Tim Rowe:
Welcome to Radically Candid, a cognition podcast that takes you behind the scenes with the people, personalities, and perspectives shaping how we think about streaming TV and how we approach solving challenges for agencies who are trying to build an owned and operated ad tech stack. My name is Tim Roe and today's conversation is with Matt Burke. Matt is one of the foundational product managers here at Cognition. And today we talk all about dynamic creative, we talk about ad serving, we talk about how those two things can be used in conjunction to really scale programmatic, whether that be on video, dynamic display, even on audio. So we talk about all things dynamic, and ad serving. If those are two items that are at the top of your list for 2025, then this is a conversation that you can't afford to miss. So we invite you to sit back and enjoy. Matt Burke, thank you for being willing to have this conversation. You said four words to me, I think in, in my first week here and they've stuck with me since then. So I was hoping that you could maybe explain what they meant, but you said in terms of this is really the disclaimers all for me. You said four words as it relates to ad serving, which is still a new and interesting concept to me. But you said four words related to ad serving. You said dynamic, creative, done easy. I was hoping that you could explain what that means, why it matters, and ultimately how it all works. Maybe we could start with the what. What does that mean? Dynamic, creative, done easy.

Matt Burk: I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of people. And I think that's why dynamic creative. can be so complex and so challenging. It means something different, slightly different to every single person and how they use it and go about it. And I think one of the most intriguing things to Cognition's dynamic creative, at least where we are today, is we are really trying to define kind of what that scope looks like for our primary client sets. And then how do we remove the barriers to entry around actually creating and activating dynamic creative at scale. And Tim, I've told you this in the past, I've got somewhat of an ad serving background, spending some time at Seismic prior to Amazon's acquisition. And at the time, you know, for large retail clients, we had a really great dynamic creative Service it made a lot of sense you uploaded your skew list essentially and we're kind of off to the races. When you look at it from like a broader sense well how can this be done. For automotive clients for example where they don't necessarily have a skew list but they do at least at the local level have inventory feeds. How do we make something similar for those type of clients and make it easier for them to actually activate on it? And over the years, we kind of found that if you leave it as kind of in a blank slate for clients, like, yeah, the creative folks, they want to go and do all kinds of crazy, complex stuff. And then when it gets to the media buyers, it's like, well, That's great but like we already had to run this campaign and we're still in this creative design and we sunk tons of dollars and resources into this process just to stand this up and we're not even there. So that's where like over time i think just. At multiple different companies, we've really tried to put some swim lanes up. What does dynamic creative mean for automotive clients? What does it need to look like? How can it be flexible enough to seem somewhat tailored and you still get this custom creative look and feel, but also something that is fairly plug and play? And that's really the intersection that I think as Cognition grows and where we're kind of at with dynamic creative. We're really kind of right there at this point with making a very scalable easy-to-use solution that works for many clients, not just one. How do we define dynamic creative? Dynamic creative from our definition is really anything that is loading into the ad from some form of a data feed, like a dealer inventory list. In a lot of cases too, that could be the entire asset for like a video dynamic creative. We could be ingesting video files, picking them up daily to swap out, you know, what the video content was the prior day for something new, fresh and updated for tomorrow. So it's kind of twofold, but I would say anything that's really coming, that's not hard-coded static within the ad has the ability to be kind of changed or altered on the fly.

Tim Rowe: What do you see? What are, what are some of the most common use cases?

Matt Burk: A lot of the most common use cases today for, you know, kind of, again, kind of going back, I mean, my background's primarily auto, so that's, most of my examples are gonna live there, but you've got, you know, at the local level, you've got all of these different vehicles that need to be pushed out. How do you do that without having a creative team take on the burden of creating a specific flat image file For every single and in some cases, thousands of different versions of available vehicles, or maybe you just need to. You know, push a certain lease offer in that lease offer varies by the market. That value that represents the lease offer. would be, uh, you know, something that could be dynamically changed based on the location and the pricing that's available in that market. So I think really for us, the most common use cases are like vehicle listings, really getting down to like VIN specific. How do I feature all my vehicles? And then, you know, kind of taking a step above that. It's like swapping out the stuff that's kind of, that's seemingly easy but when having to do it at scale, it becomes a burden for that creative team. So, how do you do something like, I don't know, a… a monthly sales value prop or offer logo for like Stellantis brands? How do we scale that out across, you know, as each month changes and now it's, you know, truck month, how do we get that value, that image to be injected in a dynamic way so the team doesn't have to continually go and update essentially the same piece of creative just so it's more customized to the message and the offers that they're pushing out?

Tim Rowe: So it sounds like a big workflow efficiency before we even talk about kind of the ad delivery, attribution, feeding a feedback loop, like just fundamentally get back time that's being spent on kind of mundane tasks and also then create the opportunity to do a lot more personalization than you're probably doing today. Is that like a fair?

Matt Burk: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's really a lot of its operational efficiency for not only creative teams, but also like ad ops folks and people that are hands on keyboards and the DSP activating against all of these because everything lives within a third party ad tag. So Any changes that need to get pushed out don't require a team to go in and manually upload creative. It just that change is happening in real time within the tag itself. So there's a ton of ton of time savings just operationally.

Tim Rowe: Can you can you maybe explain that a little bit more about the tags for both video and display? How how that saves time?

Matt Burk: Yeah, absolutely. Video is a really good example, right? Like you've got a pretty heavy video file, like an MP4 file, especially for today's standards of streaming TV or OTT. It takes a while to either pull that video down from your creative team, save it locally or save it on a drive, and then also go and upload that into a DSP or publisher that you're using. It can take five minutes, it can take 10 minutes just to upload it. When you're talking about ad serving and the tags, You're really just uploading that video once to the ad server? And then the tag is the piece that's living in your DSP. So when you talk about like daily delivery or daily changes of video files, your team is really just pulling down that one video, creating a mapping so that it's automatically picks up any video changes in the ad server. And it's really a one tag kind of set it and forget it deployment. And the videos are just automatically being updated on the backend. where traditionally someone working out of a DSP seat would have to go in every day, pull a video down, upload it, wait for it to process, and then set it back live. So this really helps streamline that process in a very big way.

Tim Rowe: And it makes sense so it's time the creation piece hey it's great to create a whole lot more stuff but we've got to be able to just as easily distribute that creative and that tagging sounds like it solves that part of the equation. the distribution piece. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. What happens next in ad serving? So get the creative and kind of getting it across all of the DSPs. Like where does the magic happen?

Matt Burk: Yeah, that's a really good question. At Cognition, we've kind of taken a different approach and I'll kind of jump back to like how dynamic creative is typically done. There's a setup, right? Like you have to know what inputs are coming from that data feed. And then you have to know, well, which ones do you actually need to render a certain version in a, you know, in a, like a display ad unit. So it's like, does the dealer name matter? Does the vehicle image matter? Do you want price? Would you rather have mileage? Would you rather have some other type of vehicle detail information that's relevant to that specific make, model, and trim level. A lot of that is defined kind of upfront, and there's a lot of different dynamic providers out there that have a little bit of a different methodology to their madness, but some are, you know, kind of checkbox, what does your dynamic strategy kind of look like? What do you need? And then what decisioning is involved? At Cognition, we've kind of taken a different approach where we've set up all of this technology on top of our ad server that just enables you in the DSP to just name your line item accordingly to our naming conventions. Like if you want to target customers in your area and just show them SUVs, for example, we can go in the DSP. All we have to do is make sure that we're following you know, if it's only new SUVs, it's new underscore SUVs in the naming convention of that line item. And we automatically pick up those files and map just to those relevant vehicles. So that's where our approach, I think, kind of comes back to the dynamic, creative, done easy. It's like we've done all of the setup. within our ad server to accommodate not all but a lot of use cases that are very standard and at the local dealer or dealer group level, just to make that very, very simple. Because your targeting usually aligns with the creative messaging. And if you're focused on only SUVs, you would have a line item or ad group in your DSP where you'd probably have in-market SUV shopper audiences aligned to that. So that's kind of the correlation that we've Kind of created so that you have the flexibility not only with who you're targeting from a media perspective but what message you're showing. That person i think overall that has really streamlined and sped up the time to market actually activate these.

Tim Rowe: Incredible, and that makes a ton of sense then that the decision-making platform, the underlying decision-making is where the magic happens. It's easy to create and distribute, but it's hard to make strategic decisions and then execute on them in real time at scale across thousands of placements, hundreds of clients, especially challenging. I know we work a lot With agencies that are focused on solving these problems for clients how have they extracted value through working with cognition on ad serving.

Matt Burk: Yeah good question i think for agencies like it's always it's always. The bottom line right like they're all tasked with doing more with less people. There's strains on resources across the board and they need to get the most out of the people that they have and make sure that they. Maintain a reasonable margin so that their business is able to survive and and otherwise a. of a race to the bottom. Everyone wants to do more with less. It's a tough, tough business to be in. And this enables those agencies to free up a lot of those resources so that they can go and think more about the strategic planning or pitching new clients, upselling, focus more on the higher level, driving the business forward rather than the day-to-day tactical nuance of managing, in some cases, thousands of pieces of creative. So I think overall, I mean, it's been, it's been well-received in the marketplace. And to my point earlier, like we're really just kind of getting started with the direction of where we want to head. So there's a lot more, a lot more to come on this that I think is going to be even more of a value add for our clients and agency partners.

Tim Rowe: When we hear dynamic creative, there's usually a third word associated with that, optimization. We hear dynamic creative optimization, DCO. How does optimization, how do we create and fuel the feedback loop? Then we talked with Michael Lieberman about headless analytics and how we're ingesting some of that. How do you think about kind of closing the loop with the magic that ad serving provides?

Matt Burk: You know, we've touched a lot on so far just the ability to kind of streamline that execution and creative workload that's associated with generating a ton of creative, but really like performance kind of lives at the intersection of good targeting on your media side and good personalized, relevant, creative. And so what does that actually mean? And I think it really, it varies customer to customer, but A good example, or probably an easy example to think of is like, hey, you've got all these lease offers in a market in the same market, which ones are really driving performance? What are we seeing like, with hat tag that's driving on site? actions or after your campaign or mid-flight is running, where are we seeing actual attribution from vehicles sold in that store and what ads or what messaging or combination of messaging is driving that performance. And those are the type of insights that we're able to extract from Dynamic Creative. It can even be something as simple as like, hey, you wanted to just run all vehicles that you have in your feed, promote them all. Which ones resulted in anything on your site or purchases? Was it F-150s or trucks? Or were it sedans? And then you can start kind of taking a look at, well, last month we had, I don't know, $1,000 cash on the hood for trucks. And it's October, heading into fall, and the ads served in northern states. You start getting these just insights that help you not only optimize in real time while your campaign's running, but also for future planning too. You know, maybe next October you, you focus more on, on trucks or you create better offers. And conversely, you could say, Hey, we had great offers or we thought we had great manufacturer rebates on trucks. And we just didn't see the sales there this month or this quarter, whatever the timeframe is. And you can start looking back at the performance of the actual versions of your creative that ran to try to.

Tim Rowe: Pull out insights how does someone know it i'm sure at this point there are folks that are listening and saying hey i need that that's something that would would definitely create a lot of value for me and my clients but for someone that's maybe not sure how do you is there like a checklist or or a list of hey this is when you know you're ready for. Create a bad server like this.

Matt Burk: We have some high level kind of framework and I guess to your point, a checklist, so to speak, of what that looks like. Kind of going back to like our whole premise of dynamic creative done easy is we've really removed a lot of what's actually required upfront. Whereas in previous lives at previous companies, there were definitely clients where I was like, there's no way we're going to do this. Like there's just, this is not the right fit. Cognition's dynamic creative is to a point where it's like, do you have a data feed? Yeah. Cool. Let us see it. Let's look at the data that's coming through. We map it all up front to our own mapping tables. And for the most part, we can work within a preset kind of defines I don't know. I want to say catalog, but templates of creative that make it really easy. It's like, Hey, we need a feed and we need your dealer logo. And then tell us what color do you want the font to be? What font requires do you have? It's really pretty easy now. So I, as long as you have both of those, we can get started, which is really, really cool. And I don't think there's a lot of companies that, that can say that right now, just due to the complex nature of all of this. And I mean, that's, it's kind of in its basic form, right? Like there's definitely outlier use cases where people have a very specific need and they have a very specific look and feel. And that's where we need to kind of take it a little bit step further. Like how do we still use the same dynamic logic that we have in place today? But how do we better incorporate that into more custom use cases and more customized, creative, specific to a client, which are all addressable, but it does require more creative conversations around what that needs to look like, what assets are available, and things like that.

Tim Rowe: We've talked a lot about automotive, but you made the point earlier of really, let me see your data feed. If you have an inventory feed, if you make offers associated with your inventory, if you have the need to create dynamic personalized creative based on a data-driven strategy and then distribute that across multiple platforms with intelligent decision-making, this could be a good fit. So it seems like that obviously extends beyond automotive which categories do you think this could. Add value for that were maybe not working with today i mean retail is obviously a big one.

Matt Burk: Very kind of turnkey travel think like airlines hotels. Those are all location based offers are you look at a flight from detroit to jacksonville and the next day you get a dtw to jacks. you know, $3.99 offer or something along those lines. There's also a lot of different just creative ways to use this. You think of, like, I've seen, like, weather-targeted dynamic creative. So things that are triggered by your location, like, and sometimes, like, this is probably not a great example, but I've seen allergy advertisers that make, like, I don't know, like, Zyrtec or something. And it's like, hey, If Tim's in Florida, you might not have to worry about allergies this time of year, but if Tim's in Pennsylvania at this time of the year and the allergen rating or index is high, let's give them that message. So it kind of can be used a variety of ways, and I don't think there's any real shortage of where you could take it, but my mind always goes to type of verticals that really just have kind of a large either product portfolio or cast a wide net to a large variety of different type of consumers. It's like just taking kind of a generic offer and like, how do you make that a little bit more tailored or personalized for that type of person?

Tim Rowe: It's good.

Matt Burk: It's good.

Tim Rowe: What should people know about ad serving that maybe doesn't get talked about?

Matt Burk: It kind of goes back to this whole like the done easy part i don't think there's enough people out there talking about that. It doesn't need to be complex and that's good we like to make things i don't know i mean like. It's like if you go into, I don't know, it's like when you, somebody says, hey, go build this house. Like, what do you want? It's like, it takes a long time to figure out what you actually want versus somebody says, hey, here's this house. This is what you're going to get. You can pick and choose these three things. And it narrows your focus down and how much time it takes to actually get something up and off the ground. And I think that's kind of the same way, the same approach we're doing here at cognition. It's like. Let's have the ability to do those scenarios with customers that really want, you know, something that's fresh from the ground up that's completely customized to them. But for the, the masses that want a better, easier solution, like we have that. And I think that's just not talked about enough is that this doesn't need to be complicated. It doesn't need to be something that's time consuming or that a company or agency partner has to dump resources in. Like we've done the upfront lift for you. Let's get it going. And I think that's where dynamic creative sometimes isn't well received in some cases because there's an association with it as being difficult.

Tim Rowe: What are you most looking forward to in 2025?

Matt Burk: I think that we really have, and I mean, all of our products are really starting to turn into something. And I think looking back three, four years ago when Cognition was in their early days, just seeing the pace of which we've evolved a lot of those, like a year ago, we didn't have dynamic rate. We didn't have an ad server. And you flash forward six months and it's like, look at what we just did. I'm most excited, I think, to see what another six months does for us and the progression and just advancement of our products that we have in place today. I think they're great where they are today, but I think we're really just scratching the surface of where they're gonna go.

Tim Rowe: I agree and now we have this great time stamp to refer back to in six months to see where we where we came from. Anything that we didn't talk about today that is top of mind for you that you would love to talk about or get on the record that I might have missed.

Matt Burk: I think the only other thing I would touch on is probably going back to video dynamic video most the time when we're talking about dynamic creative you're talking about. your ad assembling in real time as the page loads. With video, you don't always have that ability. Like those are interactive video ads, like VPaid ads. And on OTT, not a lot of providers accept anything outside of a vast tag, which effectively just brings in a flat MP4 file. When we talk about dynamic creative for video, I think a really important differentiator to kind of key off of is that it doesn't have to be this real time, you know, upon impression, upon bid requests, loading and configuring of the ad. Like there are a lot of companies and partners out there that have a ton of video assets that they have to push out. And part of our dynamic creative solution is the ability to basically map to those videos. So you set up an FTP, drop your videos daily. We have a mapping on our side and our system automatically recognizes every time a new video is picked up. And while it's dynamic in nature that the video is being changed out and it's being picked up, it's not dynamic in the sense that the video I'm getting at that exact time would be different from the video that maybe you were getting at that exact time. And so it kind of goes back to like, there's this whole creative customization piece that's very, very important, plays a huge role in dynamic creative, but there's also just this automation piece of it all too, that really helps streamline the video process for a lot of our partners.

Tim Rowe: Amazing. Matt, I look forward to looking back on this in six months and seeing how far we've come. And thank you enough for being a part of it and look forward to a future episode together.

Matt Burk: Yeah, no, thank you. This is cool. I appreciate you letting me join. Absolutely.