Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, Dustin, you’re right. Taking from Apple’s device monetization playbook, we’re seeing smart TV manufacturers capitalize on their massive customer footprint by extending addressable audiences reach to their customers. The great thing is they’re agnostic to media platforms and content providers. They don’t care if you subscribe or unsubscribe to one or any of the streaming platforms. Let’s take a company like LG Electronics, short for Life’s Good, and life is good for LG, as they have over 30 million US addressable TVs that extends out to 250 million plus targetable devices. Their website mentions, “Our proprietary smart TV data allows you to target viewers based on how customers interact with their TV. Our machine learning capabilities enable you to reach supercharged audiences, segments, and achieve better outcomes.”

Now, that sounds like something our listeners should take notice when it comes to media buying. And so, with that, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to today’s guest, AJ Kintner, VP of Sales at LG Ad Solutions. AJ, welcome to the program, and thank you for joining us. Why don’t you give our listeners a little snapshot of your background?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, no, I’m excited to be here, as what I was saying as my first searchable podcast maybe is a good definition. I started years ago, went to school for engineering, graduated, and couldn’t really find a job. So I found a startup called Avenue A/Razorfish, and who knew that it was going to be what it turned out to be. Ended up getting sold to Microsoft and kind of got the bug of startups. So been at companies like Right Media(Yahoo!), Invite Media(Google), DoubleVerify, AppNexus, and then made a switch over in late 2017 ’18 to data. Then I got a job over at Merkle and then did Merkle for a couple of years and did a stint over at Publicis working on their product called PMX Lift, which is an addressable CTV product that’s been doing gangbusters, so it’s been cool to see data really start to merge into both TV and DSPs, SSPs, anything that can accept it. So it’s been fun.

Kyle Hollaway:

So dive in a little bit on that background, the startup category, for a minute. What’s really drawn you into that environment?

AJ Kintner:

It was one of those things that you kind of stumble into. So my first job’s title was media engineer. I told my parents, I’m like, “Hey, I get to use my engineering degree.” It was literally a copy-and-paste engineer. I think I got so good at Control C, Control V. That’s all I did for two or three years of just trafficking. But really it was the environment, the fun, fast-paced of being around people who are always looking to, I don’t want to say break the mold, but just do things that seem right for their clients or the industry. And that was where I really found my niche.

We were talking at an offsite like, “What’s your superpower?” And it’s funny. Some people are like, “I don’t know.” My superpower is I can explain technical things to non-technical people or just non-technical ways. So thriving in the idea of a platform and putting into a PowerPoint presentation of what does this actually mean for a business outcome. I love that stuff. So I’ve always kind of been in that idea of tech startups in, of course, the internet have been super popular. I think the advertising space has calmed down a little bit. The amount of DSPs and SSPs is shrinking and not really growing. So we’ll see what it happens to in the next few years. But just being able to pivot in this world of always businesses that are being built and startups seem to be the place where people do it.

Dustin Raney:

Man, I love that. You just said that that’s a superhero power taking very technical things and breaking it down. Kyle and I being in the identity space, and as in this industry, it can be extremely complex and convoluted, misunderstood often. What does identity mean? So it’s kind of veered down that path a little bit as it relates to identity and AdTech and especially with what you’re doing at LG. Can you help maybe give us your thoughts on where you stand and where you play in the AdTech identity space? What are things that LG’s doing to connect your audiences back into, make them addressable, right?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, I’ll go back a little bit. I mean, there was a point where I thought a pixel was a person. I won’t tell you what year that ended, but we were brainwashed. If you put a pixel on a website, it represented a person visiting the site. Totally true. It’s a visitation. It’s a real person at the same time. But that pixel does not represent that person throughout their travel of the internet.

I think Amazon actually can dedupe your audiences you upload. So if you take an email database and you upload it to Amazon, they’ll tell you how many pixels that person has, how many device IDs that person has. And I think it was 19 to 1 in pixels and something like 8 to 1 in devices.

When you get into the offline to online transition of what is a person, we go into this idea of IDL and UIDs, which they represent them as proxies to people. Sure. But they don’t ever give you that caveat of how many IDLs or UIDs per person. That little piece of it is where it gets disconnected. And I’d say on the digital side of it, we’re still dealing with cookies and device IDs, which is pretty funny because iPhones haven’t had device IDs for, I don’t know, what five years now or seven years. So it’s really just Android IDs just to call a spade a spade.

And then, on the other side, we’re talking about physical addresses of households, IP addresses, things that we can still use in the US. And again, I’ll just kind of caveat the US for most of this because we have a little bit better, more relaxed rule sets. But I think in the CTV space, you get into the TV side with Nielsen and others who talk about reach and households and indexing and all that type of pieces of it, it fits in well of IP addresses and addressability. It looks very similar to what’s Acxiom and Merkle, and Epsilon have been doing in addressable mail and email for years.

Clean rooms are nothing new for direct mail. They’ve been doing that for 30 years. So I think it’s funny when we’re talking about these clean rooms, and there’s little groups inside these companies that have been doing clean rooms for 25 years. I think it’s just the combination of what does identity mean to, one, a client and then the company that’s actually selling it. And that’s what we’re trying to work through is what is CTV identity, or what is reach and frequency? What do all these metrics mean for CTV?

Kyle Hollaway:

So to follow on that, then, put you a little bit on the spot. So for LG, what do they mean for you in particular?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, it’s interesting. Our background, just for clarity of it, is LG bought Alphonso for their ACR data. Alphonso was a measurement company. The traditional company as, Alphonso, was shut down, but the ACR data is what was being used by LG across their TVs globally. The benefit of having a measurement company or a TV measurement company is they have stuff like household graphs and ability to understand what measurement is and frequency in reach and stuff like that. So for us being able to tell that TVs mounted to a wall, how many TVs are in the household, and then how many devices are actually in that household. So we own the TVs. We have the IP addresses that help us build out our own internal household graph, but it really just helps us internally create that footprint or that ability to see across our households and then create that addressability.

Kyle Hollaway:

An interesting question there, or certainly something that comes to mind for those that may be not as closely into the CTV ecosystem, is the reliability of IP address as that identifier or that currency within that ecosystem. What have you guys seen since you’re at ground zero dealing with it day to day? How does it look?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, I think this is the argument we run into quite often is how accurate is IP address? You could debate in a room for five days. Whether you talk to AT&T or whether you talk to a programmatic person, they’re always going to say something a little bit different. The one caveat is the ISPs that exist in our ecosystem try to keep the IP as consistent as possible. Yeah, they do turn over, but more accurately, people move, right? Transitions of life, they connect service, disconnect service. I think the multiple IP addresses we see in programmatic most likely come from mobile phones or devices that are popping into WiFi centers or airports or stuff like that. So at the household level, we don’t see IP addresses change as consistently do in programmatic or some other vertical like that.

When I was on the data side of it, we always had, I think, an average of 10 to 12% churn monthly. And this is the crazy thing, too, is the data set’s only updated monthly. In programmatic, we’re so used to this cookie being updated every minute, every second. And then you tell a person in programmatic, “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t worry. Our data’s only updated once a month.” They’re like, “Wait. Wait. What?” You can see that moment of confusion where they’re like, “Wait. How do you only update it at once?” Then you explain to them like, “People don’t move that often. They don’t disconnect their internet service that often. You don’t buy a new TV. Right?” So it’s a little bit of taking two worlds and mashing them together and seeing what it causes. It’s like a good experiment.

Kyle Hollaway:

I think it’s really interesting that while people think CTV and they’re in the digital realm, the reality to your point is the CTV really aligns more with our traditional postal address moves, right? Because, like you said, I don’t carry my TV around with me. I just move it when I move houses. And so it’s an interesting kind of bridge from more of the physical space to the digital as that device is more tied to the physical than some other devices may be. Interesting.

AJ Kintner:

A little funny side note, there used to be a company called Xumo, which was owned by Comcast. In the early days, they’d come in, and they’d pitch their OS. And for whatever reason, they’d bring their own TV. So they started by bringing a 42-inch TV in New York. And so my boss used to invite them on the hottest day of the year because they’d ride the subway with a 42-inch backpack. And they’d be sweaty, and then they’d set up the TV, and they’d do their presentation. And we’re like, “Why are you guys doing this?” But it was always the greatest meeting of seeing someone walk into a meeting with their own TV. It was awesome.

Dustin Raney:

That’s funny.

Kyle Hollaway:

That’s good.

AJ Kintner:

Yeah.

Dustin Raney:

We talked about IP address and the tie back to the rooftop and the household, but LG, are there other deterministic IDs that you guys leverage inside the graph, the concept of like an LG account holder? And are you offering, as far as your ad solutions, a more granular view through the context of an actual person?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, I’m going to talk to OEMs in general. I think OEMs across the board of, you have Samsung, Vizio, and us, who are currently in market selling ads against a footprint. If you combine us all together, we don’t have a high overlap. You have maybe a basement of the TV and your main TV. LG TVs, in general, we try to be the center of the household are OLEDs. If you haven’t seen one, they go up to 98 inches now. You can buy it at Best Buy. But it’s pretty impressive of the blacks and the darks and the colors and the lights and the brown, everything like that. It’s a very immersive TV. We see it’s more a little high-end, like main room than the other TVs in the household. But overall, our overlap’s low. So we always say, “OEMs, in general, should be bought together.” It’s a great complement.

I forgot what the last household count is, but say there’s 76 or 80 million households that have one of our TVs. That’s a pretty good reach number across the US population. So that’s where we see a lot of this addressability going across. It’s just not about us. It’s about the OEM structure. And then each one of us has our own flavor of things we add or things we don’t add. For example, Samsung has mobile devices, Samsung phones. LG sold off their mobile phones a while ago. But we all complement each other in our own ways.

I think in our households, one of the things we do see is the longer duration of people consuming media on our TVs because we tend to be the center of the house. So our FAST channels, which we can get into later, but those have increased greatly because it’s more integrated into the OS. That’s the other thing is the OS or our operating system is becoming more of the household hub. So that’s where people turn on. They go wherever they need to go, and ads are being integrated into that. And it’s much more of a better experience because you’re targeting people with better ads based off of it.

So we don’t currently go into logging into the LG TV. Now, Vizio is creating their own hub, which just came out, I think, last month. Who knows how that works, but I know one of the biggest pet peeves we get is, “Why do I have to keep logging into all my apps? Can’t you just figure that out?” And I was like, “We don’t own the apps.” And it’s this whole, I won’t say much about it, but the carriage agreements of our industry just don’t exist. And this is the interesting thing of if you go back to cable TV and cable boxes and over the airwaves, that’s 60 years ago. It took them a long time to figure out the two minutes of the 16. That was a battle of carriage agreements. And carriage agreements still in that linear space are brutal. So we haven’t even gotten into that part, but it’s going to be an interesting couple of years to see how that works out.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. You bring up a good potential business opportunity in use-case and identity, and IAM, of solving for the complexity of all the apps inside of your ecosystem and the hub and not having to log in across every single one of them and understand your passwords and things like that, which could then tie over the entirety of the manufacturers. So who knows? Maybe that starts to consolidate a little bit more.

AJ Kintner:

If you look at what Google’s doing for SSO across single sign-ins, I wouldn’t be surprised if you started to see some of those big walled gardens start to broach into this. You saw the FOMO that Google has of TVs of just buying the rights to the RedZone. That was a big move, but it puts them smack dab in the middle of TV, especially sports, which is what everyone’s talking about and trying to buy. So crazy moves for the walled gardens, but it makes sense for their business model.

Kyle Hollaway:

Talking about the apps in your ecosystem and OS, talking about the ability to identify individuals in that ecosystem, do you guys have much data sharing going on between that? Or do you view the apps as being completely encapsulated within their own environment, and you’re just kind of hosting it, and they’re sitting on top of that?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah. Where we currently stand right now is the apps are their own entity. Again, back to the carriage agreement statements that could change. I think it’s conversations with different partners, but we treat them as their own walled gardens. We respect their privacy, and that is the symbiotic relationship we have between us and them. We’re not going to disclose anything of what Netflix does on our TVs that could ever hurt their ability to be on our TV. So it’s a great partnership that’ll take a couple of years to evolve, but with Netflix doing both AVOD, SVOD, I think there’ll be a lot more conversations between us. Because here’s the crazy thing, we’ve been so focused on TV, just in like a US sense. You have ABC, NBC, CBS that ruled their airways for so long, and every city internationally, every country has their own three channels, and it’s always been that way.

And then Covid happened or right before Covid, and it all changed. So now every country has the same competitors of an Amazon or YouTube, HBO Max, Disney plus. There’s no isolation of TV channels. It’s really TV’s gone global, and it happened so quick. We all got locked in in February, and we either binged the heck out of Friends or Seinfeld or, if you’re really desperate, Law and Order of the 21 seasons, but that was the content we had to live on for a full year. And so it really changed the behavior of consumers, and the industry just wasn’t ready for it.

So just on our TVs, over half of our TVs are streaming only, cord cutters. And I will tell you the budgets have not shifted to represent that. Now, they’re definitely shifting in some degrees. So the 30-plus billion you showed represents that it should be allocated directly towards the viewership, but it’s slow. A lot of that is legacy linear, who’s introducing streaming rights. So the HBO Maxes and Paramounts and Peacocks. They’re getting a lot of that lion’s share, which is great because it’s great content, but it’ll get distributed amongst other partners over the years.

Kyle Hollaway:

Do just a little selfless plug here to us and our listeners on LG Ads Solutions. What’s your primary offering that you’re really honed in on right now regarding ads within that LG ecosystem?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah. The harmless plug will be that we just finished our integration with Acxiom, which we’re excited about because the credit bureaus of the United States they have a good footprint of what households exist. And then partnering with Acxiom to complete that identity match in an offline privacy-compliant way allows us to mirror stuff like in an old-school direct-mail type of approach where you have an audience, first-party, third-party, whatever you want, and you can build it in the tools, and you can send it to a partner like LG, and we can run ads against it. And then, we can deliver back the exposure data in a clean room, and you can do some measurement. That idea which has existed in direct mail, is completely plausible today. It just takes a lot of people to get involved and a lot of conversations, and hopefully, we can come out with a test here or there. It’s not that easy. But it sounds pretty easy, so let’s give it a shot.

Dustin Raney:

When you say run ads, it’s pretty easy to grasp with a content creator. They’re showing a commercial or whatever in the context of their application. Where are you deploying those ads, and through what kind of platform?

AJ Kintner:

We deploy them into the cloud. Just kidding. Cloud is the solution for everything.

Dustin Raney:

Oh, yes.

AJ Kintner:

It’s been a growing ecosystem. We have the operating system, which has some integrated ads into it. We have our app partners, who we share inventory access to. So we do have that symbiotic relationship with them. And then we have our FAST channels, which are the growing free-ad-supported and streaming part of our business, which most of the OEMs you log on and you have the free. Channel Plus is ours. You can log on and watch it. So I have my favorite, the Surfing Channel. I think that’s a good, always-on. Bloomberg TV, I think, is a good solid. I’ll have that on once in a while just to watch some of the ads and content.

Dustin Raney:

Mine’s the Fireplace Channel. It’s just a crinkling fireplace.

AJ Kintner:

You like the Yule Log?

Dustin Raney:

Yep.

AJ Kintner:

I always wonder where the ads are on that. That’s what I still don’t understand.

Dustin Raney:

They’re actually a little bit more disruptive when you’re enjoying a peaceful fireplace experience.

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, that’s true. I have seen Yule Logs that don’t have ads, which I always get confused where they exist. But yeah, so I think it’s just those three main channels are where we see a majority of it. And based off the advertiser, they’ll usually flock to one source. So media entertainment will buy more native ads because they want you to watch in-stream and deep link into the app itself, where native ads for general market, we’ll call it, are just normal. They see them as static. Why would I buy a static ad? You have a 77-inch TV, and you have an ad that’s the size of the full TV. Why wouldn’t you want to buy that? That’s like a mini billboard in the household.

So, I think those are the three places, but it’s always going to change how we do it. The funny thing is ACR, which is the active content recognition that we have of just watching what people watch, the shows, and the genres just to keep the generic idea of it, to better serve ads, is the whole point of it. But the interesting thing about that is, if there is data being collected from the TV being on, it’s actually a better fraud detection in some way than anything. So running online video ads on a mobile phone because you’re sitting there watching TV, and you’re then consuming media across your mobile device is actually a really good connection. The data itself can help allocate a better online video strategy, which we haven’t really tapped into yet, and then we don’t really push it, but if you’re watching TV, it kind of makes sense that you have a mobile phone in your hand. So we’ll see if that gains traction over the next few years.

Kyle Hollaway:

In that, just talking about across maybe multiple types of devices and then in even broader just CTV as a whole, this concept of inventory and partnering across and being able to achieve that scale and reach there, one of your partners at LG Ad Solutions, I think Serge Matta, Head of Commercial, had written an article about, rather than a walled garden, doing a gated community. What were your thoughts on that?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think the walled garden approach using one of the search companies that they control the data. You have to bring your data. They control it all. They can do all that. It creates a little bit of, I don’t know, mistrust or maybe with some advertisers who are competitive. For example, if you’re a CPG client, do you want to give all your data to Amazon? Right? That’s a question that comes up a lot. Is data worth anything to a client? And the answer is always yes. Your data is your consumers, and I think that’s why you have head of data at clients to tell teams, “No, don’t do that. You should not put our data there.” Right? It’s a data protection because if you’re a CPG brand or a QSR and you know everyone that goes and visits your restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, that’s proprietary information.

So giving that to a walled garden is probably not the best idea. They could definitely turn around and sell you ads in that market at a higher price. Now, who knows what they do, but the idea around the gated community is it should be a partnership where you say, “Hey, we have our data. You have your data. Let’s just figure out a place in the middle that we can sync it. We don’t really want it. You can keep it, but it allows us to create for a better targeting or better advertising experience.” And I think that’s the whole premise of what Acxiom’s always done in the backbone of whether it’s direct mail, email, or any other product. It is the data community. So, for example, Acxiom’s data is accessible, but there’s rule sets and data sets that have to be put in place before you can gain access to it. And I think that’s what Serge’s just was. We should just have a better combination to make sure everyone’s playing nicely, and we’re all in agreeance, and that’s kind of what the gated community is.

Kyle Hollaway:

Do you feel like the players within CTV, including the other device manufacturers, is there an open dialogue going there that feels like a direction it’s going, or?

AJ Kintner:

Having been on the other side of the fence? I felt that there was a great relationship that OEMs had with data partners and agencies to some degree. So it is definitely getting better. I think it’s a combination of advertiser, data partner, and agency coming together to have that symbiotic relationship again, of we all work together for one view. And that’s kind of the whole gated community. You get together, define the rules, and it all works, I think is the idea or hope we get to.

Dustin Raney:

Well, Kyle, do you think it’s time for the lightning round?

Kyle Hollaway:

Absolutely. Let’s go for it.

Dustin Raney:

Let’s put AJ through it. Okay. AJ, lightning round. Linear and streaming TV, arch enemies, or dynamic duo?

AJ Kintner:

Dynamic duo. You can’t have it one without the other.

Dustin Raney:

All right.

Kyle Hollaway:

There you go. All right. Well, you mentioned FASTs earlier, the free ad-supported streaming TV channels. What are they in particular and why are they the next big thing?

AJ Kintner:

My personal opinion is I see them as the long-form of YouTube. If I want to go watch hours of golf or skateboarding or snowboarding, you can find a FAST channel for that and just turn it on. That’s why I like the Surfing Channel. It’s just great waves around the world for hours on end. So that’s why I see FAST being a niche for everyone out there. Cat memes? We got them. FAST channels got tons of cats and dogs for 24 hours a day.

Kyle Hollaway:

That’s great.

Dustin Raney:

So I think you’ve already answered the next question, so I’m going to change this on you midstream. Instead of sport of choice, which I’m guessing it’s surfing.

AJ Kintner:

I live in New York, so surfing in New York’s a little bit harder.

Dustin Raney:

Oh, okay. Yeah. Never mind.

AJ Kintner:

It is one of those aspirational pieces that I’ve definitely done over my life of Costa Rica, Hawaii, getting my butt handed to me by the sand. But I do try to stick to the mountains or anything that’s in those senses of just outdoorsy, I guess, is the best way to explain it. Cool fact, my cousin is a gold medal winner in BMX and downhill mountain biking.

Kyle Hollaway:

Oh, wow.

Dustin Raney:

No way. That’s awesome.

AJ Kintner:

She’s like 10 times cooler than me. I like to follow her a lot.

Dustin Raney:

I was going to change it. I’m going to go ahead and ask you this question anyway. So ’80s, ’90s, what’s your music genre?

AJ Kintner:

So I grew up in Seattle.

Dustin Raney:

Oh, sweet.

AJ Kintner:

I sold Chris Cornell a wakeboard once. I met him five, six times out in the market. My cousin used to be a grunge singer, too, so I met him and his brother at one of their concerts. I’m just going to have to go with ’90s grunge Seattle.

Dustin Raney:

Very cool. Glad I asked.

AJ Kintner:

It’s a time and era I lived in, and it was pretty awesome.

Dustin Raney:

All right. Okay, last of our lightning ground. What’s better March Madness or the NBA Playoffs?

AJ Kintner:

March Madness, hands down. There was one time where my wife, she’s a UNC. I’m a UW grad. We played in the Final Four one year. I think it was like, I don’t know, 2012 or something. And we sat in our living room and didn’t talk the whole game because we’re just so angry at each other.

Dustin Raney:

Nice.

AJ Kintner:

So anytime you can do that, and we ended up losing, which happens, but it’s fun. It was a tough show. We had a good game. But yeah, just that emotion you can evoke. Go into any bar in Manhattan that whole week or month is just so much fun. So much fun.

Dustin Raney:

Agree. Totally agree.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, me too. I’m with you there on the March Madness stuff.

AJ Kintner:

We try to sell it as much as possible. Streaming sports, it’s a big advantage here.

Kyle Hollaway:

Now, is there a FAST that’s just a particular? Like there’s surfing or whatnot, is there just a particular?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, funny enough. We have an NCAA D2. I think we stream all of the national events across, lacrosse, field hockey, water polo. We have it actually as the FAST channel on our TV.

Kyle Hollaway:

That’s cool.

AJ Kintner:

So it’s NCAA on ours. But yeah, I think the sports rights are so out of control. And I forgot how much they paid for the Red Ticket, but these are type of things. But I see stuff like Sling. They have a channel on their TV where you just click on it’ll tell you where the actual football game’s playing that weekend, whether it’s college or sports. That’s the simplicity we need. There’s no more TV guide.

Kyle Hollaway:

Sure. Yeah.

AJ Kintner:

It’s so crazy. We need a TV guide of where to stream stuff. How many times do you go down the rabbit hole? You’re trying to watch a movie, and you’re like 10 minutes in, and you still can’t find that movie. It’s like, “What app is it on?”

Dustin Raney:

That’s true. With the proliferation of all the pluses, we need some kind of a central guide, don’t we?

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, and it’s funny. If you’re ever at a dinner and you ask, “What do people use?” You’ll get five suggestions of websites you can go to that can help tell you. It’s a whole subgenre that you search for the actual devices that show where it’s streaming or free.

Kyle Hollaway:

I know. My wife and I have talked about that because every one of those apps has My List, where you can bookmark something, and it’s like, “Can I get a list of my lists so that I know actually which list to look on?” Because then I’m like, “What list was that?” Yeah, you’re bouncing through a bunch of different apps, so there you go.

AJ Kintner:

It’s always around the holidays when you’re looking for some.

Kyle Hollaway:

But hey, it’s always on the same device. It’s my TV.

AJ Kintner:

That’s right.

Kyle Hollaway:

Maybe you guys could help figure that out for us.

AJ Kintner:

Well, we do have some streaming movies now, which is interesting, of OEMs actually having video on demand. So funny enough, a lot of the Christmas Vacation and Home Alones, actually, I don’t know if Home Alone’s there, but a few content is on the TV, and you can stream it directly from the TV, which is an interesting idea now.

Dustin Raney:

Expanding that coverage.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yep. You got a whole new area.

AJ Kintner:

It’s all changing really quickly.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah.

Kyle Hollaway:

All right. Well, we are at time. We’re going to need to wrap up. So we will give you our final question here, which is, what has you most excited about the next 12 months?

AJ Kintner:

Oh, gosh. Summer. No, I’m just kidding. I think the most exciting thing that’s coming up geeky-wise is the Upfronts. The Upfronts, I’m a big supporter of it because it allows people to have the conversations of how to allocate money. The logistics of how it gets allocated is what everyone’s arguing about. But the Upfronts allow us to have this conversation and say, “Hey, we want to keep and buy TV this way. It’s going to take us a little while to figure it out and how to measure it. That’s still a TBD, secondary currencies, all these other little shenanigans.” But I think it’s super interesting going into it. Because as you’re watching, who’s canceling the Upfronts? Are they going to be in person? Is the NewFronts happening? Are other Upfronts? No one really knows. So it’s almost like a game show in some ways of where’s it going to be? Who’s going to be hosting it, and what will it look like?

Dustin Raney:

Very cool. Well, AJ, thanks so much for joining us today. This was both informative and a very fun conversation, and I know that our listeners are going to take a lot from this. So for all of our listeners, you can find all of our Real Identity podcast episodes at acxiom.com/realtalk. And I think this is a wrap. We’ll definitely want to see you on the next episode.

AJ Kintner:

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was good to do my first podcast and send it to my parents. They’ll like that.

Kyle Hollaway:

There you go. Awesome. All right, thank you very much.

AJ Kintner:

Thanks, guys.