Mike Lane- CEO and Founder- Fluency

Mike Lane sold dealer.com in 2014 after 16 years, 700 employees, billions in ad spend. 

These days he's running Fluency, an operating system for digital advertising. 

A single media strategist today has to run Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, CTV, each its own beast, while margins shrink and budgets don't. 

Fluency pulls in a client's data, runs it through reusable playbooks, and sets up and optimizes campaigns across every channel automatically. Work that took eight hours becomes a button.

His bet: advertising is moving onto systems the same way stock trading left the paper floor for E-Trade and Schwab. Ten years out, doing it by hand won't be an option.

In the episode we also get into:
 → How creative is being pulled inside the media workflow. AI generates the options, testing picks the winner, but a human still owns the publish button.
 → Why "advertising engineer" is becoming a real job title
 → What clients mean when they say "I don't know what my agency is doing anymore"

Worth a listen if you build, run, or sell advertising.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Um welcome to the latest episode of Inspiring Futures. Um, my guest today, Mike Lane, CEO, uh founder of Fluency. Welcome to the pod from uh Sunny Vermont. I I believe Sun has finally hit Vermont.

SPEAKER_03 0:13

It is. Uh, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

That's great. Um So you you you started in this in uh the internet business kind of way back, right? Uh going obviously dealer.com, but what we what was happening before dealer.com? What what got you into into the world of the internet?

SPEAKER_03 0:38

Into the world of the internet. Well, I graduated college in 1997, um, which you know my eight-year-old reminds me is last century, uh, which is fine. Uh, but but what did you study at college? Uh well I started as an environmental engineer and then went to civil engineering and then really got into engineering management.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Um so what was your kind of so you could go into college, what did you kind of see yourself doing? You're an environmental engineer. What what was your kind of dream? Or or was it were you just like that? Sounds interesting.

SPEAKER_03 1:15

I'll work it out when I when I yeah, more of the latter. Yeah, it's just interesting. Like I did no idea I was a lost soul, I would say, and like uh career-wise on where I wanted to go. But my senior year of college, I really got into like took a bunch of programming classes, okay. Uh, and also took a lot of marketing classes, and that really like was something I was for the first time like interested in showing up to class on time and doing all the work, uh, and really being engaged in that sort of thing. Um, and just learning like the basics of programming, and then the internet was happening then, like real time and like web development. I really just got into um and you know, was able to produce and learn that skill set uh and just loved it. I loved the engagement, like you could create something out of nothing, yeah, and put it on a screen, and people can interact with that. That's like something that you just I never had like you know, yeah, experience with, and that kind of changed my trajectory of my life at that point in time. When I finished college, I ended up in Boston working for like a consulting company, and then quickly realized that people just need these types of solutions, business.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

When only so when was Netscape like when did Netscape come out? 90 about that time, right?

SPEAKER_03 2:33

Oh yeah, Netscape, you had Lycos, Alta Vista, like all these ancient uh dead engine search engines uh that were out there, and I just really loved that that space, and you know, really making a user experience. The whole term user experience didn't even exist then.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

So um why'd you pick a consulting company in Boston?

SPEAKER_03 2:56

Uh it's where I could get hired and the paid well, is really how it came came down to be. But we worked on some super cool projects, yeah, some larger companies.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Like so, like digitizing, building web, building the internet. Is that what job was?

SPEAKER_03 3:14

One of them was like in the banking industry, and that you know, they had developers, right? And developers have their uh personalities, and then they had business people that you know had an idea of like where they wanted to like steer this business opportunity, and they couldn't talk to each other. So just sitting with like the idea folks and mapping out visually like what you know experience would look like was something the developers needed to understand like what they were building towards, and that's where I really like got got on in the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

And how long did you stick around?

SPEAKER_03 3:48

Oh, that was just a couple of years-ish thing, because then I got the entrepreneurial bug.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Where did that come? Where did the bug come from?

SPEAKER_03 3:58

Uh, I think it came from like seeing folks with good ideas and programmers and just being like, Well, I have good ideas too. Uh, and we know programming, and I had lots of friends that were programmers, and looking at the business model and the evolution of the space, we basically were like, we could just do this. Um, we were young, naive enough uh at that time. Uh, and a few of my friends that I was working with in Boston, uh, and then someone here in Vermont, we ended up like starting GLA.com up in like so co how did that you you had how did you get that idea?

SPEAKER_01 4:40

How did I mean what was was it a conversation? Was it did you look at different different opportunities and then pick that one? Or how did that come about?

SPEAKER_03 4:51

It started because I grew up here in Vermont. Uh I came, I was coming home to visit my parents, but I was driving my college car still in Boston. And that college car, when I bought it, the odometer had stopped a year before I bought it at like 128,000 miles. And I drove that thing for five years. Uh, and who I it probably had 200,000 miles on it.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

No one cars they can, it's got to be a Volvo or something.

SPEAKER_03 5:15

It was a Volkswagen Jetta. Um yeah, I was coming home and I needed to like find a replacement car, and I shopped online naturally. I was like, I'll just stop and see like what's on the way. And I went to this one website uh called Earth Cars in Williston, Vermont, and they had they were merchandising cars, they had photos, like full photos, like all the description. And and back then that wasn't that didn't happen. Like you were lucky to have a listing that was dated of what the inventory was, and maybe one out of a hundred dealers had some photos of a car, but every car had photos on it, like multiple photos, had all the information, and it drew me into the dealership. Um, and did you hire the did you hire the person who did it? Oh, well, we had a conversation with the uh one of the owners, and they basically said, Well, I built this, I think car dealers, this is how like cars should be like advertised and marketed online. And I was like, I'm in this space, that's exactly how it's supposed to be done. Yeah, so we talked about like you know, working with him to like build a system to do that. But after a few months of like doing that, we basically said, This is a business, we should just Was everyone was everyone working, or did you quit the jobs, or what was it? What's we all decided to quit our jobs and just start this company? Yeah, because we were all working, yeah. We said this is a better idea if we if we're gonna take a shot at something, this is a good idea to go take a shot at, and then we packed all our stuff up in Boston to the biggest U-Haul. I remember we're trying to get the door shut, pushing the last mattress in there, like you need to go in four more inches, like ramming our shoulders into it, uh, to pull the U-Haul shot, and then drove, and we all lived together in the same house and essentially worked a hundred hours a week for oh, this is a classic Silicon Valley kind of building living dorm style.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

Oh, totally, like friends 18 hours days.

SPEAKER_03 7:16

Yeah, friend, friends and family rounds, hardly paid ourselves type situation, just to like uh get the business off the ground and figure out uh what was the what was so you so how long did it take to build a a prototype that of what to show people that it didn't take too long to get the base uh system up because you're just building like a website, but we ended up over time building like our own CMS platform. Um that that would be a good idea.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

What was the biggest like what were what were kind of some of the biggest like I mean, obviously it's one thing having a great idea, and it's the other thing like making sure the rest of the world that you need to see it as a great idea gets it right? Yeah, it's like there's two different things. There's like you see the world, and it's like and then you've got these stuck in the mud, old school dealers. They're like, What so so it was the selling was with the selling of it was pretty tough?

SPEAKER_03 8:12

Uh yeah, I remember the first two clients, they couldn't be more diverse from each other, right? One was Lexus of Westminster and Westminster, California, like so things like marble.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Oh, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

Um like a Southern California Lexus deal, yeah. So Cal dealer, beautiful. Like they wanted they wanted a custom experience, they knew they needed the internet, they were like in it, right? And then the second client was uh Greensboro Garage in Greensboro, Vermont. And you've never heard of that. Um, it's down two dirt roads, right? Dirt parking lot, and that's that's the second client. And we went up there uh because they were in Vermont, we're like, we'll just go up there to be a really cool experience. We got there, they were taking their first computer they ever had out of the box. So uh like they didn't understand like the concept of a mouse. Like, what do you do when it gets to the edge of the desk? Like you just pick it up, like that's where we started. Um, and in that same like time period, we brought both of those people completely online um with with their new uh web experience web website. And the the whole premise of this you gotta make it easy, right? We made it super easy back then.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

They gotta put the inventory in, they gotta have the they they they gotta manage the thing on a like a daily basis because otherwise it's useless. And then so you get these two clients, and then does it slightly snowballing, or do you are you waiting for like the phone to ring?

SPEAKER_03 9:39

Or no, it's a slog. Yeah, it's a log. It was a slog in the early days, but the we built such good websites that the dealerships down the road, because the the first thing dealerships are competitive pressure, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:54

They'd say they so well exactly right it's like having it's like having a satellite dish on your roof, and then everyone in the neighborhood or a solar panel, like everyone gets one, right? It's like the word of mouth in the community. Okay, we gotta if if we don't get this, we're in trouble. So they they'd ask around and like who builds it, and they wouldn't even ask around.

SPEAKER_03 10:13

We put our logo right on the bottom of the website. So when a curriculum got a new website that looked awesome, the first thing they wanted to do was shout it out to the world. So naturally, back then they would take out a newspaper ad to advertise their website, right? Uh, they'd be like, come see our Honda dealership, uh, and then the Acura dealership down the road would be like, Whoa, theirs is way better. My ego will not allow that. So then they would call us, and that kind of like helped to build that momentum in the business.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

And how did you did you have like a was it a challenge of like scaling up and hiring people, or did the or you always do you always manage that maybe to manage that? We had to learn it.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

We were young, we didn't have that all that experience that other orgs had. We we had to figure all that out. Um, and that's really what I enjoyed about one of the most enjoyable things about like growing a business is there's always something new to like figure out in that space. Problem solving. Yeah, problem solving. How do you scale teams? How do you scale systems? How do you stay in front of it? You know, you got to document something, but you're not documenting it for yourself, you're documenting it for the next hundred employees. And how does that stay flexible and and stay updated?

SPEAKER_01 11:24

So you would what would you spend uh around a decade doing this, or is it less less than that?

SPEAKER_03 11:31

16 years.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

16 years.

SPEAKER_03 11:33

So 16 years building this business, building and growing that business, and we sold it in 2014.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 11:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

But how many um so that's like 16 years is like that's a decent amount of time. And was that you became did does that and you be? I mean, obviously there were lots of people doing this, but did you became the dominant player?

SPEAKER_03 11:56

Yeah, we grew that, became a dominant player for sure in in the automotive space, providing services like it was not only websites, we did inventory management, lead management, CRM tools, um, and then got into digital advertising too. Yeah, uh SEO services, manage like content services, how do you build creative stuff, put that on the website?

SPEAKER_01 12:18

Well, so the so your revenue model was like a dealer would pay you like a a subscription, like a monthly there'd be a monthly bill for the web services, and there'd be all the add-ons according to what services you were providing them. That's kind of what the model is. Yeah, and and they rarely rarely canceled, right? I mean, it was just it was just kind of like the cost of doing business.

SPEAKER_03 12:39

It was cost of doing business, but but competitors came into the space. Um players had to up their game, and then new players came in. So and yeah, you always lose a little bit here, but we're always we kept growing.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

Yeah, net net, it kept growing.

SPEAKER_03 12:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Um, so then 2014 comes along. Um, were you looking to sell the business, or were you surprised, or someone, how did that work out?

SPEAKER_03 13:06

We we had been approached several times over the years, um, but it was never the right partner, the right dollar amount, or the right time. And then in 2014, all those things like came together, and we you know, after 16 years, we're like, okay, now is that moment, right? Uh, and then we just knew it and it was the right deal.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Were all the or your the original polynomials still in the business? So people are kind of like left in no, all all the founders still worked. People you you got into the U-Hole van with yep.

SPEAKER_03 13:41

Set up still work there, yep. Oh, that's cool. That's really cool, right? Yeah, it was super cool. Like we went on the entire ride together, and then there were I forget exactly how many people, 700 something employees at that point in time. So we like grew that business pretty substantially.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

It's amazing. So what did you do when you what what was your reaction when you sold it? Was it like um I need to take a year whole vacation and and rest? Did you need or did you need to like take it take a take time out?

SPEAKER_03 14:11

No, uh, I mean, I took a few weeks off, I think, uh, you know, earned vacation. But then I was gonna basically uh write it out and say see what happens. Like, how is this gonna go? Under the pretense of like I don't have to stay, but I don't have to leave either. Like, let's just see how this goes.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

And maybe your your new owner was Cox automotive, like that they were the company that bought you, right? Is that right?

SPEAKER_03 14:35

It's actually dealer track uh and they built financial service, did like all the financial services and tooling for the industry. We did like the marketing, so like those two things were came dealers needed together, right? A dealer management system, and then a year later, Cox Automotive came and bought the combined entity as well.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Okay, so now you start you stuck around through that like uh merger of those two organizations, just the just just for the dealer track.

SPEAKER_03 15:02

I stuck around like 10 months, and then I left and it was like six months later, not even six months later, is that Cox bought the whole thing? Wow, but yeah, we it started growing rapidly, right? We go from like a 700-person company you made, which is good, and then suddenly we're 2800 people, right? And then Cox is like a tens of thousands, 30,000 like type organization, and you're like, that's very different from when started a company with a few people, a handful of people, and that's not and that was like one of the reasons I wanted to be an entrepreneur too, is like I wanted to like I like that smaller, intimate, like yeah, building something building something with a group of people, yeah. It's fast, it's less corporate.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

So you're um you stick around for 10 months, then you then you quit, and what happens then?

SPEAKER_03 15:48

Uh picked up a hammer, did a bunch of remodeling of my house things, like use my hands, not on a keyboard, but like the physical worlds, um, built a barn, uh, did some nonprofit work for uh some nonprofits uh I work with, and yeah, walked around the woods, did a whole bunch of life stuff.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Is your are you uh your is your family like multi-generational, like Vermonters?

SPEAKER_03 16:17

Is it is it like something you are in multi-generational, like to be considered like Bonner, you need to have like seven generations of Vermonters. I don't have that deep uh, but yes, multiple generations of Vermont uh here for sure.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

And it's sort of a characteristic about uh Vermont's way. There's a sort of like there's some DNA, you know, you you go through you like sort of like um shared hardship winter, you know, you you need someone who's gonna be able to like pull you out of your driveway when there's five foot of snow, yeah, when the power goes out. It's sort of like a is a sort of a camaraderie and a resilience of of of within communities up there, right?

SPEAKER_03 16:56

Oh, totally, like take care of each other. Yeah, expected to know how to split wood at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Yeah, it's yeah, because like you know, it's like it's it's not for it's not for the soft up there, right? You know, you gotta you you gotta do a lot of your things yourself and nature nature has a way of like um you know making messes of uh of best laid plans, right?

SPEAKER_03 17:20

You know, no, exactly. Sometimes it snows it snows when you don't expect it.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Or it does your roof gets damaged, or you know, and and and and you don't have like you don't have huge infrastructure. People are like distributed around, you don't have this much also infrastructure. Uh so yeah, it's like living I and I've been up there a few times about it. Um in fact my dog was bred bred up um right on the Canadian border up there.

SPEAKER_03 17:49

That that does not surprise me at all.

SPEAKER_02 17:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:52

That sounds right.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Yeah, on a on a little uh like a turkey farm. It's just like beautiful up there. It's it's like another another world. So yeah, I can see it.

SPEAKER_03 18:03

It is, and even Burlington here where I'm I am right now is the largest city in Vermont, right? It's like 40,000 people.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 18:10

Tiny, it's a town in many other areas.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

It was your c was the company head headquartered in Burlington then?

SPEAKER_03 18:16

Dealer.com was, yes. Yeah, it was, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

So you you you you take a sabbatical, you you get you work at your house, you build a house, you you you know, you help in the community, and then you get bored.

SPEAKER_03 18:29

Get bored, yeah. I was, you know, you're at that point where you're like, I I'm not done working, like what am I going to do? And then one day I walked in on my current founders, uh, co-founders here at Fluency, when they had that same itch that I had. And they were uh did you know those guys or did you knew them before or you had a yeah, they were they all they they worked uh and and they're all friends too, uh at dealer.com together. I hired Scott he was 19. Right uh at dealer.com and we like we did all the tests, they're like tech support together, like carry the cell phone around, the bat phone for after hours support. Um and you know, we've worked together for years in different areas of the business.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

So they came, they said we've got an idea, you would you want to come back and help us? Does that come back?

SPEAKER_03 19:27

Yeah, there was like you know, uh larger companies like restructure and they had an opportunity to step away from that business, and they wanted to do they basically said, like, if there's any point in our lives where we know enough to go do something, not the start a company when you're 23 or 24 years old with the naivety like to just power through it, but like have the the the wherewithal and like the technical capabilities to like go execute, you know, you're at that age, we have that enough experience, right? And they had that edge too. And then I ran into them. Uh, you know, they were meeting in a small restaurant near the airport at a hotel that no one would ever run into them. And I just happened to be in that same hotel at like 7:30 in the morning, and they were like, What are you doing here? And I was like, What are you doing here? Uh and I was there for a meeting, uh, because I was trying to help some uh government folks understand uh just uh education of the technical uh landscape in Vermont. Uh and they were having a meeting there that day, that morning as well. And I was like, I gotta go to this meeting, but whatever you're doing, I want in. And so I talked to them after, and they're like, get the itch uh to go do it. And I'm like, I got the itch. Um so we spent the next several months talking and just analyzing business plans and models, like knowing what we know today, right? How would we approach the world and what how would we do that? What would we what would we tackle and make a great business? And that's where we came up over and over back to this this model of what fluency is.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Which which describe the describe the model that you uh you had then.

SPEAKER_03 21:12

What was yeah, the the the model essentially is like if you look at the world of digital advertising and digital advertising execution, right? Uh everyone wants to believe it's getting easier and easier to do things. And that is true for a certain aspect, right? Even today, if like you want to make a creative piece, a video, short video, it is easier today than it was a year ago, than it was five years ago. But when you're a strategist like trying to execute and do the hard lift of what digital advertising execution, right? You gotta go in and do that on Google, and you gotta go do that on uh in Meta, and you gotta go do that now on TikTok and then Trade Desk, right? Before in the early Earlier days of digital advertising, it was I'm gonna go do something on Google, maybe I'll do some stuff on Microsoft, right? The old Bing days, and like it started small and that was easy, but now that same team had to go do that on Facebook. That is almost double the work that they had to do, and more channels, more channels, and like that concept. And then if you start looking at larger agencies or brands that do this at scale, they essentially have teams that do that, and those teams are completely underwater, and especially on the agency side, right? Agencies only charge a certain percentage usually of media that goes through, and that varies based on industry complexity, right? But call that like you know, average like 15 to 25 percent uh on top of media, right? But if you're managing small accounts, especially small accounts, say they only have a thousand dollar budget, right? If you're even if you're taking 20%, like that's $200 of labor a month. Like that gets burned up in seconds. Um, when you start adding people, chasing for phone calls or data from a client, software and operational costs, right? That's not enough to like sustain that. And then you gotta do meta and like all these other channels. So the complexity goes up dramatically, especially for agencies. And then on the other side, on the brand side, brands spent you know a decade, right, building and getting their data organized because data was going to be the new currency, and everyone knew that. Like, how do I get my data organized? And then then they get it organized in their new data warehouse, data lake, whatever you want to call it, right? It was the next question is like, how do I use that in my advertising? And I want audiences generated, I want inventory updated, real time, like linked to my advertising. All these things become very, very complex. And there's either point solutions you could do. So the concept of fluency was like, we're gonna take all that complexity and make it very simple and build an operating system that allows you to pull in all that data. It's gonna allow you to build business logic so you can do the things uh that you would typically spend eight hours setting up a campaign in Google and Meta and on Microsoft. Uh, that would take you all day, and it's gonna be done in seconds. It should be push button at this point. There's APIs for that. Um, and you're just taking the data from your CRM tool or your ERP system that has name, address, phone number, all the things, the URLs, and you're taking that in and setting up the account at Google instead of cutting and pasting it over there, right? And then you have campaigns, you have strategies uh called like playbooks. I want to do this with this media plan. I need to execute it this way. Be like, okay, you can program that logic.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

So when you started, what did you build your user experience based on? What was your who were your users? Did you have like pilots? Did you have beta testers? Did you we did?

SPEAKER_03 25:14

Yeah. I mean, we had we had a lot of experience too, right? At dealer.com, we did, I mean, we managed billions of dollars of advertising.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

Uh so you're already kind of you've basically taken the knowledge base that you had in the single vertical of did of dealers and expanding it beyond beyond that vertical, right?

SPEAKER_03 25:31

Yeah, the concept, yeah. So a dealer, like we were one of the very few businesses that built its own technology stacks, um, and then executed and scaled that and ran billions of dollars of digital advertising through it. But that was like one business, one data set, um, one vertical, right? It was so it was very finite. It had didn't have to have a lot of the flexibility of like a platform, but it was also like purpose built. And when you want to build an operating system, right, it's gotta be how the users want to execute their thing on that. So it's a different beast, different approach, but some of the fundamentals of like how do you take mass data, how do you like build uh a way for them? And we just went to work and executed on uh just building a whole new tool set on like how you could like build that business logic, how you can execute on that, how you can like use APIs in a different way to modernize uh in a very modern tech stack um that can transact billions of times a day against APIs at on a limited scale. So different approach.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

So your typical your your um your client, your user is a media strategist, like a 27, 28-year-old media strategist sitting in front of a screen helping like plan, optimize client campaigns, and then your buyer is uh the head of media, uh the CEO, the president of the agency. Yep. And then on the brand side, maybe like someone like in CMO procurement, exactly could be any, could be all kinds of people.

SPEAKER_03 27:11

Could be all kinds of people depending on the brand and how they're set up. Um, but yeah, going through like corporate purchasing um is always interesting.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:20

Uh but but yeah, essentially like that you you nailed it. The at the end user at the end of the day is the person in there trying to execute the advertising.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

So you seem you know since you've been in this business, like you now, you're now um what are you decade?

SPEAKER_03 27:41

Eight years in, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Eight years into this business. Yeah, and there's been a lot of changes in this in in this landscape alone, right? I mean, you didn't you didn't have TikTok at the beginning. Yeah, uh you got TikTok added, you've got Meta telling everyone you don't need anything, just come to us and we'll do everything, we'll make the ads for you. Yeah, right. And so the self-service part has gone. We've seen YouTube go from like something on the to become the most popular or the largest most watched platform, video platform, um, in it in the past decade. So you've you've had you've had a lot of changes, and then you've got agencies struggling with like margins and competition and you know, they've gone from AOR relationships where they had uh recurring revenues to projects where you know there is no recurring revenue. And how do they how can they justify paying you know a monthly subscription for a product that they they used to have six clients on it and now there's they've got two. So all these dynamics have changed, right?

SPEAKER_03 28:59

Totally changed.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Yeah. What would you care what would you characterize as the big like in the last few years? What do you characterize as the biggest changes we've seen the digital advertising marketplace?

SPEAKER_03 29:10

The the the biggest changes I see are the absolute need to get away from how it was done before.

unknown 29:20

Right?

SPEAKER_03 29:21

Because AI's influence that. But the fundamental base of like what people are looking for has not changed. Right? They want to be able to manage uh the media, whether your brand or um you know an agency. Like I need to be able to activate my data, I need to be able to follow media plans, I need to be able to like update those media plans, I need to be able to like set up accounts efficiently, optimize efficiently, get all my reporting back, and I need to do that as efficiently as possible.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Um where do where do you where where do you stand on the measurement piece?

SPEAKER_03 30:07

The measurement piece? Uh I mean we we pull down all the reporting and like unify that into like one spot for all the channels for our clients.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

So your media strategists can run uh a performance report direct from their desktop using your yeah, right in the software.

SPEAKER_03 30:28

You can like pull down all and and look at all performance, you can put guardrails on because the data is like pulled down every single day, right? You can get up in the morning and say, like, you know, create agents. Now you can create agents and say, like, if anything goes outside these guardrails, let me know right away. Um, and now we recommend like what you can do to correct that, right? There's a no spend on meta yesterday. Be like, tell me why. Like, I don't need to go dig anymore, right? There's common reasons.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

So people are you so you're expanding your kind of workforce through the agents who are helping you out.

SPEAKER_03 31:04

Yeah, that's the whole like promise, right? Of AI is to like give me superpowers. And we've been writing agents that's essentially the basis of all our platforms since we started this business. But now those agents are even smarter because you can customize them more, right? You can have them build reports better, you can have them do unique analysis real time. I can get you an answer to anything on your portfolio just by yeah, talking to the software now.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

So earlier this week, Publicist bought live ramp.

unknown 31:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Is that a game changer?

SPEAKER_03 31:41

It's interesting, move, but not surprised, right? Um there is this race, especially like the hold codes, right, to like establish themselves a unique value prop. And that right is just part of their story, it looks like.

SPEAKER_01 32:02

Well, they're that they're trying to like they're trying to become they're trying to say to clients, give us all your data, and we'll manage your data, and we'll we'll plan, buy, execute, create everything for you. We have the data, the data intelligence through Epsilon, we have you know, live ramp. So we have all the pieces and you know, trust us to do it. Is that kind of what you're hearing?

SPEAKER_03 32:31

Yeah, exactly. Because like you know, the question we get from brands all the time is like, I don't know what my agency is doing anymore, right? They can't activate my data, or they're not like like getting the audience from here and like applying them at scale to my comp very complex like strategies I want to run, right?

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Just explain, just explain that it's a kind of a pretty profound statement. You just said uh clients are saying they don't know what their agencies are doing, right?

SPEAKER_03 33:00

I mean, this isn't new, like everyone.

SPEAKER_01 33:02

Oh, sure, yeah. I'm just like I'm just interested in your the value of their agency, right?

SPEAKER_03 33:07

And the agencies, right? When you go when you go start go looking at like talk to Google or Meta, they're like, you know, they're saying to folks too, like, hey, you can just do this yourself, just log into Meta and point your website, and we'll help you build creative. Yeah, and you know, the agency's value prop has to evolve as as this moves forward, which a lot of agencies are working on that, and you see that I think with this acquisition, too, is like they're trying to solidify a value prop. You know, all the agencies, the hold codes especially, are building their story.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Um, in their whole like agencies, there's a kind of a weird thing right now because it's like there's 85,000, depending on who you talk to, there's like 55,000 or 85,000 agencies, right? So there's a massive long tail. Like the the holding codes actually represent in numbers, like a very small proportion. So there's a lot of like, I mean, mom and pop agencies, right? Um, and they don't have the deals with Library, they don't have, but they have some local clients that want them buying media. And so is that is that where you see kind of in terms of your market, how do you how do you see your kind of like your classic agency president? What type of agencies are they?

SPEAKER_03 34:25

Yeah, so like just like that, like the whole goals are doing their own thing, they're trying to build crops. So every other agency, the other 87,000 agencies out there, they need to figure that out. And a lot of them are doing that, right? How am I going to approach that market? A lot of them are specializing, right? So they have to start thinking about, and there's a lot of like clients we help support.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Yeah, it's really interesting because I just did a I just did a podcast with um some guys called Ammunition. Really interesting agency, uh down in Atlanta. And they, I mean, they're a they're a kind of all business agency. They're not about like creative awards, they're about they're all about like doing the right thing for their clients. And they started in like the housing. They started with they started in a very specific vertical, yeah. And with home builders, and they learned how to, it's kind of a bit like your dealer.com thing. It's like, okay, they learned that vertical, and now they now they got the adjacencies, and they just signed like Kimberley Clark is like a local massive business local to them in Atlanta, but they have like they do home building materials. Exactly. So it's really interesting, and now they they've just so that was really interesting talking to them because they're you know, they're they just they're all about like we've got a lot of knowledge. We know we like we know a lot about these markets, yeah. And um, which is different from a kind of like typical agencies who are not very usually they're sort of agnostic about the clients they have. They don't really have a there is no rhyme or reason why these clients come to them, they they just they work with a diverse set of clients, um, versus okay, we specialize. And I think that's it's definitely interesting that when you when you hear the specialty coming, um, because you're not going to get that at a holding company. Um, and it's really interesting. I was I did another interview with someone who had been at Google for seven years, and she said, you know, when you look behind the Google search box and you look inside Google, you realize like the car dealer group at uh Google is like 400, 500 people. You know, all these verticals behind this it's like you think of how big it is. Um, and this that inside those organizations, there are all these specialists who who understand in a way that's sort of like forcing agencies to um, you know, you know, get get smart. The agency I thought surprised me, and this was a while ago, was an agency called Jellyfish.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:08

Because they were the first ones I saw like they were actually becoming super friendly. Like they don't have like people were kind of using Google and but they were never sort of like as friendly and as like, okay, no, we're gonna do the training courses and other sort of but this was sort of like this frenemy thing where they got kind of access and then got this, they got a different level of relationship and a different level of sophistication, I think, that I hadn't we hadn't I hadn't seen before. So yeah, I think you know, right, there's so much, so much, so much is changing. Um so so how do you how do you guys keep up with that? Because you've got like you've got a lot of macro changes, but you've also it's like kind of a bit like your story in the car dealers. You got the you got your local guy in Vermont up the who's just got their first computer, and then you got the Lexus dealer, you know, you've got the you've got versions of agencies like that. So how do you how do you how do you manage that through that? Uh, because that's that's interesting, because they're not they're not like a there's not one agency model, they're they're all working through different scales.

SPEAKER_03 38:16

No, they they are and they're working different focuses and like different goals, right? Um, but to go back to like just the the earlier point about like the agencies that work best, uh that you know our ideal client profile, right? They have some sort of repetition in they have pain points, but like they have repetition in their business or like at least thought process of like getting there. So like when you talk about like verticalized agencies, like someone that just focuses on home services or just focuses in auto or just focuses on serving franchises or multi-location, right? Those are like immediate home runs of like their value prop that fluency delivers is like off the charts. Like we check all the boxes on that because you have high data, lower budgets, typically, like right, and then like the efficiency gains there.

SPEAKER_01 39:11

But it's still the performance marketing focused people, right?

SPEAKER_03 39:14

Yeah, the the just the gains there, it doesn't just stop with that group, but that group of folks and those types of agencies that have that repeatable business. Um it's lights out home run for for them, yeah, typically. But then there's like a lot of the other agencies that are like developing those focus areas because that becomes very common after you build automation, right? You'd be like, Oh, I did this for dentists.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 39:38

And be like, I could go launch another dentist really rapidly. I should go sell another dentist, and then that dental group, and suddenly they got a hundred dentists.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:47

They're also doing lawyers, and they like did that for the lawyers. Like, we've naturally like help that pattern recognition like happen for a lot of agencies uh automatically. But it doesn't stop there though. Uh around like budgeting, things like that, like just budget management, like figuring out having a world-class budget, like you can't overspend, right? Someone gives you a million dollars to spend, you spend a million and one, like that last dollar's coming out of your pocket. And if you go way over, slob dollars out of your pocket. But also if you're billing on a percentage, right? If you only spend 500 of a million, yeah, you only can bill on 500.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 40:23

So you're just leaving money on the table. So you need like a world-class like budgeting solution that does all that as well and sets up the accounts and does all those things. Um, but the change essentially around a lot of the agencies is around like focus and discipline, as like they've seen margins get smaller, and the things like, yeah, now I got TikTok, like that's more labor costs. I don't know, my budgets aren't necessarily going up X amount to like cover that labor cost. I need to figure out how to do that more efficiently, and those pain points are being felt. So now you know your client wants to be on Netflix or on Prime and be like, I need to buy differently in different places, and then YouTube right is up, and now I'm on YouTube, like it just adds up, yeah. But now I need to be able to report back to my client on all those channels as well and have a good story.

SPEAKER_01 41:20

So, how do you guys work? Because I mean, one of the things I remember working inside agencies on this was certainly if you were a small agency, you never knew what the hell was going on. There was no one to call at like meta. They and you because you were just they didn't give it, they didn't give a damn. They wanted to self-automate everything. And I mean, I think we had, I mean, uh, I worked on like a very, very big piece of like um business for Google, which was priceline, and so we got we had access because they spent so much money, but that was a rarity, most you know. So you guys, do you guys have like because you're doing this at scale? Do you like you hear a lot of these media strategists and they complain like they changed the algorithm, you know, and no one told us, and so there's like changes going on all the time, and the agencies are always like the last to know. Exactly. It seems like a problem. Is it you can you guys help that you help them with that to a sort of degree?

SPEAKER_03 42:23

We help to a degree, I will say that uh we don't have we don't get enough of the information either to like uh pass that on. The the reality is like we have to be reactive to some of it, right? But we do know like when API changes or major updates are coming out, but there's always like micro things that happen all the time, and we it's our job to keep a pulse on that. Whereas an agency, if they were trying to like keep up on all that, it's hard, right? Yeah, focus, it's not your prime job, which is like why we come in as a partner to be like we're gonna stay on this and try to make sure we like cover the things that we need to cover so you don't have to worry about that and the automations can keep working.

SPEAKER_01 43:02

So, what are agencies what are agencies asking you for? Like, what are they saying we really need, yeah? If you could add these features or this stuff, what would they what do they really want right now?

SPEAKER_03 43:11

Uh depth and breadth on like uh I mean, there's uh I can I forget the number. Uh my business partners uh uses it's like you know, get them millions of configuration possibilities just on Google alone. Wow, right? So we focus on like the center mass shot of like what are we what what are the things most people are gonna do, right? Um uh what people ask for a lot of people are asking, like TikTok's making moves, right? Uh they want more depth, they want like to add uh if you're a smaller or mid sized agency, have you know a DSP offering? Um, right? Connected TV is like a thing people are talking about. They might want to start like be able to experiment and offer products around that. So like asked around that and be able to extract. Execute that. And they're coming to us too and say, like, how do I develop those products? And then we show them what's capable on the platform. We always come back to that. And then make sure they're using the latest and greatest. Right? Google, Meta, they always say, like, you got to use the latest and greatest, which is all AI driven now. And how do I do that? How do I take my old portfolio? I may have 800 accounts that are dentists and doctors' offices or whatever. How do I get them from point A to point B? Because if I did it manually, I'm going to have 3,000 hours of labor and I can't do that. So, like, how do I like build my new playbook using the new best practices? Take clients, build a story, right? Go back to my other clients, my other 800 clients, and tell them I'm going to evolve their advertising and be a good agency for those businesses.

SPEAKER_01 44:55

And how often do they have to be doing that?

SPEAKER_03 44:56

Because if things are changing, I mean, these days it happens more often, right? Because there's something new all the time coming out. Um, like Google's got new creative tools they announced this week. Be like, great. Uh, and people are gonna want to use those, and like, how do they work? So we work with Google and say, like, what's available in the API? Like, how do we like build that into workflows? Because people want to be able to use this new stuff, but they also are not gonna give free reign to AI to do anything, especially in any any business that has regulatory compliance stuff to go with it. Think like fair housing or financing, like there's like lawyers are not gonna allow AI to build creative and throw it up anywhere on the planet. So building workflows for them to like build creative, right? That's gonna be compliant, and then have a human in the loop to like eyeball everything to make sure it meets the spec. Um, and then they own pushing the button to push it out there.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

So, what what about the the shift to um LLMs and what's happening there? So much of the customer journey is starting in a in a clawed or a open AI chat box. Is that yeah?

SPEAKER_03 46:14

I mean the assumption, right? Like people are gonna want to make money and advertising is gonna be blended into those all those, right? Like Chat GPT, like their initiatives right now, um, to put advertising in there to help monetize their business. I mean, they need to. Uh, the billions and billions or hundreds of billions of dollars that are going into these, right? People want to return on that, and advertising is is a natural way to like extend that. Um, so that's gonna be another channel, right? People are gonna want to be able to like do that from that perspective, and then you gotta be able to build creative and leverage these tools too to like build some of that. So just using LLMs, we build that like right into the product, whether that's a simple chatbot tool or using the creative engines out there, but building that into like solid workflows that you don't have to go figure out how to do that.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

So so when you think about the creative side, now you have people asking for are you talking to the same person behind the desk, or is it a different person now?

SPEAKER_03 47:18

Oh, at the agency, yeah. Uh sometimes different, right? Um, creative teams have obviously like have great concern on like what their roles traditionally have been to what they're gonna be in the future, right? Yeah, that is like one area like that has been hit pretty hard. Um but the the the logic and like helping build what that creative like the job's changing, right? Just like many of the other jobs that have changed in the past, like the job isn't now to spend eight hours in Photoshop making the perfect asset. It is like building better prompts and building more creative assets and more options that the advertising engines can use, and the best creative will win, right? If you can have the right system set up uh to be able to like test those things rapidly and let the right creatives win, it's like teaching the system how to do that, but deal with all the right compliance issues, the brand guidelines, the standards, like making sure that those are all executed really well. Still takes that creative eye for sure.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Do you think there's sort of like um it's become a sort of treadmill a little bit like this this or or a hamster wheel that the you just can't get off it? It's sort of like and I had a comp some conversations this week that sound very much like this that the pressure's coming from on top, like we we gotta make our targets, and it's coming straight into the marketing department. And years ago it used to be, yeah, we'll plan a can't, you know, we'll plan a magazine campaign for Q3, you know, but it's like you're in Q1. So that yeah, yeah, well, you know, we're gonna brief the agency, dah dah, dah. Now it's like a real-time pressure. It's like, okay, we've got a dashboard, we're seeing our sales, you know, we're seeing how many tickets we're selling on the airplane, whatever, whatever that metric is they're using and their clients. And they're like, how do we juice this up? What do we have to do? You know, it's like, and so they're on this wheel that they just it's just like it's like relentless, it never stops. It's like every day they've got a target and it doesn't change tomorrow. It's like it's another still there. Is that something that's is that is that me reading it wrong, or is that is that what's going on?

SPEAKER_03 49:28

Oh, I mean, there's a lot of that out there for sure. Yeah, like you get a you know, a good read on that, right? It's like you know, people in sales, like sales leaders, right? They're like, you know, it's the first anything you did yesterday was like doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 49:41

I mean it's but it's like it's like it's like it's like because because media has become like so much more real time, and you know, uh you you know you can sense that people things you know when things are or aren't working in a much very fast, right? So you being, you know, if the pressure's coming from on top and something's working, well, we want to do more of it, or if you pressure's coming from on top and something isn't working, then we got to change it. So it seems like there's the inside these organizations, uh, especially at a at a client level and not and out of an agency level, they're they're kind of in the same boat. They're like they they they're on this hamster wheel, they don't have resources. Like the m you said it before, like their margins are kind of like we can't put like this has got to change, but like we've got to put more hours on it. We already used our hours.

SPEAKER_03 50:40

Yeah, there's no hours, there's no hours available.

SPEAKER_01 50:42

There's no hours available, so it's like kind of like really, really, really hard.

SPEAKER_03 50:46

Yeah, that's the pressure a lot of our clients do feel. Like they they know there's a different way. So when we do like a demo of our product, it kind of like bends some people's minds because they're like, if you can say what you do, why isn't everyone using you already? And be like, Well, we have we're growing pretty damn fast, so that that is happening. Um, but we're also focused on uh enterprise folks, the larger complex problems. Um why do we pick that space? Because a lot of the market's like uh very it's got a lot of competitors in it, um, and we wanted to build like a system that does the most. Um, but we have clients in all areas uh of the spectrum. Um but to get to the point of like it's a system. People need to think about systems versus like a strategy for one client. It is like how am I operating my business? Because when something isn't working, I'm not gonna be afforded a team of five people to work on a ten thousand dollar a month client, right, to go do something for two weeks and come up with new creative and a new approach. I need to be able to like see the data, push a button, make decisions right now, today, and have that executed and delivered, including creative today.

SPEAKER_00 52:09

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 52:10

And that some one person's gonna be able to do that and do that effectively and communicate back to the client, show them like do all these things very rapidly.

SPEAKER_01 52:18

Is this a new person we're talking about? Like it's not the same person you were talking to back in um the day when you started out. It sounds like this is a new kind of hybrid, multifaceted individual who can he, you know, can make things, has a really deep understanding of social media in a way that is beyond like the Google understanding, understands TikTok.

SPEAKER_00 52:43

I mean, you know, to make a film power of data.

SPEAKER_01 52:48

You make a make a make a film, not every everyone can make a film for TikTok. It's it's like really, really hard.

SPEAKER_03 52:54

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 52:55

You know, I don't know, like who can who can make a film for TikTok and do really good SEO analytics for a client? It's like, wow, that's like they're probably not getting they're probably not getting paid enough if they can do it.

SPEAKER_03 53:09

No, but that the that job is like meshed and merged. We think about the the skill set we talk about changing in the sense of like it's not like who knows Photoshop or Illustrator or can do like video production as much as like you understand data, you understand like data logic when you want to like pull things together. This is like kind of like the job of the strategist now, right? When they're thinking about like how do I pull data out of a CRM system? How do I like link all this together to an outcome, which is a TikTok budget and video, and have media plans over here that I'm pulling? Like, how do I orchestrate that? This is a little bit of a different skill set, but you still gotta know at the end of the day, like how Google works, how meta works, how tick tock works, right?

SPEAKER_01 53:58

Today, today, not well, not a month ago. It's like you're gonna know how it works today.

SPEAKER_03 54:02

Yeah, no, exactly. You gotta like keep keep up with all of it. So the job has definitely gotten like more complex. We've actually introduced like two specific new roles, uh, and maybe other people use these, but I haven't heard too much of them in the industry. One is called an advertising engineer, yeah, right? You have your strategists, yeah, and people are like, There's a senior strategist and a lead strategist, and be like, we take that and be like, that is one career path, but there's another career path now called advertising engineers, and they are like doing that like work of linking that data together, and then there's another layer on top of that called advertising architects, and those are the ones that really are understanding how to like pull all that stuff together and how you architect a solution uh on how you want to pull all the data through to the advertising back data, you know, the reporting all the way back to like super.

SPEAKER_01 54:52

These are data, these are data functions. An advertising engineer and an advertising architect, uh data functions, data specialty functions. Is that how you see them? Yep.

SPEAKER_03 55:06

Yeah, yeah, they are focused on like work streams, um, but but obviously there's nuance in every agency or brand in that, but those those rules are like how do I execute complex advertising functions uh and get deterministic output, right? I want to do these, have these things done with these goals, and yeah, get that back to be able to like look look good to our clients based on our RFP or value prop or sales pitch, whatever that is.

SPEAKER_01 55:38

Yeah, yeah. So um when you like I said earlier in a call, I I saw you guys at a Mirin conference, which I thought was interesting. It's like it's a new business conference. So I was thinking, well, it's not really a media, it's like uh it's for people trying to get business in agencies. I mean, obviously, yeah, they're an important audience, but it seemed like a little different. Um what would where where do you where do you go to find your clients and how and how has that got harder in as the years have gone by? Or is it the same places?

SPEAKER_03 56:19

Uh we we go to conferences, like we really kicked this business. Well, we started in November 2017, right? But we spent 2018 and 2019 building this, like the base software for our business. So two years doing that. We kind of like went to market to test in 2020, like right when COVID hit.

SPEAKER_00 56:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:35

Um, and and conferences like shut down, right? COVID.

SPEAKER_01 56:39

Um just at the time when you needed them, just when the time we needed them, right?

SPEAKER_03 56:43

Um, to go out there. So we like had to take a different approach, like most businesses did, like essentially like stop thinking like that this g was gonna work, and there's no pity parties here, like you get to figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 56:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 56:56

So when you're like trying to launch a business, we had some early partners, we focused on those, those early successes. Um, kind of like you know, people someone left that business, went over there, and like things happening.

SPEAKER_01 57:09

Had a good experience, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 57:11

But all while like building our brands and value prop and case studies, right, on like showing actual successes and being like this client removed 92% of their button clicks, right? That is like that's amazing, yeah. Amazing about, and they were just like underwater, everyone's miserable, like and like looking at like the culture change software or software made in their business. They didn't like go get rid of a lot of people, there's like natural attrition, but they were able to like grow their business at the end of the day, like successfully, and like change the culture in their business. That's that's the cool stuff uh that happens that we really like to be able to like see that the actual change.

SPEAKER_01 57:58

Yeah, yeah. So um are you gonna be will you be at CAN or is that something that uh we won't be at CAN this year.

SPEAKER_03 58:07

Uh we do go to lots of conferences though, like the CS at Ad Week. Um, we are not going to CAN this year, but we'll be there next year uh in force. Um uh the Marine Plan.

SPEAKER_01 58:23

What about the ANA conference?

SPEAKER_03 58:25

Then like they do I think we're going to A, we're going to like fora's. Uh we go to uh what's the big one in first week of January in Vegas?

SPEAKER_00 58:37

National Retailer Foundation, pardon. Is it is it? I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 58:41

Oh why this is like something like CS. Yes. Uh we're also at Possible. That just happened like uh not that long ago, yeah, as well. So like we we are at a lot of conferences, and then we have uh a little regional stuff too that we go to. Our sales team is all remote, so they're like popping in all over the place as well.

SPEAKER_01 59:01

Cool. Um thoughts for agencies, what agencies need to be doing in this rest of the year. What I mean, you talked a little bit about it, but like how do you connect what you can provide agencies and what agencies need to be doing to get their house in order? Because it seems like there's a correlation between you know, you it's there's a sort of a bit of a walk-run here. You know, you can't just you need a sort of a mindset about like having an operating system. You need to think at a high level about your business.

SPEAKER_03 59:35

And yeah, at the highest level, there's not there's not a spot tool, right? There's no like Google script or some magical hire that is gonna like revolutionize any agency or any brand's in-house marketing. It is really about like what system are you gonna put in? I take it back to like CRM, like when CRM like really became popular, like everyone has a CRM system now. There's no question, like I'm using HubSpot or Salesforce or one of the other. I mean, there's there's lots of options out there today, right? Um, but prior to that, everyone had spreadsheets, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:13

A few months ago, a few months ago, I was too maybe it was the last year. I was talking to somebody who was kind of like he was buying agencies. He was like, he was going out and buying agencies, and he was talking very specifically about agencies not really having a a good understanding of how to run a run a business, you know, like how to run a balance sheet, how to know how to how to charge correctly and and how to know um what you're you know, how to make a margin. And he was basically saying that there's a lot of businesses out there that they're straight they don't they just kind of struggle with like the fundamentals of what a business is. And uh it seems to me that it seems to me that you kind of unless you've kind of sorted that out, you can't like you can't expect you, you can't this isn't a silver bullet. You've got to you've got to do the hard work and working out how your business makes money or can make money. And then if you've got that, you can put this in place and it can help you. But if you don't have the first thing, it's not like no, totally.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:12

Yeah, like how how is it gonna just run and operate is like how we like like just think about like that. So like go back to like the CRM thing, or or even think about like the world, you know, the financial world, right? Back in like you know, 2000, people were running around pieces of paper, yeah, creating stocks, yeah, and then three years later, like that floor is dead, like that doesn't happen, didn't happen anymore, right? Because everyone went to systems, right? You got Fidelity, Swab, like E-Tray, like they run the systems now. My theory, which is I see it happening because I'm in it in one of those businesses, is like digital advertising is going to move there, it is it is moving there right now to systems, and we're one of like the those systems. And yeah, if you're not using one of those systems 10 years from now, it will be a struggle in a slog because your clients are going to be asking for all these complex things to be going off on all these platforms. Yeah, and for you to do it manually is an impossible task. It is absolutely impossible.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:17

So well, thank you so much. That was really, really good conversation. Appreciate you taking the time.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:23

Yeah, fun being here. Good to see you.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:25

Thanks so much. Um, I hope you have a uh a good week, a Memorial Day weekend.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:31

You too.