Wurl’s Post

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>> Wurl is one of the largest ad tech, or CTV, ad tech companies in our space. And we provide monetization, distribution and advertising solutions to premium content publishers and streamers. And we're introducing a new product to agencies and brands called Brand Discovery that launched a couple months ago. >> Well, that sounds pretty exciting. So tell me a little bit about Brand Discovery. >> So Brand Discovery is a product that allows advertisers to precisely match their ad with the context and emotion of that context at a scene level right before the ad break. And it's really exciting because we think it's the next evolution and step in contextual advertising, understanding where that user and audience is from an emotional perspective, not just from a content perspective. >> That's brilliant. That's brilliant, did you develop the sort of the tech behind it, or are you using, like, somebody else's tech to sort of identify the emotions? >> Yeah, great question. We actually developed this in-house. We've been testing this for a better part of a year, learning how emotions and what emotions and how do you correlate to better performance as well as ad engagement. And we find when you match emotion to the content or live programming right before the scene, and it matches that ad break, you get better performance. We see two to three x in our own internal testing, and then we've seen some really exciting test results when testing with brands. >> That's pretty cool. Now, do you have, like, x number of categories of emotion, or is it more sort of free form? >> We get asked that a lot. There's a famous psychologist called William Plushnick, and in the 80s, he developed a primary wheel of emotions, and he identified eight primary emotions with three different levels of intensity. And so our AI knows with any live programming, because we are also at world, the largest operator of premium fast channels in the world. We actually know what emotions are contained in the ad, and we squeeze using our own AIs, and our models are constantly learning. We also score the creative to understand what emotions are there. And then when you marry the two, we see performance. We've been testing with our partners at an agency, with a brand advertiser, looking to reach millennial moms. And what we found is when you matched that sentiment and the video creative with the ad break, we saw a 7x increase in and brand awareness and a 2x lift in purchase intent. And we keep seeing these results being repeated. So what's exciting is we're also discovering new categories of emotions that work. So, for example, we work with another agency that has a customer that wanted to drive incremental foot traffic. They wanted to drive incremental sales. And what we discovered is high joy, anticipation actually leads to a precursor to being hungry, and so that actually drove traffic into these QSRs. And we think that there's a lot of different categories that could be useful too. >> That's fascinating. I love that. That's great. So, just so I understand it better. So an agency uses your product to plan and to buy, like, how does, what's the actual? Yeah. What actually happens is they use us to understand the emotion of their creative, and then we help them understand the emotion of the audience. We also have 60,000,000,032nd ad impressions available on a monthly basis. So we think about what is your starting with a KPI? What KPI are trying to start with? And we're gonna find an emotion and an audience for that. >> Okay. So you basically, you match your product to the ads, not to the content? >> We actually, yeah, it's both. So we first start, and this is a new way to approach contextual. Takes that one step further. We understand the content first and where the scoring is and what emotions are contained and also the creative so that we match those two, and that's a precursor to drive better performance. >> Gotcha. Gotcha, but so the agency would use this product to actually plan. >> Yeah, the agency, and we're transaction agnostic. So they wanna transact through an SSP directly through us, their DSP. We're able to do that. >> Okay, now that's fascinating. See, I'm gonna ask you some more broad, we're gonna go to some more broad questions. Yo, what brings you to can, and what are you, what are some of your key takeaways thus far to be a self-serving as you are? >> So we're here partnering with our agencies and brands, and as we're not a new entrant to this industry, but to agencies and brands with this advertising product, we're here to make a bigger presence and partner. >> It's excellent. It's excellent. And what are some of the things that you've been seeing that you think are interesting here? I was over at the Media Monks tent at a panel yesterday, and they had a robot that an AI robot that actually interviews you, gets to know who you are and then renders and sketches a picture. And the accuracy of what that does is really amazing. So, in and of itself, does that solve a business problem? No, but there are multiple applications for generative AI and understanding where audiences are. It's a really exciting time to be in our business. >> Yeah, no, it's crazy what those things can do. I was playing with the ChatGPT talking, and I thought it was off. And I called the dog over and it sort of, we got into a whole conversation about my dog, right? >> It's amazing. And the interaction that happens and the machine learning language models that are being developed and continue to evolve. When we come here next year, I think we're gonna see an exploration explosion and innovation like no other period of time in our industry. >> Yeah. And what's crazy, too, is it uses, like, human voice tics. Like, it'll go, and, in the right places. And you're like, whoa. >> Yeah, and it will paraphrase back. >> Yeah. >> So it understands what you're saying. >> Yeah, it's just wild. So I wanna go into sort of circle back to what you're talking about with the contextual products. What's the industry response been so far? >> It's been really interesting. So we've had a lot of response to emotional resonance where that is. I think that the challenge is there's been status quo thinking for so long that contextual is one thing, it's just the content. And so this thinking about emotion as the driver or lever for performance is really new. So we spent most of this year educating agencies, and we've got a lot of brands and agencies beginning to test even more, and the results are fascinating. >> Yeah. And so what are some of the big opportunities that agencies have when they're advertisers from using this? >> We talk about the right time at the right place, at the right audience, at the right ad. And we've been talking about data and tech and our industry for so long. What about the viewer? Where is the viewer? And the opportunity is to better understand not only what content and programming the audience is watching, but where they are on their emotional journey to tell better stories to connect and resonate. And we also think that we can offer greater transparency. So there is a lot of fragmentation in walled gardens, and unlike linear CTV is a step above. So you know where the audiences are, but you don't always know the right timing and placement, and I think we solve for that. And we wanna democratize CTV, so that agencies better understand the timing of where they should be placing the atom to have maximum impact and drive business outcome.