Nathan Labenz: observation

Transcript context

…So we actually engage quite a lot with the authorities, you know, kind of in the EU, with the different data protection offices, the DPOs in different parts of Europe as well as in the US. And, you know, kind of we're very much advocating on behalf of the end user. right to ensure that it's about, you know, transparency. It's about user consent, ensuring that users have a way to be able to opt in and opt out. And that's why, you know, we had the cookie consent message long before it was even regulatory. And we also kind of push through on ensuring that we live in a system where there's a fair value exchange, right? So that the user feels that they have you know, kind of proper, you know, kind of use of their data and that they get value back, right, through free content, through free services and so on. In a world where all of that disappears, right, then you take away all the value for the advertisers. So if an advertiser who's spending money to try and increase their sales, they're not getting that value back. If their products are being shown in front of people who have no interest, then that does nothing for their business and they're not going to spend. If they don't spend, then those people who provide that rich stream of, you know, services and of websites and of content, they have to monetize some other way. So then what they do is they have to put up paywalls. That's not in the interest of the end user. So as long as there's fair value exchange, as long as we're transparent about what we do, then I believe that's really important. So back to the question about US versus EU, to a large degree, a lot of that stuff's been equalized, right? A lot of those things like, you know, in California, it with a lot of changes through CCPA and CCPR and so on. And they're very much inspired by each other. We try and build a global solution. So, you know, kind of what we've done in Europe, we use the same approach globally. So it's not like, you know, we try and be looser elsewhere. We really believe that by having that principle and by being born in Europe, it means that we have a solution that can work pretty much everywhere. Cool. That's really interesting. Let's talk about creative a little bit. I think I'll do it. I'll invite you to help lead this part of the conversation. But it is interesting that we've made it this far and not really talked about creative. Obviously, there's a lot of different formats. I don't even know today if I guess a couple of ways at least I would want to come at this. One is like, I think the number I saw was Credo has 17,000 advertisers. In our experience at Waymark, we've kind of seen often lack of creative is one of the biggest barriers to new advertisers signing up with a platform like Criteo or for that matter, Meta or Google or what have you. I wonder if you see that similarly, like is that a core barrier to market expansion? And then obviously we're in this moment of like cost of creative of some quality is dropping precipitously. And I don't know if there is a dynamic layer to the creative. Like when we're doing these kind of matching auction prediction sort of things today, is creative an input to that decision making? Do advertisers have multiple creatives that you're sort of scoring or embedding and kind of using to drive outcomes? Or is that still a frontier where perhaps because they don't have enough options, you can't do that in many cases? I don't know for what other reason, but it seems like in the future, we sort of imagine everything's going to be highly personalized. The ads are going to be much more talking to us as individuals. It seems like you have the infrastructure to do that, but maybe just the creative is not there. What do you think is the future of creative? Yeah, I think that's one of the most exciting areas in the whole generative AI space. kind of the things that you can create with these next generation models, it's just insane. And I think they have the possibility to create even more engaging advertisements, right? You know, you talked to Nathan about the hyper-personalized, I think that's super, super powerful and people will see it and they go, wow, okay, that's exactly the product I'm looking for. And it kind of makes it much, much more interesting and much more engaging for them. The other part as well is, you touched on the point there, with this technology, we've the ability to democratize that content creation. So before where, you know, kind of the mid to long tail would have been very much cut out of the picture 'cause it was just out of their reach, out of their means to be able to create that high quality content, that is now becoming more and more accessible. Criteo recently launched a self-service product called Criteo Gold, and this is like, really make it easier and easier for those advertisers who are very often, sometimes much smaller, to be able to create very engaging campaigns with really great creatives that will help to drive and grow their business. That's super, super important. And it's really, really enabled by platforms like Waymark, who's a great partner of ours.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.