All right. We are going to go ahead and get started. Thank you for joining us. My name is Rohit Kulkarni. I'm the Internet research analyst here at Roth Capital Partners. Very excited to host three C-level execs here today. I'll let them do the intros. They have decades of experience in advertising. They have billions of dollars of ad spend that they have come across their systems. The topic and the variety of topics that we'll talk about today would overlap between what is AI doing to each of their businesses, as well as what is AI doing to overall advertising ecosystem. What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? What are the risks? Longer term, crystal ball outlook from each of these people. With that, I'll just start from all the way there. Bill from Digital Turbine, just a quick introduction, and then we'll move down. Yeah. Hi, I'm Bill Stone from Digital Turbine. Yeah, really excited. Thanks, Rohit, for you and the Roth team inviting us to participate today. I've gotten a ton of questions on what is AI gonna do to your business, so excited to do a little deep dive today 'cause it feels like it's shoot first, and we still haven't asked any questions. It'd be good to get some questions asked today. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, Rohit. Remco, yeah, running Verve. I've been in the space for a while and super excited about the topic, of course. It's changing a lot. It's disrupting the market, and I'm happy to have the discussion. Thank you. Just a quick introduction, Lauren. Thank you for joining. Of course. Thank you for having me. Hi, everyone. I'm Lauren Dillard. I'm LiveRamp CFO. I've been at the company going on 13 years. I agree. It's a completely transformative time to be in ad tech, martech, and I'm excited to participate today. Awesome. Thank you. I'll start off with a low-ball question for all of you guys, and then the degree of difficulty will keep on rising as we go. Maybe we'll go back as Lauren settles down from Bill. Talk about in the last 9-12 months, what are the most successful AI deployments that you have done in your company, both for your customers as well as your employees? Yeah. For us, we're using AI across our entire business right now. Whether it's our QA, whether it's our coding, whether it's our back office activities in terms of how we automate replying to things, simple things like RFPs or whether it's you know, how we're just automating processes for campaign setup and creative, and we're using it all across our business. For us, you know, we're seeing returns. It's hard to measure the return on any one specific thing, but where I see it show up is in the aggregate results, you know, we reported 25% gross profit growth in our last quarter, but we did it with declining operating expenses. The only way you can do that is if you're really driving efficiencies in your work and your processes and using tools like AI. What about customers? What are one or two things that you have delivered to customers that have delivered clear ROI through AI tools? For us, for customers, it's really about delivering better return on ad spend for them. The better we can use our AI machine learning platform we brand as DT iQ in our targeting efforts, that delivers better return on ad spend for our customers, which in turn then spend more dollars with us. That's a good answer. Remco? Yeah. Also here, AI is everywhere. The boring side is the cost side, of course, bring the cost down. If you see how we get sellers, let's say, how to say it, in preparation, so getting first calls, et cetera, we get efficiencies like the same person can do three, four times more calls per day. We see programming, all the tools that you built with Claude, for example, you do it so much faster. On the cost side, there's a lot. The even more exciting side, I would say, is the revenue side. We have ATOM, which is an extra SDK that we have on device, which collects data on the device in a privacy-compliant way. We use AI on device to optimize. We have, let's say on the retail media side, we do a lot with AI on the whole measuring loop. Maybe to already start with a bit of a statement, AI should not be singular. It's all about data in the end. AI only works if you have the right data. At least on the commercial side, that's crucial for AI applications in ad tech. Great. Thank you. Lauren? Well, great. I'll start on the customer-facing or revenue side. Before I do, for those who are less familiar with LiveRamp, I thought I would just quickly level set and talk about what we do. Simply put, LiveRamp provides software that helps companies use data to deliver and personalize advertising. In practice, we work with the world's largest B2C marketers. We help them connect, manage, activate data across the largest ecosystem of media buying platforms and partners, including, you know, some of the folks on stage with me today. In the past year, we've introduced several enhancements, AI enhancements to our product. The first we talk about is an AI segmentation tool. This allows our marketer customers to very easily build precise audience segments using first, second, and third-party data that they can access through our network and do so using natural language prompts. This is a real time saver for our customers and accelerates their time to value. The second big enhancement has been the expansion of our data marketplace. We operate as the ecosystem's largest third-party data marketplace, bringing together buyers and sellers of third-party data. That data has, you know, traditionally been used to personalize advertising. Increasingly, that data is being used to train models, and we are now making models and agents available to our customers through our marketplace as well. The final piece I would just mention, I think this kinda underpins everything I've talked about at least today, is we've effectively agentified our platform and our network. The headline we use is agentic orchestration. Really, these are just public APIs that allow everything, you know, humans have access to today, allow them to be made available for agents to be able to operate autonomously across our network and partners and platform. Obviously, all of this is very, very early, but has been received very well so far by customers and partners. Awesome. I do want to touch upon AI agents, that is the hot potato everyone's talking about in the investment community. What can agents do? What can agents disintermediate, and so on and so forth. Perhaps, like, at a very high level, the investors that I talk to think that AI agents will cut through all the workflows, all the various steps that advertisers need to take, and they'll be autonomous, and so what happens to the ad tech companies? I think that's where a lot of investors have jumped over. I would love to break down that and would love to hear like, maybe I'll just look at you, Remco, taking a first pass at that. Like, what are you seeing in terms of development of AI agents being used inside marketing workflows today? Where do you see early successes? Then again, same question to Lauren and Bill. Yeah, we get a lot of questions on that from investors. Agents is kind of the buzzword at the moment, and agents can do everything. Not totally true. I mean, agents are basically a faster way to optimize things, and they can do a lot by themselves, but they still need an environment to work into. They need data. They need, let's say, customers to work with, et cetera. Where do you use agents? That's really if you have workflows where a lot of manual work is done, you can automate those perfectly well with agents. Agents can also communicate with each other. Agents can also control each other or check each other, because often an agent has also some hallucinations or whatever you call it, and you have another agent to check that. Agents is super smart way of building things. We see a lot, for example, in, let's say, building media plans and things like that. It's perfect environment. I mean, typical media plan, if the team is building that, can take up to two days to really get all these things. If you have smart agents, you can do it really in an hour or two. There's a lot of things that you can make easier. I would say it's mostly an efficiency drive. Would I let an agent go out and negotiate the tariff for an ad or something? Probably not. Mm-hmm. There are certain things that an agent can do very well, and certain things not. Maybe it will come. We're using it a lot. There's a lot, and I think that's the nicest challenge of AI. The progression, it's so fast. We're discussing to redesign a big part of our platform, and the question is, do you start with that today? With a platform like Claude, for example, it takes a year to be ready. If you wait half a year, is the technology so much further that you can do it in three months? Mm-hmm. The progress of all those tools is enormous, and you see different ones, Gemini versus Claude, et cetera. There's also you see a bit of the one is better in the one part than the other part. The progress is what makes it so exciting. Nice. Thanks. Bill, where are you using agents inside any automation of marketing workflows you're using? Yeah, we're using it across our entire business. I think one of the things to build on Remco's point is what I see from investors is they wanna use the verb replace versus enhance. Yeah. Remco talked about enhancing media plans. We think about it similarly. We always think about it in terms of how does it enhance budgeting? How does it enhance targeting? How does it enhance measurement? All of these different layers within the stack are being enhanced by agents. The stack itself is not being replaced. The stack itself has a lot of other dependencies and things around it of how that interacts. That's where I think that combined with data is where the secret sauce of success is going to be. I think investors need to be really thoughtful about not to conflate replace and enhance. Okay. Oh, Lauren, if you could add to that same question, but even more importantly, you're a data platform, and you see all the other parts of the ecosystem. If there was a neutral party who would see which of the parts of the ecosystem might get collapsed, what would your answer be? Be careful. There are a couple other guys over there. Well, I don't. Check the answer. First of all, I don't think it collapses. I think it gets orchestrated, and we can talk about what that means. Remco touched on it. I might expand. I think we're seeing the ecosystem move to what we call, you know, multi-agent communication, so specialized agents being created to perform very specific tasks today in the marketing workflow. If you think about kinda the generic marketing workflow is a highly iterative, wash, rinse, repeat process. You plan an audience segment, you target that segment, you measure the results of a campaign, you take those learnings, you feed them back into the next campaign to kind of optimize your results next time. We think kind of in this multi-agent world, you would start with something like an orchestration agent. Using natural language, our customers could tell that agent, hey, I want to, in the case of a running shoe brand, I wanna increase the sales of the women's GT-2000 shoe by 20% over the next three months. That agent would then pass along directions to a segmentation agent, which would build the audience segment to target in order to achieve that objective and so on and so forth, and, you know, the next agent kinda gets its task. To Bill's point on Enhance, I think that whole process gets supercharged with AI and with agents sitting on top of it. I don't think any piece alone collapses, but rather I think the entire process can become far more iterative, far more data-driven than it is today, which, you know, for companies like LiveRamp who manage a huge amount of data across our network, like that's a really exciting dynamic. Okay. We'll monitor this very closely. Just to draw that out further, would you anticipate the positive outcome from this if agents truly amplify what each of the steps is doing, advertisers become that much more efficient, would that translate to more economic power to the ad tech platforms? Do you feel that you would have sufficient amount of value creation so much so that take rates may go up because of agents? Anybody. Remco. I think there's so much to optimize, but it will not only be optimization on the platform side, it will also be optimization on our client side, and our publisher side, etc. The whole thing will get more efficient, and I think that's about time also that it happens because advertising is pretty inefficient at the moment, digital advertising. Too many parties, sometimes ads go over different intermediaries. This can be much more efficient. Our companies can be much more efficient. In that sense, it really makes sense to go into that direction. Also our targeting at the moment is far from great, I would say. Measuring is really far from great. Attribution is not great. There is so much to improve in this sector. What I think is gonna be the big difference is between a company at scale that has the data, that has the money to invest all these things, and smaller companies where we see a lot of dropouts. If you see how many small companies at the moment try to sell before they die, I would say that's a lot, and I would be really, really afraid if I would be a small company in this space because you don't have the stuff to do it. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, I would echo a lot of what Remco is saying here. Agents is a sexy buzzword, and we all wanna talk about it, and it absolutely is going to enhance what we're doing. I really wanna emphasize two important points here that I think get glossed over 'cause agents is a sexy thing. Number one is data. Data is king. Who has the best ingredients of data? For us, that's our on-device data. We view that as going to win. That's the best raw materials. That's the best ingredients. The companies that have the best data are going to win. The second class of companies that are gonna win are those that have the distribution, reach, and scale. As agents make things more efficient, what happens is the barriers to entry get lower, and that means there can be more competitors, more things, more options. Everything has become democratized. The companies that actually have the reach and the scale to go attract customers in the marketplace are gonna win. For us, we have a technology called Ignite we put on our 1 billion devices. We have an SDK footprint that's on almost 3 billion devices. We have reach and scale, and we have data. We think those are the real ingredients that matter. Agents will make it more efficient, absolutely. I don't wanna diminish it. Right now it feels like it's getting a disproportionate amount of the airtime at the expense of the things that I feel are more important. Okay. I do want to kind of draw that out, like data, identity, privacy. Each of you guys have products, have an offering, have kind of skin in the game. Maybe starting with you, Bill, again, like you mentioned the OEM relationships you have. With the entire move to kind of companies don't want to share data, no identity, talk about how does that kinda affect your relationships with your advertisers, and to what extent are the OEM relationships now even more critical for you? Yeah. For those that aren't familiar, I know, Rohit, you are, we have a technology called Ignite that has permissions on device. It's not an app. It actually has access to what apps are being used, how long people have spent in apps, what apps they've deleted, where they are, different attributes around the device and the user and so on. That first-party data is really critical and gold. What we're seeing right now from the OEMs and operators is wanting to leverage that in a much more aggressive way. That raw material is the fuel that goes into agents and then be able to do that with the reach. That technology is really important in terms of driving the outcomes that advertisers want, and it's better for end users as well. I see. Oh, okay. Maybe you, Lauren, looking at you have the data platform. What is the biggest change or new product or step function utility that in the days of all advertisers looking to have better data, better first-party data, what is it that has happened in the last 6 to 9 months in your company that makes you more have that epiphany moment, like, aha, this is going to make us the secular wave of data being more valuable makes us even more important part of the ecosystem? Yeah, I think this actually goes back well beyond the past, you know, 6-9 months. The advent of clean rooms, so Bill touched on it, you know, companies in our space are hesitant to share data. It's not that they don't want to, but they wanna ensure that the data is being, you know, shared responsibly without exposing personal information and with the appropriate kinda governance and controls enforced. A clean room effectively enables that. For those who are not super familiar with clean rooms, they are basically secure environments where two or more parties can share data and run analytics on top of that data, you know, primary purpose of driving more effective advertising over time. I mean, it's interesting, we started on AI, and I think AI is a huge catalyst for this. I mean, the early use case for a clean room in our space has been as the foundation for a retail media network or a commerce media network. Again, for those who might not be familiar, this would be where a retailer would be putting, you know, SKU-level sales data in a clean room for its merchant partners to be able to access, to better understand who is buying through that retailer, the end customer, and also better understand how their marketing and advertising is performing. I think in an AI kind of future era, those clean rooms are gonna be used to train models and for agents to kind of operate on top of collaborative datasets, right? We know that a brand's most proprietary data is its own first-party data. The next most valuable data is data that it can glean from certain partnerships. If that data can be brought together collaboratively for agents or models to train on top of, like that becomes really, really valuable to the end customer. Again, very early days, but I think, you know, from the standpoint of kinda the potential for, you know, data and new technologies to catalyze data in this era, I think there's a real opportunity for a clean room. Do you anticipate, like, to draw that out further, clean rooms and the data that you already established can be used by LLMs that are built in-house to improve their whatever part of advertising, that could be, like, be it targeting or audience creation or whatnot? Yeah. I mean, it's happening today. I see. Yeah. It's happening today. Okay. Interesting. I guess, as the only European on the panel, Remco, talk about identity, privacy, data. Like it feels that you have your hands tied behind your back every time you need to target some to people. Like that was a light comment, but how do you view the evolution of kind of use of first-party data into identity and privacy-related things? Yeah, privacy is a big topic. Coming from Europe, we know that very well, GDPR and all the things, and it's very much regulatory-driven in Europe. Yeah. Privacy also in U.S. becomes a bigger and bigger topic, partly by the industry. Apple, 50% market share on mobile phones, 80% of the people saying no if they are asked if they want to be tracked. Also in the U.S., consumer-driven, I'd say company-driven, we see a lot more on privacy, and the consumer wants better privacy. We also get advertisers more and more into, "Hey, we want to do our targeting in a nice and privacy-comfortable way." Privacy is also a topic in the U.S., even though not everybody is still aware of that. The thing that it does, it makes the market even more complex. A publisher now has part of its volume where you don't have IDs, you don't have cookies, and part where you have. The part without cookies, you don't get the same CPM, the same price for that, unless you help them also to do targeting in a good way there. We have invested a lot coming from Europe and early seeing this happening. We have invested a lot in ways to target individuals without IDs, different ways to do that with AI, with intelligence on device, with, let's say, getting data from different sources to optimize. It is possible, but it needs a bit different approach. Okay. Is there anything within the kind of AI used to train that data better that can improve and just help you circumvent won't be the right word, but help you kind of not have as much of a handicap from a targeting or attribution purpose when it comes to European regulations? Yeah, AI can help you find contextual pockets. Something that you can guess but probably will not find, between 9:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M. in the morning on a weather app, it's a great time to advertise diapers. Stupid thing, but parents with young babies look at the weather app before they go out into the park. That's something you can think of that, but those are pockets that you normally find with AI. You find where certain ads work well, you can improve on that. It's a lot more, let's say, yeah, result-based that you're looking at. You have to go away from, I have a cookie, I build a profile, I know this person has a car, so I should advertise cars to this person. Doesn't make sense. It's also not very efficient. How often do you buy a car? Every three years? Every four years? Only then it makes sense to advertise cars. The rest is a waste of money. There's a lot of stuff that you can do with targeting profitability. We do a lot with search intent data. What are people really searching for? We have now lately also, we just had a press release on that, connected to LLMs, and LLMs give even better search data 'cause people say, "Hey, I searched for a car." Then the LLM asks, "What kind of car? What type? What color? What that?" Et cetera. You get many more rich data, and the richer the data are that we have, the better we can target. Okay. I do want to talk about. It seems like the industry is shifting more from kind of deterministic to more probabilistic kind of model-based measurement. I don't know. I'm just looking at you, Bill. Is this something that is really happening? How does that affect your business as kind of there seems to be almost very limited amounts of ways to do a very clean deterministic targeting and measurement now. Yeah, no, absolutely. That's a true statement. I think the key is that you mentioned is on the measurement piece of that. We've historically in the mobile ecosystem have had this thing called last look- Yeah ... whoever the last click is gets credit. That's fine. I don't think that's changing. I think the momentum is there for that. Where I think AI is going to be helpful is now how do you move that upstream so advertisers can have a better view, not just on what the last click was, but how does AI help us in our modeling to say, "Okay, let's think about the attribution window if the person didn't open the app within 7 days or 24 hours, but they did within 30 days," or even further out, what was the marketing mix that drove that last click in terms of, you know, different mediums along the way? The AI and the agents that are gonna be involved in helping that modeling is going to help deliver better outcomes for advertising. The point being is that ultimately I think the actual measurement of the payment is. I think that's not gonna change. I think that's locked in. The other things are gonna help make it richer and better. Interesting. Anything to add, either of you guys, in terms of probabilistic modeling and? Yeah, I mean, I would just agree, and I think, you know, probabilistic inference, kinda contextual targeting, and that's been around for a while. The brands that work with LiveRamp value the deterministic matching primarily for the measurement and the ability to close the loop and the ability to optimize that next campaign based on known kind of actual purchases, whether they be, you know, offline in store or through a mobile app or, you know, through some other channel, and I don't anticipate or see any reason why that would change. No, I would also support that, both of you actually. I think where you have the possibility to do deterministic measuring, you will always prefer that over probabilistic, and you can do that in a retail store, for example, if you have an integration with the cash register. I know what people are buying, and I can really measure A/B test, et cetera, advertising efficiency. If I don't have that, I need to go probabilistic. D o it in the other way. Okay, I do want to spend the next few minutes talking about the new things and changes in advertising and just kind of the same question to all of you. How does this affect you, and how should investors think about that? Search is changing. The open web is getting fewer and fewer clicks from Google. Google is keeping more of the internet's time spent. How should investors think about the impact of that on LiveRamp, for example? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question. I think there's a myth that LiveRamp is more exposed to the open web than in fact we are. I mean, I was looking at our top largest measured by data volume integrations just last week, and the vast majority of them are not open web. At the same time, I think we're finding that AI is creating new surfaces and channels that over time will be monetized via advertising, so in effect, you know, creating potential new channels for advertising. OpenAI, ChatGPT announced a handful of months ago they're beginning to experiment with advertising, so has Perplexity, so has Gemini, and you know, we think that over time those channels will capture more share of ad dollars, and so there might be some share shifts. I mean, we certainly have seen that over the course of our business, throughout periods of time. We believe ad dollars in the aggregate will continue to grow, and they'll continue to be more data-driven tomorrow than they are today, which, you know, benefits LiveRamp. Okay. Search traffic declining, does that affect you guys at Remco? Um- Yeah. I was gonna say it's a positive for us, because, you know, we're an app company and mobile web, and I think investors have a hard time distinguishing between the web versus apps and native experiences, and they're very different, right? Everyone here has been onto their favorite LLM and typed something in, and they get an answer back versus going to a website x or a website y, and those companies are absolutely being hurt right now. Their traffic is going down. Everybody in here knows it, and those companies are being impacted by it 100%. When I think about the apps that are on my phone, I think about the IP, the Digital Rights Management, the things I've shared, the native experience on that. That's different than the mobile web. As you see that go down, you're seeing things that are actually now moving into those native app experiences on device. As the barriers to entry become lower because people can write code and create apps much more instantaneously, we saw OpenAI last week talking about all these great things that are gonna happen, and that's fantastic. Again, things are lowering, but that traffic that was going to search and going out to the open web, it's moving now into those applications, and the question is: How are those applications going to actually get customers? For the last 200, 300 years, there's been customer pull, but there's been advertising push. The question is, how is that going to happen in a new world? From a Digital Turbine perspective, it makes us excited. We're leading it. I like it. Remco? That was already our answer as well. We're also an in-app company. 90% of our revenue is in-app. I would like to add only one thing to it. It's disrupting the market. It's changing. There's tens of billions of dollars that were spent for advertising for search. Those need to move somewhere, and a lot of those will be moving in-app. A lot of those will also be moving CTV. We don't see LLMs yet offering a lot of advertising space, but also that will come. I mean, they need to make money. They're burning money like hell. So there's a lot of disruption in this market, and I think that's also if you have a company that's agile, that's really able to react to those things, it's a great market to grow. Okay. All of you just mentioned the second thing I was going to raise is ChatGPT. Like, ChatGPT is going to be a pretty significant player in the next 12-18 months, no matter which way you cut it, when it comes to advertising. Talk about how should investors think the impact of growth in ChatGPT ads on each of your businesses, be it from ad tech standpoint. Just to make it a multi-layer question, recently there have been news around ChatGPT trying to integrate with companies like The Trade Desk or companies like Criteo or even AppLovin. Like, there have been. Again, I don't know where they will go, but you guys are all ad tech companies. Where does ChatGPT rank in terms of tailwind, headwind to you guys? Bill. Yeah, I'll start. You know, there was an article in The Information last week talking about OpenAI building its own app store. Yep. Yep. You know, to me, as we're in the app distribution and democratizing, that's a great thing for us because we can help with that distribution of that. I view that as a good thing. I think the bigger question for you know the big LLM companies is how do you make money? If it's costing you for every query of whatever it is that you're querying, you know, you're seeing a shift into the enterprise. As we think about end consumers, I think it's gonna be interesting to see how that ends up funding itself or paying for itself, and if the answer is advertising. You know, from a Digital Turbine perspective, especially when you hear of things like app stores, that's what we do, is we distribute apps. I may say, "Okay. Hey, you know, get the Uber outside the hotel here and pick me up," and I can download an Uber ChatGPT, OpenAI version of that app. How do I get that to the device? How do I get all the native things that need to be in that in terms of, you know, my personal details and credit cards and payments and all the rest of that? How do I then for all the other apps that wanna now distribute because they have an OpenAI version and they don't wanna pay an Apple or Google tax for that, then now you've enabled now an entire ecosystem to go help drive a brand-new business and revenue stream. We think about it as an enormous opportunity versus just thinking about maybe a much more narrow use case of, say, the Delta Air Lines app or the Uber app, but more the entire ecosystem that may want to look for alternative distribution outside of the duopoly of Google and Apple. Maybe they should just create an AI phone, basically. That would help you guys. Well, I mean, we don't have time today, but there is a conversation: is OpenAI gonna be an operating system? Is it gonna replace or complement? How does it interface with Android and iOS? Again, those are opening up more distribution, more opportunity for app publishers in terms of trying to reach consumers at a more effective cost. Okay. Remco, ChatGPT, what happens to, or Yeah. As mentioned before, we use the data for better results. What's gonna happen with them, it's unclear. It could be an open system. It could be another walled garden that is coming, like Google. Hey, they have enough views, they have enough reach, so just sell it themselves. Traditionally, competition works better in ad tech, so just opening up the system, you get better returns than that. It's a little bit the crystal ball. We don't know what they are gonna do. There's a lot of rumors around them. I wouldn't expect them to pick just one party to work with. That would be stupid. It could be that they just buy somebody and do it themselves. Okay. What does ChatGPT, growth of ChatGPT ads mean to LiveRamp? Yeah. Well, maybe just to pick up on something Remco said. I mean, if you look at traditional search or CTV as you know, examples, you know, recent examples of, you know, companies or channels embracing, you know, advertising as a monetization engine, I think, you know, initially they start closed, right? They invest in kind of, you know, internal ad tech. They sell their inventory directly. Then to your point on competition, over time, they then choose to monetize some inventory through programmatic channels. I imagine that will play out similarly here. For LiveRamp, this is just a new channel that our network will connect into. In the same way we've helped our customers connect their data into traditional search channels, we would do the same thing with tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini. Over time, our hope would be to also help kinda measure help our customers measure the effectiveness of their ad spending in those channels by being able to connect, you know, the equivalent of exposure data inside a ChatGPT back to some sort of conversion or outcome. You know, our role is to connect that data so that our customers can perform measurement and analytics on top of it. Okay. Two more kinda secular trends. Connected TV, you guys mentioned that a few times. I'll start with you, Lauren, again. Connected TV is probably one of the fastest-growing channels out there in advertising. Part of it is becoming more and more performance-driven so that all the data becomes that much more valuable. Otherwise, people just throw money blindly, and brand marketers don't care. How does CTV help or hurt LiveRamp? I mean, it's been the fastest-growing channel for our business over the past 2-3 years. If you look at our top 50 largest integrations, again, as measured by data volume, today, roughly 70% are either pure-play CTV or video platforms or CTV, you know, enabled, meaning they're monetizing CTV inventory. It also remains the fastest-growing channel within our data marketplace. I think one really interesting opportunity or shift we're seeing is the data accessibility of these CTV platforms, even more so than many of the traditional social walled gardens. They're willing to give data back to customers for measurement, for optimization. Now, they wanna do that in a protected way. This is where I think our clean room can add a lot of value. We are finding that they are a far more data-accessible channel than maybe some of the traditional kinda walled garden channels were. I think that's in part allowing them to continue to kinda gain share from maybe those more traditional walled gardens. Bill or Remco, do you have a play on CTV? How do you think about that? Yeah. CTV is a fast-growing channel. I would say that retail media is even growing a bit faster than CTV. That was going to be my last point. Come on, Remco. Come on. Sorry. Sorry. I didn't want to steal that. No, CTV is. I understand that we serve it, we do it, but the problem with CTV is everybody has the same. There's hardly any differentiation there. You see that the margin pressure is very high on CTV. That's for a platform. I mean, we like to make money. As such, we don't do so much CTV. We technically can do it. Where we see good results is in performance, really drive to store for retail media, for example. We see really very promising results. CTV will grow, CTV will further go, but it's really about figuring out the right model to make money with it. Looking ahead, I mean, there's still so much linear TV, and that all needs to move over to CTV, so it will only continue to grow. It's really about, yeah, everybody is moving into it, especially since web is under pressure. You see more and more moving into CTV, and the competitive pressure on CTV is enormous. I see. Bill? Yeah. No, I would just add that, I would think about advertising sometimes, especially in digital advertising, we make it really complex. We're gonna get into a bunch of acronyms, and we're gonna talk about CTV. At the end of the day, it's not complicated. You have a product, you have a user, you're trying to connect it and find it, okay? That's what it is. As we think about our brand business, which is growing at 20%+, we do it through what we call in-app channel. 'Cause if I'm just trying to reach Rohit, and I'm trying to reach people that like Rolex, I think you are gonna be probably support the products that we wanna distribute for our partner. Whether I'm doing that through CTV, whether I'm doing that through retail media, whether I'm doing it through our in-app channel, it doesn't matter. I'm trying to reach Rohit and people that look like Rohit for whatever product I'm trying to sell, right? I think I agree with Remco's point that CTV has gotten, you know, really saturated and really noisy, and it's gotten diminishing returns. For us, we've created our own channel of in-app, which is different than CTV, and it's different than retail media, but we offer extensions for people trying to reach those audiences that may struggle in those other formats. At the end of the day, we're just trying to connect a product to a user, and I don't think the CTV part of it is... Again, it's getting a little commoditized right now, and it's getting really cluttered and crowded. That's why we think we've got a unique channel that others can't replicate given the scale that we have on our platform. Interesting. I know you already kinda talked about the last secular trend. I wanna talk about is retail media networks. Again, whoever has a kind of a horse in the race, who's playing in retail media networks, how should investors think about how you benefit from them? Lauren? Sure. Well, I would say the kinda definition of a retail media network has expanded to include many companies. Yeah. Who plays in retail media? Many companies do now. Yeah. We talk about it as commerce media networks. I think, you know, other industries have seen the success of retail media and are replicating it now with, you know, within their space. You know, ones that are maybe really obvious, some that are less so. Airlines, for example, are some of, you know, the more recent kinda companies and industry to embrace kinda this concept of connecting data with different, you know, second-party partners and, you know, other people, other individuals or partners within their ecosystems. On-demand delivery services, right? A DoorDash or Uber Eats, I mean, these, I think, is the next wave of retail media to emerge. Even banks, I think, are dipping their toes in the commerce media network pond. I think a lot of growth ahead as the concept of retail media expands. Bill? Yeah. This is an exciting area for us. This is one of our fastest-growing parts of our business. What we see today, and kind of just a simple example for investors, is you'll have a retail media network. It could be Amazon, it could be Target, it could be Walmart. Pepsi says, "Hey, I wanna spend $100 on that retail network." They'll say, "Okay, this is the audience that I'm trying to target for that." Back to my original point, it's connecting the right type of people. They'll realize throughout their network, maybe they can only get $80 of that $100 to whatever target that Pepsi is trying to reach. Oh, you know, for a company like us, again, back to the reach of, you know, 3 billion on devices around the world, we can offer that extended reach for a Walmart or for a Target or for an Amazon that now expands the reach for the Pepsi trying to spend those dollars on their retail media network. That's creating a new channel, but it's still an extension of retail media. That's an exciting part of our business and go forward because, again, it's just back to finding the right users that match up with the product. That ad for Pepsi shows up in whatever app you're in, and then it goes to Walmart or Target or Amazon. Yeah, that's pretty smart. Remco, you wanted to add on, retail media? Yeah, I wanted to add one point. It's making the industry, again, more complex because there are so many companies now that all want to have their own retail media network. If I'm a CPG, I don't know where to go anymore. Of course, I go to Amazon, I go to Walmart, I go to Kroger. Those I know. Then there is hundreds of other ones. Airlines, everybody does this. This, again, asks for a platform approach, and it's really you need to aggregate, you need to curate because this is a mess, and it's nice. We like that. Interesting. From secular to a little bit of cyclical, like, trends, this year you have a couple of tentpole events in advertising. A few actually, like you have the elections, you have the Soccer World Cup and a few other. You know, you have the Olympics. Investors are focused on that. They could add a few points of growth to advertising overall. Maybe clarify that. How does that help your business? Or is that something of a tailwind that investors should be focused on for each of your businesses? Bill? Yeah. I'd just say, you know, again, for the last hundreds and hundreds of years, media dollars follow eyeballs. If eyeballs are in the Olympics, eyeballs are on elections, eyeballs are on the World Cup, whatever the event is, more eyeballs equal more dollars. You know, absolutely those will provide blips for those eyeball-oriented events, but the dollars follow the eyeballs. They always have, and they always will. What about specifically for Digital Turbine? Does that- Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any plans? That's absolutely a tailwind for us and any ad tech or media company because, you know, we obviously make money on more eyeballs spending more time in whatever experiences we're going to do. Those are all positives for us. Thank you. Remco? Yeah, we do use also those events. I heard soccer is big in Europe. Soccer is big in Europe, yes. Absolutely. There's two effects of those. Let's say, first of all, if you do a lot of political, there's some companies specialized on that. They have one year where they have great numbers, and then the year after, they have to explain to their investors again that the numbers are not so great. Then they have a little bit better year, and then they have again a bad year. That's the reason that we don't like political too much. Those events have a double effect. First of all, there's more money pouring into the market, like Bill said. Secondly, when there's more money pouring in the market or, let's say, more spent, the CPMs go up because the demand goes up. It has an overall effect. Even if you're not strong in political, you still get an increase of your revenues because of higher CPMs. Okay, any impact on how people view LiveRamp in such events? My answer might be a little bit different. Our model, we're a subscription model based on data volume across our network. We're not as... We don't see... The cyclical shifts are less noticeable in our revenue. The piece that the area of our business that it would show up would be our data marketplace. Again, I think I mentioned earlier, but our data marketplace connects third-party data and data buyers and sellers for audience creation and targeting. We take a take rate on it. That's the piece of the business that- I see. would pick up a couple points in an election year or over the course of an Olympic season. Okay, cool. I actually forgot one point in the previous AI discussion we had. Gen AI tools for advertisers, like are you investing in that? To draw out a hypothesis there is now you can create a pizza ad 1,000 different ways, and you can target using which who likes pepperoni versus who likes chicken or whatnot. That adds to the complexity, but also kind of perhaps adds to better conversion and all those. Is there something on the ad creative, ad optimization gen AI tools that you have been doing more of, or how have you seen any kind of results from those improvements? Remco. Yeah. We are a company that likes machines to do work, and let's say human work is, let's say, more inefficient. The nice thing now with that creative, let's say sending a film crew over to South Africa with 40 people to make a nice commercial, you don't need to do that anymore. You can do a lot with AI now with creative. If you take it one step further, you don't need to have only a single commercial like which you had with linear TV, but you make commercials that are really dedicated to it. It's almost a one-to-one marketing where you can go. Every commercial can be different. The color of the car in the commercial, red sells better for women, black better for men. There's a commercial with a red car and a black car, and you can even drive that a lot deeper. In that sense, the commercial part comes much closer to the efficiency of a platform, the measuring, the targeting, and it becomes one ecosystem, and as such, also brings, again, efficiency in the whole chain. Okay. Allows us also to have as part of forward integration to help the agencies more and, yeah, get less hands on keyboard, all those kind of things. Are you able to stake a bigger claim on agency dollars by doing the improvements that are helping them provide better value to their clients? Yeah, we help agencies to basically become more efficient. If each agency would do that themselves, it would be super inefficient again. As such, it's good to do it. The customers of those agencies expect them to become more efficient. There's a very nice way of really doing more, but working with them and not against them. Okay. What about you? Yes is the short answer. We use generative AI threads, but I think the bigger theme is it's just yet another example of enhance versus replace. This is just another tool to enhance better outcomes using machines and data and learnings to drive better outcomes for advertisers, better outcomes for customers, and that's all we're doing, is this is enhancing it, and it's making it faster, and it's gonna make it better for all involved, but it's not replacing anything. Advertising is still there. It's not replacing advertising. It's enhancing the advertising. Okay. I have to ask a simple lowball question at the end. You guys have been a great sport, but apart from all the discussions on AI agents and kind of what terminal risk they may provide, what are the biggest kind of concerns or risks as execs in ad tech that you have right now? Is it competitive? Is it privacy or something else that you are worried about right now? Maybe Bill. I wouldn't say worried. I think that the key in technology, and we saw this. I've been through the fixed to mobile transition, the digital transition, the app economy transition. Now, this is the fourth one. There's certain trends that happen along the way. One of the trends is disruption and adaptability are different things. Companies that can adapt, you know, like what NVIDIA's done to adapt and since what companies like Walmart and Microsoft have done to adapt is different than Blockbuster and Borders and all the other people that failed to adapt, right? Having a culture of adaptability, I think is super important. You understand, I'm a big believer in the Gartner Hype Cycle. If you don't know what that is, you can go look it up. There always tends to be this hype in technology and this, "Oh my God, we're over our skis," then it kinda comes back, and it transforms our lives. Understanding where we are on the curve for all of these different elements you just described, I think is super important because you don't wanna be Friendster to social networks, but you also don't wanna be TIDAL to music streaming and be too late, right? Being able to understand where you're on the curve and time your implementation in tech is super important. I think there's certain things right now where things are way over their skis, and there's certain things that are happening much faster than people think. Being able to take all the things you just said and get them on the right spot, I think that's key to success. Okay. What about you, Remco? What are you worried about? Yeah. I think if you're afraid of change, you should not be in this industry. Okay. Because this industry is changing all the time. If we now look, I mean, we're living in exciting times. We got the internet, we got the mobile phone, and now we have AI. In between, we had also the blockchain, which was not as big and at least not a success. No, but AI, I think the big difference is that the speed of change. Yeah Is much faster than anything we have seen before. If, as a company, you're not agile, you're not really open to it or force your employees actually to work with it, to use it, you might be, let's say, missing it and be totally left out. You need to be agile. Totally agree with what Bill is saying. You need to, as a company, be able to adapt and to jump on it, and it gives you a lot of opportunities, but it will indeed also get some casualties among you. Okay. Lauren, what are you worried about? Yeah, I mean, I think internally, your point, I mean, I think the biggest risk is just, you know, the pace of adoption and not moving quickly enough. With customers, I mean, everything we've talked about today introduces so much more complexity into what is already a very, very complex ecosystem. I think it's incumbent on all of us to really help our customers navigate this period of change and complexity. I think it's introducing more fragmentation than it is consolidation. I think data is gonna matter a lot more. I think the old ways of working, you know, either get changed or replaced or enhanced. I think a lot of that will require some hand-holding with our customers and partners, you know, exciting times and willing to, you know, put in the work to do it. Okay, awesome. I would- Yeah, Remco. I would add one thing to it. It's not only our customers, it's also our investors. We're having investors here, and I see a lot of uncertainty with investors. What's AI gonna do? Is it gonna really kill your whole business model? I think it's super difficult. I mean, for us, partly, it's already difficult to see what's happening and how you adapt to it. For an investor, it's even more difficult. If you see how the whole sector has gone down in valuation with 30%-60% in the last one year roughly. Yeah Or let's say even in the last four months, it's huge. That's also for us as companies to really explain what is really happening or how do we see it. Therefore, I'm super thankful to be here. Thank you. To have the possibility to explain. Yep. Bill, anything? I thought you had it. If not, you have been a good sport. A quick word association. Without blinking, the first thing that comes to mind when I blurt out these things. Yes, no answer. AI agents will take over ad tech in 2027. No. No. All right. No. Okay. Search ads are peaking in 2027. Yes, no, maybe. Yeah. No. Sorry. I don't know what you mean. Search advertising. I don't know what search. I thought you said ser- For the traditional search? Traditional search advertising is peaking in 2027. Yes. What? It has already. It's down. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay. You guys stumped me. I was not expecting that answer. Lauren, you wanted to add something? I was just gonna take the other side of that trade. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. Okay. Walled gardens will start to open up to broader ad tech in 2027. Yes. Yes. No. Okay. This is just one word reaction. Different questions for each one of you. Digital Turbine. First word that comes to your mind when I say this, Digital Turbine. Amazing. Verve. Fun. LiveRamp. Accelerating. Roth Capital Partners. Great. Great conference. Hospitable. Thank you so much. Thank you.