October 1, 2025 • 35 mins
Stephen Upstone has spent two decades proving that AI isn’t just a tool, it’s the new operating system for brand advertising. In this episode, the LoopMe Founder and CEO joins Michael to reveal why mobile apps and gaming are marketing’s most undervalued frontiers, how the mid-funnel is becoming the next big battleground, and what it takes to turn disruption into lasting competitive advantage.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good Company is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Overall, consumers and advertisers win big. It was much much
harder to find and buy things before and or to
get information before, and smart businesses will win as well.
But it will be a new generation of businesses coming through.
I think we yet to see the kind of next
generation of Jenai first businesses, and I think we'll see
(00:25):
that over the next couple of years.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
I'm Michael Casson, and this is Good Company. Together we'll
explore the dynamic intersection of media, marketing, entertainment, sports and technology.
I'll be joined by visionaries, pioneers, and yes, even a
couple of disruptors for candid conversations as we break down
how these masters of ingenuity are shaping the future of business,
culture and everything in between. My bet is you'll pick
(00:56):
up a lessen or two along the way. As I
like to say, it's all good. Welcome back to Good
Company today. I'm thrilled to welcome Stephen Upstone, founder and
CEO of loop Me. Long before AI became a headline
fixture in marketing conferences, Stephen was finding ways to harness
it to reimagine how brands connect with consumers and the like.
(01:18):
He's an architect of a word near and dear to
my heart. Brand formance, a mindset that fuses emotional storytelling
with the kind of precision targeting and measurement once reserved
for performance marketers. Stephen has a knack for calling out
the blind spots most people overlook, whether it's exposing why
mobile apps and gaming are the most undervalued ad environments
(01:40):
out there, or predicting how AI will completely upend creative
agency models and the very structure of media itself in
an era where the openweb is shrinking, linear is fading,
and data is once again considered the new creative Stephen
has a track record of turning disruption into oppert tunity.
(02:01):
If you want to know where the attention is really going,
where the next big marketing battleground will be, and how
to win in a world where algorithms might be your
most valuable creative partner, this is a conversation you won't
want to miss. Steven Upstone, thank you for joining me
on Good Company today.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Hey Michael, great to see you. As always.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I want to start with something near and dear to
my heart, and that is the origin of brand formance.
We both have an affection for the concept and that
made up word. The way I looked at it, it
was really blending the heart of brand building with the
head of performance marketing. Talk about that, give me a
little riff on brandformance.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, I think it's a really great way of thinking
about it, very very simply, and everybody knows that brand advertising,
the stuff you see on television has just had a
fantastic impact on the relationships that consumers have a brands,
and it helps us to rely on or love even
certain brands, and certainly builds consideration and purchase intent, and
(03:04):
so clearly has a massive effect, as you said, down
to that emotional connection that's built. And yet the way
in which advertisers have exploited this medium for years and
years and years has just been at a very high
level of reaching frequency and just sort of putting ads
out there initially on fewer channels, now on a much
much more fragmented set of channels, and using things like
(03:27):
brand safety and viewability as quality measures and some audiences.
But it's still very very simple. And the way performance
marketers look at things at the bottom end of the funnel,
you know, with putting pixels on it, are to try
and close a sale or close an action, and it's
all around incrementality and using AI and incrementality. And we
had this idea that brand advertising deserves more and that
(03:50):
marketers deserve more from this really effective medium, and so
we just looked at things and I would describe those
things as sitting or living in the mid funnel, as
measurable things that we can optimize towards to bring better
results to brand advertising and to better understand how to
exploit that opportunity, especially in the mobile channel, but also
(04:10):
in connected television, in lots of different video and creative channels.
And that's that's how we kind of think about brandforms.
So yeah, taking a performance marketers approach to brand advertising,
I guess is the way that i'd think about it.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
And Stephen specifically, you launched lup me in the shadows
of Google and Meta, and you know what gave you
the conviction at that point. I always want to know
when somebody kind of looks at a bar that's so
high and takes a shot out.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, I guess I was lucky to be quite early
a couple of times in my career in being involved
in new trends before I had founded anything but I
was kind of like employee seven in a couple of
startups and had seen first of all AI very early,
and that was computational AI, which is kind of real
time predictive analytics. I think of it as like having
(05:02):
you know, a million kind of math PhDs who can
work for a whole week for you to do some
really complex math, and yet they can bring that result
back in points of milliseconds. And I was working on
that with a business called touch Clarity and we sold
that was twenty two years ago. We sold that to
Omnature and they still run some of that in their
test and target solution within Adobe's walls. That was quite
(05:25):
a formative experience. We met a lot of the folks
who went on to kind of build Google's Deep Mind.
David Silva was consulting with my data science team. Professor
John Shaw Taylor, which is the guys came out to
the founding team, came out as so we'd been early
in in this kind of computational AI area, and I
was just amazed at how little that was used in advertising.
It was everyone worked in segments. And then I was
(05:47):
also quite early in mobile video mobile kind of in
app video. We stitched together the first video podcast and
the video iPlayer.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Stephen, let me start you there. When did you first know?
I mean, you know, when you think back to the
days when right around the IPO of Meta if we
remember that snaff who with I think it was General Motors.
Actually that was the client that pulled out. If I'm
not mistaken, I'd have to go back in my memory,
because the position was Zuckerberg didn't understand mobile and as
(06:17):
I recall, they took a massive hit and then they
they reimagined and understood the future. When did you first
know that? I think you might have known it before
they did.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, we were playing around a mobile video with Vodaphone
as well, and the experience just looked really good. I
think it started to look really good and crisp, and
you could just see the way the technology was going
to continue to get better and better and better and
better in the same way we'd seen the dial up
on the Internet before and leading to broadband and better experiences.
I think it was around the time of the iPhone launch.
(06:49):
I remember actually doing a presentation and I was kind
of presenting why the iPhone would change everything, and there
was someone very senior for Nokias Sympi, and I think
that CIO or CTO was talking about how well the
iPhone was going to get killed because they had twenty
competitors against the single iPhone that were going to kill it.
And I was saying, you're kind of missing the point here, guys.
You know you have too many buttons on your devices,
(07:10):
and it's just when suddenly you could see something so
crisp and hold it in your hand that you could
just see, that's where all all of kind of video
and all the attention was going to go.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
And I switch from a flip phone to an iPhone
under the heading of TMI Stephen. This wouldn't surprise many
people who I know well, but I've been accused of
finishing phone calls in the shower. And I took a
flip phone back in the day into the shower. Thankfully
it wasn't video, and for the other people for sure,
(07:40):
and I dropped it and it got wet, and I said,
that's it. I'm switching to an iPhone. I don't know
what the shower had to do with it, but that
was the moment for me. I don't know if it
was too many buttons or it wasn't as slippery and
it fell into the shower. But that was my moment.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I think my kids now often do cools in the shower.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
That's sort of stuff as well.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
It's kind of like become a more thing.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
I haven't done that.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
I did once have a venture calclist that I was pitching.
I think he was based in New York actually, and
I called him up and this was pre zoom, obviously,
and there was a splashing sound and I said, are
you Is it okay for the coll He said, yeah,
I'm just having a bath, but but pitch me the business.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
My god, it kind of sets you off a little,
you know, it takes you off your game.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
I have a funny story. And I'm sure many of
our listeners will know the name Andrew Robertson. He's a
blue blood and a Hall of Fame member and really
one of the great executives in our industry. Ran BBDO
for a thousand years and AMV before that. Something you'll know.
Andrew was at a conference once and he stood up
and he said, I don't know about the rest of you,
(08:49):
but whenever I go into a hotel and I take
a shower, I have a real problem in the shower
because I can't read without my glasses, and I can't
see which is the body wash and which is the shapoo.
And it landed so well with me because I'm blind
as a bat without my glasses and the printice a little.
And so I tell Andrew this all the time. I say, Andrew,
(09:11):
don't take this the wrong way. But I think of
you often in hotel showers.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
As you put body Larsen onto your head.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Yeah, it's never good, Stephen. Let's get back to what
we're here to talk about. AI is the new new thing,
but Stephen Upstone, not to you. You got twenty years
in AI, you know, long before it was the omnipresent
buzzword for our industry. Do you see a reason why
it took so long for the industry to realize that, wait,
(09:41):
there's something here that should have impact on eating, sleeping, drinking,
everything we do.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah. So I think there's a couple of big things
to code out. So people seem to adopt technology very slowly,
and it's kind of crazy when you look at it,
and especially marketers, you know, they tend to be slow
at picking up new things. If you if you think
about YouTube. When it first came along, everyone would just say,
oh my god, there's never going to be any ads
running on YouTube. It's like full of cat videos and
(10:08):
stuff like that. So I think that there was a
general caution and slows to adopt and people had to
fit the AI to something that was a task they
wanted to achieve. And I think this first wave of
AI was very much computational AI, real time predictive analytics,
and even that which is now quite broadly distributed, there's
still a lot of people who have you know, inadequate
(10:30):
approaches with very simple algorithms and a lack of the
right data and don't organize their data in the right way.
So I think there's still a lot of work to
be done in that space to create advantage improvement and
apply that frankly to new things, you know. I think
that's where a lot of our success that Loopy came.
We applied that data and analytics the things that hadn't
(10:51):
been applied to before. And then there's this new wave
coming through with the generative and language model based AI,
which is we're so early in that phase and that
is just really going to kind of bring a ton
more change across the whole of everything, old industries, not
just our industry.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Absolutely, we're going to hit pause for a moment, but
stay with us after the break. We've got more insights
to share. Stephen, Would you give me a tru or
false answer to this question? A lot of companies seem
(11:31):
to be buying AI tools, but along the way, they're
not necessarily changing the way they work. Do you think
that's just a time continual you know, kind of give
us a minute we're adopting or is it? Gee, where
does this live in the organization? Does it live inside
the stack, inside the team, inside the product. I know
(11:55):
that's a compound question. The first one was true and false.
The second one was a real question.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So I want to answer in a couple of ways.
I think the first part is looking at these definitions
between computational AI or MATHAI, predictive analytics, and generative AI
or language based AI. The stuff that's really taking hold now.
I think there's still a lot of work to be
done with MATHAI. There's a lot of companies that still
(12:23):
use data sets that are not well organized, lack their
kind of unique data advantage, and so I think there's
a lot of work that can be done in those areas,
and there's also very basic types of AI being used,
or just really basic machine learning. So even on that journey,
which is arguably twenty years old, there's still a ton
(12:46):
of work to do for a lot of big corporates
and ad tech companies and publishers and advertisers, So there's
a lot of work there. When you then move to
this other area, generative AI, where it's moving so so quickly,
I think that there's a rush for people to understand
where they are today and to start making initiatives, and
(13:06):
I think they're right to be on that rush because
the impact of these technologies is so much broader. So
if you look at ad tech, for example, the area
that we're working in and optimization and media, the computational
stuff is there's still a lot of differentiation and value
to be created there. As you come into generative, these
(13:26):
language models haven't really been used in anger yet at
all properly across the ecosystem, they're already having a massive
impact with websites starting to go away, agencies, business models
where people are paid on time materials are going to
start to be quite challenged as well, and just the
pace at which every one of us has our everyday
(13:47):
work life is going to radically change as well.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Well, it's Stephen. You know, I was chatting to a
good friend today, Shiv Singh. He's just written a book
AI Marketing Transformation for Dummies. It speaks to me in
practical terms. You know, it's not that this is something
that's great. It's this is something that's great, and this
is how I could use it. And you know that
learning curve is interesting. But to your point, I was
(14:12):
telling him, I do a lot of public speaking, as
you know, and interviews, and obviously this the thing that
I think i'd like to hope makes me better at
this than the average veyre is that I prepare. I
don't just turn to chat, GPT or an AI tool
to write the questions and organize my thoughts. That's not
(14:33):
to say I don't use it, of course I do.
But you know, as Megan Traynor said famously in her
song it's all about the bass. I look at it
in AI terms, and I say, it's all about the prompt.
That's where I want to go later in this conversation,
and I digress because you were answering a question. But
I do want to ask you another question here, Stephen,
(14:55):
and I read it this morning with great interest Facebook's
announcements and then and doing a move, And basically, if
AI could buy the media, optimize the outcomes, and effectively
write the ads, what is a true competitive advantage for
a brand? You know, Mark Zuckerberg is basically the statue
(15:16):
of liberty to me right now, in a funny way,
the inscription says, bring us your hungry, you're tired, and
you're poor. What he's basically saying is bring me what
the outcome is you want, and I'll do the rest.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
So I think there's still a lot of things for
brands to cling onto and their relationships with consumers who
for a while are still going to be the decision makers. Here,
at some point the AI starts to the consumer.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
You're saying, the consumer is going to be the decision.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Consumers are still decision makers. And when you look at differentiation,
it still will come from a lot of those things
that we've been talking about for a long time. So
coming back to that split between computational and generative or
language based. Language base is going to change things like
the way in which we interface with ourselves, so that
(16:02):
changes software interfaces, it changes relationships with agencies, It changes
the pace and how we work. You know, literally you
could go in and check where your agents are each
day to find out what jobs you have to do.
So that will start to have a big impact. It'll
change creative as well and the way in which creative
is done and personalization. But there's still a lot of
(16:25):
differentiation on the computational side coming through, and there are
a lot of the new technologies coming through in generative
that are really going to need keeping a head or
for for example, we run one hundred and fifty developers
and we started writing code with AI agents about a
year and a half ago. And you have guys like
Mark Benioff, you know, talking now about the fact that
(16:45):
fifty percent of the codes being written by AI agents.
So that allows the speed of innovation to increase or
cost savings to materialize. And I think that that kind
of also is going to be a really interesting impact
to look at just really simple things like note taking.
You know, if you think about the amount of time
(17:07):
we all spend taking notes and how rapidly that's going
to change, you know, how that might need then meeting effectiveness, I.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Have to tell you when I was in law school, Steve,
and there was a guy that I was friends with
who was a year ahead of me, and he had
the best penmanship ever, and he took the best notes.
His name was Steve. I just said, Steve, just give
me your notes. Because he was one year ahead of
me in law school and we had the same professors.
I said, I don't have to take notes, and I
look at your handwriting and his cursive was like calligraphy.
(17:38):
So I found an AI way to get my notes
taken early.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Find enough, even the art of note taking had something
I worked with some investment bankers before, and they'd been
top ranked analysts and they had learned that by taking notes,
they encouraged the client to speak more. And so there
was a whole kind of interaction thing going on there
that can also be learned.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
But you know, that's an interesting point because is I
said earlier, Steve, And and you do this as well. You know,
when you're public speaking or speaking to an audience or
a group, you know it doesn't have to be on
a stage, I mean in a conference or you know,
a zoom. The art of note taking makes you think
people are paying attention and you know, the nod of
the head and the you know, those are the signals
(18:17):
you read and that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
But what's then going to happen with all that data
when you have all those notes taken? You know they're
going to be people who will be able to say, hey,
why are you having thirty minute meetings when you could
have finished at twenty? Or did you realize that this
same point was made by this same individuals six times
in the meeting and these three didn't say anything. You know,
you need to change the way that you react.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
I did ask chat Gept the other day, effectively, I
was going to see a shrink. I said to chat GPT,
what have you been telling me lately that I haven't
been listening to? I did, and then I felt like
I needed to send two hundred dollars and thank you
for the session, doctor, chat Gpt.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
It's great when you start to get a little bit
of personality and humor in there as well. You can
certainly respond to these agents. But I think just coming
back to businesses and running businesses in this era, you know,
I think you have an obligation to understand if you're
writing software, have you started writing software? AI what's the
impact there. What's going to be the outcome? Are you're
(19:16):
going to be producing more products? Are they going to
be more bug free? Are they going to be reduction
in cost? How do you need to build a team
around these new technologies to face the future. On the
computational side, do you have the right data assets to
give yourself a competitive advantage? Look at what's happening in web?
Are you over reliant in web advertising day? If you're
doing too much in web or relying too much on
(19:38):
Google Search performance in the past, that's going to start
to go away. And sure there'll be some new AI
based advertising models available, generative AI based models, but they're
not there yet.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Stephen, think about the opportunity through the lens of how
many people now eight hundred million people going on chat
GPT there's no advertising.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
There should be a scene that Microsoft just poach senior
guy Neil from Google and they're talking about building ads
into AI.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
And by the way, Fijisumo going over to Open AI
from Instacart tells me that advertising is somewhere in the equation.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Oh, it's one hundred percent going to be there, And
I guess there's an opportunity for these big AI brands
to either use the data to power their existing AI
models through other channels and kind of extend, and or
to run ads inside the experience. And I think that'll
be a big decision for them because it's still an
early enough market where there's a ton of different AIS
(20:36):
that could claim the consumer's kind of heart or main
first place to go, and so they want to protect
that user experience a lot, but they want to start
making where they're making such vast investments into infrastructure, they
want to start to show the use case. So it
wouldn't surprise me if they started to use some of
that data to power existing models or things off platform,
(20:58):
if you like, as quickly as they start to do
things on platform as well. So I think it's going
to be pretty interesting. As I say, it'll start to
change the media mix as well as consumers start to
spend time in different places. If you look at contextual
advertising at the moment, there are tons of players who
are working running ads inside contextual spaces and reading the
copy in their ads. You know, it's already a crowded market,
(21:22):
and now the amount of ad space that they can
run on is shrinking. It's just going to lead to
kind of rapid consolidation there.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
I think.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
I think you're right. Good company will be right back
after the break, Stephen, I want to switch gears for
a second. I want to switch to gaming. You know,
(21:50):
it's one of the unsung areas of our business. And
I say that with some authority. If you think about
the amount of time and the audience and the economics
in the gaming space, we never talk about it. It's
one of those things. And I've said this about the
event side of my life, and can I say why
(22:11):
isn't gaming? You know, sports has started to be focused
on in can over the last few years. Hats off
to stag Well for the Stagwell Beach and bringing sports,
you know to the center. There's no gaming beach. There's
an influencer beach. Now there's Gaming is a pretty important
part of the equation. And it's certainly no longer a
niche audience. It's affluent, it's diverse, it's engaged. What's the
(22:32):
biggest misunderstanding you think that brand leaders have, and you know,
brands in general, about who's actually playing and why.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, I think the first thing that's misunderstood is an
idea of brand safety. You know, whilst marketers have charged
rapidly into the TikTok worlds and the social worlds, where
arguably there's a lot more work that has to be
done to monitor content. Once you come into gaming, there
are great sways of it that might beuzzle games, you know,
(23:00):
people playing scrabble and that kind of stuff, or even
if there's a kind of shooter game, it might be
a sort of someone navigating an asteroid feel or something
like that, and it doesn't have to be unsafe. So
I think that that's a large misconception, and I think
a lot of the challenges that gaming has is that
it hasn't really been represented to brands in a serious
(23:22):
way in the past, and it also, to some extent,
was happy just selling to itself. So a lot of
the ads running inside the gaming space were running from
other gaming companies, and so I get excited by that.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
I think that's a.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Huge, huge opportunity to educate brands at the moment. We
do a lot of work in gaming. A lot of
what we do though is we still just lead with
the result. So we work in brand formats as we
touched on earlier, and we're trying to optimize and provide
a better result, And you just find that because the
time spent in that ecosystem and the quality of the
ad units that sit there, we just tend to drive
(23:57):
a lot of better results from that without going and
knocking on some store and talking about gaming, because if
you launch with that sometimes people will say no before
they've even really leaned in. So I think that at
some point that will reach a tipping point in the
same way that we touched on earlier. You know, the
kind of cap videos of YouTube suddenly became one of
the best environments where people spend time in, and the
(24:17):
same with Mark Zuckerberg's MESA platforms.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Stephen, It's like the political world we live in today.
The extreme right or left is not where opportunity exists.
It's in that movable middle. You've built Loopne's measurement stack
around that mid funnel, which is kind of often I
think overlooked by folks. It's that space between awareness and conversion.
(24:41):
Why would you say that's an important battleground right now
because it seems to be.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, I mean, brand advertising it's so powerful. I just
think it deserves more measurement and attention. If you're just
running things on a kind of reach and frequency basis.
Then you're missing half the value of brand advertising. You're
not really understanding consumers are actually able to be pushed
to the next phase. And so if you do something
(25:06):
that's harder to do. So if you just reach people,
then that's just you add up your reach figures and
run it. And you know, you and I both started
out as agency media guys way back when, and that's
pretty easy to measure it. It's harder to get these
kind of incremental steps and to look at these quality
pieces and to actually get them in a timely fashion
that you can actually do something about them and to
(25:27):
interpret them. But the size of the prize is definitely
worth it. We think there's about one hundred and twenty
billion dollars in the US alone of opportunity of moving
what is currently sort of upper funnel you know, used
to be on linear television, and moving that into being
much more digital, much more mobile, and moving that into
the mid funnel to things like purchase intent or consideration,
(25:48):
and looking at incrementality to be the guide as to
how much additional value is being created by picking certain
moments with certain consumers at certain times rather than just
running it on televis in the kind of the old
fashioned way. So part of that will be taking the
gaming message to some of the more forward looking marketers.
And I think cmos today should really be asking that question,
(26:09):
what are we doing gaming websites are going away? CTV,
I know, is really interesting, but there might be not
as much space in there. What are we doing in
app gaming? I understand that it's bigger than TikTok today,
you know, and yet I know I'm advertising in TikTok
and hear from them all the time. What should we
be doing in that? What's our stratch? Is it just
the same formats running within those spaces because it is
(26:30):
quite TV like in a lot of the user experience,
But it probably needs consideration as well, and certainly more
kind of analytics and understanding.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
We're in the middle of waiting for shoes to drop,
whether it's IPG and omnicom. Now that the Paramount deal
is closed, you know what's next on the agenda. It's clear.
I think that media consolidation is coming on every side.
Who do you think survives well.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I think there's a few interesting dynamics coming through actually
in the independent agency sector. I think is really really
interesting as well. So it's now larger than the whole
codes and it's growing very rapidly, and I think the
innovation level there, there'll be some agencies that grow up
much more kind of agentic AI focused that you might
(27:15):
be tiny today in five ten years time could redefine
the agency model. I think when you look at the
whole code, Publicist is just clearly doing an exceptional job.
And I think the acquisition of IPG by Omnicom is
a very smart one to move away from this kind
of time and materials towards more platform revenues, more data
assets in the business, and more ability to charge for
(27:37):
outcomes as well. So if you think about the business
model moving, that's a big shift. So I think that
the smarter agency groups will have a great spot to work,
and then some of the smaller independent agencies you can
really innovate, are going to do a lot lot better.
And I think within the whole ad tech ecosystem, if
(27:57):
you look at the businesses that are built multi billion
dollar ad tech businesses, they tend to be putting performance
at the heart of their stack, and they tend to
have unique kind of competitive advantage coming from that. So
you've seen people like zata app loving lift off businesses
like lup me who have that kind of combination of
powerful AI with some unique data that seem to be winning.
(28:21):
I think even when you look at our ecosystem, we're
still winning mostly from the computational waves. So as we
start to come into the generative wave, I think it
will be about CEOs that really help all of their
teams to adopt the new opportunities and lean in very
quickly and effectively to those new opportunities. But there's going
to be a lot of disruption, and I suppose publishers
(28:43):
is probably one of the biggest lookouts and platforms that
are maybe aligned to some of the biggest areas of disruption.
You know, if you're leaning too much on Google Search
as your business, then that could be very tough. If
you're leaning too much on websites, especially some of the
reference websites that start to go away, that could be
very tough as well. So I think it's people who
are leaning more towards pockets like app and gaming that
(29:04):
we've already touched on connected television as well, and adopting
these new technologies more broadly, not just buying a machine
learning algorithm.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
More so would you a venture a guest Steven As
to who wins in this follout.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
The good news is I think that overall, consumers and
advertisers win big. It was much much harder to find
and buy things before and or to get information before,
and smart businesses will win as well. But it will
be a new generation of businesses coming through. I think
you can already see those kind of advertising two point
two ad tech platforms that are coming through. But I
(29:39):
think we're yet to see the kind of next generation
of Jenai first businesses, and I think we'll see that
over the next couple of years. That's certainly where any
C suite should be making sure that their businesses has
been thought about in the right way.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
There So, Stephen, I want to get personal now before
we get to my favorite part, which is lightning round.
I want to get personal. What's the most counterintuitive lesson
you've learned from building that we're in the process of
building Loopney counterintuitive?
Speaker 4 (30:09):
Counterintuitive?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Gosh, I suppose there have been really tough times that
have created the entire business. So I think when we
first hit COVID, that was a time where we lost
tens of millions of bookings that already booked overnight. We
had to make some cuts to the overall workforce as
(30:32):
well because there was a lack of certainty in the future.
We saw rapid improvement in productivity and culture and every
measure is that everyone just had this crazy purpose to
build the business.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
Rally around the flag approach.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, and it just happened so seamlessly and fast, and
everybody really kind of dug in. And so I think
that that was pretty humbling to witness, and you know,
really kind of amazing to see that the team that
we had, we'd assembled and how they would kind of
collaborate together to turn that into a really successful time.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
There you go.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Okay, here it comes, Stephen. I'm going to shoot you
the lightning round questions. Okay, what's one small habit in
your daily routine that brings you unexpected joy?
Speaker 4 (31:18):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
I love cycling to work. And my wife's a writer
as well. And when I cycle, as well as just enjoying,
you know, passing through mostly London. I think New York's
maybe not quite ready for cycling yet. Then I like
to listen to literature as well. Audiobooks are not kind
of business podcast necessarily like this great one, but actually
(31:40):
just literally that just takes me somewhere completely different. So
it's a really good way to kind of prep yourself
with a little bit of exercise.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Love that Stephen, who was your mentor early in your career,
and is there a particular piece of advice that that
person gave you.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I've been fortunate to see things that I could learn
and take from every one of my early early bosses,
you know, just from kind of very mid level people
in advertising who just really cared about the result. I
just remember the number of times we'd sit up until
seven or eight at night just making sure that we
had the perfect result for the client. It was a
(32:14):
great guy called Mark Barber that I used to work
with who really instilled that. I had the pleasure of
doing some work with Uji or Kohley along the way,
and something he said really stuck in my mind. He
was CMO of Vodaphones, kind of US Divisions and phenomenal
guy that it really was as hard to build something
very big and very meaningful as it is to build
(32:35):
something small, and so you just need to take on
the much much bigger, bigger, bigger, tasks, I think, But
I feel like I've learned something from every single one
of my bosses, and there's something I really think is
so important now to have people senior to you on
advisor boards and junior to you who can help help.
But I'm not being very lightning about this.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Oh no, that's okay. Is there an industry buzzword you
wish would disappear for?
Speaker 4 (33:01):
We just deal with so much jargon.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I think that it would be best if we kind
of banned all the three letter acronyms for an entire year.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
That would be great.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
If people kind of had to pay a financial penalty
like a swear box every time one was used, that
would be That would be a better world.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
You know, when I started doing business with Microsoft a
one hundred years ago, it was a joke. If you
were onboarding at Microsoft, I obviously wasn't working there. They
were a very long term partner of mine. You had
to learn the acronyms because they had more acronyms than
Carter has liver pills, and you know, the glossary of acronyms,
and I would marvel at the fact that I memorized
most of them, and people would say you sound like
(33:36):
a softie. I said, wait, I don't know if that's
good or bad, but I knew all the acronyms. Stephen,
one more, if you could give your younger self, and
you're still a pretty young guy, but if you could
give your younger self one piece of guidance, what would
it be?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
One piece of guidance? I think, just stay really close
to technology. So I started my career in ninety four,
which happened to be the same year that the first
AD banner was served on Wired. And if I look
now thirty years later, the transformation that's happened everything by
the Internet.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Finally, if my.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Son is just starting his career now in twenty five,
just as this AI wave has come, so I think,
stay close to technology. But I can't stick with that.
It's all about people in the end, and your ability
to build connections and initially working for them and then
motivating them and building through them is ultimately what's going
(34:29):
to define your career.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Stephen. Speaking of connections, I'm glad we have one, and
both a personal and a professional connection. I consider your
friend and like to consider your partner as well, and
I really really appreciate you taking the time. I know
our listeners will as well, and I want to thank
you for joining me today and Good Company.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
Likewise, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
But I always get great energy from you and hope
I can emulate that through the things that I'm doing
as well.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
I have no doubt about it.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
Stephen Upstone again, thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
I'm Michael Casson, thanks for listening to Good Company.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Good Company is brought to you by Three C Ventures
and iHeart Podcasts. Special thanks to Alexis Borger Pudeo, our
executive producer and head of Content and Talent, and to
Carl Catle, executive producer at iHeart Podcasts. Episodes are produced
and edited by Mary Doo. Thanks for joining us. We'll
see you next time.
Good Company is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Overall, consumers and advertisers win big. It was much much
harder to find and buy things before and or to
get information before, and smart businesses will win as well.
But it will be a new generation of businesses coming through.
I think we yet to see the kind of next
generation of Jenai first businesses, and I think we'll see
(00:25):
that over the next couple of years.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
I'm Michael Casson, and this is Good Company. Together we'll
explore the dynamic intersection of media, marketing, entertainment, sports and technology.
I'll be joined by visionaries, pioneers, and yes, even a
couple of disruptors for candid conversations as we break down
how these masters of ingenuity are shaping the future of business,
culture and everything in between. My bet is you'll pick
(00:56):
up a lessen or two along the way. As I
like to say, it's all good. Welcome back to Good
Company today. I'm thrilled to welcome Stephen Upstone, founder and
CEO of loop Me. Long before AI became a headline
fixture in marketing conferences, Stephen was finding ways to harness
it to reimagine how brands connect with consumers and the like.
(01:18):
He's an architect of a word near and dear to
my heart. Brand formance, a mindset that fuses emotional storytelling
with the kind of precision targeting and measurement once reserved
for performance marketers. Stephen has a knack for calling out
the blind spots most people overlook, whether it's exposing why
mobile apps and gaming are the most undervalued ad environments
(01:40):
out there, or predicting how AI will completely upend creative
agency models and the very structure of media itself in
an era where the openweb is shrinking, linear is fading,
and data is once again considered the new creative Stephen
has a track record of turning disruption into oppert tunity.
(02:01):
If you want to know where the attention is really going,
where the next big marketing battleground will be, and how
to win in a world where algorithms might be your
most valuable creative partner, this is a conversation you won't
want to miss. Steven Upstone, thank you for joining me
on Good Company today.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Hey Michael, great to see you. As always.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I want to start with something near and dear to
my heart, and that is the origin of brand formance.
We both have an affection for the concept and that
made up word. The way I looked at it, it
was really blending the heart of brand building with the
head of performance marketing. Talk about that, give me a
little riff on brandformance.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, I think it's a really great way of thinking
about it, very very simply, and everybody knows that brand advertising,
the stuff you see on television has just had a
fantastic impact on the relationships that consumers have a brands,
and it helps us to rely on or love even
certain brands, and certainly builds consideration and purchase intent, and
(03:04):
so clearly has a massive effect, as you said, down
to that emotional connection that's built. And yet the way
in which advertisers have exploited this medium for years and
years and years has just been at a very high
level of reaching frequency and just sort of putting ads
out there initially on fewer channels, now on a much
much more fragmented set of channels, and using things like
(03:27):
brand safety and viewability as quality measures and some audiences.
But it's still very very simple. And the way performance
marketers look at things at the bottom end of the funnel,
you know, with putting pixels on it, are to try
and close a sale or close an action, and it's
all around incrementality and using AI and incrementality. And we
had this idea that brand advertising deserves more and that
(03:50):
marketers deserve more from this really effective medium, and so
we just looked at things and I would describe those
things as sitting or living in the mid funnel, as
measurable things that we can optimize towards to bring better
results to brand advertising and to better understand how to
exploit that opportunity, especially in the mobile channel, but also
(04:10):
in connected television, in lots of different video and creative channels.
And that's that's how we kind of think about brandforms.
So yeah, taking a performance marketers approach to brand advertising,
I guess is the way that i'd think about it.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
And Stephen specifically, you launched lup me in the shadows
of Google and Meta, and you know what gave you
the conviction at that point. I always want to know
when somebody kind of looks at a bar that's so
high and takes a shot out.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, I guess I was lucky to be quite early
a couple of times in my career in being involved
in new trends before I had founded anything but I
was kind of like employee seven in a couple of
startups and had seen first of all AI very early,
and that was computational AI, which is kind of real
time predictive analytics. I think of it as like having
(05:02):
you know, a million kind of math PhDs who can
work for a whole week for you to do some
really complex math, and yet they can bring that result
back in points of milliseconds. And I was working on
that with a business called touch Clarity and we sold
that was twenty two years ago. We sold that to
Omnature and they still run some of that in their
test and target solution within Adobe's walls. That was quite
(05:25):
a formative experience. We met a lot of the folks
who went on to kind of build Google's Deep Mind.
David Silva was consulting with my data science team. Professor
John Shaw Taylor, which is the guys came out to
the founding team, came out as so we'd been early
in in this kind of computational AI area, and I
was just amazed at how little that was used in advertising.
It was everyone worked in segments. And then I was
(05:47):
also quite early in mobile video mobile kind of in
app video. We stitched together the first video podcast and
the video iPlayer.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Stephen, let me start you there. When did you first know?
I mean, you know, when you think back to the
days when right around the IPO of Meta if we
remember that snaff who with I think it was General Motors.
Actually that was the client that pulled out. If I'm
not mistaken, I'd have to go back in my memory,
because the position was Zuckerberg didn't understand mobile and as
(06:17):
I recall, they took a massive hit and then they
they reimagined and understood the future. When did you first
know that? I think you might have known it before
they did.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, we were playing around a mobile video with Vodaphone
as well, and the experience just looked really good. I
think it started to look really good and crisp, and
you could just see the way the technology was going
to continue to get better and better and better and
better in the same way we'd seen the dial up
on the Internet before and leading to broadband and better experiences.
I think it was around the time of the iPhone launch.
(06:49):
I remember actually doing a presentation and I was kind
of presenting why the iPhone would change everything, and there
was someone very senior for Nokias Sympi, and I think
that CIO or CTO was talking about how well the
iPhone was going to get killed because they had twenty
competitors against the single iPhone that were going to kill it.
And I was saying, you're kind of missing the point here, guys.
You know you have too many buttons on your devices,
(07:10):
and it's just when suddenly you could see something so
crisp and hold it in your hand that you could
just see, that's where all all of kind of video
and all the attention was going to go.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
And I switch from a flip phone to an iPhone
under the heading of TMI Stephen. This wouldn't surprise many
people who I know well, but I've been accused of
finishing phone calls in the shower. And I took a
flip phone back in the day into the shower. Thankfully
it wasn't video, and for the other people for sure,
(07:40):
and I dropped it and it got wet, and I said,
that's it. I'm switching to an iPhone. I don't know
what the shower had to do with it, but that
was the moment for me. I don't know if it
was too many buttons or it wasn't as slippery and
it fell into the shower. But that was my moment.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I think my kids now often do cools in the shower.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
That's sort of stuff as well.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
It's kind of like become a more thing.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
I haven't done that.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
I did once have a venture calclist that I was pitching.
I think he was based in New York actually, and
I called him up and this was pre zoom, obviously,
and there was a splashing sound and I said, are
you Is it okay for the coll He said, yeah,
I'm just having a bath, but but pitch me the business.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
My god, it kind of sets you off a little,
you know, it takes you off your game.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
I have a funny story. And I'm sure many of
our listeners will know the name Andrew Robertson. He's a
blue blood and a Hall of Fame member and really
one of the great executives in our industry. Ran BBDO
for a thousand years and AMV before that. Something you'll know.
Andrew was at a conference once and he stood up
and he said, I don't know about the rest of you,
(08:49):
but whenever I go into a hotel and I take
a shower, I have a real problem in the shower
because I can't read without my glasses, and I can't
see which is the body wash and which is the shapoo.
And it landed so well with me because I'm blind
as a bat without my glasses and the printice a little.
And so I tell Andrew this all the time. I say, Andrew,
(09:11):
don't take this the wrong way. But I think of
you often in hotel showers.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
As you put body Larsen onto your head.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Yeah, it's never good, Stephen. Let's get back to what
we're here to talk about. AI is the new new thing,
but Stephen Upstone, not to you. You got twenty years
in AI, you know, long before it was the omnipresent
buzzword for our industry. Do you see a reason why
it took so long for the industry to realize that, wait,
(09:41):
there's something here that should have impact on eating, sleeping, drinking,
everything we do.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah. So I think there's a couple of big things
to code out. So people seem to adopt technology very slowly,
and it's kind of crazy when you look at it,
and especially marketers, you know, they tend to be slow
at picking up new things. If you if you think
about YouTube. When it first came along, everyone would just say,
oh my god, there's never going to be any ads
running on YouTube. It's like full of cat videos and
(10:08):
stuff like that. So I think that there was a
general caution and slows to adopt and people had to
fit the AI to something that was a task they
wanted to achieve. And I think this first wave of
AI was very much computational AI, real time predictive analytics,
and even that which is now quite broadly distributed, there's
still a lot of people who have you know, inadequate
(10:30):
approaches with very simple algorithms and a lack of the
right data and don't organize their data in the right way.
So I think there's still a lot of work to
be done in that space to create advantage improvement and
apply that frankly to new things, you know. I think
that's where a lot of our success that Loopy came.
We applied that data and analytics the things that hadn't
(10:51):
been applied to before. And then there's this new wave
coming through with the generative and language model based AI,
which is we're so early in that phase and that
is just really going to kind of bring a ton
more change across the whole of everything, old industries, not
just our industry.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Absolutely, we're going to hit pause for a moment, but
stay with us after the break. We've got more insights
to share. Stephen, Would you give me a tru or
false answer to this question? A lot of companies seem
(11:31):
to be buying AI tools, but along the way, they're
not necessarily changing the way they work. Do you think
that's just a time continual you know, kind of give
us a minute we're adopting or is it? Gee, where
does this live in the organization? Does it live inside
the stack, inside the team, inside the product. I know
(11:55):
that's a compound question. The first one was true and false.
The second one was a real question.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So I want to answer in a couple of ways.
I think the first part is looking at these definitions
between computational AI or MATHAI, predictive analytics, and generative AI
or language based AI. The stuff that's really taking hold now.
I think there's still a lot of work to be
done with MATHAI. There's a lot of companies that still
(12:23):
use data sets that are not well organized, lack their
kind of unique data advantage, and so I think there's
a lot of work that can be done in those areas,
and there's also very basic types of AI being used,
or just really basic machine learning. So even on that journey,
which is arguably twenty years old, there's still a ton
(12:46):
of work to do for a lot of big corporates
and ad tech companies and publishers and advertisers, So there's
a lot of work there. When you then move to
this other area, generative AI, where it's moving so so quickly,
I think that there's a rush for people to understand
where they are today and to start making initiatives, and
(13:06):
I think they're right to be on that rush because
the impact of these technologies is so much broader. So
if you look at ad tech, for example, the area
that we're working in and optimization and media, the computational
stuff is there's still a lot of differentiation and value
to be created there. As you come into generative, these
(13:26):
language models haven't really been used in anger yet at
all properly across the ecosystem, they're already having a massive
impact with websites starting to go away, agencies, business models
where people are paid on time materials are going to
start to be quite challenged as well, and just the
pace at which every one of us has our everyday
(13:47):
work life is going to radically change as well.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Well, it's Stephen. You know, I was chatting to a
good friend today, Shiv Singh. He's just written a book
AI Marketing Transformation for Dummies. It speaks to me in
practical terms. You know, it's not that this is something
that's great. It's this is something that's great, and this
is how I could use it. And you know that
learning curve is interesting. But to your point, I was
(14:12):
telling him, I do a lot of public speaking, as
you know, and interviews, and obviously this the thing that
I think i'd like to hope makes me better at
this than the average veyre is that I prepare. I
don't just turn to chat, GPT or an AI tool
to write the questions and organize my thoughts. That's not
(14:33):
to say I don't use it, of course I do.
But you know, as Megan Traynor said famously in her
song it's all about the bass. I look at it
in AI terms, and I say, it's all about the prompt.
That's where I want to go later in this conversation,
and I digress because you were answering a question. But
I do want to ask you another question here, Stephen,
(14:55):
and I read it this morning with great interest Facebook's
announcements and then and doing a move, And basically, if
AI could buy the media, optimize the outcomes, and effectively
write the ads, what is a true competitive advantage for
a brand? You know, Mark Zuckerberg is basically the statue
(15:16):
of liberty to me right now, in a funny way,
the inscription says, bring us your hungry, you're tired, and
you're poor. What he's basically saying is bring me what
the outcome is you want, and I'll do the rest.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
So I think there's still a lot of things for
brands to cling onto and their relationships with consumers who
for a while are still going to be the decision makers. Here,
at some point the AI starts to the consumer.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
You're saying, the consumer is going to be the decision.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Consumers are still decision makers. And when you look at differentiation,
it still will come from a lot of those things
that we've been talking about for a long time. So
coming back to that split between computational and generative or
language based. Language base is going to change things like
the way in which we interface with ourselves, so that
(16:02):
changes software interfaces, it changes relationships with agencies, It changes
the pace and how we work. You know, literally you
could go in and check where your agents are each
day to find out what jobs you have to do.
So that will start to have a big impact. It'll
change creative as well and the way in which creative
is done and personalization. But there's still a lot of
(16:25):
differentiation on the computational side coming through, and there are
a lot of the new technologies coming through in generative
that are really going to need keeping a head or
for for example, we run one hundred and fifty developers
and we started writing code with AI agents about a
year and a half ago. And you have guys like
Mark Benioff, you know, talking now about the fact that
(16:45):
fifty percent of the codes being written by AI agents.
So that allows the speed of innovation to increase or
cost savings to materialize. And I think that that kind
of also is going to be a really interesting impact
to look at just really simple things like note taking.
You know, if you think about the amount of time
(17:07):
we all spend taking notes and how rapidly that's going
to change, you know, how that might need then meeting effectiveness, I.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Have to tell you when I was in law school, Steve,
and there was a guy that I was friends with
who was a year ahead of me, and he had
the best penmanship ever, and he took the best notes.
His name was Steve. I just said, Steve, just give
me your notes. Because he was one year ahead of
me in law school and we had the same professors.
I said, I don't have to take notes, and I
look at your handwriting and his cursive was like calligraphy.
(17:38):
So I found an AI way to get my notes
taken early.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
Find enough, even the art of note taking had something
I worked with some investment bankers before, and they'd been
top ranked analysts and they had learned that by taking notes,
they encouraged the client to speak more. And so there
was a whole kind of interaction thing going on there
that can also be learned.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
But you know, that's an interesting point because is I
said earlier, Steve, And and you do this as well. You know,
when you're public speaking or speaking to an audience or
a group, you know it doesn't have to be on
a stage, I mean in a conference or you know,
a zoom. The art of note taking makes you think
people are paying attention and you know, the nod of
the head and the you know, those are the signals
(18:17):
you read and that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
But what's then going to happen with all that data
when you have all those notes taken? You know they're
going to be people who will be able to say, hey,
why are you having thirty minute meetings when you could
have finished at twenty? Or did you realize that this
same point was made by this same individuals six times
in the meeting and these three didn't say anything. You know,
you need to change the way that you react.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
I did ask chat Gept the other day, effectively, I
was going to see a shrink. I said to chat GPT,
what have you been telling me lately that I haven't
been listening to? I did, and then I felt like
I needed to send two hundred dollars and thank you
for the session, doctor, chat Gpt.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
It's great when you start to get a little bit
of personality and humor in there as well. You can
certainly respond to these agents. But I think just coming
back to businesses and running businesses in this era, you know,
I think you have an obligation to understand if you're
writing software, have you started writing software? AI what's the
impact there. What's going to be the outcome? Are you're
(19:16):
going to be producing more products? Are they going to
be more bug free? Are they going to be reduction
in cost? How do you need to build a team
around these new technologies to face the future. On the
computational side, do you have the right data assets to
give yourself a competitive advantage? Look at what's happening in web?
Are you over reliant in web advertising day? If you're
doing too much in web or relying too much on
(19:38):
Google Search performance in the past, that's going to start
to go away. And sure there'll be some new AI
based advertising models available, generative AI based models, but they're
not there yet.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Stephen, think about the opportunity through the lens of how
many people now eight hundred million people going on chat
GPT there's no advertising.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
There should be a scene that Microsoft just poach senior
guy Neil from Google and they're talking about building ads
into AI.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
And by the way, Fijisumo going over to Open AI
from Instacart tells me that advertising is somewhere in the equation.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Oh, it's one hundred percent going to be there, And
I guess there's an opportunity for these big AI brands
to either use the data to power their existing AI
models through other channels and kind of extend, and or
to run ads inside the experience. And I think that'll
be a big decision for them because it's still an
early enough market where there's a ton of different AIS
(20:36):
that could claim the consumer's kind of heart or main
first place to go, and so they want to protect
that user experience a lot, but they want to start
making where they're making such vast investments into infrastructure, they
want to start to show the use case. So it
wouldn't surprise me if they started to use some of
that data to power existing models or things off platform,
(20:58):
if you like, as quickly as they start to do
things on platform as well. So I think it's going
to be pretty interesting. As I say, it'll start to
change the media mix as well as consumers start to
spend time in different places. If you look at contextual
advertising at the moment, there are tons of players who
are working running ads inside contextual spaces and reading the
copy in their ads. You know, it's already a crowded market,
(21:22):
and now the amount of ad space that they can
run on is shrinking. It's just going to lead to
kind of rapid consolidation there.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
I think.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
I think you're right. Good company will be right back
after the break, Stephen, I want to switch gears for
a second. I want to switch to gaming. You know,
(21:50):
it's one of the unsung areas of our business. And
I say that with some authority. If you think about
the amount of time and the audience and the economics
in the gaming space, we never talk about it. It's
one of those things. And I've said this about the
event side of my life, and can I say why
(22:11):
isn't gaming? You know, sports has started to be focused
on in can over the last few years. Hats off
to stag Well for the Stagwell Beach and bringing sports,
you know to the center. There's no gaming beach. There's
an influencer beach. Now there's Gaming is a pretty important
part of the equation. And it's certainly no longer a
niche audience. It's affluent, it's diverse, it's engaged. What's the
(22:32):
biggest misunderstanding you think that brand leaders have, and you know,
brands in general, about who's actually playing and why.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, I think the first thing that's misunderstood is an
idea of brand safety. You know, whilst marketers have charged
rapidly into the TikTok worlds and the social worlds, where
arguably there's a lot more work that has to be
done to monitor content. Once you come into gaming, there
are great sways of it that might beuzzle games, you know,
(23:00):
people playing scrabble and that kind of stuff, or even
if there's a kind of shooter game, it might be
a sort of someone navigating an asteroid feel or something
like that, and it doesn't have to be unsafe. So
I think that that's a large misconception, and I think
a lot of the challenges that gaming has is that
it hasn't really been represented to brands in a serious
(23:22):
way in the past, and it also, to some extent,
was happy just selling to itself. So a lot of
the ads running inside the gaming space were running from
other gaming companies, and so I get excited by that.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
I think that's a.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Huge, huge opportunity to educate brands at the moment. We
do a lot of work in gaming. A lot of
what we do though is we still just lead with
the result. So we work in brand formats as we
touched on earlier, and we're trying to optimize and provide
a better result, And you just find that because the
time spent in that ecosystem and the quality of the
ad units that sit there, we just tend to drive
(23:57):
a lot of better results from that without going and
knocking on some store and talking about gaming, because if
you launch with that sometimes people will say no before
they've even really leaned in. So I think that at
some point that will reach a tipping point in the
same way that we touched on earlier. You know, the
kind of cap videos of YouTube suddenly became one of
the best environments where people spend time in, and the
(24:17):
same with Mark Zuckerberg's MESA platforms.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Stephen, It's like the political world we live in today.
The extreme right or left is not where opportunity exists.
It's in that movable middle. You've built Loopne's measurement stack
around that mid funnel, which is kind of often I
think overlooked by folks. It's that space between awareness and conversion.
(24:41):
Why would you say that's an important battleground right now
because it seems to be.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, I mean, brand advertising it's so powerful. I just
think it deserves more measurement and attention. If you're just
running things on a kind of reach and frequency basis.
Then you're missing half the value of brand advertising. You're
not really understanding consumers are actually able to be pushed
to the next phase. And so if you do something
(25:06):
that's harder to do. So if you just reach people,
then that's just you add up your reach figures and
run it. And you know, you and I both started
out as agency media guys way back when, and that's
pretty easy to measure it. It's harder to get these
kind of incremental steps and to look at these quality
pieces and to actually get them in a timely fashion
that you can actually do something about them and to
(25:27):
interpret them. But the size of the prize is definitely
worth it. We think there's about one hundred and twenty
billion dollars in the US alone of opportunity of moving
what is currently sort of upper funnel you know, used
to be on linear television, and moving that into being
much more digital, much more mobile, and moving that into
the mid funnel to things like purchase intent or consideration,
(25:48):
and looking at incrementality to be the guide as to
how much additional value is being created by picking certain
moments with certain consumers at certain times rather than just
running it on televis in the kind of the old
fashioned way. So part of that will be taking the
gaming message to some of the more forward looking marketers.
And I think cmos today should really be asking that question,
(26:09):
what are we doing gaming websites are going away? CTV,
I know, is really interesting, but there might be not
as much space in there. What are we doing in
app gaming? I understand that it's bigger than TikTok today,
you know, and yet I know I'm advertising in TikTok
and hear from them all the time. What should we
be doing in that? What's our stratch? Is it just
the same formats running within those spaces because it is
(26:30):
quite TV like in a lot of the user experience,
But it probably needs consideration as well, and certainly more
kind of analytics and understanding.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
We're in the middle of waiting for shoes to drop,
whether it's IPG and omnicom. Now that the Paramount deal
is closed, you know what's next on the agenda. It's clear.
I think that media consolidation is coming on every side.
Who do you think survives well.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I think there's a few interesting dynamics coming through actually
in the independent agency sector. I think is really really
interesting as well. So it's now larger than the whole
codes and it's growing very rapidly, and I think the
innovation level there, there'll be some agencies that grow up
much more kind of agentic AI focused that you might
(27:15):
be tiny today in five ten years time could redefine
the agency model. I think when you look at the
whole code, Publicist is just clearly doing an exceptional job.
And I think the acquisition of IPG by Omnicom is
a very smart one to move away from this kind
of time and materials towards more platform revenues, more data
assets in the business, and more ability to charge for
(27:37):
outcomes as well. So if you think about the business
model moving, that's a big shift. So I think that
the smarter agency groups will have a great spot to work,
and then some of the smaller independent agencies you can
really innovate, are going to do a lot lot better.
And I think within the whole ad tech ecosystem, if
(27:57):
you look at the businesses that are built multi billion
dollar ad tech businesses, they tend to be putting performance
at the heart of their stack, and they tend to
have unique kind of competitive advantage coming from that. So
you've seen people like zata app loving lift off businesses
like lup me who have that kind of combination of
powerful AI with some unique data that seem to be winning.
(28:21):
I think even when you look at our ecosystem, we're
still winning mostly from the computational waves. So as we
start to come into the generative wave, I think it
will be about CEOs that really help all of their
teams to adopt the new opportunities and lean in very
quickly and effectively to those new opportunities. But there's going
to be a lot of disruption, and I suppose publishers
(28:43):
is probably one of the biggest lookouts and platforms that
are maybe aligned to some of the biggest areas of disruption.
You know, if you're leaning too much on Google Search
as your business, then that could be very tough. If
you're leaning too much on websites, especially some of the
reference websites that start to go away, that could be
very tough as well. So I think it's people who
are leaning more towards pockets like app and gaming that
(29:04):
we've already touched on connected television as well, and adopting
these new technologies more broadly, not just buying a machine
learning algorithm.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
More so would you a venture a guest Steven As
to who wins in this follout.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
The good news is I think that overall, consumers and
advertisers win big. It was much much harder to find
and buy things before and or to get information before,
and smart businesses will win as well. But it will
be a new generation of businesses coming through. I think
you can already see those kind of advertising two point
two ad tech platforms that are coming through. But I
(29:39):
think we're yet to see the kind of next generation
of Jenai first businesses, and I think we'll see that
over the next couple of years. That's certainly where any
C suite should be making sure that their businesses has
been thought about in the right way.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
There So, Stephen, I want to get personal now before
we get to my favorite part, which is lightning round.
I want to get personal. What's the most counterintuitive lesson
you've learned from building that we're in the process of
building Loopney counterintuitive?
Speaker 4 (30:09):
Counterintuitive?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Gosh, I suppose there have been really tough times that
have created the entire business. So I think when we
first hit COVID, that was a time where we lost
tens of millions of bookings that already booked overnight. We
had to make some cuts to the overall workforce as
(30:32):
well because there was a lack of certainty in the future.
We saw rapid improvement in productivity and culture and every
measure is that everyone just had this crazy purpose to
build the business.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
Rally around the flag approach.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, and it just happened so seamlessly and fast, and
everybody really kind of dug in. And so I think
that that was pretty humbling to witness, and you know,
really kind of amazing to see that the team that
we had, we'd assembled and how they would kind of
collaborate together to turn that into a really successful time.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
There you go.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Okay, here it comes, Stephen. I'm going to shoot you
the lightning round questions. Okay, what's one small habit in
your daily routine that brings you unexpected joy?
Speaker 4 (31:18):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
I love cycling to work. And my wife's a writer
as well. And when I cycle, as well as just enjoying,
you know, passing through mostly London. I think New York's
maybe not quite ready for cycling yet. Then I like
to listen to literature as well. Audiobooks are not kind
of business podcast necessarily like this great one, but actually
(31:40):
just literally that just takes me somewhere completely different. So
it's a really good way to kind of prep yourself
with a little bit of exercise.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Love that Stephen, who was your mentor early in your career,
and is there a particular piece of advice that that
person gave you.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I've been fortunate to see things that I could learn
and take from every one of my early early bosses,
you know, just from kind of very mid level people
in advertising who just really cared about the result. I
just remember the number of times we'd sit up until
seven or eight at night just making sure that we
had the perfect result for the client. It was a
(32:14):
great guy called Mark Barber that I used to work
with who really instilled that. I had the pleasure of
doing some work with Uji or Kohley along the way,
and something he said really stuck in my mind. He
was CMO of Vodaphones, kind of US Divisions and phenomenal
guy that it really was as hard to build something
very big and very meaningful as it is to build
(32:35):
something small, and so you just need to take on
the much much bigger, bigger, bigger, tasks, I think, But
I feel like I've learned something from every single one
of my bosses, and there's something I really think is
so important now to have people senior to you on
advisor boards and junior to you who can help help.
But I'm not being very lightning about this.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Oh no, that's okay. Is there an industry buzzword you
wish would disappear for?
Speaker 4 (33:01):
We just deal with so much jargon.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I think that it would be best if we kind
of banned all the three letter acronyms for an entire year.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
That would be great.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
If people kind of had to pay a financial penalty
like a swear box every time one was used, that
would be That would be a better world.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
You know, when I started doing business with Microsoft a
one hundred years ago, it was a joke. If you
were onboarding at Microsoft, I obviously wasn't working there. They
were a very long term partner of mine. You had
to learn the acronyms because they had more acronyms than
Carter has liver pills, and you know, the glossary of acronyms,
and I would marvel at the fact that I memorized
most of them, and people would say you sound like
(33:36):
a softie. I said, wait, I don't know if that's
good or bad, but I knew all the acronyms. Stephen,
one more, if you could give your younger self, and
you're still a pretty young guy, but if you could
give your younger self one piece of guidance, what would
it be?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
One piece of guidance? I think, just stay really close
to technology. So I started my career in ninety four,
which happened to be the same year that the first
AD banner was served on Wired. And if I look
now thirty years later, the transformation that's happened everything by
the Internet.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Finally, if my.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Son is just starting his career now in twenty five,
just as this AI wave has come, so I think,
stay close to technology. But I can't stick with that.
It's all about people in the end, and your ability
to build connections and initially working for them and then
motivating them and building through them is ultimately what's going
(34:29):
to define your career.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Stephen. Speaking of connections, I'm glad we have one, and
both a personal and a professional connection. I consider your
friend and like to consider your partner as well, and
I really really appreciate you taking the time. I know
our listeners will as well, and I want to thank
you for joining me today and Good Company.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
Likewise, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
But I always get great energy from you and hope
I can emulate that through the things that I'm doing
as well.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
I have no doubt about it.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
Stephen Upstone again, thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
I'm Michael Casson, thanks for listening to Good Company.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Good Company is brought to you by Three C Ventures
and iHeart Podcasts. Special thanks to Alexis Borger Pudeo, our
executive producer and head of Content and Talent, and to
Carl Catle, executive producer at iHeart Podcasts. Episodes are produced
and edited by Mary Doo. Thanks for joining us. We'll
see you next time.
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