doing it. That's where the huge value is. And I would link it back to the relationship between data, signal and advertising is very different between the relationship between data and direct channels. And that is why data is so rewarding when you use it for suppression and sees for lookalikes and advertising. And when you use it for targeting to upsell, cross sell your existing customers, advertising is very disappointing.
Okay. I still think there's lots of good work to be done and it should be, but the role of other channels is far more successful there. Like you walk in and also you walk into the media agencies. They are very adept at building acquisition campaigns. They're less adept at customer growth. Okay. So we, we pick as few fights as possible and
Rio (40:57.998)
Okay, well Rob, on the agency front, I'd love to know how have you been working with agencies? mean, agencies are changing, I think they becoming, like, their own, they're trying to get better technology. I mean, I think some are doing it better than others, they're starting to have their own platforms, they're being focused on bringing their own identifiers so they can have some IP. How are you working with them and what challenges have you had and what successes? Love for you to talk about that a little.
Rob McLaughlin (41:19.547)
Yeah. We love the fact that all of the major networked agencies and many of the Indies that we work with already, they're big supporters of our approach and the way we do it. Fundamentally, they get to do their job. When we have a client in common, they get to do their job, but the ad accounts that are running are enriched with the data signals which we're providing. So literally, they don't have to lift a finger.
They don't have to pay for anything. It's just their clients are giving them tools which are super powerful in order for them to do their job. So we love that. They're super smart and get it very, very quickly. So far, and this surprises some people, far, like those acquisitions that publicists have made, that WPP have made in the clean room and similar space, it doesn't really impact us.
Cause I think there are multiple reasons. I don't really, if that was kind of your part of your question, but fundamentally the data owners are the advertisers or in the third party case, the publishers or the data or the data providers. Agency in my view, I worry for agencies when they talk as if they are the data owner. Okay. They're in often the data owner. Okay.
Brett House (42:47.138)
Yep.
Rob McLaughlin (42:47.731)
They occasionally are a trader of data in between a data owner and the advertiser. Publicis is maybe the best exception with Lotomy where they really have acquired some serious data sets. I think that's an incredible business. also, I'm not alone in thinking that. Yes, yes.
Brett House (43:07.138)
Well, epsilon, publicist with epsilon as well, right? then, omni-com and axiom, right? So you're getting,
Rob McLaughlin (43:14.655)
Yes. But we wouldn't be alone in saying, those third party owned data sets, is that really the future? I'm not saying it's not, but I don't think it's the whole of the future. I'm pretty confident that the future contains the data owner, the advertiser being the data owner and them being able to use their data alongside lots of other
Brett House (43:40.141)
Yeah, which I think is inherently more powerful and real. When we talked to George Musi, who will be publishing shortly, he talked a lot about that. all of these database kind of identity resolution providers, the Epsilon's, the Axioms, the new stars, they all came from the same kind of core database marketing fabric from 25 years ago. Right? So there's not a ton of
dis-differentiation argument, arguably, within their data themselves. And I think that sort of supports your thesis that really the data owner has the power in terms of the quality, the depth, the consistency, the real-time nature of their data. Yeah. And Rob, let me ask you, is the...
Rio (44:16.904)
They know their customers, no doubt. First party data is going to be much better, relevant to the brand.
Brett House (44:23.46)
Oh, totally, totally. And you mentioned clean rooms, Rio, and Rob, I'd like to hear your perspective on this is that to me, the number one use case of sort of clean rooms, or at least native data architecture where you can is second party use cases, right? Where you're, you know, you're a retailer, partnering with a CPG company, you're an airline partnering with a hotel company to say, hey, we're going to cross target, cross pollinate, because we know if your customer is arriving in Miami,
and staying on JetBlue that the Marriott might be interested in targeting them with a hotel offer, right? Have you seen a lot of those use cases? Because I found that that, honestly, a lot of brands aren't particularly sophisticated, which surprises me, despite all the clean room hype that we've heard in the last 20 years or 10 years. Have you seen a lot of those use cases being sort of leveraged and thought about?
Rob McLaughlin (45:08.798)
Mmm.
Rob McLaughlin (45:16.575)
So we've seen a lot of work in that space and a lot of use of clean rooms. I'll say only slightly tongue in cheek, a lot of use of clean rooms to create very expensive Venn diagrams.
Brett House (45:29.476)
of how these how this data can meld and be used together and
Rob McLaughlin (45:34.056)
Yeah, and I've got to, you might imagine I've got two issues with that. One, that data that you brought together on a clean room, that's not the match data for the DSP. That's the two brands data. You haven't done the match of the DSP. So it's not your real audience in media yet. And two, you've had to compromise privacy and security in order to
Brett House (45:57.229)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (46:03.817)
just create this Venn diagram, which isn't even actionable in media yet. Because in order to make it actionable in media, you're going to have to onboard it into a DSP.
Brett House (46:14.5)
And that might be a 50 % or 30 % hit rate.
Rio (46:16.206)
Well, if you're using Amazon Marketing Cloud or Adstata Hub ADH, in theory, you are pulling in platform signals for the match. So think those would be the exceptions. just for generic cleaner, I'm like, no, you definitely would not.
Rob McLaughlin (46:33.503)
Well, see that, you see Rio, that worries me though, because what your brand strategy and advertiser strategy is going to be Amazon centric. Yeah, like that might work for then your Amazon DSP campaigns, but I'm also want to, I want to push out to Disney Plus and I want to push out to the trade desk. Yeah. It's very important.
Rio (46:55.822)
Yeah, that would work for one channel, 100%. That would not work for others.
Brett House (46:57.529)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (47:01.695)
I throw shade on something, but I want to say the reason I do that is because the answer I believe, we believe is just staring us all in the face, which is brand A and brand B push their customer files encrypted, of course, to a DSP or to multiple DSPs and make that overlap happen at that DSP at the point of media. Okay. Then you're doing it with your, you're finding that overlap with the real available audience and you can action it straight away.
Brett House (47:31.683)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (47:31.871)
I probably don't need to say this, but there's no associated cost for doing that as well. And the data was going to be at that DSP anyway. So all of the DPAs and stuff like that that you'd need to sign in order to work with that DSP, we're always going to be signed anyway.
Rio (47:49.166)
You're interested, Rob, we bring up like in the future, if we really think like some kind of agentic trading will start taking place between, let's say, buy and sell side, right? I mean, in theory, you know, we remember the conversation with Dr. Fu the other day, he was basically saying he thinks the future is direct buys on the advertising, you the buying portals for the different publishers from theory, a solution like yours, Rob, it could just be sitting in middle, right? And you're allowing like a
Brett House (48:08.686)
Yep.
Rio (48:18.998)
encrypted push from, you know, from brand over to, over to the advertising portals for these, for these publishers, you're doing to match directly there. In theory that could happen, right?
Rob McLaughlin (48:29.471)
And I think that it really can. the commercial, the unlock that we see is we've removed the cost of data transportation.
Brett House (48:43.874)
Yep. Yep.
Rio (48:44.558)
Because you, because you make it easy. instead of having to build integrations with 15 different, like, you know, 15, 20 different, like I'd say places you could buy CTV inventory, like your platform can make it very easy. I'm think that is kind of interesting.
Rob McLaughlin (48:55.839)
I mean, we make it easy, but it's also you do more of it. It doesn't cost you more. Like, um, like we have a retailer who onboards probably into 30 different DSPs every day. Yeah. Some of it's Delta of course. so, but, but for the purpose of my point, I'll act as if it's the whole file. Yeah. They're pushing like 12 million records to 15 different DSPs every day. Like.
Brett House (48:56.003)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (49:26.025)
That's, and they could double that. could, it's, where.
Rio (49:30.798)
Cost won't scale as they increase their value, you're saying.
Rob McLaughlin (49:33.951)
There's no, no, that's the amazing, there is, when you remove the incremental cost of signal delivery, then you can put that signal everywhere. And that's where an agenda, especially an agentic approach can really pay off because agents can go and seek value of using that data everywhere. doesn't, you're not, you're not saying, Hey,
Brett House (49:59.417)
With, yeah, without having like somebody internally having to manage that complexity. That's what we talked about with Dr. Foote. Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (50:02.685)
Yeah, and making a judgment call, we can afford this quarter, we can afford to push it to the trade desk and to Metta, but that's it. And then you just out on the whole of the rest of the ecosystem.
Brett House (50:11.715)
Yeah.
Yeah, well, and Dr. kind of made a good point that there's so much consolidation that there really are a handful, maybe 10, you can count them on two hands, places that you really need to push your data to because it's, yeah, because you're already with those platforms in mind, the walled gardens, whatever you want to call them, the retail media networks, you're hitting 95 % of your addressable audience anyways. So what do you need all of these extension plays? And the further you extend out the kind of less trustworthy
Rio (50:24.462)
Yeah, I think you said 1015 max. Yeah.
Brett House (50:43.81)
the inventory gets.
Rob McLaughlin (50:45.439)
Right. got really, I got worried the other, like a couple of weeks ago, talking to one of the, one of the companies that runs on the biggest, well, a lot of the big retail media networks here in the UK, at least. And they were talking to me about, they've got five or six big retailers, supermarkets on their books. And they were saying, yeah, so once we, you know, we're planning to bring this data together and then we want to extend it. And I was like, in the UK.
if you've got five of the biggest supermarkets and you've got that, like that data set is going to include everyone in the UK. Yeah. That doesn't, that doesn't, that doesn't like, and the answer in that is because of the associated cost or perceived associated costs, they're bringing all that data. They weren't planning to bring all of the data together. Yeah. So they were trimming it and trimming it and trimming it. And it's like, well,
Rio (51:20.558)
Who you going to extend to, right?
Brett House (51:21.075)
Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (51:41.855)
This is this valuable asset and that's the power. When you remove the cost, the incremental cost per line of data, then the industry can get to work. The ecosystem can get to work and it's only going to be accelerated.
Brett House (51:54.649)
Yeah. And it's, arguably it's real reach versus this sort of, you know, expansion play where you're reaching people that don't, may not even exist. It may be inventory that's just completely fraudulent. That's kind of Dr. Fu's point, right? Like first party data ensures that you're, this is real reach and you're, and if you go publish or direct or platform direct, the likelihood of hitting your audience increases, right?
Rob McLaughlin (52:17.567)
I think we find that the people who are obsessed with audience extension, reach extension, synthetic audience data, they're the people without the data. And I get that. I get that. I get that. But we work in service anyway. We work in service of the data owner.
Brett House (52:32.428)
Yeah
Rob McLaughlin (52:43.379)
And very often it's been first party, but it's very important for me to say we've seen an explosion in data, data providers and publishers, people like Experian and others. You know, if you're a publisher, your core, your core business is publishing. You're not a data business as much as they might've tried to say that you're not, you're a publisher. Okay. And that's hard work to do publishing and to create content.
activate getting value from their data sets. That's the they are not looking to add massive costs. And actually it stopped them from being able to data providers. They've stopped and you'll see it. They've stopped describing themselves as data and technology companies. They don't say that anymore. They used to 10 years ago, you talk to a trans union, they got Hey, yeah, we're a data technology company. They don't anymore. Because they've not they found that they they're brilliant. They are brilliant data companies.
Brett House (53:30.276)
What are they?
Rio (53:30.294)
He did,
Rob McLaughlin (53:41.568)
And they rely, they must rely on other people. And, you know, sadly, tactical relationships, often with the likes of live ramp and others in order to get snippets of their data on the advertiser by advertiser basis into media. Well, we are very, very happy to be doing for them on both sides of the Atlantic is being able to say, Hey, we can, you can onboard your gigantic valuable data sets into media. Yeah. In their entirety.
And it doesn't have to destroy the margin of your data business.
Brett House (54:16.58)
Well, that's a good point. So.
Rio (54:17.816)
So Rob, we unfortunately don't have too much time. We're about a little under an hour, but we'd love to maybe hear from you, like how if anyone wants to get a hold of you, wants to find out about your business, how would they do that? I mean, what's the best way?
Rob McLaughlin (54:32.505)
thank you. Well, yeah, we're very, we're very excited to be servicing clients, both in North America and in Europe. Our headquarters are here in London. So yeah, always happy to have people over. But yeah, you should get in touch with myself or the rest of our team here. Go to weareaudiences.com and see for yourselves.
We've got some great vertical leads who've really perfected understanding how, if you're a publisher, if you're an advertiser, a retailer, or a data provider, how can you, with as little disruption as possible, be able to enable signal delivery and unlock those revenue streams, which as an industry we've been waiting for for so long.
Rio (55:30.382)
So maybe before we go, can do some quick hits. I think we got a couple of minutes left. What do you say?
Brett House (55:30.488)
Well.
Brett House (55:34.692)
Sure. Well, as Rob did with that, right? So how about the first one? Biggest myth about first party data?
Rob McLaughlin (55:35.615)
Yeah, go for it.
Rob McLaughlin (55:43.507)
Yeah, that people don't have it or they don't have enough of it. That advertisers don't have enough of it. It's wrong.
Brett House (55:49.986)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's more about utilization, effective utilization of that versus not having it. Yeah. Access.
Rio (55:50.126)
So that's a myth.
Rob McLaughlin (55:55.955)
Yeah, access, access. Yeah.
Rio (55:58.978)
What's the most overhyped part of the data stack or tool in the data stack?
Rob McLaughlin (56:03.679)
CDP. It's irrelevant, completely irrelevant. And I include Composable in that. Completely irrelevant. In an era of cloud and data warehousing, yeah, I worship, I worship, we worship a defeat of Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery. That's where the action is. That's where the data is. Nothing else is relevant. Nothing is relevant. You put anything in between it, Composable or otherwise, you're bringing cost, you're bringing complexity. Don't do it, okay? Don't do
Rio (56:29.902)
Well said.
Brett House (56:30.966)
Yeah, very well said. So suppression reach targeting retail media, which is the most undervalued use case. Suppression. Why? Yeah. Yeah.
Rob McLaughlin (56:36.863)
suppression. Yeah, suppression. We talked about it, right? It's massive. Yeah.
Rio (56:43.788)
What kills activation faster? Legal, legacy processes, tech stack, et cetera.
Rob McLaughlin (56:55.519)
cost.
Yeah, yeah, cost, cost.
Brett House (56:57.976)
Yep. So, so, so on that topic, I mean, I think we could probably end with this is what is one thing and we've talked about it within this, this podcast is that brain spent too much money on right now.
Rob McLaughlin (57:10.047)
Yeah, third party technology. need to go, they need to turn around. If you're a marketer, you need to turn around and say, hey, what cloud infrastructure? I know it's boring and it doesn't sound very marketing, but what cloud infrastructure? What data warehousing infrastructure? Okay. That's where all the data is. Your dreams will come true when you lean into that.
Brett House (57:35.074)
Yeah.
Rio (57:35.728)
Rob, this is great. think we obviously could have kept talking. That's the topic we're all three passionate about. Love your enthusiasm here. Yeah, maybe we could do a part two. I mean, I think it's a cool topic area. So thanks for joining.
Brett House (57:47.778)
Yeah. And thanks everybody for listening. Yeah. Thanks for joining Rob and thanks everybody for listening. It's made it this far through the podcast. You can reach us at dev dev dev dot signal and noise dot AI and subscribe and share a signal and noise on Apple podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. And thanks and see you next time.
Rob McLaughlin (57:47.903)
I'd love to do a second and thank you very much.
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