You know, looking at the demands being placed on CMOs today, do you think the industry needs to rethink what makes someone qualified to lead a modern marketing organization?

Uh, absolutely.

And, um, and yes.

And I have definitely talked about how my career path to the CMO role has been, um, a non-traditional one, if you will.

But I also feel like that non-traditional path of being in operations, um, running product marketing teams, running account management teams, leading commercial orgs, has shaped my perspective on what the modern B2B CMO should be.

And I think that that role now is much more than marketing, the marketing function, if you will.

Of course, there are demand gen, branding, and at the end of the day, marketing's job is to create more awareness and help drive leads and, and pipeline, right? But the role is much more of a business partner to the CEO and rest of the organization type role.

You wanna talk about that a little bit?

Who holds the championship belt?

I'm gonna say brands because the big global brands still carry a ton of influence in every way, shape, or form.

Those brands are usually clients of the agencies that you just mentioned, so in many ways, they're partnering together, or brands are sort of giving direction to their agency partners.

And they carry a lot of influence, and they spend a ton of money across a bunch of different channels as well too.

So, my sort of rapid fire answer to you, Ben, is gonna be the brands.

But you're essentially saying the agency is the car, the brand is the driver, and then the independent media buyers are sitting in the back seat or maybe waiting for the bus.

I don't know if I'd say sitting in the back seat waiting for the bus, but just because of sheer size, the influence is the big brands, the big global brands.

Really?

And I'm choosing video because everyone everywhere is consuming video.

I look at my own personal habits where the way I consume content today versus maybe the way I consumed it two or three years ago, it's definitely video first for me.

If you look at data with respect to where digital advertising is going, it's definitely trending towards video.

Display is starting to trend down as well too.

Video is very interactive.

It can be contextually relevant.

Display three is the interesting part to me because I think contextual advertising and I think understanding the context of what's on the page and maybe the world has passed me by, that's not necessarily the case.

How would you argue against the effectiveness of AI in contextual advertising?

I would argue the understanding the human nuance, the cultural subtext, if you will, of who people are and how they do what they do, and can AI really glean that from understanding the context of what someone is consuming? That's where my argument would be, but I hate making that argument.

Well, now that I understand the right process and I understand the data sources, I can feed it to AI, and it does a better job than I ever would have.

Right, and faster too.

And I think there's this popular saying right now about AI, which is that AI is the worst it's ever gonna be right now.

The point there is that all these tools will just continue to get better and better and better, and I'm sure when you first started the podcast or using AI tools versus the way you are now, I'm sure it's more efficient and effective for you, and it's the same thing related to contextual advertising that's underpinned by AI.

Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.

If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

Are you investing more in AI-created ads or human-created media?

I'm investing more in AI-created ads, and the reason being is because of everyone is being asked to do more with less.

And if you're going to scale, if you're going to have speed, you have to use technology, because your competitors are using it, others are using it, so on and so forth.

Now, at the same time, I think there still has to be a human element within anything you create from an AI perspective.

So, hopefully, I didn't dodge your question, but that's my answer.

Yeah.

So marketers get it, and that's one of the trends we're seeing where contextual is a part of the media mix and should be a key part of the media mix.

What I will also say, just to answer your question a little bit further, when you can understand the context of what someone is reading, listening to, or watching, you can get into a place of, okay, what is their emotional state while they're consuming that content? You can get to a place of, okay...If this individual consistently consumes a certain type of content, then you can make some assumptions about that individual in terms of what other types of content they may like.

I'll give you an example.

So we just released a case study for a company called Mars, which is a pet care company.

They came to us because they wanted to expand their reach and relevance of their sort of pedigree product in the UK and in France.

So this is a European case study.

And you mentioned you could understand the context of the page, and talk to me a little bit about how contextual advertising tools have become more sophisticated over time.