Exploring the Future of Media with Ryan Green #205

In this episode of The Screen Lawyer Podcast, host Pete Salsich welcomes Ryan Green, Fractional Chief Media Officer at The Last Splash. They explore the concept of media placement and its transformation in the digital age, highlighting the role of AI in targeted advertising. Ryan shares his perspectives on the future of digital advertising and the challenges and opportunities it presents for brands and advertisers.

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Transcript

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On this episode of The Screen Lawyer Podcast, I'm joined by Ryan Green, Chief Media Officer at The Last Splash. Ryan, welcome. Thanks for having me. Glad you're here. Ryan's going to talk to us about being a Chief Media Officer now and in the future, and telling stories for brands in a way that makes sense. Stick around. Hey there. Welcome to the Screen Lawyer Podcast. I'm Pete Salsich, The Screen Lawyer, and my guest today is Ryan Green. Ryan is the Chief Media Officer at The Last Splash. Welcome, Ryan. Thanks for having me, Pete. Appreciate it. Only have known each other for a couple weeks, and it's been an impactful couple weeks so I really appreciate it. And we're gonna get into that a little bit. First of all, though, I want to, I just, you know, I use the term Chief Media Officer. Yeah. which, you know, would you say it? And I'm like, oh, sure. That's a thing. And then sort of talking like, I don't really know exactly what that is. So I want to get into that because we had a really interesting conversation. But let me set the tone a little bit. So about a month or so ago, I attended a, morning panel, put on by a local agency called 314 Digital that promotes lots, just as you might suspect, digital agencies marketing in the 314 area code here in Saint Louis. And Ryan was the moderator of a panel on all of the emerging ways that AI is used. Might be a threat, all sorts of different things. Really fascinating panel. And, Ryan and I started talking afterwards, and then we had lunch a couple days later, and I learned all kinds of things that I didn't know about where media and AI and this thing that we've all I think we've known for a while is heading. So that's why we're here. And I thought, oh my goodness, let's get him on the podcast. Because I think everybody else wants to know this too. So Ryan set the tone for us a little bit. Tell us kind of about your background and how you got to where you are now, because you've been a marketing professional for quite a while. Yeah, I've been in marketing for, the last 12 years. I just recently started my own firm, The Last Splash, and I'm a fractional chief media officer. so let me let me with the concept of fractional. So what do you mean by being a fractional CMO? So fractional means that I'll be able to lend services to multiple brands. And you know, brands are very familiar with having chief marketing officers, right? but more and more, Fortune 50, Fortune 100 companies actually do have a C-suite spot available just for the media lead generally, that has been, rolled up underneath marketing and still is at the majority of organizations. But we have to define what that word media means, that media is going to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different. Exactly. people. But to businesses, media is going to be, usually their largest marketing expenditure. Okay. You may spend a half $1 million producing, a beautiful television spot, maybe six different versions of that, but you may spend ten, $15 million promoting that interest. And you can where, where you place that spot is, a relationship that you're developing with media. that could be, Sunday Night Football, that could be on Instagram, that could be, on billboards, that could be on connected TV, on the digital media side, in particular, we've been using AI to help place where that ad should go. Interesting. For the last ten years, since I've been, been there, AI is not a new concept. And yeah, I that's a really good powerful point. And let's pause right there just for a second because I two things. One, I said CMO Shorten Chief Medical officer, but then immediately, as soon as you started talking about Chief Marketing officer, I'm realizing that actually that's a term that CMO these. So we will sort of separate those two then talking about media and then first when when we were first talking about media, I was still thinking of the media as a media producer, as the as being the, you know, creating what? Yeah, this we will create this podcast is a form of media. Yep. Right. It is a piece or however you think of it. But as I'm listening to you talk, and particularly how you use have been using AI for a long time, you're not talking about it so much in the creation of the media product, but more in how the media goes out and lives in the world and finds its audience and the placement, the placement, the where and of who are probably the two things that media, the way that I'm defining it, is answering who are we targeting and ad to and where is that, ad being presented? It used to be in the Don Draper days in the 60s. It was just where it was going to be on CBS. It was going to be on ABC. It's going to be on I Love Lucy. it was very much on where. Okay. But with digital, now that there is a fingerprint of every device and the browser history of where that person has went what they purchased, right, and what their interests are, the other devices that they have, that are likely associated with that same browser, who becomes a powerful signal. And for the last ten years, that has been almost where all of the attention of paid media has went to. How can we target a very niche specific audience? So if I'm, you know, targeting, I went ahead, you know, males between the age of 18 and 24 and the the middle of the United States, who are all like sports or some and probably a lot more detail than that if you want to, but you can combine all three of those elements. Okay. and there are signals to be able to do that that's still available today. But we could also get to if somebody owns a cat or a dog, if you were a pet food company, you may want to have a different creative for the for the cat owners and the dog owners. Right. so that the targeting. Right. I kind of hate using that term targeting comes from military. Sure. so does, campaign actually write that these are the and strategy, in fact. Right. are words that marketers use that all came from World War Two analogies. Right. so we need to find some different language for that. Yeah. But being able to, specify a very niche specific audience is possible with digital marketing being able to use and the statements to say, I want somebody who's 18 to 24 and has a certain household income and has a certain, interests and characteristics, that's, that's starting to break down that. Well. So, okay, so because that's not new, right? I mean, what you've just been talking about is something, you know, if I, if I'm scrolling, Instagram and I stop even for a short period of time, and, you know, if I don't click on a video, but it knows that I watched the full 15 or 20s and next thing you know, things that are just like that start showing up. Right? So that's the same beautiful button down that I think you saw when we have lunch. You know, maybe one that would get targeted to you, right. Perhaps, you know, a couple of years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was at Congress and, some, you know, older Congress person said, how does Facebook make money? And he's like, sir, we sell ads. Yeah. right. So they in in fact, they're selling targeted advertising. that is able to deduce that you're somebody who likes to wear pink shirts, right. or that favorite likes to wear blazers. Right. that's that's the more honest answer. It's not that they just sell ads, it's that they sell highly targeted, very specific advertising. But the reason he was in front of Congress is that there's a lot of people that feel like that's a privacy invasion, got it, and the regulatory environment, as I'm sure you know, your, law firm knows, is quickly changing as it pertains to the use of data that's used. That is the fuel that's behind a lot of this. And, it's probably put on steroids. Now that we're talking so much about generalized artificial intelligence, right. Combining that, that data with a stronger, computer and, with more automation has incredible potential and has, incredible risk to it, for brands and advertisers that they really need to think about in particular, this year, 2024 is going to be the linchpin year, I feel like, in the evolution of digital advertising. Yeah. And why is that? What what's going on right now that makes you say that the combination of, the quick enhancements that, generative AI is bringing and the, regulatory environment, that I was speaking about. But the third big thing is that, this should be the year that Google Chrome deprecates third party cookies, third party cookies, or what contain a lot of the data that we're talking about here. so a lot of the hyper targeted, ads that you've seen, right, are going to become a lot less effective. That signal, really, it's called signal loss in the industry. the effectiveness of that is going to be greatly reduced. So there's a lot of a lot of changes happening, both in the way that we work, where, the screen time that we're looking at, even looking at like something like social media, right. Our, is a brand comfortable with advertising on X, do you want to really put all your eggs on TikTok if that's going to. Right, be forced to be sold. Right. And that algorithm is not going to come along with, with the sale by the way. Right. So there's the effectiveness of that platform. going to be the same even looking at television right now, linear television and streaming television separately, both are unprofitable business models. So the advertising relationship in the environment, right is going to change. I think, quite a bit. Even on streaming TV. That's a lot of different plate, you know, places where billions of dollars of ads are spent that are all changing. This is why I think this is a year that brands should be looking at having a stronger presence and understanding of media, and why I think this is the right time to enlist a chief media officer to help brands evaluate the relationship with media and guide what, what the next move is. And so that's really so I, I'm was tracking with you on the you know, certainly we have you know the all these things going on this year. One of the things that we're studying this year with AI also is the legal landscape, right? The cases that are challenging the large language model, training methods, on copyright infringement grounds, we've talked about that a number of times here in the podcast. but I hadn't focused on the I want to talk more about the concept of the deprecation of cookies, because, yeah, you know, I've noticed and probably everybody has more recently, every time you go to a new app or website, even on your phone up, you got a full screen pop up, you've got to accept cookies. And I know that, or reject cookies or accept some. You get to make a choice. And that is something that we have tracked, as you mentioned, the emergence, maybe emergence is the wrong word, just the gradual strengthening of the privacy laws. Yeah, right. It started in the EU, and the GDPR. And then California was the first state here in enact stronger privacy laws. But it really I mean and we advised clients this for a while now that if you're dealing with data privacy, your best policy is to be as protective of that data, because that's where the law is headed. Don't start trying to be a little bit less. You want to live in the world. You want to be on the internet globally. You've got to, you know, adjust your data privacy practices to fit that emerging sensibility. So I can see how that but I hadn't really realized that the the cookies as such may go away from Chrome as a browser. So tell me more about that, because that's something that was new to me. So in reality, cookies have been eroding for several years now. Apple doesn't use cookies. or at least persistent cookies. I think they, they expire after seven days. Okay. so if you go back on your iPhone and it within a day or so, it's... But, but a week or so goes by. You're not. It won't remember that you bought the shirt, you know, so it's interesting. Stop. I have to start. I have to look at another video of pink shirts. Yes, yes, to likely the algorithm. Right. Firefox doesn't accept, cookies. Google has, experimented now where 1% of its browsers don't accept third party cookies. So these are the cookies. Like, the information that can get bought and sold by, third party vendors still does accept first party cookies. So when you log in to, a website and it remembers your password, that's right. that mechanisms stays brands can still collect authenticated first party data. when there's consent which is why you're seeing a lot of. Right. the accepting of cookies is almost a forced acceptance. you know, I think, well, it's you can say no, but then you're only going to see about a third, and they make it challenging for you to say, now you're. Yeah, there's a couple extra steps. So there's, the UX on the, right on the rejection is by you just want to move on. But that's being technically compliant with the law. Yes it is. And for because there's still some gray area in particular between GDPR, CcpA that you're talking about in California and 15 other state laws that have similar but slight differences. Right. Because there's no federal law. Right? Right. So, as we await the slow federal government to decide, right, to move forward with, with some kind of clear legislation, as the tech big tech is lobbying both sides pretty heavily, right? they may have the largest, lobbying group of anybody right now. There is, some data aggregators that are trying to use non cookie information to, still be able to serve you your pink shirt. Okay. that is privacy compliant. in one respect, but could be looked at once. The federal legislation comes out as being pretty similar to, to what cookies are doing. So I've been advising clients to try not to use a short term Band-Aid, but think about what their strategy is going to be long term. And so and I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to make sure I'm tracking and that we're all tracking. So follow with you. This is some complicated stuff. So if it actually is, it's and to me I think it's fascinating because it, it, it speaks to something that I, and I think a lot of us, you know, we you have this generalized awareness if you just pay at all attention that we use our devices, we put things out into the world. You know, we when, when people when I get a, you know, any kind of feedback on any of the work that we do here at The Screen Lawyer, it is it pushes you to do more. Right? So that's just a tiny touch of what a brand does when it invests all kinds of money in getting its information about its product, making, you know, touching this particular audience. To me, this pink shirt buying this is we're going to roll with the pink shirt analogy all the way through. I think it works a salmon think it is actually more Salmon. It doesn't think yeah, I do have pink shirts though. But but so you know that generalized awareness serves me walking around the world, but I'm not trying to sell a product and putting my large advertising budget on everything. And I think, you know, years ago, this is an analogy and I don't know if it'll fit, but maybe it'll help set the tone for the people that have held on to their corner office. With last year's model of tactic. Yeah, and it's very hard to get them to convince you to convince them to leave that behind. You know, years ago, I represented a startup software company that that, created a mobile app for use in a trauma setting. And it was groundbreaking in what it could do and in the testing models in the pilot programs, the users loved it, raved about what it could do, and keep the information flowing as fast as the patient was flowing through the trauma setting. but in the company never was able to sell it because selling software into the medical professional system meant getting past the guy that had his corner office because he got laptops on carts ten years ago. Yeah. And that was literally this. How do you crack the knowledge base into the, you know, into sort of I don't want to say dinosaurs. That's unfair. Regulated industries. Regulated industries. That’s a nice term for dinosaurs sometimes. And also the people that are making those buying decisions. We talked about this the other day. You know, people who, you know tip the hair color scale more like I do these days, who are, you know, have been very successful with the old way. Yeah. And, you know, getting that group and the next group comfortable with understanding how to navigate this privacy AI world. Yeah. But still getting the message out. I think it's really important to understand how to speak that way. It is you know, there's how many you know, the big fad in business 7 or 8 years ago was the direct to consumer trend, right. D to C, the Casper, mattresses etc.. Right. They built their brands on performance marketing that used niche targeting, that used a lot of automation and a lot of the things that are starting to crack a little bit, that we're talking about here. They also trusted that the platforms that they were buying from when they counted a conversion, that it was accurate. And so what do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? So let's say you bought your salmon shirt after seeing one of the Instagram ads for it, but you also saw an ad on connected television for it, and you also saw a billboard. Facebook is going to take 100% credit. Got it for the lack, because you were for the last ad or the last time that you clicked on an ad. Maybe you searched for it, right? Sure, it's it's going to your $100 shirt. It's going to take $100 of credit, even though you probably your wife said, I like how you look in salmon. Please buy a salmon shirt. That was huge. Should get the 100 credit for it, right? and some of the lawsuits that have been coming up recently have been, there's a consortium, there's a class action lawsuit right now, against meta from advertisers who said, hey, you're you told us that we reached this many people, and, it was a lie. Yeah, it wasn’t accurate. There wasn't. There was an this happened all the time when I was a, social media buyer setting up campaigns. I would log in and be like, oh, my reach today is 10 million users. Well, it said 27 million yesterday. What happened in one day? You're telling me that something like, like the the algorithm is learning. They would say or, you know, they’d have some kind of excuse. There's also not, the, the Googles and Facebooks of the world are very sensitive to anybody grading their homework. Or verifying what is being shown is is accurate. Occasionally we would get a refund for like, $6 on a $10,000 campaign. I have no idea what the refund is from. There's no independent audit, there's no verification, or you're just trusting the numbers on a screen. You're not necessarily trusting the story and the intuition and the things that most marketers got into the profession for. Most marketers are not quant nerds that are, you know, manipulating, pivot tables to try to figure out exactly what time stamp an ad is should be getting full credit. They're like in these big attribution models. They want to tell a story. They want to represent a brand. They want to make those connections with their consumers. The D to C movement was kind of the opposite of that, and it was very effective for a while, but there are some cracks in that, and I think that it's going to be tough for the corner office person at those companies who built their success on, putting it into the system to convince them not to, is going to be pretty challenging, right? So it's not just the gray hairs. It's also the millennials who play, right, who put, brands together, this way that are going to need to backtrack, maybe need to listen to the gray hairs a little bit, listen to to media buyers that did traditional. Well, I guess in a way, in a way it, it it seems like perhaps what some part of this response is, a return to measuring, making more meaningful measurements about whether you, your media was successful, your media buy, or your placement. And either story. Right. Obviously the story, the creative still matters. And, you know, we often when we're talking with guests here, we're they're involved in that creative piece. and obviously that that has to work. If that doesn't work it doesn't matter where you place it. Correct. Right. Yes. But you can have a wonderful, set of videos. You can have a whole campaign, if you will. It's not successful. And it's it's not because the great it was, it might have won an award. It may have won an ad. He may have won, you know that happens that kind of got won the con award. Yeah, sure. So many things. And yet the company decides, yeah, it's not selling the product. And so that placement is, is such a and and maybe what we have been told the last dozen years or so, and what many marketers have bought into is a series of measurements that, yeah, they really weren't accurate. And whatever they were based on isn't compliant with current movements and privacy law anyway. Correct. So we have to rethink the whole strategy. But video is not going away. Social media is not going away. Direct to consumer advertising is not going away, as such. Correct. So we're navigating all these existing things with some new rules. The hard thing too, is that the very niche targeting, especially when it was effective, still is effective. Sure, it still is, because on the flip side, it's the change that I've seen happen in society over the last 4 to 8 years is that we've become very polarized. It's very challenging to have a one mass media message that resonates with everybody. Yeah. Bud Light is a example of right. you know, maybe not representing anybody very, very closely. It's a risk to try to be ubiquitous. It is probably, a smarter strategy, maybe to focus on some fairly decent sized niches for your brand. Right. Red Bull is an example that, I mean, very targeted towards extreme sports to youth. And if anybody else wants to come along, they're happy to sell them products. Right. But it the brand's ethos was going to be being that way. The the Targets and the Bud Lights, and the Fords of the world are have a big challenge. They're not because they do need to be ubiquitous, but you're in a very polarized environment. So the niche focus, I still think is for 95% of brands is where they need to be. And maybe it's multiple niches. Right. And in that case, you do want to be able to serve a cat ad to cat people a dog ad to dog people a hamster and a hamster people. Right. a, an ad for the new hybrid Ford truck, to urban audience and the F-150 to your rural audience. This is actually where I think Saint Louis has a big opportunity. From a marketing perspective, we are a stone's throw away from rural America, from urban America, and from a suburban America. I mean, literally here in Clayton, you can look out your window and see farms, you can see downtown Saint Louis, and you can see the million dollar suburb houses right, right behind us. Why can't this is the place where we can bring all of those groups together, interests who have faced a lot of the, challenges in uniting and find ways to be able to talk to the common good. Budweiser would have been very smart to bring their marketing back to Saint Louis and not have it sitting in Soho, New York, or wherever or in Tribeca or wherever their headquarters right now, where 90% of their marketers are, they did a lot better than they were doing the flies or frogs with D’Arcy in the 80s than they are today. Right, because their brand doesn't stand for anything. And if you wanted to stand for middle America, not rural America, but middle America, right. Which is all of it. Yeah. Which is which is part of all, right? Yeah. Yeah. there's a big opportunity, I think, for brands to think about the Midwest in a different way. and not just have the 90% of advertising agencies are in four cities in the United States. Wow. They're New York, Chicago, San Francisco and LA. That's not representative of the the vast majority of the people are the buyers of their product. That represents, to me, a very strong opportunity to tell different stories and to take a different approach. And we have that here in say, well, that's really interesting that I had no idea that that the advertising agencies had sort of been so concentrated. You know, you grow up hearing Madison Avenue and it's sort of a thing. Right. And, and the, the rest is sort of, I guess obvious when you think about it. But it's also an interesting way to think about an opportunity that presents itself for the rest of the country. you know, one of the things I think we we want to focus on more, where I would like to see more focus on and sounds like you agree is identifying the opportunity for the the smaller in relative size to the giant companies? Yeah, but the opportunities they have to reach people more quickly and maybe can't afford, I don't have a need for a full time C-suite position to have this thing, but a fractional consultancy that focuses just on this and works alongside the rest of their teams, rather than elbowing somebody out, could be a real valuable option. And that's why I wanted to offer this to the marketing community. It's Fortune 100’s that have a chief media officer, Shannon Reid, is at GM? She, came from L'Oreal. She's amazing. represents the chief media officer role so Well, that's GM, right? Like, right. this should be available to mid-market brands so that they can, understand the changes that are happening and really think of a strategic direction that maybe their full brand goes with that allows them to utilize the best of what we've learned over the last ten years about more niche, targeted advertising that apply that right, with some of the more traditional ways of measuring in and with intuition. Right. When you're so spreadsheet focused. Yeah. You over optimize. Right. And yeah, it's got to be a little it's sort of the the, the marriage between and I'm, I don't know if you're a baseball fan, but in the baseball world, the marriage between the eye test. Yes, and the old fashioned eye test and the analytics. And now you need both, right? One or the other by themselves doesn't work anymore. Well, this is fascinating. And I'm really interested to follow the the chief media officer journey. check out Ryan's LinkedIn because I noticed that just just either today or yesterday, you actually posted about some of the things we've talked about. Yeah. So it's it's worth a follow up there. And that leads me to the last question that I always ask all my guests here and, you know, here at the screen lawyer, we talk all the time about the fact that pretty much everything ends up on the screen these days. Right? You went from a and we've just spent all this time talking about how our screens can be manipulated, either in our favor against us, how do we think about it. But I always want to know what's on your screen like right now. And you know what? If I say what's on your screen, what screen does your head go to first and what's on it? Oh, my cell phone, it's LinkedIn. As I said before, I think one of the reasons LinkedIn is a great platform and I hope it continues to stay this way, is that you have to put your resume on there. There's this is not an anonymous area where you can just spew crap and, you know, have no consequences for sure. so the level of conversation there's different I think it's, it's gentler and nicer and more at peace with the world because of. Because you can't hide behind a false screen? Yeah. Just throw rocks. Absolutely. I probably spend the most time. I just bought a house and have a, theater in the basement, which now has been certainly sucked up by my, my my son, who, he'll be three in May. Oh, fantastic. And, he's got a lot of Paw Patrol. He suddenly loves, Mario and Luigi. But it's funny. This is mostly on YouTube, and I watch YouTube as well. building business. There's a lot of great entrepreneurial content. It knows when I when he goes to bed and when I wake up, I like what I give you. If you log on after a certain point in time, Paw Patrol is not the teaser. From 5 to 7 p.m. it's all kid stuff. And at 8 p.m. it knows Dad’s coming on and wants to watch golf videos or. Oh, and it's so, so it's it's using, you know, your son doesn't know he's being manipulated by cookies, but he is. Yeah. Or being or he is looking, you know, that's a positive thing. He's like, that has made my life easier. That I don't have to have two accounts. It knows when it's my time and when it's his time. That's actually true and manipulated is is the wrong word because only because it has a negative connotation. He's he's actually already participating in this exchange that we have with brands, with content providers by our own viewing habits. That's part of the reason I've decreased my screen time, because I know I have to be a model for him. Yeah, and I don't want him addicted to cell phone. There's, you know, a lot of backlash against. Yeah, cell phone. I think the eye test and the advancing analytics all show us that there may be a challenge with mental health and, Yeah, and screen time. So, that's true. And, yeah, as we evolve, I think, certainly our relationship with the cell phone and with content is going to evolve as well. Yeah. And that's one of the other twelve things that are included. It, I think, with, having a stronger, more intentional relationship with media for brands to have and for individuals, as well. Well said, well said. Well, that's, that's a perfect way to wind this up, Ryan. Thank you. Yeah, it's been fascinating. I learned a lot, today. And I really appreciate your time. It's been fun getting to know you. And we'll continue the conversation. folks, if you have enjoyed today's content, and you getting this on your audio podcast, find us and follow us wherever you get your audio podcasts. We drop a new episode every other Wednesday here at The Screen Lawyer. And if you're watching on our YouTube channel at The Screen Lawyer, hit that like and subscribe button. So you continue to get our content and anything you want to find about any of the topics or any of the past episodes, just check out TheScreenLawyer.com. Take care.