Thomas Forte: So, Michael, you sort of touched on this in that answer, but on the M&A front, I would imagine there’s a lot of assets that might be available at attractive prices. Can you just talk about, should we assume that your strategy going forward has been, I guess, the strategy you’ve employed mostly over time, which is smaller scale, kind of widely accretive deals versus maybe larger scale ones?
Michael Blend: Yes. I mean, that’s a good assumption, Tom. So you’re correct on the first part. We’re seeing a lot of companies in market right now. And while I haven’t done kind of a formal analysis on multiples, I can tell you that it does seem as though pricing is coming down. People are starting to be a little more realistic about the value of their companies and we’re just seeing a lot of them out there. So we do plan on being conservative. Anything we buy has got to be pretty low risk. Likely, it’s got to be, we’re looking for tuck in acquisitions that complement the core business. I don’t think right now we’re looking to do anything dramatically large. And so kind of on a go forward basis, I said, we’re really looking for deals that are going to support the organic growth of the core business that are right in our wheelhouse.
If we do go into other areas of on the advertising side, it likely would be with pretty small acquisitions that might have a product that that would get us to market quicker, but nothing super aggressive planned right now.
Thomas Forte: And then for my next one, this is one of those where I really don’t know the answer. So I look forward to your thoughts on this one, Michael. So with this being a presidential election year, historically has that a positive or negative impact on your digital advertising efforts, including raising the cost of ad impressions?
Michael Blend: So we would see that, you get what you’ll see more with the election you’re advertising is kind of on the branded side, of the business, not so much from performance side. I think that you’ll see growth in overall impressions as people are just kind of tune to the news a bit more. We typically haven’t really seen a really measured effect, on election year advertising on our business. Unlike, you know, some businesses, I’m sure CTV, I would suspect we’ll do our right as come on. But what I would mention, Tom, is kind of heading into the latter half of the year on the branded side of programmatic advertising, you’re going to see a pretty substantial market shift as Google deprecates cookies and Chrome, which it looks like they’re still going to be doing the back half of the year.
We expect that will bring down pricing, overall in display and programmatic. And so any kind of effect you would see on the election side with pricing going up, potentially with a little bit more cash coming into the system, we believe would be more than counterbalanced by pricing coming down related to cookie deprecation. If that happens, which we’re hoping, frankly for System1, we hope it will happen, we should see some pretty positive effects on the buy side of our business, keeping in mind that a lot of our business is going to be contextual based advertising, not really reliant on third-party cookies.
Thomas Forte: So there have been a number of e-commerce companies commenting that Timo and Shine are raising the cost of their digital advertising, giving their heavy spending. Is this a situation that’s impacted you or that you’ve been able to take advantage of?
Michael Blend: So we’re not, again, this is an area where we have not seen a direct effect. It may be moving some of the market actually, I’m relatively confident it’s moving some market pricing on kind of the app side of the business and, within kind of the Facebook ecosystem and TikTok ecosystem. But some of those areas are where we’re kind of beginning to scale much more. And so we’re working off a smaller base, for instance, on the video side, on the buy side. And so at this point can’t really affect, can’t really point to any directly negative effect on our business from kind of the Chinese e-commerce companies.
Thomas Forte: And then as AI is employed more broadly in search, how may that have a positive or negative impact on your ability to measure consumer intent and on RAMP in general?
Michael Blend: So it’s kind of I guess, I’d answer that that in 2 parts. So AI for us, I’ve kind of mentioned with the incorporation directly into our platform, which has been really good. We’ve seen really positive effects. On the AI side on search, if that kind of starts eating away at search market share. We won’t be, we won’t be exposed to that in a broad way. What we would expect to see, particularly given our relationships with some of the really large search engines out there, Google and Bing the most prominent, If they start seeing declines in overall search query volume, then they would look more towards their partner business, which we play a part of to get distribution for their advertising networks. So what we would suspect is that if they start seeing reduced queries on their own search engines, they might be a little bit more aggressive in working with their network partners like System1.
And so while we don’t see really, potential negative effects on our buy side of the business, we would anticipate seeing some positive effects on the sell side of our business.
Thomas Forte: Last one and then thanks again for taking all my questions. Can you tell us where you are today on leveraging TikTok? And if the law were passed in the U.S. banning it from app stores, would that have any impact on you?
