Episode 4
Billboards Bets and a bit of Booze
Paul Roberts, the driving force behind Kubient, shares how he’s fearlessly pushing the boundaries of ad fraud using cutting-edge AI technology. Plus, Gudai and Roberts place the biggest bet in Billboards, Bets, (and a bit of) Booze history – the definitive merger announcement between Kubient and Adomni!
Transcript
Jonathan Gudai
I think a lot of startups and entrepreneurs always have that dream of their IPO or going public.
Paul Roberts
Sure. We’re excited to bring some key people with us and help you guys and you know, I think it’s gonna be a really fun ride.
Jonathan Gudai
All right. Here we are on Billboards, Bets, and a little bit of Booze with an esteemed guest, a very, very special episode and a very, very special guest I have here Paul Roberts, co-founder and CEO of Kubient.
Paul Roberts
Thanks, Jonathan. Great to be here. You know, obviously Vegas. Little early here but excited to talk to you and learn more about what you think the future is.
Jonathan Gudai
Vegas baby. We’ve a ritual that before we get started we like to bring a little Vegas experience to the mix. And so on the screen here, we’re going to pull up a roulette wheel. Not sure if that’s your game or –
Paul Roberts
It could be today.
Jonathan Gudai
And you get to place chips wherever you would place them on the roulette wheel. And depending upon where it falls, that’s going to determine what we’re going to be dipping into on the booze side.
Paul Roberts
I love it.
Jonathan Gudai
Take it away.
Paul Roberts
So I’m going to go to number nine.
Jonathan Gudai
Red, number 9
Paul Roberts
33.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay.
Paul Roberts
And then I’ll take the column of the 2 to 1. The two bottom ones.
Jonathan Gudai
Oh, okay.
Paul Roberts
I didn’t know what my budget was, but.
Jonathan Gudai
You are spending a hundred bucks. We got a hundred bucks in play.
Paul Roberts
I love it.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay. I like it. I like where your head’s at. You got a little diversity there with colors and with rows. Here we go. Drum roll, please.
Paul Roberts
Like at the table. Come on. 33.
Jonathan Gudai
Come on 33. 14. And is it the first row? No win. No win. There you go. But the good news is that even though it didn’t hit your number, there still is something.
Paul Roberts
Still a winner.
Jonathan Gudai
As a little concession prize that we bring back. And you just had an authentic Vegas experience.
Paul Roberts
I lost some money.
Jonathan Gudai
Thanks to you our streets are better, our schools are getting new books. So appreciate that!
Paul Roberts
I love it.
Jonathan Gudai
So what do we have here? Let’s take a look. What what you do you got there?
Paul Roberts
Let’s see. We have a 39 year old aged in oak barrels. I believe we have a Château de La Croix.
Jonathan Gudai
Oh, that was a nice pronunciation, I think. Very nice. All right, so let’s. Let’s. Let’s crack that guy open. Sure 39 years old, huh? Well, they’re a little cork. Cork action going on there.
Paul Roberts
Yes, a little.
Jonathan Gudai
Thank you. Thank you. So, 39 years ago.
Paul Roberts
What were you doing 39 years ago, Jonathan?
Jonathan Gudai
39 years ago. I think I just learned how to walk. It was a fun time for my mom, as we all know that period. But. But no, it. Yeah. The early eighties. Is what we’re talking about here.
Paul Roberts
Eighties babies.
Jonathan Gudai
Early eighties. How about you?
Paul Roberts
Let’s see. In what year did we say? So 1980. I was four years old.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay.
Paul Roberts
Probably just figuring out a couple of things myself.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah. What kind of trouble you can get in and out of?
Paul Roberts
Well, I was the youngest of four children, so I’m sure I was getting dragged along to a lot of different places, different things, and.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah. Is this New York?
Paul Roberts
Yes. I grew up on Long Island in New York, and my father was always a big traveler, so he was always, keep in mind, domestic. You always get in the back of a station wagon. We’re going to go see the Grand Canyon. We’re going to go see the Golden Gate Bridge. We’re going to my mother’s and say we have four kids and a pretty busy schedule.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Paul Roberts
And lo and behold, you know, school would let out. You get in the back of the station wagon and you would drive across the country.
Jonathan Gudai
When you say station wagon, are we talking about like the Chevy Chase…
Paul Roberts
Legit. Brown side.
Jonathan Gudai
Wagoneer.
Paul Roberts
Facing backwards. No seatbelt.
Jonathan Gudai
Yes.
Paul Roberts
Giant swinging door that I caught my thumb in one time. Oh, that was a, you know, a very-
Jonathan Gudai
Safety hazards were a little different back then as far as you know, the whole way that that worked.
Paul Roberts
At that point, I think with children, it was more of just being quiet, rather than where’s the seatbelt.
Jonathan Gudai
Lots of quiet games being played when you’re going from New York or up or northeast to the Grand Canyon.
Paul Roberts
Yeah, a lot of stops. A lot of you know, I do remember always, you know, stopping at the side of the road and having a, you know, a picnic, if you will. And, you know, the very interesting how from one generation so much has changed.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah, totally. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that that whole road that you took or multiple highways. Billboards on the sides.
Paul Roberts
Correct.
Jonathan Gudai
And the difference maybe just being now there’s more of them and there’s some digital.
Paul Roberts
Sure. And we’re moving from those old you know, I picture the guys with the big stick rolling the billboards up. And now these are obviously digital plugged into the ability to target and data and all the fun stuff we love.
Jonathan Gudai
Definitely. Which we’re going to get into before we do. Cheers.
Paul Roberts
Cheers. Thanks for having me.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah, thanks for being here.
Paul Roberts
Wow. That’s pretty good.
Jonathan Gudai
That’s an Armagnac. All right. So, Luba, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the bottleneck in case. In case.
Paul Roberts
We need to see how long this goes.
Jonathan Gudai
All right, So as I mentioned, this is a very special episode.
Paul Roberts
Sure.
Jonathan Gudai
We have quite a bit of exciting things to be putting on the table and sharing with the world. But really with this podcast we try to think about is not necessarily the historical stuff.
Paul Roberts
Mmhmm.
Jonathan Gudai
Which I’m sure hearing about Kubient. You know what brought you to building Kubient and to where you are today. We’ll probably talk just a little bit about what Kubient does do today, but I’d love to really hear what is exciting you, what are the bets that you’re making on the business side-
Paul Roberts
Sure.
Jonathan Gudai
And you personally with your time, and how do you see innovation, you know, blossoming from your world?
Paul Roberts
Yeah, it’s interesting. Obviously, digital advertising is relatively new. If you look at, you know, the last ten years of programmatic, specifically, a lot of it was building technology that connected buyers and sellers. That was the exciting part. I built an SSP, I built a DSP build in exchange, you build a bidder, etc..
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
That really drove the innovation for a long time.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
And I think what we’re seeing now is a lot of the innovation going outward towards the actual brands, the advertisers and the screen owners themselves.
Jonathan Gudai
Mm hmm.
Paul Roberts
Where the brands and screen owners are starting to say, well, I could build an SSP, I could build a bidder. That’s not the exciting part anymore. It’s how do I own more eyeballs on the screen side?
Jonathan Gudai
Mm hmm.
Paul Roberts
How do I use that data to help my brands get smarter? And the brands are basically saying, wait a second, I was losing $0.50 of every dollar to all these tech players in between. I own the budgets. I own the data. I own the strategy. Why am I giving you all this money?
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
So I think it’s an interesting time where you’re going to start to see brands and those screen owners interact more closely, delivering more value to the screen owners. Number one, more revenue. And number two, you’re going to start to see brands own the entire process. They’re going to have transparency. They’re going to be able to see where their dollars are going.I need data. Here’s what I paid. Here’s what went to the screen owners. And here’s my actual ROI.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
Where hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars were made in this murky ecosystem.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
Because the brands had no concept of where their dollar was going. But yeah, the smart brands who started to say, Wait a second, I’m losing $0.50 of every dollar buying a tremendous amount of ad fraud, all these negatives, because we don’t have our own tech or our own in-house specialists who can actually engage with a company like an Adomni or another audience owner.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm. Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
So you’re starting to see companies like Kroger’s, Home Depot, build out these purpose-built teams within their companies and say, for $1,000,000, we could build some really interesting tech and take all of our first party data, not give it out and water down an ecosystem, but put a point at the end of the spear and say, This is why I need to reach. Here are the screen owners who have that audience, whether it be out of home, whether it be CTV, whether it be mobile, etc..
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm. And so Kubient, in terms of how you solve problems for those brands in that new world where that first-party data, what is your kind of value prop historically and even today when you’re talking to brands.
Paul Roberts
Sure. So we work with both the screen owners and the brands and agencies themselves and give them a very purpose-built solution. So we have first-party data. We know who we want to reach. We just need integrations into audience.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay.
Paul Roberts
Tell us who they are. We need these 55 CTV apps. We need these out of home screens. We need these mobile apps.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
Our team then goes and engages with them and says, we have direct brand budget from ABC. They want to run ads directly with you.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay.
Paul Roberts
And the brand owner will say, excuse me, The screen owner will obviously benefit because they’re making a tremendous amount of money.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
Compared to the old system where it went. Agency trading to the DSP to Ad Exchange to SSP to publisher. So we’re increasing their revenue.
Jonathan Gudai
Got it.
Paul Roberts
Not only that, but we have a proprietary product that just received a patent called KAI. So what KAI does is it operates as a middle layer. It’s an application that uses machine learning.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay.
Paul Roberts
And what it does, it says, okay, we have Jonathan on a CTV app in his home. We have him on his mobile device. We have him out of home. How do we know what’s really him? The current solution, which most brands and agencies use, is they buy the media. They run that through a machine learning algorithm. So there are third parties who give you a tool which allows you to use machine learning and say, Is this Jonathan or not?
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
They then use a list in the auction to say, okay, this was a bot we saw before. The problem is and this is kind of the genesis of Kubient, nobody was really stopping ad fraud, they were identifying it after you bought it. So we went to some of these partners and said, How come we can’t take this machine learning technology and move it into the midstream? Why does it sit outside of it? And varying answers of, you know, And finally, as an entrepreneur, you say “Screw it.”
Jonathan Gudai
This is the problem I want to solve.
Paul Roberts
Let’s go raise some money and do it ourselves. So we found an amazing team, very small, nimble and said, we’re going to take that same level of machine learning technology that is used to identify fraud after it’s bought and stop people from buying it. But not only that, introducing transparency, which there is zero in that world.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
At the end of the month, you guys have, you know, screens. You get a PDF at the end of the month from one of these vendors and say, Sorry, guys, we’re clawing back $62,000, 10,000 400,000. The numbers are astronomical. No rhyme or reason. They don’t want to give you the information.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
We looked at it as if, you know, the IAB thinks last year $50 billion was wasted ad fraud. If we can give back 10% into working media for the brands, that’s going to go to publishers.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Paul Roberts
And a lot of publishers say to us, Well, why do I want to remove this Inventory if brands are buying it. Yeah, there’s ethical reasons. But then from a business standpoint, they’re getting depressed CPM.
Jonathan Gudai
Quality. Yeah.
Paul Roberts
So if an advertiser was going to spend $10, they’re going to bid eight, knowing that 20% is going to somebody who is never buying their product.
Jonathan Gudai
Right. I actually had a conversation with a senior marketer at a conference last year about this exact topic, and particularly around connected television, because there was a report that had come out where a study had shown that I think it was like 25 or 30% of the ad impressions delivered or presented are to TVs that were turned off. So like Apple TV, Firestick, all these like streaming devices.
Paul Roberts
I mean, advertisers don’t want to buy that inventory.
Jonathan Gudai
Are showing ads on a big TV in someone’s living room that is off.
Paul Roberts
Sure.
Jonathan Gudai
And that report had come out. And so I raised my hand and asked, as a marketer, how do you think about, you know, that being such a large percentage? And her answer is like, I saw that email. I saw that article and I immediately deleted it. She’s like, Because I can’t do anything about it. And we know that there’s an element of waste that’s in the digital advertising ecosystem. And I just was like, Is that really going on here?
Paul Roberts
It’s one of the biggest if you look at ad fraud as a whole. In 2023, it’s predicted to be one of the largest global crimes in the world.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
If you’re a crime lord, you know, and you’re okay. I sell narcotics, I do nefarious things, whatever it is. There’s a lot of risk, a lot of moving parts. Or do I take 40 super smart guys, put them in a country with zero extradition to the U.S. and just have them run ad fraud.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
Why wouldn’t I?
Jonathan Gudai
That’s happening in, you know, overseas audiences. And it’s also something that we proudly say in the digital out of home space that we don’t have bots. There’s not robots that are walking past the screens that are being tracked as impressions. And so the idea of brand safety and ad fraud isn’t really a problem we have here. However, you know, just like how the money moves and when money moves and CTV was the most hot and maybe still is the hottest kind of growth channel video besides Digital Home. But there’s always going to be in the early days, the bad actors who can take advantage of something that’s new.
Paul Roberts
Of course,
Jonathan Gudai
Exploit it until there’s-
Paul Roberts
You know we always talk about criminals. Follow the money. So five, six years ago, all the criminals were focused on desktop impressions and then it moved to desktop video, then it moved to mobile impressions, then moved to mobile video. Now, CTV CPM rates could be 40, $50.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Paul Roberts
Why are they going to waste their time stealing $2 display impressions on desktop?
Jonathan Gudai
Right. What? How does fraud play out in the world of CTV where it’s I mean, I know I give the example of the screen being off, but like, how are you detecting that someone is in their living room watching something?
Paul Roberts
Sure
Jonathan Gudai
Assuming that they fix that problem with the TV’s being on.
Paul Roberts
Yeah. So two of the big areas obviously is around, you know, not being engaged on the screen. That’s not that hard to figure out. But then the other part is around mimicking apps. Which is very simple to figure out because you’re going to have a digital handshake in the auction process where some people turn a blind eye. Very similar to the representative you mentioned that they just delete the email. They have $15 million this going to spend in CTV. Are they super concerned that it’s on four different versions of Hulu, where one of them is the actual Hulu app? Or do they package it up at the end of the quarter and say we were able to serve ads on Hulu?
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
So that I do partially blame our industry as turning a blind eye because there is so much money involved. And at the same time, a lot of people throw their hands up and say, we don’t know the solution. And, you know, that’s one big one. One of the biggest challenges we have as Kubient is going out and saying not only do we fix the problem, but we can actually show you the data.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
So you can make smart decisions. So when you’re plugged into a large SSP, potentially just using an example, if mobile video has a high level of fraud but CTV is clean, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Or a lot of times they get the report, they yell and scream to their service provider who’s sending us all this fraud, and they finally give a name and they just wholesale shut them off.
Jonathan Gudai
Blacklist Yep. It’s an interesting world, and I feel like it’s always this kind of, you know, cat and mouse game where the bad actors are a little bit ahead on the new frontier. And then they get stopped and they move to the next one. It’s almost like a parasite in a way. It’s like bouncing until they, you know, they get caught or something else catches their eye that’s bigger. So for the bets that you know, you’re placing and sounds like you have an SSP, you have an anti-fraud solution, is it CTV focused or is it other channels as well?
Paul Roberts
Not CTV focus. We could do anything that plugs in programmatically, but it seems that the bulk of the conversation we’re having now is around CTV.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay. Got it.
Paul Roberts
And one of the interesting things that came out of building, KAI, is that we take so much data in, especially around CTV, giving our partners a dashboard on both the buy and sell side to see errors.
Jonathan Gudai
Got it.
Paul Roberts
Which is interesting because a lot of app owners, they only monetize a certain portion where they’ll have a team of four or five ad ops people. And we have a beautiful dashboard where it’s as if we got to do this, if we had to do that, very simple. But when we had so many asks of, well, what else can I KAI do?
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
Just tell us. It’s, you know, that’s the beauty. Once you have the data, you can do a lot with it.
Jonathan Gudai
And it’s something that we talk about with other outside investors or brands that you go to a UI and, you know, there’s dropdowns and there’s radio buttons and there’s fields. But really, most of the actual action is behind the scenes. Right. It’s all that data that’s flowing from these devices to the cloud to your systems being filtering all that. So, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but you also have a big data sort of world that you’re in.
Paul Roberts
Correct. We’ve looked at hundreds of millions of devices and we assign our own unique ID to them specifically for identification of fraud, because everybody, regardless of what type of Internet connected devices you’re on, you’re leaving a breadcrumb.
Jonathan Gudai
Sure.
Paul Roberts
And what you’re doing is you’re building up a pattern of behavior. And what’s perfectly suited to figure out that pattern, behavior and future expected behavior, but is machine learning.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Paul Roberts
So, you know, I always use myself as an example. You know, three kids, a lot of sports, A lot of business travel.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
If all of a sudden I’m on the NHL site and then I’m on JetBlue to fly to Vegas to see you, and then I’m, you know, very expected behavior. But now all of a sudden, I’m on a brand new, you know, Chromebook on – Now, all of a sudden, I’m looking at you know, we talked earlier about fail videos in that I like them not something I look at often. But you know, there’s an expected behavior of everybody on the Internet.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
And that’s really what drives KAI, because we use a type of algorithm that looks at your past behavior and can very confidently predict, is this really Jonathan or is this? So that data, which I believe is really the future of the value proposition in a lot of ways. You need to own the audience either through screens, etc.. You have to have the budgets and data. I think those three pieces come together with a nice UI, nice clean UI, and some technology is going to help everybody.
Jonathan Gudai
Totally and you know right now, I mean AI is obviously hot, but it sounds like you guys been working on A.I. for a while. That’s kind of built into the solution that is doing that pattern recognition and not just saying, here’s a report of how much you wasted last month, but more like, here’s what we could have wasted, but we saved you upfront to ensure that those dollars were being used appropriately.
Paul Roberts
So. Right. That’s where it starts to get meaningful because anybody can plug you into a website, anybody completing ESPN or APNews.com. They have multiple integrations. But if we become that middle layer of intelligence where using AI, using ML and saying not only do we save this money, but here’s an actual, you know, actionable item for next month where it’s going to even improve your ROI greater.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Paul Roberts
That’s where I think it goes with the AI piece.
Jonathan Gudai
Totally. And with programmatic that fits the whole idea that you’re always optimizing and you’re looking at these different reports and hopefully the insights are clear and easy to follow and good people are actually doing something with them.
Paul Roberts
We always love to think that we have the smartest people on the other end of the conversation, but sometimes let’s make it easy for everybody.
Jonathan Gudai
Right, Totally. And that was where Adomni started early on. It was just, how do you make digital billboards easier to buy? And then as we, you know, blossomed, it kind of shifted to how do we also show the impact and effectiveness of these screens on whatever the business’s outcomes were. And so, yeah, there’s but you do need to have I mean, look at Amazon, right? Amazon is Amazon because it’s so easy. And that stickiness. Google so easy. So you have to have that as a gateway, but you also in the marketing land need to see results.
Paul Roberts
Correct.
Jonathan Gudai
Right. And so I think you can –
Paul Roberts
That was always the knock on out of home. How do we know that every dollar I spend on getting a return. And, you know, obviously exciting to watch you guys solve that. And, you know, Amazon is great, but if all of a sudden you ordered a package and it didn’t come right, it’s not Amazon anymore, right?
Jonathan Gudai
Right. It doesn’t matter how easy it was. It was that brown box being there. So all right, Kubient is a technology provider focused on marketing. But you’re also a publicly traded company. Talk a little bit about that.
Paul Roberts
Sure. So we decided. I’ve been a serial entrepreneur my whole life started on the internet back in the late nineties and have raised money privately through funds etc. and we had an interesting opportunity with Kubient where we were looking to grow KAI, grow the team out. We went to, you know, the traditional ad tech investors and you’ve been down those conversations. It’s not always pleasant. So having some banking relationships, I said ad tech is no longer a four letter word in, you know, the public markets. Why don’t we look at raising the capital we need? So at first there were a couple of jokes about, you know, you’re too small, you’re too big, you know, etc.. Nobody said we were too big. I’m sorry. But I always try to you know, nobody said that.
Jonathan Gudai
Right. Ha ha.
Paul Roberts
But, you know, the reality is that going public was all about getting the right service providers around us, getting banking support, getting the right team going, you know, finding the right CFO. So we kind of shifted from raising private money to, hey, we’re going to do this. We found a couple of banks that believed in a story and again, being able to show all the data, being able to show here’s what KAI is in a very layman’s sense. Here’s a publisher. They’re sending 6% ad fraud. Here’s an advertiser. They’re buying 15%. We can prevent that.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
It’s anybody can understand. It’s an easy story to tell an investor. So we pulled together the S-1. We did the whole, you know, paperwork side of the world, which is always fun. And then, you know, we were able to go public in August of 2020.
Jonathan Gudai
Oof. Right in the middle of the pandemic.
Paul Roberts
Correct.
Jonathan Gudai
Well, beginning actually not the middle. Wow. The timing.
Paul Roberts
The timing is unbelievable. I think if we were a month later, we wouldn’t have gotten it done.
Jonathan Gudai
Because of all the prep that had been happening even before that. Wow. Okay. August 2020. So you IPOed.
Paul Roberts
IPOed on the Nasdaq. We did it the hard way. We didn’t do it through a SPAC, or a reverse merger or an uplisting. We did it the old fashioned way, Roadshow the whole nine yards. And, you know, we raised that capital and of course, you know, a month later, it is the world ending. I’ve been very fortunate in a lot of areas in my career. Timing has not always been my forte. But jokes aside, you know, we now had the capital to deploy. We went out, we upsized and rightsized a lot of the teams and said, we have this public vehicle now. We have this great technology. We need you to help us take it to the next level. Timing obviously wasn’t on our side with the pandemic. You know better than most. It’s you know, you saw the advertisers moving, shifting and pulling back. Some were even spending more in areas. But right. We kind of took this as, okay, let’s not make any huge bets.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Paul Roberts
Being in Vegas at the time, like, let’s just keep growing.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
And then we didn’t really see the traction that we were hoping for, so we kind of pulled back a bit and said, okay, let’s, you know, we have the public vehicle, we have cash, we have what we think is very differentiated technology. Let’s start looking at strategic alternatives.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
You know, we think there’s a lot of great companies out there. And again, my bet we talked about earlier has always been that the people who sit in the middle are going to lose somewhat of their relevance. And A two has direct relationships on either side and who has data and who has the brand budgets? Who has the audience? You know, and fortunately, we’ve seen that come to fruition with some bigger brands starting to say, okay, we want to start talking to, you know, the Adomni’s of the world who have those direct relationships.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Paul Roberts
You know, and we always thought KAI and Kubient would be that important middle layer to take their first-party data, take some third-party data, take the data that comes back on after it, you know, make it smarter, more intelligent, more actionable. So we ran that process. And of course, you know, in a pandemic, everybody sat on their hands. Nobody, you know, if nobody moves, nobody will look at us.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Paul Roberts
But the challenges so many companies were raising and they raised for this growth because it was never-ending.
Jonathan Gudai
Right. So, you know, those few years you’re building, building, building, building realized that like the market was just tough. Yeah.
Paul Roberts
And multiple factors. And we literally heard from some of the biggest SSPs and DSPs saying in these challenging times, we’re not removing revenue. And you be very, very awkward silence and say, but it’s fraud. And they would say, but we’re not removing revenue. Yeah –
Jonathan Gudai
Crazy world we live in where it’s, you know, sometimes the wrong you know, the wrong mindset wins out in certain circumstances. And it’s not sustainable. It’s not long-term now. But in a time like this where there’s so much volatility and there’s there’s so much uncertainty.
Paul Roberts
Yeah, you know.
Jonathan Gudai
Some crazy stuff.
Paul Roberts
Yeah so then as we were building, we weren’t getting the traction we had hoped for. You know, we would consistently, you know, win good meetings and talk to people about here’s the fraud you have. But it just wasn’t happening, for lack of a better term. So that’s when we sat down with our bankers and said, you know, what do we do here? We don’t want to continue to raise money and burn money. We want to get a great return for our investors and look at pieces that are out there that have already got market traction, who they already have, the big brands. They already have the people that care about these problems. And obviously, being so passionate about, you know, fraud, inefficiency, where would this make sense? So, you know, looking at, oddly enough, companies like Adomni, the other companies that Adomni owns great relationships on a buying and selling side. I always go back to that in the markets. But you guys have obviously done all that legwork of saying, here’s why it’s so important to have direct screen presence and direct audience presence.
Jonathan Gudai
Mmhmm.
Paul Roberts
And delivering those results. It’s only the next progression of, you know, out of home to say, how do we solve some of the challenges which you’ve done around? I spent a dollar. I got a dollar 50 return. But then bringing that audience to other screens and really strengthening those campaigns.
Jonathan Gudai
Totally. And so normally we talk about three bets on this particular podcast. But I think that there’s probably one big bet that we can talk about today.
Paul Roberts
Sure.
Jonathan Gudai
And so you spoke about how you went from builds to then sort of thing about buy—slash partner slash merge. And so, you know, without further ado, let’s throw it out there.
Paul Roberts
We’re uh.
Jonathan Gudai
What’s the big bet?
Paul Roberts
Yeah. Pretty, pretty excited to get, you know, a transaction or in a merger done with Adomni and find a really great home for Kubient tech and the team and you know help you and the team on your journey. And you know we couldn’t be more excited. I think we’re at the place you guys are just ripe for disruption and you’re doing some really exciting things and the key has always been people you know we talk about this all the time. You know, I think we kind of see the world the same way that brands need a better solution. They need to be able to reach audiences efficiently, understand their ROI. And the screen owners are only going to get you know, there’s video screens everywhere. You talk about video everywhere. There’s video screens everywhere. So having, you know, the core technology, the core team to kind of expand on that, you know, it’s an exciting time. And, you know, say cheers!
Jonathan Gudai
Cheers! We are talking about it, making it happen. And the crowd goes wild. Yeah. I mean, that’s –
Paul Roberts
And I had to hold that in the whole podcast.
Jonathan Gudai
You know, that was a big buildup. I feel like the editing team here is going to have to do some, you know, we are on the cusp of announcing this. I know that, you know, by the time that this podcast comes out, it will have been announced and one of definitely the biggest things that has ever happened to us.
Paul Roberts
Sure.
Jonathan Gudai
And as we thought about what even made sense for us, you gave us a back story. It was how do we just continue to get our solution out to more people? How do we scale the company to deliver more return to our investors? And how do we ensure that we don’t have to slow down at a time when, even with the pandemic where there are certain lulls and spikes, we were still building, we were still pushing, we were still investing, and, you know, this announcement that should be coming out in May that would be finalized later this year enables Adomni to combine with Kubient and become a publicly traded company and be able to leverage the platform that could be into offers as a as a publicly traded vehicle with certain privileges that comes with that. And then also to be able to watch it and participate in a process that I think a lot of startups and entrepreneurs always have that dream of their IPO or going public. You know, sometimes it’s later in their kind of growth cycle.But in this case, you know, we are still in growth mode. So it’s so exciting for me.
Paul Roberts
It’s exciting and it’s been an interesting process. Obviously, it’s we went through it and now you’re kind of going through it and it’s like, you know, now it’s what do you do next right? You know, obviously Adomni’s built an amazing platform, great relationships. Those get scaled. You look at other areas to focus on like connected TV, there’s just so much revenue flowing through there. We’re excited to bring some key people with us and help you guys. And, you know, I think it’s gonna be a really fun ride.
Jonathan Gudai
Totally. And I think that’s also what might have come along with it with this sort of idea of, well, what is bigger and better look like where we started off just really trying to solve the problem of digital out of home. And then over the past seven and a half years, we’ve realized that, you know, it’s not just digital at home.These are just digitally connected screens in the real world. But there’s all these other touchpoints that if you can connect that and have a true omnichannel strategy and they work together, then to your point, earlier brands, who are looking for better solutions, are going to see those better results by connecting these things in a very synchronized way. And so for us, like during the pandemic will come in, why do we do digital home? We should have done CTV like that’s what everyone’s watching and doing and that’s the hot thing. But the reality is that Digital Home was still starting to thrive in certain areas during the pandemic, and now people are spending more time than ever out of their homes again because this is where the true social sort of, you know, connections happen. And like we’re here in person, we could have easily done this over a Zoom podcast, but it would have been the same.
Paul Roberts
I agree.
Jonathan Gudai
You know.
Paul Roberts
And I think you’re spot on where you look at the real omnichannel approach. We talk to brands all the time. You can’t buy a website or an app or an out of home screen. You have to buy the audience, right? And you have to figure out where do they go. And we talked earlier about digital journeys. I wake up in the morning, you’re looking at, you know, emails and news. You’re on your phone. Odds are you go downstairs, your kids may be on a connected TV. Then throughout your day, you’re on a laptop, you’re walking by all these digital signage. And you have to basically be able to craft a message and follow them. But not only that, but get enough data back that you can understand how impactful it’s been.. And to your conversation earlier about what is the ROI. So we talk a lot about audience kernels. How do you actually capture somebody in their daily journey and build upon that?
Jonathan Gudai
Totally.
Paul Roberts
And that’s why we’re super excited because obviously you are one of the largest out-of-home screen platforms, now all of a sudden, how do we take all that audience and build upon it. And then reach them when they are on their laptop, their connected TV.
Jonathan Gudai
And I think that’s I mean, one of the big takeaways for what excites us about this is that we’re blossoming from just a point solution to a bit more than that. And whether it’s doing certain things with social platforms or it’s doing certain things with mobile extension, CTV, you know, the ability to have a conversation with a brand and say what is your business outcome that you’re driving toward? What are your goals? And then let’s work backwards from there to identify what are the right touchpoints and what are the best screens to tell that story. In a way that’s harder than ever to break through because of the fragmentation that exists. And we’re in a unique position where digital out-of-home plus some of these other channels that we’re looking at as for add-ons, a lot of people’s time and attention is being put there.
Paul Roberts
And time and attention is the key. And being able to monetize that and track it back to who actually performs, it’s exciting.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah, well, we are excited to get on this journey with you. A little terrified at times. I have to tell you, being a public, you know, leader or being in the public sphere obviously brings with it its own sort of set of challenges and whatnot. But, you know, ultimately we’re super, super pumped for this. And I think, you know, our team, our employees, our investors, even our just broader industry, like having another company go public and start to kind of watch what we’re doing. I think they’re going to be a big spotlight.
Paul Roberts
I agree.
Jonathan Gudai
On where we are. And from a relatively humble beginning. There’s just so much to run, so much, so much whitespace to go chase after.
Paul Roberts
It’s exciting.
Jonathan Gudai
Definitely. Well, Paul, thank you for being on the show. This was definitely the biggest bet of all the ones so far. So maybe in the future we’ll have something bigger than this. But you take the biggest bet award so far for, for the podcast and –
Paul Roberts
Where is the crowd noise for that?
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah exactly. Yeah. There we go! And let’s build some great stuff together.
Paul Roberts
I’m excited!
Jonathan Gudai
Let’s make our shareholders incredibly wealthy.
Paul Roberts
Awesome.
Jonathan Gudai
And let’s have some fun along the way with our employees and with our customers.
Paul Roberts
I am in. Thanks for having me.