Jon DeGennaro:

Thank you guys. Thank you guys for having me. Yeah, I don’t know if I could live up to The Dark Night, but I’ll try.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, so over the years we’ve had the chance to rub shoulders at various industry conferences. It’s great to finally have you on the show. If you don’t mind, start by giving our listeners a snapshot of your background and what brought you to this point in your career.

Jon DeGennaro:

I’ll try to be as succinct but comprehensive as possible. I have done nothing but digital media sales and business development since I got out of college. I started at a company called about.com, which was one of the original portals. It had 600+ human led guide sites about every topic under the sun from gardening.about.com to horrormovies.about.com. And I worked for their pay-per-click division called Springs, which was a company that pioneered putting sponsored links within content pages and as the brand advertising side of the business was dying out during that dot com boom or tail end of it, the performance division, our division, was the growth engine there and we provided performance that was almost as good as keyword search, which wasn’t completely dominated by Google at the time, but they were definitely one of the players. Overture and Yahoo were the other one.

And we had a great run putting these sponsored links listings within all of the about.com guide sites as well as all the prime media sites, which were Car and Driver and newyorkmagazine.com, you name it. And three and a half years later, Google actually bought Springs and it became Google AdSense, some early 2000 history there. From there I went on to really maybe a path less traveled. I went into the ad network space and behavioral targeting space. I always liked what that could provide in terms of scale and driving a real horizontal solution that anyone can take part in. Fast-forward to 2008 where I went to work for a company called Turn, which was one of the original DSPs but was not called a DSP when I joined there. It was a performance-based ad network that was doing bid-based pricing, very similar to search, and it was really just Turn and Right Media who were doing DCPM pricing back then.

And they also had an idea of building these private ad networks for agencies and for brands and for publishers, and that morphed into what became Agency Trading Desks and the self-service DSP world and six years of just a really great run there where we built a category… some of my best friends and some of the work I’m most proud of come from my days at Turn. This isn’t a long enough podcast to talk about the history of Turn, but you might want to do one of those one day. And then I jumped into the world of identity and have been part of it ever since with Tapad, helping to build their early data licensing business. I spent a couple of years at AOL helping them launch their AOL ONE DSP product in the self-service world and then over to Drawbridge where I helped them rebuild the East Coast Media team and then do a pretty hard pivot out of media and into the data world, which led to the sale to LinkedIn.

And that deal closed and the next day, I decided to come on over to LiveIntent and try this identity thing with email at the very root core of it and a lot of email, at that.

Dustin Raney:

Love when you guys come on the show and we just get a history lesson and I love that, see, and it’s such a dynamic market. Jon, thanks for that. And yeah, we’ll definitely take you up on the follow on podcasts around the history of Turn and such because it’s such a rich subject matter that I know we could go on for a long time. Now, LiveIntent, email, the State of the Union, where we are today. Why don’t you give us a little background also just on LiveIntent because you guys have been evolving and pivoting a bit yourselves over the last several years. Talk us through that.

Jon DeGennaro:

We think the core business, still very much the strength of everything we do. We are in its simplest form a ad server for email. We don’t send a single email ourselves. We are just the ad server for which a publisher would put our tag in their email template, and upon open is when an ad renders a publisher can do direct sold and sell those ads themselves or they could tap into our demand, which is a pretty big demand pocket of various programmatic, various in-house T2C brands with always on budgets. It’s very performance based. And on the publisher side, we’ve taken what’s been a cost center for them and turned it into a revenue center and they love us for it and we love them for it. And that is a business that continues to grow.

The breadth of different publishers who are now getting involved in monetizing their email has also only grown. And what actually happened throughout the course of time is we needed folks to be able to bid on hashed emails as a core identifier, and there are no cookies and no JavaScript in email so it is quite challenging to serve a behaviorally-targeted dynamic ad in email, as rudimentary as it sounds. And if you went to Google and said, “I got a billion newsletters that I send a day, can you put an ad in it?” They’d say, “Go call LiveIntent,” because they don’t want the headache of new JavaScript. And so we’re happy to have a pioneered and continue to innovate in an area that Google has not wanted to play, but to provide our service, we need our tag in the email template. We need our JavaScript on the website pages so that we could send the last known third party cookie to the DSPs for them to be able to bid on this inventory.

What we actually got was a first party cookie connected to hashed emails, which allowed us to provide even more resolution to our publishers and our brands, and the byproduct being a pretty sizable identity graph that has 900 million active hashed emails in it. It has 500 million authentications a day that tie the inbox to the web. And so the core business, very much intact, very much growing, as I said, at a very steady clip. And the pivot that you mentioned is we have been the root source for linkage for a number of years and we decided wanted to build a bunch of derivative products on the audience and data side of things.

And we have numerous products around being able to resolve site visitors, to provide wholesale linkage, and to provide identity spines. And then probably the biggest thing to talk about as of late has been we wanted to take the power of targeting hashed email and bringing it to the web. We were 10 years too late to build the web SSP, so we went the route of putting our JavaScript into an identity module within pre-bid and have been going to market with a service called the publisher-connected ID whereby we’re helping publishers monetize Safari and Firefox, and some publishers are seeing 200%, 300% returns in Safari and Firefox. So that has been a up-and-to-the right business over the past six months given the countdown has begun. Yeah, I’ll stop there, but that’s the long and short on where LiveIntent’s at.

Dustin Raney:

Man. A lot to unpack there, but I’m going to take it fun real quick and just say that Bruce Almighty is one of my favorite funny movies and in the movie it’s [inaudible 00:08:20]… it was back before the digital age and he’s sitting there solving everybody’s problems through email, playing off Yahoo or whatever, and it’s just crazy to see email in 2024 and beyond come back as the proxy behind digital advertising, of what was leveraged as a marketing signal or touch point now is becoming the center of attention.

Jon DeGennaro:

Yeah, without question. Email is definitely the center of the universe yet again, and I remember that scene from Bruce Almighty. Our CO Matt Kaiser always says that, “I’ve the same email address for 20 years.” And so it has been so core to our identities as humans for so long and people who knew me 20 years ago can catch me still on that same email address. You catch me on the same phone number as well. But I think without question, the importance of email has definitely come back into the frame and people are leaning in even further if they were already involved and folks who didn’t think about email have been thinking about it and thinking about it pretty quickly.

Dustin Raney:

Regarding email and just trends, just talk to some… I’ve got kids, they’re varying ages. Email hasn’t really been a primary vehicle for them on communication, but certainly I see as they have aged out of the house and into business, it is picking up. Do you guys see any specific trends around generational aspects of email use?

Jon DeGennaro:

That’s definitely a true statement. I think there’s always going to be… I have a 12-year-old daughter who has not embraced email yet as well. I don’t [inaudible 00:10:01] as much just at a macro, statistical view at LiveIntent, but I would say that those trends are probably quite similar in our exchange as well is that as you get into the high school years and into college, email becomes a bit more part of your everyday mechanism. Yeah, for sure. The younger generation, the tweens where my daughter is and younger than that obviously, are not embracing email like the rest of us are, but they soon will be. They soon will be.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. Do you see with publishers and such now with cookie deprecation taking off and a lot of discussion around first party data at the publisher level, their first party, putting up… whether it’s paywalls or other types of mechanisms to capture signals and those signals tend to largely be an email address, right?

Jon DeGennaro:

Without question. So I think across the board, there are going to be a lot of ways in which folks are going to account for cookie loss, but building up your own troves of first party data are core, right? No matter what framework or solutions you adopt, that first party data that is earned is much more powerful whether it’s website visits, email captures, other data you could append to your current databases. Folks are definitely leaning in there. So I think they’ve been leaning on us as well as a partner to help drive their first party data captures, whether that is a traditional publisher who actually acts as an advertiser and wants us to help them drive more registrations or newsletters, and then on the flip side of it, advertisers are starting to act like publishers and really using what they have by way of email databases as a vehicle to speak to their customers, even as an advertising vehicle for other brands. But without question, it is fundamentally and crucially important that everyone start to build up if they haven’t already their first party data troves.

Dustin Raney:

So you have companies like Trade Desk leading the charge around Universal ID 2.0. One, do you guys play with UID 2.0 or interoperate it with them, or what are your thoughts there on that kind of more federated…

Jon DeGennaro:

Absolutely. So we are, and I don’t know if I mentioned earlier, but we have our own ID called the non ID creatively named because it is not a manmade ID, but it is just a salted hashed email address which is the same as the UID 2.0. Our goal in having our ID in the [inaudible 00:12:44] wasn’t to be the one ID to rule them all, but to act as a bridge identifier to the ecosystem of IDs, whether it’s the UID 2.0, the Ramp ID, agency IDs, you name it.

The value we could provide is being able to tell you this is the last known hashed email that authenticated on this browser. And so we not only proliferate our ID but proliferate the UID 2.0 within our module, as it is very closely aligned with the spirit of what they’re doing there. And our publishers absolutely are very excited about what the UID 2.0 can provide them by way of demand. And so our goal is not to stop there, but to also add in all of the other IDs that are in demand in the ecosystem because in a world where third party cookies are gone, the slack will absolutely be made up by alternative IDs.

Dustin Raney:

So a question there. Riffing off of all of this, Apple’s hide my email feature. How do you guys see that? Are you seeing any impact to that? Obviously it’s a paid service because you have to have a iCloud+ subscription and whatnot. Are you seeing any impact there or does it really not matter?

Jon DeGennaro:

So absolutely, for LiveIntent a bit more acutely than probably others because mail privacy protection essentially proxies the inbox of Apple users. We have seen some challenges by way of knowing were impressions actually served or not? We’ve done a lot to combat that and that’s why we’re very much a performance-driven ad exchange. If people are not clicking on ads and converting, then we are not going to track the performance that we have in the same way as the traditional display web world where I don’t know if cookie bombing is still in vogue, but we’ve never been able to take part in that.

We’ve been able to really show… we served an ad for Domino’s and then two days later my email address is in the Domino’s database. And so mail privacy protection, to answer your question there, has definitely us, but quite fortunately for us is we have our click tag within the email templates. So we capture authentications that link out from the inbox not only if it’s a ad within that email, but any of the content links. So we see half a billion authentications a day, which is quite sizable, which also helps us combat some of those challenges.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, that’s a great call out because for a digital engagement in the browser, hide my email might be used, but obviously if you click on something and you’re signing up for a Domino’s coupon, you’re not going to give them a hide my email entry there, right? You’re probably going to give them a real one because you want to make sure you’re getting that coupon. There’s a value exchange directly there.

Jon DeGennaro:

Yeah, that’s been the great thing for us as well. And we have a lot of filters. We go through a lot of processes to make sure that the emails that are getting sent out aren’t dead emails or burner accounts and ultimately will hurt not only our publisher’s deliverability, but LiveIntent as a whole. If our tag is within 2,500+ publishers, we take that really seriously for sure.

Dustin Raney:

Okay. And let’s go beyond email a little bit now. A lot of people engage publishers, brands, they don’t authenticate. I guess one of the things that everyone fears with cookie deprecation is that you’re losing this ability to personalize experiences via resolution at more of a device level than a personal level and leveraging maybe more probabilistic capabilities or an IP address, for instance, to get back to some form of resolution. How does LiveIntent play in that space and what are your thoughts on the future of leveraging things like IP?

Jon DeGennaro:

I’ve worked for two probabilistic identity companies, so I’m a proponent of probabilistic identity. I don’t think deterministic alone gets the scale and gets everyone where they want to be and need to be. So for us, we see all of these authentications today, but also have a massive first party cookie consortium of sorts. We can take a look back and say, “What was the last hashed email tied to this browser?” and give you a very accurate high probability view of it was jon.degennaro@gmail. Authentications have variations based on who you’re talking to. For us, let’s say there’s this authenticated probabilistic that we do that gives us the additional scale needed. But IP in general, IP is still here and I don’t know how long it’ll be here. Google will also deprecate that.

Given the timeline with cookies, I don’t know how long IP will take, but I do very much see IP as a key mechanism, especially as cookies go away, as we start to look more at the household level. Individuals won’t go away, but I think household becomes all the more important and IP is still the main identifier at a household level and pretty powerful for us is we see probably about 105 to 110 million household IPs where 400 million hashed emails authenticate against. So that’s very powerful signal which we can then triangulate to CTVs obviously and all of the other devices in the household. So I think IP will remain as a core identifier. For how long? I don’t know, but even at an MSO or a cable provider, they have a big part in providing IPs. So can Google proxy the browser and give rid of IPs? Sure. But it’ll still exist minimally at the set top box and the CTV level.

Dustin Raney:

Just another example of how interconnected ultimately the ecosystem is, right? We talk about the channels and multichannels and each one does have a particular business structure and mechanisms, but we’re all interconnected ultimately, and a brand, when trying to reach a consumer with a particular message and engagement, they need to be able to do that across each of those. And I love how you guys are taking multiple types of signals, primarily starting with email as that foundation, but then being able to associate it like to an IP address for CTV. So being able to move from email, too, that’s certainly a powerful capability.

Jon DeGennaro:

Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, I’d love your guys’ thoughts on it. Does IP become all the more relevant and powerful when cookies are gone, or how do you guys view the use of IP but then the possible phase out of it as well?

Dustin Raney:

I think it’s going to be interesting for sure. If you got to think about the spirit in which things like CCBA, GDPR are being written in all these other states that are coming on board to protect the consumer, ultimately at the end of the day, I think we… Kyle and I often talk about the value exchange. Ultimately, there’s got to be some balance between what the consumer’s trying to do, which is either read really good content or buy really cool products. As they’re engaging across the open internet, they don’t really want their experience massively disrupted and having to remember passwords and paywalls and everything everywhere, and it’s going to be hard to enable an experience like that without some of these device IDs staying whole.

If everything’s blocked, it’s going to require some pretty intense memory, more fragmented and it seems to be getting more fragmented every day, the user experience. So that’s got to be solved for. And then I do think that you alluded to what maybe Google or Safari’s view would be compared to the open internet that publishers view or a cable company, and I do think that there’s probably some antitrust placement in that arena to where if you try to take certain things away, that might become advantageous for a walled garden because it gives them more power because they’ve got so much deterministic data, it starts to become a challenge for them. So I do believe that it’d be pretty hard to just completely obliterate or obfuscate the IP address. Kyle?

Kyle Holloway:

Yeah. I’m with you and as Jon pointed out, outside of the browser, the IP infrastructure of the internet is how it functions, so it’s not that they’re just some ubiquitous capability that just says, “Oh, nobody can have an IP address anymore,” then nothing talks on the internet anymore, and even the move from IPv4 to IPv6, which is interesting enough, brings an extra layer of specificity, the ability to get down to specific devices and build out even a richer ecosystem, that’s not going to change. Now how from going from the consumer experience to that more networking enablement I think is where the questions lie, and I think there will be regulatory pressure on how that data is managed with the knowledge that, yes, there’s a functional aspect that it has to be there to enable just communications as a whole and not just talking about ads, just talking about moving from one computer to another system, and then you start looking at the world on how it functions with automotive embracing the connected car, you’re talking about everything going on in the CTV space and all the screens that are now available to us…

We’re even talking to a partner in out of home, addressable billboards, because all the billboards are transitioning to an electronic format. All of that has to have mechanisms to work. And so Google just can’t come in and just be like, “Nobody can work anymore.” But how it interacts with the consumer and on the browser, my ultimate question’s just going to be, one, at what point does a consumer voice start to countermand some of the altruistic stance that Google and Apple have taken of, “It’s our job to protect the consumer?” And at some point the consumer’s going to be like, “No, it’s okay. I’ll protect… I’m self-sufficient,” and being able to make some decisions. And so that’ll be interesting if there’s ever a swell from the populace to push back against some of the decisions the walled gardens are making.

And similarly, just as government regulatory views come into there, I think you’re right that there’s some anti-competitive nature to some of the behaviors that are causing some of these challenges, and we’re seeing that in the EU already where the ICO and the UK is already pushing back against deprecation of third party cookies simply from not a privacy perspective, but from an anti-competitive stance. They’re requiring some additional investigation around that. So that was a long-winded way to say, yeah, you’re right. I think IP is going to be around for a while. I know emails are going to be around for a while, and even within the mechanisms, this aspect of cooperating together, interestingly enough, we all… “Oh, third-party cookies stinks. That’s just how the world works.”

As that’s going away, it’s actually creating opportunity for more collaboration, and I think that’s been a healthy move for the business, our industry as a whole. And in that, I think we’re seeing some of these other mechanisms come into play where people are like, “Hey, we actually do have other tools to use, and so let’s collaborate and use those and not just wholesale have a dependence on something that has some challenges.”

Jon DeGennaro:

Yeah, I think about consumer consent and is… I’m opting in for you to use my cookies to target me. I start clicking no all the time, I’m going to hit some paywalls. And so I think folks are going to figure out that cookies are not public enemy number one, but they’re actually pretty helpful in remembering my passwords, giving me free content, and the value exchange is going to be clearer and clearer. And I do think… I don’t know what, and it’d be great to know from you guys, we learned from GDPR. I do think uniformity and there should be a national stance on consumer consent in terms of opt-in, because it is very fragmented state by state. How realistic do you think that becomes uniform nationally? How do you guys think about that one?

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, that’s a tough one. Certainly Acxiom as an entity and Dean having a chief privacy officer and having instantiated that within the industry early on, we agree because one of the biggest challenges, even going back to direct mail days, was when you started seeing a fragmentation across every state having their own regulations around some of these advertising mechanisms, coalescing that and saying, “Hey, rather than putting the burden onto the brand, where now they have to manage 50 different rules and how they’re instantiated in impact, we need to come around some kind of national agreement on that,” and that even at our holding company level, IPG with a opinion around it, that would be a good direction to go. That said, looking at Washington and the dysfunction in Washington, I think it’s going to take us a little while to get there. I just think there’s such a polarity of our current government that would be defining those regulations. It’s going to be hard to coalesce around kind of a unified view of that.

Jon DeGennaro:

I think if we get to a even playing field on consent nationally and cookies finally go away, I don’t know what everyone’s going to talk about, but I do think at that point-

Dustin Raney:

We won’t have a podcast anymore. What am I going to do?

Jon DeGennaro:

I think at least at that point, to your comment before, I think true innovation is actually going to show its face. Companies that are really innovating are going to rise at the top. I think we are a very publisher-focused company, so however we could provide value to publishers by way of tools we create being part of them, we will obviously continue to take a look at it and continue to develop with it. One of the things that we have done a bunch with is our advertisers sometimes don’t have all the creative assets that would be best for email.

Email has the full native spec, but a lot of them don’t have native creatives, so we’ve been using AI to help build creative schemas and transitions. And so that’s really the first place is how can we use AI to keep giving the best possible tools back to our publishers, helping them change their email template, helping them have the best possible advertisers, best possible creative from our advertisers? Probably the place that we’ve started on the bad side of AI is we have really filtered out… and this is probably somewhat of a controversial topic, but made for advertising, we’ve seen that get into the newsletter space. And so I’ve seen folks using AI to create made for [inaudible 00:28:20] insight and newsletters and robo content. We’re also very cautious about some of the bad actors as it relates to using AI and a lot of companies that can make sense for a lot of other different companies.

I think there are a couple handfuls of independent ad tech companies that if you combine them together, would have a very unique and very powerful and competitive value proposition. So I would venture to guess that there’s going to be some mergers of the smaller ad tech folks to increase their value proposition and create their own ecosystems. Of course, you got the biggest players, Trade Desk and Amazon, and I don’t know how they engage given that the Google cookie deprecation… it seems like they’ve always solved with some homegrown and in-house solutions, but maybe they’ll be thinking about complementary companies from the outside that can help expedite maybe the publisher side of what they’re doing.

Then obviously, the big retail media guys, Walmart, Uber, Instacart, all those folks, as they start to build their own sizable walled gardens, I think might see some interesting companies that they might bring into the fold. Then I think as cookies will continue to fade, advertisers, marketers, publishers will need help navigating that, so I think consultancies and agencies are going to continue to thrive because their services are needed to help folks really navigate this very complex ecosystem, which in many ways might be getting more complex.

Dustin Raney:

And I think one of those, even just recent, obviously the LiveRamp/Habu joining forces, is that aspect of looking at complementary capabilities, clean room with a pure play identity provider, just to further facilitate the exchange of data and to establish that with minimal movement of data within that cross-cloud function. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s going to be an interesting couple of years as that value exchange nets out across different pockets of the industry and collaboration accelerates in some areas, and some of that collaboration is going to be through mergers and acquisitions. That’s great. We’re coming to the end of our time here, but first of all, we started this thing talking about The Dark Knight, and I haven’t heard the backstory yet.

Jon DeGennaro:

I should have thought of a cooler backstory before I got on. I think if you look at all of the profiles on the LiveIntent executive page, we all have our own unique stories on there, so check those out. But maybe Dark Knight by way of this is now my third identity company. I don’t know where I’ll go work after this, or maybe I’ll do something completely different, go back to looking at the gardening.about.com site and start my own organic farm somewhere or something of that nature. I just have done a lot around identity, not as much as you guys are really in the depths of the product and business side that you guys have been in, but very much have spent the past decade really in the weeds of identity and all of the players in the ecosystem that take part in it. And so if that makes me a Dark Knight, so be it.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, definitely. You definitely have a great pedigree there of all your experiences and you’ve amassed quite a knowledge trove there, so I am more than happy to call you a Dark Knight of all of that, and I’m super excited to have had you on today. I think we’re going to have future conversations, so it’s exciting to see what LiveIntent is doing. I know Acxiom is leaning into our partnership and there’s a lot of opportunity ahead to ultimately drive value to brands to help them navigate all that’s going on in the ecosystem, and at the same time, to drive that value to the consumer and not lose sight of who’s on the other side of that email that’s at the center. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Jon DeGennaro:

Thank you guys. Really appreciate it. And now that I know that October is the best time of year to come down to Little Rock, you might see me at the back end of the year.

Dustin Raney:

Absolutely. Would love to have you and host you down here. It’s a friendly place to be.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to Real Talk about Real Marketing, an Acxiom podcast. Find all our podcasts at acxiom.com/real-talk or your favorite podcast platform. Until next time.