Vol. 3, Issue 1: Tempis Fugit
Welcome to 2024, everyone. I, for one, am grateful for the grace of our new robot overloads*
*Wait, that’s my intro to 2034. Apologies.
We’ve done 3 full weeks in 2024 already, which is crazy. Time really does fly.
The first order of business this week, after taking most of it to recover from what I can only imagine was a virus from another planet and of the kind you can only catch in Las Vegas*, is CES. It seemed to me, and this is purely anecdotal, that CES was back in a big way this year. Everything felt much more well attended, much more crowded and that just about everyone that I asked to meet with was there.
*Non-STI category
I spent a little time speaking with the good folks at IQVIA for a podcast series they’re running, and without spoiling too much, they asked me what I was most looking forward to about 2024. This is a dangerous* question, because you can conceive of and answer it in so many different ways. Without spoiling the joy of listening to my mid-pitched, somewhat nasal voice answer this question live on the air, there’s a couple things worth noting.
*I’m using “dangerous” here in the absolute least compelling way possible
I don’t think the big priorities have changed much here: CTV, identity*, transparency across the transactional chain, sustainability. These things remain the top priorities for nearly every organization that I spoke with, and I expect we’ll get some answers to this year
There’s also what we used to call “automation” as a catch-all, but what we now call “generative AI” as a catch-all. We’re going to be asking ourselves a lot of questions about this that it’s going to take some time for us to answer intelligently.**. The big obvious one is how does this impact how programmatic advertising transacts, but there’s other ones about how we adjust as a work force to the new realities of AI
*Identity is doing a lot of heavy lifting as a thing here
**I went off on a wild tangent with the marketing people at IQVIA both during and following the recording of the podcast that started with a quick conversation about grappling with gen AI’s human impact and wound up in like a Eugene Debs-like monologue about worker’s rights and the length of the work week. We run the gamut here at Geoff Wolinetz is Too Late.
I had a really interesting conversation about the distinction between Deep Learning and Machine Learning at the blackjack table at like 1am, so I need to follow up with that person to see if that conversation was actually interesting or if it was interesting because most of the other people were drunk and I was winning some money*. Kidding aside, we had a good conversation about the richness of non-PII data signals and how the bidstream itself has a ton of actionable, interesting information that can drive value without the need for direct identity signals.
*Any time I don’t have to come home and explain to my wife how much money I lost is a win, full stop
A lot of interesting stuff to look forward to in 2024.
I’m a fan of the writer Joe Posnanski, even if his obsession with baseball borders on the sociopathic. One of his newsletters this week concerned the notion of something they used to play in the NFL called “The Playoff Bowl,” which was effectively a 3rd place game for the Super Bowl. And as he was musing about the notion of these types of 3rd place games (the NCAA had one for years as well), the grandfather of modern baseball writing Bill James wrote to him with an interesting bit of color. I’m a HUGE fan of Bill James.
See this passage from that note to Posnanski from James below (emphasis mine)
I think it is one of the central debates of our time: how do we make the ordinary matter? Baseball sneaks another team or two into the playoffs every time we're not watching, but as we make the playoffs more important, we make the regular season LESS important. We don't really have pennant races anymore; it does not really matter whether you win 95 games and win the NL East or win 94 games and finish second because, either way, you're going to have to win several rounds of playoffs. Young people now don't actually understand the concept of a pennant race. They don’t understand what it was, what it meant.
I’m gonna move past the last couple of lines of that for a few reasons. The “you young people just don’t get it” stuff stated that plainly is dull and uninteresting to me. Every generation doesn’t understand the one that comes after it and, to blithely quote Mike and the Mechanics, every generation blames the one before*. Tempis not only fugits; it generally moves forward. The things that were interesting years ago might not be interesting today. Things change. Tastes evolve. The world passes from the hands of one generation into another. That’s natural and good.
*This song still slaps. Forever and always.
But that first line hit just right because I think about it all the time: how do we make the ordinary matter? In the realm of sports, I call it the “Steinbrennerization of sports”: that somehow anything short of a championship in any year is a failure. If the point of making the effort were to always win, why bother entering at all? And the answer is or should be that the point isn’t necessarily to win; the point is the competition.
I say this frequently when I’m asked to comment on the industry or really anything: competition is good. Markets thrive and consumers almost always win in markets with healthy competition. The idea that there has to be one winner is a fallacy. There’s room for many winners.
I may or may not include this every week, but here’s a sampling things I’ve read or am reading:
From the September 2023 issue of Harper’s: “My Generation: Anthem For a Forgotten Cohort”
From the Dec. 7, 2023 issue of The New York Review of Books: “Gut Instincts”
From AdExchanger: “Attack Of The Clones: Programmatic’s Hidden Scourge Of Bid Duplication”
Heather Cox Richardson: Democracy Awakening
Housekeeping item:
I’ll be at the IAB ALM week after next, so if you’re going to be there also, why not shoot me a note and we can speak about anything in this newsletter or anything else at all?
That’s all for this week. Until next week, friends