Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing:
Today we're getting radically candid with Amber Daniel. Amber is the Chief Revenue Officer here at Cognition, and we're talking all about the big shift. The shift from the way we watch television to the way we watch television today with streaming making up more than 50% of all television viewership. We're going to talk about the shift from paid search to AI summaries and how that's cannibalizing some of your best traffic, what it means for your organic strategy, and what it really means to deliver dynamic, personalized video ads at scale. This one may shock you because it's not about data or targeting, and we'll tie it all together with how resolving the customer journey down to a single identity is probably a lot closer than you think. Enjoy. Amber, we started this conversation talking about the shift from linear television viewership to streaming that led into the shift from traditional search and how AI has evolved the way that we search. We talked about creative as the targeting and then one identity to kind of rule them all the job to be done, if you will, across the streaming TV universe. So I thought what we could do is pick that conversation up. for our friends, put it on the record here. Really expose some of what you're seeing. You're at the tip of the spear for all things streaming TV, all things automotive. We'd love to hear insights that you're seeing and feedback that you're hearing. So that's okay with you. We'll go through those things today. Yeah, let's do it.

Amber Daniel, CRO: I guess I'll start with I was thinking about this in the middle of the night, as I often do. I was thinking about really what I would consider like the great migration of all things advertising. You know, we've seen the migration from what we would broadly call traditional. So think of your newspapers and I would say direct mail, but there's still a lot of engagement there. But traditional media outlets, radio being one of them, you know, this migration started with paid search. And we started to see those dollars flow through a more digital mechanism of advertising, something that is trackable and is reliable in terms of understanding where you're generating the most leads or sales or whatever outcomes it is that are important to you. You know, from my purview, I believe that we are sort of in the last phase of that. I think, you know, you see the numbers published everywhere that transition from the linear buy to the streaming buy. And I think there are some other pieces. You know, we we talk about paid search a lot in our world because there's a lot of comparison to streaming TV metrics and paid search metrics. I think. You know, like I said, we're in the last phase of that shift and think we have an opportunity to really. lay the groundwork and set the tone for what we should be expecting and the benefits of continuing to transition those dollars from linear to streaming. And you're seeing that beyond just, you know, agencies and publishers are starting to move into that space. You've got, you know, Amazon DSP that's really leaning in. You had YouTube start leaning in really years ago with their pre-roll products. And it's just very blatantly obvious that the signals that we're able to execute on for streaming TV are really driving that.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: It's really interesting thinking about that, right? Broadcast now dropping below 20 percent of all TV viewership. The shift happened. The shift to streaming has happened. We don't need to convince anyone of that, but I think it's still that figuring out phase of does it perform like paid search? Do I compare these metrics, right? Search typically a demand capture tactic, whereas maybe streaming TV or TV in general, I've thought of as a more top of funnel metric. How should advertisers, brands, OEMs, how should they be thinking about streaming TV's role in the funnel, but then also how it's influencing search behavior, especially as AI and AI search comes online and is more prevalent. How do you think that that changes?

Amber Daniel, CRO: So, Tim, I really think there are two parts to this transition and kind of the metrics that we should be looking at. The first part is the targeting capability. understanding the audience capabilities that you have across the board, all these signals, right? Each platform kind of has their own approach and their own storyline behind their audiences. You have some of the platforms talking about first party data and the ability to ingest that and target your consumers in a way that makes sense for you. The linear buys that are layered with streaming TV, I think is a pretty big indicator, again, of where we're going. I think that's important. Now we talk about the measurement component. the measurement capabilities that we have in streaming. One are very similar to those what I would consider traditional digital metrics that we see in paid search and Facebook, where we have the ability to onboard first party transaction data or audience data to build a more robust measuring capability. I think when you look at also what you're able to do from a targeting standpoint, you know, we talked earlier about the audience capabilities, and that's, you know, if you look at the DSPs, Amazon DSP really leans into their audience capabilities. Amazon Garage, and then you have YouTube that has their own sort of story that they're telling with all the signals from search and engagement. One of the things that we have discovered at Cognition is through, by way of acquisition, we have a measurement suite. And frankly, I've been learning so much since, we'll call it September of last year, about the real story of We'll say programmatic as a whole, but that layer of streaming TV, we're seeing about 30% of paid search traffic is actually influenced by streaming TV or some sort of programmatic element in that journey. And I think that's a really big eye opener and something that we really need to pay attention to. I think it's something we've always sort of known was happening, but now we have that capability to tell the story. And by the way, that window of time that we're measuring is 48 hours. So Tim Rossi's streaming TV ad while watching Righteous Gemstones and… Naturally. naturally. And he inevitably is on his phone, right? We're, we're a society that exactly, we're a society that is totally plugged into our mobile phones. We are often doing more things at a time. So we're seeing that search happen within that 48 hour period of time. And oftentimes it's a, it's a much shorter window.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: It's really interesting. And to put an exclamation point on that impact of the second screen, Media Post recently published some research. We're spending more than 12 hours a day on our phones. That seems impossible, but really it just means we're doing everything with our phone on nearby streaming or playing some sort of content, listening to a podcast, playing a video in the background while we're cooking dinner. It's just become an extension of us. So to your point on how streaming is driving search and why having streaming layered into a linear buy makes it really hard to start to quantify the outcomes. Can we come back to the 48 hour exposure window? Can we really, I'd like to double click into that. So what you're saying is 48 hours from the time an ad is delivered on someone's TV screen, we're observing that period to see, does anything happen? Do they go to a website? Do they take an action? Can we talk about that?

Amber Daniel, CRO: Absolutely. We're observing any action that is taken that is resulting in a website visit. So the start of our measurement solution is at the point of ad exposure. So Tim Rowe is watching Righteous Gemstones, is exposed to an ad. We are effectively starting that tracking and that customer journey from that point. Once Tim Rowe lands on a website, then we're able to make the connection that he was exposed to this ad. Oh, and by the way, we can see he was exposed to this creative. He is living in this geography. There's so many, you know, he's viewing from a specific device. So just think about the macros that come out of that exposure in the ad server. Being able to stitch that together is really interesting. You know, I use paid search on my first kind of in the first example. But we're seeing that with Facebook. We're seeing it with organic. The other really interesting piece of this is as we start to monitor this from a very high brand level all the way down to retail, we're seeing a lot of cross-shopping behavior. That's another really big eye opener. We work with a lot of automotive brands, and I think there's been a gap in really understanding, or frankly, the gap is in understanding how consumers are cross-shopping as well. If you put the automotive lens on this, This isn't something that really dealers want to hear, but the reality is consumers are looking at multiple dealership websites. They're looking at a lot of inventory. I think one of the most interesting and validating observations that we've made is the affordability concern. This has been a concern across the board with you know, homes and automotive. But what we're seeing is a lot of consumers are actually going and they're looking at multiple dealer websites. They're looking at multiple vehicles on a website. And one of the most common actions is a consumer actually sorting from lowest price to highest price. And

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: You know, this is really behavior.

Amber Daniel, CRO: Yes. I think it's just such a such an eye opener. And if you think about the granularity and the ability to decision off of that type of granularity is really taking us into a new phase of of measurement and streaming TV.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: I mean, those are insights that allow you to change business model. You make better business decisions when you understand those sorts of insights. So thank you for painting that so that the shift from consumer attention to streaming TV, the impact that that's having on outcomes. There's a there's a in-between piece, and that's the way that we search. And it's changing so dramatically. Almost overnight right i think we shared a statistic the other day twenty six percent of google search sessions that are presented in a summary. End after they see the summary yeah it's like a problem.

Amber Daniel, CRO: It definitely feels like a problem. This is admittedly a topic that I'm pretty excited and passionate about understanding. I think we have a lot to learn. I think AI's role in technology across the board is like a massive question mark where we'll end up seeing the most evolution. You know, when you think about behavior, I think about my own behavior, and I know your behavior, like Tim Rowe leans into AI in several different ways. But I often start now, I often start my research in chat GPT, or I will go to complexity, or I start to compare the query results from those two platforms, or multiple platforms. And then I may go in and use Google or whatever your search engine is, but I do think that we will continue to see a decline in how consumers engage in search. I think one could hypothesize that Paid search will become even more low funnel because the research phase is happening outside of search. It's happening in ChatGPT. It's happening in Perplexity. It's happening in Grok or Gemini. once the consumer is ready to actually search, they'll go to the search engine. And then, I mean, in theory, right?

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: It makes sense. No. And I'm even thinking about how I use AI. I use it intensely as a research assistant. And then the final decision, I want to be hands on keyboard, controlling, driving. And I know folks are using agentic browsers and all sorts of crazy things like that. But I think that Especially this conversation, it's all really leading back to humans being in control of the experience. We want to be more judicious with our time, get the content that we love, get the answer versus more information that's just leads us deeper down a rabbit hole. We just want answers and content. We want it on demand and on our terms.

Amber Daniel, CRO: I couldn't agree more. You know, if you also, sorry to belabor the topic, but I think it's an exciting one. You know, if you isolate search in two parts, right, you've got your paid search, which we already touched on. And then you, you have this search engine optimization topic that has been ongoing. It was, you know, it's, it's a good business for a lot of agencies. I think when you. When you isolate that story behind what is the impact on SEO, AI's impact on SEO, that's a really interesting one to think about as well. You've got AI that's pulling all this content, all of this information from somewhere. I think the really interesting thing is going to see is going to be where agencies and brands start to invest in SEO so that they start to rank effectively and optimize for those AI tools.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: I think it ultimately comes back to the point that we're set on driving home here today, which is you need to own the customer journey. show up on a screen on a high value, large format screen in their living room during a moment that they have gone through a multi opt-in process, right? They sat down, they turned on the TV, they selected the app, they found the show, they turned on that episode. They're probably not going to turn off the TV when the ad plays. What a great opportunity to be a part. It's more like sponsored content blocks of days of old, uh, or, or, or, you know, and you're seeing some of that language like, Hey, this, this, this content is brought to you by these brands. And I think it's creating a more favorable association.

Amber Daniel, CRO: I, you know, I, I think it's an interesting point that you make about content. When I think content, I'm thinking all the content that exists on the web, right? Text and information. But when I think about the engagement with streaming TV, you know, marketers have done an amazing job of making marketing. emotional in a way. There's an engagement component to an emotion, whether it's excitement or sadness or whatever emotion they're trying to share or get out of the consumer. I think that's really, really interesting as well, as we start to take these measurement outcomes and utilize those in optimization for streaming. Optimization can mean a lot of things, but I'm actually talking about content. Personalization. So thinking about what the ad looks like and the ability to engage with the customer in a way that is captivating, right? It gets your emotions. to a heightened place and you are more likely to, I mean, oftentimes, right? If we're doing things the right way, you're more likely to have an affinity for that brand because there's that emotional component. When you think about paid search, it's very tactical. There's no emotion in search. So I think that's also something that we really need to consider when we think about our approach to streaming, like the optimization is not only in audience and signals, it's also in the content that we're creating to use in our advertising.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: And it seems like especially with automation and all sorts of targeting and data to talk about that creative, not that it's become an afterthought, but it's almost a bottleneck to be able to do all of the dynamic personalized things you can do. With creative, but to your point, exactly. That's the ad that feels like, wow, they just really get me. They know me or this is a brand that I could see myself like wearing or driving, right? Like I see myself in it. That's not targeting. That's great creative as the targeting. So how do you do that? How do you do dynamic, personalized, emotionally engaging content at programmatic scale? How do you think about that?

Amber Daniel, CRO: You know, at Cognition, we really lean into our creative ad serving capabilities. The creative ad serving was really designed, at least for Cognition, to solve two problems. The first is just the challenge that is uploading creative into a platform, right? You've got Amazon, takes five minutes to load a piece of creative. You have YouTube, which requires you to actually host a video on YouTube. before using it in your advertising. So the first problem we needed to solve was having an easy and seamless way to get creative into the DSP and sort of change that on the fly. That's first and foremost. The second part of it is really just in creative at scale. Scale is a massive challenge in our business when you think about it from an automotive standpoint. You have tactics that exist in the marketplace that are very VIN or vehicle focused. I have a love-hate relationship with Venn-level marketing because I think it inflates the VDP views, which is an outcome.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: Part two.

Amber Daniel, CRO: Yeah, we can get into things Amber likes to argue about.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: That could be a recurring segment. We might do that once a quarter.

Amber Daniel, CRO: Scary. But I think it's really interesting that we've gone into this place now. We've built a solution that allows us to scale. To give you some context, I think we launched on the 1st of August over 3,000 different types of creative in a 24-hour period, which is really just bananas in a space. And it's a gap that we were able to fill. I think second, you know, phase two of ad serving and creative is really starting to customize the content in a way that makes sense. And what I mean by that is, you know, we've talked about personalization of content forever. With the ad server, we're able to take those macros and those signals and start to make decisions on the fly. One of the common use cases that we see or ask that we see from brands is, personalizing or customizing content based on geography, right? I don't have the same background in my ads as you do, Tim, in New York City. I'm in Austin. You wouldn't expect to see buildings.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: Might be a little weird.

Amber Daniel, CRO: Yeah, so just little things like that that start to add up and make a difference in conversion and that emotional connection. It makes you feel like you're at home when you're watching the ad. So that's just one example of how we're able to utilize effectively the Cognition ad server to, I don't want to say exploit, but really create content that is engaging and delivers outcomes.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: It makes sense. And I think to be able to do all of those things, we would agree. Resolving down to a single identity becomes table stakes. If we could do everything that we've talked about to this point, right in a perfect world, which that technology exists today. And if you're listening to this, you can start to build towards the outcome that we're talking about that resolving to a single identity. How important is that piece and where do you start in that?

Amber Daniel, CRO: It's increasingly important. We have the walled gardens and the two platforms that I've stated several times over the course of this podcast. But when you think about ownership and transparency, you really want to have insight in a very privacy compliant way, obviously, to understanding more about Tim Rowe or Amber. You want to understand what is important to them. I think more importantly, it's about what is not important to them. I think oftentimes we think about what we should be targeting. That's really when really it's way easier to identify what we should not be targeting. So if you think about identity in the way of. enrichment or audiences and the actual result in the end use case of why we would want identity to play a massive part in marketing. I think that's how you have to think about it. It's like, what are the areas where Tim Rowe shouldn't be targeted? Where are the opportunities for that optimization, you know, exclusions? I just think that is so overlooked in our space.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: Because without it, you just end up including a bunch of people that really aren't qualified or not a fit, and you end up serving them ads. That's a really great point. And I think perfectly answers the question of why is resolving to a single identity table stakes? Amber, I think this is a great start to the conversation. What else do you want to add to that?

Amber Daniel, CRO: You know, I was just thinking about the role of identity also in the journey. Okay. So, in every phase of the journey, a customer takes a different action, right? That's what the journey is. What are the actions that a consumer has taken? And as we start to identify more about Tim Rowe and his journey, we're able to use that in an automated fashion to feed into the optimization of campaigns and the optimization of creative and really start to develop a robust plan that we can actually leverage.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: So I think for me, the takeaway is the hardest part isn't necessarily the technology. That part is hard and cognition's working on solving it so you don't have to worry about it. The hard part's actually the paradigm shift of this is happening. We know it intuitively as consumers, but as advertisers, as practitioners, how do we action against it? How do we do it with a high degree of confidence? in 2025 and going into 2026 and beyond. So, Amber, this has been a great starting point, I think, for that conversation. It feels like there is an evolution to this and a frequent check in. I would love to check back with you maybe the second half of this year and see how that has evolved. Would that be fair?

Amber Daniel, CRO: That sounds like a plan.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: Cool. We'll do that. If folks want to learn more about you, connect with you on the socials, give them the Latin long. Where should they go?

Amber Daniel, CRO: You can find me on LinkedIn, Amber Daniel. You can also send me an email at amber at cognitionads.com.

Tim Rowe, Head of Marketing: Easy peasy. We'll make sure it's close by and easy to get to so you can get in touch with Amber. Amber, thank you. Thanks for being here.

Amber Daniel, CRO: Absolutely. Thank you, Tim.