From your seat, what made Compare Media the right fit for Open Brand?

Yeah, so really happy to have acquired Compare Media and have it join the Open Brand team.

Compare Media is the perfect fit for Open Brand because what it delivers to customers is exactly what our technology was designed from the OpenBrand is a real-time market intelligence platform that's built off real-time AI-based data pipelining.

And while that may seem like a very obvious idea today, in 2023 when we were founded, this was less than an obvious idea.

And so when Chris and I set out to do this...

There wasn't really anyone in the market intelligence space doing this, and we thought that would provide a competitive advantage whereby we could increase the depth of data, the frequency of data by maybe an order of magnitude if we used AI-based data pipelining versus more of the traditional ways of building data products.

And The technology that Chris had developed at his startup, DeepAd, was designed from the ground up to take large, high-frequency data streams with all types of unstructured data from lots of different marketing channels and to structure that data so that it could be used in time series analysis.

I guess if you're looking at the landscape right now, I mean, where do you see the biggest gap between what brands need, you know, from market intelligence and what they're actually getting?

um still investors and and and uh and and still around as advisors but you know we own the company and then day one you're walking in getting introduced to everybody else and kind of um you know taking the company forward so why don't you just talk about what that first day looks like like what are you really trying to do and what are you trying to accomplish you know that first day and then maybe that first couple weeks

yeah well i think there's a couple things first of all uh one thing that you and i discussed really early on was sort of like the average length of the investment.

And when you think about everything in the context of the investment length, you can say that like every day that we spend, we have one less day to make this the greatest company of all time.

And so what we did right up front was Chris and I spent the entire summer putting together like a very, very long plan with multiple work streams, figuring out exactly where we needed to bring in new talent, where we needed to improve the products, how we were going to improve the products, who was going to be doing that, what the timeline to do that was, what additional assets we were going to need, and how we were going to basically take a solution that while was very much appreciated by an A-plus type customer base, had a lot of room for improvement, especially as it relates to frequency, reliability, and accuracy.

And so by having such a robust plan upfront, we walked in on day one and presented essentially the nuts and bolts of that plan to the company.

And I think that helped build a lot of trust right off the bat.

I mean, always in these situations that current employees can be super nervous.

But overall picture for Trackline, you know, we got in front of these founders, right situation, right time, and you guys can fill in the blanks from there.