What Will the Next Advertising Dollar Deliver? Featuring Jake LaDuke and Khushboo Beniwal of Databricks

What does your day-to-day look like at Databricks? I mean, you're not selling software in the traditional sense.

You're working with some of the biggest names in media and advertising.

What does that partnership look like?

So I touched on it a little bit.

So our customers that we're working with, we kind of work across many different altitudes.

So part of what we do is we focus our efforts on top-down motions as well as bottoms-up motions.

So when we're working bottoms up, that's really getting our hands dirty and understanding who are the people who are hands on keys, accessing data, who need to make the decisions that are relevant to the business.

And how are they using platforms like Databricks to make their jobs easier? And that can be through using any of Databricks capabilities or building out agents so that they're sort of doing more with less and working faster.

And then when it's on the top down pieces, this is where it's working with executives to understand what are their growth strategies now and what are they going to transform into for those next level of growth opportunities? Because that's where I think advertising is at such an interesting inflection point, particularly on the buy and sell side and all of the ad tech in between.

Everyone is trying to look around corners to see how is AI going to transform my business and not just from an efficiency standpoint, but how can I use this as a growth lever as well? That's where Kushboo was talking about data monetization.

I think, you know, we have the traditional advertising business as we all know it, the way it's existed.

And there's been incremental growth over the years with new surfaces being added and so on.

And there's a lot of optimization that's happening there.

There's a lot of, you know, you're going to hear us talk about, you know, how outcomes really matter now more than attention metrics.

And so we're seeing a lot of innovation in that space, a lot of data driven decision making that's happening.

use of AI to essentially do things better.

AI is having another impact as well.

And there's a couple of other trends there.

But essentially, the world of advertising is also changing as we know it.

Consumer behavior is shifting in leaps and bounds.

And so with the executives that we talk to, a lot of the conversations we have are about how consumer behavior is changing and how it's impacting advertising as a whole.

You know, things like agentic commerce are top of mind for a lot of CMOs.

Things like AI-driven creative generation is top of mind for a lot of CMOs.

Social media influencer marketing is another really big one.

So these are trends that are outside and impacting advertising.