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OhHello - Zach Kubin
45 Plays1 year ago
OhHello!
It's episode 74, and this "Hello" (an OhHello.io 🌞☕️ mentor), is coming in with all the dance angles ---> why? Because Zach Kubin is the co-founder of Adelaide Metrics ...and #attentionmetrics matter!
I ❤️ a good collab. I also love watching my kids read "Where's Waldo"; let that be crystal clear. Today, many digital ad campaigns suffer from an affliction known as Waldosis (sounds itchy and uncomfortable).
Before you start this video, please open a new tab and copy/paste the link below; so, together, we can find a cure for Waldosis 💉 (and get 🔥 swag)
🔎 https://www.adelaidemetrics.com/ohhello 🔍
In this episode, Zach Kubin talks to us about the history of Adelaide, the importance of measuring attention, and the mentors that have paved the way...
w/ shout-outs to David Sable, Carrie Frolich, Alice Dure, Emily Chard, Kaitlin Keaveney O'Brien, Jared Hand, Marc Guldimann, Diane deCordova
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🎧 pod.link/1666003514 to listen to the audio/subscribe
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Transcript
Introduction and Setting
00:00:04
Speaker
There we go. Oh, you gotta get into it. Oh, hello, Zach. Hello, Jeremy. How are you?
00:00:15
Speaker
Watching your dancing, I feel really good. It's a Friday. It's a Friday.
Introducing Zach Cuban
00:00:20
Speaker
Recording this on a Friday. You're recording this from your farmhouse out in Southwest Connecticut. And you just look exuberant right now. You've got this great smile on your face. Good. I'm excited to have you here. We've known each other for a long time. We've paralleled by growing up in this universe together. I have the pleasure of knowing who you are. Who am I speaking with?
00:00:42
Speaker
You got Zach, Zach Cuban. I'm gonna know how to introduce myself on this one. I think you and I have known each other for so long. It feels awkward when you have to introduce yourself to people that you've known for this amount of time, but currently co-founder and head of sales at Adelaide. So really excited to be here with you.
00:00:58
Speaker
I'm very familiar with Adelaide and I hope our viewers, our listeners are as well.
The Power of Kindness and Respect
00:01:03
Speaker
We'll get into that in a few minutes, but as we've both grown up into this industry of advertising, ad tech, marketing, SaaS, why don't you tell us a little bit of advice just that you would give your younger self and that you would give to your younger colleagues as a co-founder and someone who has been doing it for 20 years. Sure. You're old.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely feel a little bit older. Looking back on my career, which has been about 15, 18 years, there's a good story about when I was working at Group M, which is where I started my career. We had a junior planner work for me who has now become
00:01:38
Speaker
SVP or EVP or some senior person at publicis. And the advice that I would give myself, which is something I try to do is you never know who's going to be that important person at some point down the road. Be nice to people. Just be kind to people. Just assume that everybody at some point is somebody that you need help from or
00:01:57
Speaker
need advice from or need to call in a favor from. Obviously, if they think of you, when you make that phone call with somebody they want to help out, it just helps move things along a little bit faster. So definitely a big fan of paying it forward, however you want to define it, treating people with respect and you never know when you have to call in that favor. That says a lot. It's part of the Oh Hello mantra and we're excited to have you on the platform.
Zach's Career Journey
00:02:20
Speaker
Help us understand just watching you build Adelaide for the past several years. We were working on a partnership together probably four years ago when I was at Adobe and you were in the earlier days of building Adelaide. Help us just understand about your journey thus far.
00:02:37
Speaker
Well, I mean, you can start from the very beginning. I think there's some humor in that. I started my career at Y&R. I worked for a guy named David Sable, who still to this day is a mentor of mine. He built the very first digital advertising agency at WPP. They're literally building banners on websites. I was in college at the time, and I just had a front row seat to how that business got done. I parlayed that into a job where I was effectively working in a closet.
00:03:06
Speaker
like Milton from Office Space. I was expected to make call calls. I wasn't. I did that for two years. Didn't like it. A friend of mine said, you know, AT&T is this big piece of business. They're going to work at Group M. You should go take a job there. I interviewed with a woman named Carrie Froelich. She put me on Alice Duray's team. Shout out to Alice.
00:03:24
Speaker
who had to tolerate me for about four or five years. I worked on the AT&T business, got to really understand how media was bought and sold, had the good fortune of media guy named Sam
Founding Adelaide and Attention Metrics
00:03:34
Speaker
Duncan. Sam and I built this blog called What Happens in Media Planning? We were exposed to sales folks and all of the nonsense that they put out and how they try to get your attention and try to get you to go do stuff. So we started creating all these gifts, making fun of sales people. Lo and behold, here I am doing this.
00:03:53
Speaker
Went to a startup after that. Was recruited by a guy named Jared Hand, another one of my mentors. I know mentorship is a big part of the Oh Hello Platform. Worked for Jared for two years. And then, you know, the apocryphal Mark Goldman story. I met Mark and Diane at the tail end of my career at Onswipe. They came in for a meeting. Meeting went really poorly. We had no business to do together, but I think Mark and Diane said like, that Zach guy seems all right. Maybe we should try to hire him.
00:04:16
Speaker
I was out in Colorado, went skiing with Mark, randomly was there for a job interview. He thought I was there for the Digiday Summit. I wasn't, but happened to be there with my father skiing. And we had it off. And that was nine years ago on a chairlift. Mark was like, let me tell you about attention metrics. And I was, uh, I was all in at that point. That's amazing. You just said it yourself. Attention metrics. Yeah. What are attention metrics? How do you view attention metrics?
00:04:40
Speaker
So when Mark and I first started and Diane and Perry and our sort of co-founding group, the first thing that we built was a platform that we built creative for publishers that they could resell. It was intended to be politely interruptive. Basically the ad experience was you'd scroll an ad on the screen, people would spend time with it, they'd scroll it away. So we sold that format, went really well. And then we had this meeting with this guy named Eric Picard at MediaMath. And Mark and I sat in this meeting
00:05:08
Speaker
We had this idea for a media business where it could sell based on duration. We left the meeting and Erica is parting words where you can't do this as anything other than a managed service. You have to build a sales team. I walk out of that meeting with Mark and I said, this is terrible. We're going to have to hire a sales guy. And I had this experience at Group M dealing with all of these sales people. And Mark looks at me and he goes, what are you talking about, man? You're going to do that. And I was like, wait, what? And I was crest, I was crest on for like two weeks.
00:05:36
Speaker
Talking to my girlfriend, I'm like, I can do the sales thing. This is a terrible idea. We took the business at Parsec where we sell cost per second advertising and we turned it into a $10 million business in about three years, which is really exciting. We happened to get to this point where our clients at the time, Microsoft, were eager for us to pivot from a media business into a measurement business.
00:05:57
Speaker
And so we kind of took their advice. We sold the Parsec business to Cargo. We built Adelaide from the ground up as a measurement business. And so for us, what we're trying to do is just to help brands and agencies get a better understanding as to the quality of the media they buy, right? Putting a rating on it, making that rating super simple to understand and say, media that is rated higher by Adelaide with the AU metric typically drives better outcomes. And so for us, attention measurement
00:06:21
Speaker
is simply to replace a lot of the metrics that brands use in market like viewability and video completion rate and say there are better ways to measure the media you're buying and we think that we've got a pretty good solution for it.
Adelaide's Unique Market Approach
00:06:32
Speaker
So what specifically would you say is the the differentiator or what separates Adelaide from the herd? Is it the fact that you are just creating attention metrics, creating your own unit or is it help us understand?
00:06:45
Speaker
So there's a, I think a common misconception about attention measurement, right? Like we just want to measure the amount of time that people spend looking at content. That's an ingredient, but that's not the be all end all. My mom who works in finance, she was like, give me a really easy way to explain what you do to people. I said, okay, what we're doing, it's like money ball, but for smart media buyers.
00:07:10
Speaker
Right. Better data to make better decisions that typically drive better outcomes. And so there are an increasing number of companies out there that are focused on attention. They talk about attention and how we wanted to find that attention for us at Adelaide is simply the probability of attention on the media placement itself.
00:07:29
Speaker
and then help those brands and agencies buy better media as we've rated it and showing them that it's driving better outcomes. Our differentiators is just, we are relentless in showing the efficacy of the metric as it relates to outcomes. Thank you for explaining that. I think that's such a finessed, eloquent way of describing it, especially because it is so buzzy in our ecosystem and seeing just how much traction you guys are making
00:07:57
Speaker
With that, help us understand just how does it relate to the buy side from the sell side when it comes to attention metrics. Can you kind of explain the variance between the two?
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah, I just want to acknowledge that the terms finessed and eloquence are not normally associated with anything I'm involved in. So I really appreciate that. My wife will listen to the podcast and she'll be thrilled to hear this. So when you have the buy side and the sell side, the iteration of our business started by helping the buy side find arbitrage, finding opportunities for their dollar that would drive better results.
00:08:33
Speaker
And over time, we saw more and more publishers say like, hey, we're hearing about the satellite metric.
Buy Side vs. Sell Side: Attention Metrics
00:08:38
Speaker
We're hearing about AU. How do we rate? What is our rating? And for a long period of time, we didn't want to share that information with the buy side, excuse me, the sell side, because we wanted our buyers to find that arbitrage. We wanted them to take advantage of the inefficiency of the market.
00:08:54
Speaker
Over time, and I'd say over the last 12 months or so, we started bringing the sell side into our conversation and saying, hey, let us help you understand of the media that you're selling to your clients. Where's the good stuff and the bad stuff? Because what ultimately that allowed the market to do is to have a shared understanding of quality.
00:09:12
Speaker
Right now, there is a total dissonance in how the market assesses the value of one impression versus another. Viewability, video completion rate, ain't it? There's a meme that we've created, like Waldo is viewable, right? And that's sort of like an easy to explain joke that people can be like, yeah, that makes sense.
00:09:32
Speaker
And so what what our hope is is that overtime as more advertisers and more brands and agencies kinda get on board with Adelaide, that it gives publishers an opportunity to justify the price that they're selling their media for and create some shared understanding of the quality that can be transacted and.
00:09:49
Speaker
At that point, I think we've got a pretty good story as far as currency is concerned. Currency is a loaded word right now and got a lot of friends by the work of Nielsen and Comscore, but I think our definition of currency is really on the quality of the media that a seller represents. We want to be able to be that rating. I love the Waldoism approach and just the way that you're able to explain to both your mom and a seven or eight-year-old what you're doing because
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah, we've got their parents and our up and comers in this industry, and there's a lot of noise.
Growing Partnerships and Marketing Strategies
00:10:19
Speaker
And we, as the industry, see more news and press and buzz about Adelaide than a lot of other companies. And there's something to be said about the grit and hustle. Help us understand a little bit more about just some of these partnerships that you're most excited about, some of these partnerships that you're rolling your sleeves up and just diving in for. Yeah.
00:10:41
Speaker
I'll talk about how we got the partnerships, which I think is interesting. We have an incredible marketing department and I cannot say enough about how much easier it makes our job and the salespeople at Adelaide. But when we started, there were no partnerships, right? Our focus was solely on working with the agencies and what we found at agencies were you typically have a champion. You typically have one person that is ideologically aligned with what you're trying to do.
00:11:09
Speaker
You go in there, you talk about attention metrics. I remember I've told the story a number of times. We have this, there's this one woman who works at this hold though. And the very first conversation I had with her was, she's like, I believe in attention measurement, but prove it. We proved it. And then, you know, you're a hip hop fan. I'm a hip hop fan. Drake talks about his day ones. You know who those people are. That from the very, very beginning were there when you proved it out and you're like, all right, I'm going to open the door for you at this hold though. I'm going to make your life a lot easier. So when you get that level of
00:11:38
Speaker
partnership in place. And I know who each of those, each of those day ones are at each of the Holocaust that we work with. It makes those partnerships that we have that much easier to strike. And so we've got some really incredible partnerships coming up, specifically on the publisher side about some products that we're going to be releasing on the supply side and also on the on the just sort of the overall programmatic side. The excitement that we have as a result of those partnerships is a function of the great marketing and the great positioning we have in market and the support that we get from our clients in the buy side.
00:12:07
Speaker
You're working across hundreds of different advertisers.
Success Stories with AU Metrics
00:12:10
Speaker
And about it, call it a minute, minute and a half or so, tell us a little bit more about some of the learnings that you've seen over the past few years. Just spill the tea. Let us understand. There's so much that you're seeing. You and I have talked off the record. Give us a little bit more.
00:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, most brands, most agencies will accept that the way that they're judged with the metrics that they have for media are bad. Most brands will say, I judge the efficacy of my media on click-through rate, on video completion rate, on viewability.
00:12:45
Speaker
because I don't have anything else. And so when we make the case as to why AU might help them out, A, you're solving a problem, but B, more importantly, you're giving them ammunition to go to their senior leadership and say, hey, we're working with this company. It's as a result, giving us access to information that we didn't have previously. We're making better decisions with our media dollars and we're driving better performance.
00:13:09
Speaker
That performance for us, it doesn't matter. It can be brand lift. It can be conversion. It can be whatever that business objective is for us. That's the North star that we want to hold ourselves accountable to. And so the success that we've been able to show is however we're going to be judged, as long as we can articulate that to our stakeholders and talk about AU, the use case for AU is to show incremental effectiveness as measured by this. When we do that, everybody's really happy. And most of the time that happens, right? That is typically the way things go for us.
Conclusion and Future Encouragement
00:13:38
Speaker
Zach, this has been awesome. Really enjoyed just hearing about your journey and enjoy. We're so excited to have you on our platform. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for just telling us the story about Adelaide. It's just, it's fun watching you guys grow. You guys are crushing it. Continue to do well. Thank you, Zach. Thanks for me. Appreciate it, man. Good to see you. Yeah, that's how, that's how. Good grief. Where'd he go? Here we go. Thanks, everybody.