Jeff Green: You bet, thank you. So let me first explain one of the reasons why I think it’s so exciting what’s happening in shopper marketing. So of course, many retailers have been sitting on amazing data where they know what’s actually being purchased, especially for those products that you tend to buy at the store and not online so many of the products in grocery stores and pharmacies are still primarily purchased in a store rather than online. And then, of course, many of them have amazing online presences as well as, of course, brick-and-mortar off-line. So many of them are bringing their data into the ecosystem, and they’ve recognized that the way that they’ve operated in the past creates a bit of a needle in a haystack problem where you take a small amount of data and you go look in that massive ocean of 12 million ads available every single second, and you go look for the usually thousands or tens of thousands that have your data on it.
And so you start with the data and you go hunting for it. Well, in this new world where things are leveraging UID from the very beginning, you get rid of the sort of 9 dominos that need to fall in the supply chain so that you can then leverage the data, but instead, you start with the data and you’re actually just looking at the opportunities that match that instead of going out and looking for opportunities in that way. So by starting with the data, you make it so that you get rid of the matching problems of cookies, and you make it so that the flywheel spin faster for all of these businesses. So they’re not just making additional money on a small amount of data, but they’re actually selling more products across their entire company.
It’s actually part of the reason why I believe that the moves that were made by 3 of the most the forward-looking pioneers in the retail data space, which includes Dollar General, Albertsons and Walgreens that we’re all looking for an opportunity to do something new in data. They made their data available for free so long as people will pay to use it for targeting. So their data is available for measurement so that advertisers can, without any significant opt-in or any friction, find out where they’re selling products, and it’s their belief as well as ours that, that will make it so that people are automatically optimizing their advertising purchases to sell products in those 3 stores. If we are all proven right, we think this represents a massive change to the way people leverage data in brick-and-mortar stores and in retail.
And that just will continue to accelerate this flywheel that is spinning in shopper marketing. I just want to remind everybody that shopper marketing is not just about shopper marketing itself, it is about improving the entire funnel. So every CPG has massive amount of incremental data and insight to know where to spend their money in advertising so that they are being more effective. So all of this has the sort of a flywheel effect of improving decisioning, moving more dollars to our platform, making efficacy go up across everything on our platform. And then, of course, there is an overlap between shopper marketing and CTV where they both benefit from each other, especially because in most cases, their data is anchored off of UID2, which of course, is e-mail based in both the shopper marketing world and in the CTV world.
So all of that together creates just yet another amazing secular tailwind for us in shopper marketing or retail.
Operator: The next question is from Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley.
Matthew Cost: Maybe just on the CTV market. When we think about what you’ve learned through the upfront, this year. How are you feeling about growth and trends in the market through the back half and into ’24? And then on a related note, if you could just give an update on the new forward market. What is the level of interest in it? And how are those conversations trending to that new product? A – Jeff Green You bet, thank you. So let me just say that I have never been more bullish on CTV than we are right now and that includes all of the major news and headlines that are contributing to the current environment. You’re seeing everyone in CTV look to add and/or enhance their ad-funded options. Nearly all of them are doubling down on the ad-funded options.
So where there’s just a few years ago, there was a religion around only having subscriptions and not having ads. That’s gone, across the board. Everybody is looking to add ads and make them more effective. So the secular tailwind on our business is as great as it’s ever been because of those things. Also because there, of course, is a writers and actors strike, that makes it – so it’s much harder to sell at the upfront for all the content owners, which of course, the upfront is predominantly built for broadcast and legacy television. In order to take advantage of the very best of digital, we need a more sophisticated forward market than just the upfront, which is effectively a party where transactions are done with handshakes and very high-level data instead of the sort of precision that data-driven advertising can bring in an impression by impression and customized user by user, that environment can bring.
And so our product that we have been working on literally for years on the forward market, makes it possible for people to have a much more sophisticated upfront buy. So the early phases have gone well. It is still very early phase. So I don’t expect it to see all of the fruit harvested and even in 2024, this is going to be something that we build up over the years. But I see it in the long term being a very significant portion of our business.
Operator: Our next question is from Justin Patterson with KeyBanc.
