All right. [Non-English content] Good morning. Good morning, stateside. Good afternoon in France. I'm Jason Kreyer, internet tech analyst from Craig-Hallum. We've got Magnite with us today. We're just going to kind of spend some time recapping the week that was in Cannes. I've got CEO Michael Barrett with me. In due time, we'll have President Sean Buckley join us as well.
Again, working.
Exactly. We've got Nick Kormeluk and David Day in the room as well, so we may get some cameo appearances if I push too hard on the finance questions. Hey, Sean. I'm here.
Right.
Goal, just to kind of recap what you guys are hearing, what's important, what is all the news of the week. I'd like to get started with the Magnite related stuff, and maybe we'll just kick it off with orchestration. You launched that, what, a week and a half ago? A week ago? A ton of AI-enabled capabilities in there. What's the reception to that product? Where do you think the industry stands in terms of their desire for agentic interaction?
I would say, if we go back a couple months, we sort of made our first announcement on the agentic front, which was the launch of both our seller and buyer agents. This enables buyers and sellers to first and foremost interact via natural language with our platform versus sort of being in the UI and turning levers and, or pulling levers and twisting dials. That was the initial launch, and what we've launched here is what we call our orchestration layer. The main use case there is we have access to the broadest and deepest set of supply intelligence across all the major media owners. We've compiled that all in one place, and it allows buyers in particular to come in and integrate their own agentic tools as well.
We have both the end-to-end workflow, and we've built the system to be interoperable if folks want to bring their own tools. We've gone through that process now with a number of agency partners, for example, which we announced. They can tap into the orchestration layer. We enable media owners to create the inventory packages, the audiences, all that stuff, and that's made available now to buyers so they can start transacting agentically with those partners. That's kind of the two-step process in terms of the announcements we've made on the agentic front.
What is a little crazy is how all over the place the industry is as it relates to what this means in the near term, right? In other words, I think we've been quite open. It's dollars flowing through these systems for testing purposes, not billions. You talk to one DSP and they're like, "Much to do about nothing. There'll be no agentic dollars in 2027." You talk to another agency, and an agency's like, "Hundreds of millions of dollars in 2027." Then you talk to another agency and they're like, "No, agentic's never gonna get down that far because that's where our humans need to make the decisions. That's the value we bring. It can help us here, but not here."
It is kind of being universally talked about, universally adopted, wild degrees of separation between how much dollars are gonna flow through this in the near term. I'm not talking five years out, I'm not talking 2027. It's pretty interesting.
That question was asked on a panel I attended this morning. It was, like you said, very wide range of opinions. What is the uniqueness of orchestration? You're bringing that to market. What are you seeing in the market similar to that? How are you positioning that differently in the market from what exists today?
Well, I'd say maybe three things. One is we're uniquely positioned because we work with virtually every ad-supported media owner, particularly here in the U.S. We have this incredible footprint on the inventory side that is quite frankly, just unmatched. That gives us a huge advantage. As I mentioned, we have the end-to-end workflow, so you can do an agentic transaction wire to wire on our architecture. We've also built it so that it's interoperable, so particularly if buyers want to integrate with their own set of agentic tools, we support that as well. The last thing I would say is not only do we work with virtually every major ad-supported media owner, but we sit in a very unique place in the supply chain.
Particularly the depth of the integrations that we have with SpringServe and CTV is a real differentiator. We're already working with all of these constituents at scale. Not only are we developing these innovative agentic products, but we already have the deep trusted relationships and sit at the right spot in the supply chain to really activate on those tools. It's not like we're coming in with a cold start in those relationships. I think the combination of those things does definitely differentiate us.
The other thing that you guys have released a week ago was news with Viasat. From my mind, that builds on an already announced relationship with United Airlines. What is the status of the opportunity in the airlines? Obviously, you've got captive audiences. Curious what's new with Viasat , and how have these things taken off?
Yeah. Obviously in the grand scheme of the broader business, it's a relatively small category, but you mentioned the United deal as well. I think what's interesting is just delivering ads in those environments is sort of one step. By the way, that is kind of the way it started, where it's, hey, you don't necessarily have stable connectivity during a flight. Flight takes off. We sort of preload the advertising. A bunch of stuff happens on the flight. Flight lands, we sort of ping out, okay, here's what's occurred. An interesting development there would be the Starlink side. That gives you much faster and more stable connectivity, and that's when you can start to get into more of the real-time transactions during flight.
Again, relatively small category in the grand scheme of the overall business.
Okay. Want to touch on CTV. We've been hearing more commentary about new entrants looking at the streaming industry. Are you hearing potential for new entrants? Anybody that maybe doesn't have CTV inventory of their own, just why is streaming such an attractive industry for more entrants getting involved?
When you say entrants, you mean on the demand side or?
On the demand side.
Media creative, yeah.
Yep.
Well, obviously that big deal that was announced yesterday, Vibe being acquired by Walmart, is a just affirmation of the concept that successful streaming services will need to have tens of thousands of advertisers, not 500 to 1,000 legacy linear broadcast advertisers. Companies like Vibe, MNTN, et cetera, have proven out the thesis that streaming inventory can be performant. A Walmart acquiring Vibe turbocharges that because of the thousands of relationships they have with retailers. Not just Walmart stores, but in their marketplace that they've built that is similar to the Amazon marketplace, where third-party manufacturers can sell on their marketplace.
Being able to activate all of those thousands of products and SKUs and companies as TV advertisers because Vibe then plugs into us and gets the inventory. Walmart Connect, we have a big deal with. We mentioned that last week, where they've taken their graph of data, their shopper data, and plugged it into our SSP, taking it from a DSP, and now it's democratized and multiple DSPs can access it. All this points to this idea that more and more performance advertisers, small to medium-sized businesses that are never advertised on TV, it was just a putt too far. Creative, creative review, budget size, all this kind of stuff is like all those walls have been knocked down.
Yeah. We completely anticipate that anyone that has advertising relationships with mid-size merchants will now be using TV as part of their media diet. I think we stand to benefit greatly from that because keep in mind, with the legacy folks, they have mature sales teams. There's no one that has a sales team that knows who these advertisers are. That's where we shine. They turn to us and say, "Hey, we understand that Vibe has all these advertisers. Can you get us some on Disney? Can you get us some on Paramount?" That's when they plug into us, and we bring it to them. That is a product that carries with it the highest take rate because we're finding the demand sourcing and then bringing it in.
We think it's an incredibly bright trend, the supply side activation and data and the growth of these advertiser base. It's a very good trend for Magnite.
Walmart represents a really interesting opportunity because obviously you've got a working relationship with Walmart and Walmart Connect and VIZIO, right? Historically, we've talked about all those names. They're piecing together these different assets, kind of starting to look a little walled garden-y, but it feels like, maybe it's more hedges than walls on the garden, right? How much do you think strategic changes? [audio distortion]
Yeah, no, I would say that might be a perception, but in reality, we've spent a lot of time with them lately. In reality, they want to be the most open there is. They want their data set deployed everywhere, to make the full advantage of it for the advertisers. They are anything but a walled garden in that respect. A walled garden would've been continuing with the strategy of keeping your data domiciled in one DSP and forcing the world to use that DSP. They said that was the first chapter of commerce media. Second chapter is activating on the sell side, keeping it closer to Walmart, working with a trusted partner like ourselves, better signal fidelity, transparency, decisioning, optimization, all sitting on that side and not housed in one DSP.
They're actually opening it up to, DSPs have to go through a review process with them, but ultimately opening it up to everyone.
It's great to see that streaming doesn't appear to just be making the same mistakes that open web did, right? Maybe not every participant calls it a mistake, but essentially bolting on additional capabilities to build those high walls.
Yeah.
Right? To keep things a little bit more open like Walmart appears to be doing. Staying on the path of M&A, if we rewind a week, we saw the Roku, Fox marriage. Any thoughts on the implications for the industry? Any implications for Magnite?
I'll hit the implications for Magnite, and let Sean discuss the implications for the industry. For us, it's all good. We have a deep partnership with Fox and their Tubi property, a deep partnership with Roku. More is better. I think with Fox, they'll be able to promote Roku more than Roku's ever been able to promote themselves. Increase in households, more streaming hours, all that stuff accrues to Magnite's benefit. I think we feel we're in a very good position there. As far as the industry.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I don't want to speak on behalf of what their strategy is, as Michael mentioned, both sizable customers of ours, we're excited about it.
Every meeting I've had this week, every panel I've listened to, everything's talking about agentic and AI embedded in advertising and stuff like that. We talked a little bit about the appetite and just maybe frame, what more does it take? Is there a linchpin? What takes us from where we are today to moving into an industry where we've got much more agentic flow and buyer's agents connecting with seller agents and removing that human component?
Yeah. Well, I would say the one piece of the agentic story that hasn't been talked enough about is the creative aspect to it, right? In a long time to make a television commercial, and these days, you can make a television commercial in 30 seconds. We actually bought a company that does that, and it's been widely adopted by our publishers to white label it and present it as their own self-service front door for SMBs. We are already seeing agentic at work in massive scales in that area.
I think the easy way to think about it is, today, a trader at an agency is beholden to 12- 15 different dashboards that they have to go to look at, pull, call a rep and say, "Hey, my performance data looks like it's 12 hours old. Do you have a problem over there?" All that kind of stuff. You create an agentic overlay to that, it just makes all the sense in the world. The agent is querying all of the interfaces. They don't go away. The trader's freed up to do more constructive stuff instead of having to plow. We're seeing that as the first adoption.
The next will be planning, forecasting, RFPs. I'm an agency for an airline. I want to run in travel content. I want to spend $750,000, and I want to do it in two weeks. Upload it to the buyer, speak to the computer. It's now in the buyer agent, the agent then talks to all the sellers, the sellers instantly say, "Okay, got it. I'll go back, look at my inventory, package it, tell you what it's going to cost." That process used to take weeks. These are very easily adopted things.
I think what's going to be more difficult but is in the works is the agentic decisioning. Okay, now buy, the campaign just automatically starts to run, morph, change, shut down, shift to this media, not that media because it's not performing.
Reoptimize.
All that stuff is really where the power lights up, and we feel super excited about that from the sell side because more and more of these deals are being activated on the sell side. Why wouldn't it then go to the logical conclusion of activation to optimization to results to deftly shifting media plans in real time? That's what people are asking of us, and that's what we're going to be able to deliver. You're seeing a lot of agentic happen, just the dollars flowing through it right now probably aren't even being classified as agentic because their interfaces are agentic and not decisioning systems that are agentic.
What about the targeting and the audience creation and segmentation, right? That has been on a trend where it appears to be moving somewhat from the buy side to the supply side. Curious, as we enter into an agentic world, does any of that change?
What I thought it was interesting, the technology we acquired, streamr, as Michael brought up, there was a component of that that was obviously building video creative. You could create cinematic video out of still images and essentially build a TV commercial very quickly and very cost-effectively. There was actually another component of that technology that follows that process, which we've now begun to integrate more deeply into our workflows. All you really had to do was type in a business name. It would go out and find all the imagery and build that video creative.
It then understood a lot more about that company. It knew geography, it knew ideal audience. It knew the demographics to target. You can pre-populate all that stuff based on one piece of fundamental information. You still have a human review it. Does this all look right? Is this what I want? Okay, click go. We're injecting that type of agentic mentality into a lot of our workflows across the business.
Okay. We've been in this environment where streaming viewership is what? 60%+ of consumption. Ad budgets are still in this world where they're, I don't know, 30%-40% are in streaming, right? There's this catch-up that happens over time. We're talking about agentic. We're talking about the potential for new entrants in the industry. What do you think it takes to close that gap to get ad dollars in streaming to start to match what the viewership is in streaming?
I know for 10 years, mobile lamented the gap between users, every year was the year of mobile, then it happens faster than you think, but it always takes time to change behaviors. Digital, in the early days of websites, they had all this traffic, and they were still running magazine ads, and they were like, "What the heck's going on here?" It takes a while to change practices, but I do think Agentic will accelerate that because, again, it's making the decisioning and not just the planning. It's going to be choosing the best media at the best price, at the best performance, and we now know that streaming plays a vital role in that.
Historically in Cannes, you get a lot of commentary from the agencies. Seems like it's been a little bit quieter on that end lately. Obviously, you've got a lot of marketplaces, a lot of agency relationships. You're out here continuing to curate those relationships. What are you hearing from the agencies in terms of what they're focused on, and if there was any notable takeaways from Cannes this year from an agency perspective?
Well, it's interesting you bring that up. I do also think the industry has shifted a little. Most of the announcements go up in the week or two leading into the conference. I think we had 13 announcements in the two or three weeks leading up to the conference, I think everybody has sort of jumped on that sort of model where they get the announcements out because obviously everybody's so busy and there's so much going on here. Generally speaking, it's a lot of the themes that we already touched on. One is there's a clear theme toward supply side decisioning.
We've been working with the holding companies to integrate the data assets that they've either acquired or built on our side of the fence, which is a fundamental change in terms of where decisioning is happening and where data is enabled. We've worked with them to, in many cases, to create the marketplace products you've described, we're now working with them aggressively on implementing agentic strategies and virtually all of the big agency groups are very much leaned into that. Those are also core examples of what we're talking about with agencies in addition to media owners.
I'd add to that, and it surfaced during the upfronts, but it's now become part of every conversation when you have it with an agency or a media partner, and that is outcome-oriented advertising. What does that mean? Essentially, marketers are going to their agency saying, "Hey, if I sell more soap, I'll pay you more." This whole model of the way we used to work with each other is dead. Because they're all so used to the performant nature of digital, right?
They're turning to their broadcast agency saying, "Hey, CPMs, Nielsen, what is all this stuff? I want to sell more soap. If I do, I'll pay you handsomely." Of course, the agency then turns to the media owner and says, "Hey, let's sell soap together." "Don't sell me CPMs anymore." It will be a journey, but streaming gives that liberty to those media owners because it can be more digital by nature, trackable, measurable, attribution, that it's really the language that's being used is outcome-based marketing. That's not to say that the Super Bowl is going to be outcome-based marketing, but there's a lot of inventory out there, particularly among the glass guys, right?
LG, Samsung, Roku, VIZIO. There's a ton of inventory sitting there, and those guys are on the bleeding edge of this outcome-based advertising, which again, lends itself to, "Hey, if you figure it out for Procter, it's going to be pretty easy to figure out for the small to medium sized guy." Open up the aperture for that stuff.
You guys have had your own outcomes-based products that you've come to market with, right? I'm assuming a lot of your conversations out here are talking with those different types of buyers and discussing what the game plan is on outcomes going forward.
Right. Yeah, the products that we're working on is, okay, how do we get more of the data from the end buyer to better optimize the supply we're sending towards deals? It's again, against that theme of how do we improve supply side decisioning on that front. We're definitely working on that.
One of the discussions we had this morning talked about what is your prediction for next year's Cannes?
Hopefully cloud cover and lower temperatures.
Lower temperatures.
Not 97 and humid. [audio distortion]
My prediction is this room will now be my meeting room going forward.
Yes, it's been very hot this week. What I found really interesting is this prediction was next year's Cannes will be attended by Elon Musk, will be attended by Sam Altman, right? These LLMs are going to soon realize, and they've already started, that the future of monetization is via advertising, which I think will bring a lot more perspective, a lot more hype out here. Curious your perspective. I'll go to each of you, but Michael, what do you think? How do you think Cannes 2027 is different than 2026?
It's funny. There's been pretty little movement in the last five years in terms of the marquee activations in Cannes by the companies, right? Typically, boats worked for certain sized companies like ours, and so you have a lot of ad tech on the boat row and not a lot of media. The beach used to be the area where all the media companies activated, and they've gotten pushed up the hill because now Google, Meta.
You are absolutely right, that there's not a chance in hell that an OpenAI, or xAI isn't activating in a huge fashion next year because they ain't going to come here and just get a hotel suite. I think, yeah, the landscape will change once again with new entrants pushing other people further up the hill.
If you could book a boat next to Anthropic's boat, you may have shade cover the entire day.
That could be right there, seeing Anthropic is going to be here, that means they're open to ads. That's good. It's good. That's a big proclamation. That's great.
It's interesting to see new constituents. Usually this whole row is mostly ad technology companies. Mercedes Formula One team as opposed to there. That's pretty incredible to see. I would just say we're hearing more and more about it this year, but I'm very interested in the creator economy. They've run their businesses in a certain way through certain channels to this point. I think what you'll likely see, and we're starting to see, is the creators start to distribute through new channels, and I think CTV is going to be one of those channels beyond just YouTube or the current distribution models they have, but more broadly into the space that we operate in as well. I would keep an eye on that trend.
Awesome. For me, that's a wrap on Cannes 2026. I've got another day. I don't know about you guys. Do you have another day?
We're working. Yeah, we're working really hard. Thursday tends to be the wind down day, right? You're hitting the wall 1 million miles an hour Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday, for those that stick around, their calendars are usually lighter. It's a wonderful client opportunity to chill with them and hang with them and not do 30-minute meetings back to back to back. Thursday's the highlight of the week. You put yourself in a body bag on Friday scoop yourself home, so.
A little less sweaty making 2,000 km walk from here to the Croisette.
You're going to get your steps in, that's for sure.
We're getting the steps in. Okay. Thank you everybody for attending. Appreciate it, or walking.