Episode 193: Adam Epstein on Muse & Agentic Commerce, Plus TTD Blocked on Safari and Amazon UnBoxed

Ari Paparo (0:30)

Hi, and welcome to the Marketecture Podcast. This is Eric Paparo. I'm here with Eric Franchi, and I am in a hotel room in San Francisco, where I am a guest at Amazon's Unboxed Conference. Eric, have you ever been to Unboxed?

Eric Franchi (0:44)

I have not. Sounds like I missed out on some stuff this time, with a great keynote, some cool product announcements. What's the vibe out there?

Ari Paparo (0:53)

Well, first of all, it is a very large conference, especially for a single-vendor conference. It is at Moscone, so that's a pretty big venue. It's one part of Moscone, it's the west one. I'm going to estimate 3,000 attendees. Maybe that's a little high, just ballparking it. But the keynote was packed, people were standing room only.

It's a very large advertising conference compared to the conferences Marketecture puts on or AdExchanger had a programmatic IO this week. They certainly aren't anywhere near, they probably aren't even near 1,000 at that event. So it's quite large. I don't know if, does Meta have a dedicated ad conference or do they just all fold it into their general developer conference?

Eric Franchi (1:43)

No, no. From what I can tell, it is just developer conferences.

Ari Paparo (1:48)

The Amazon conference is really interesting because it's all these kind of brands. Like I interviewed a woman who had been working on a tea brand and agencies you've never heard of because they specialize in, commerce agencies are kind of totally different from the agencies that we talk to all the time. It's been pretty interesting. Nothing absolutely breaks through in terms of the announcements, but pretty interesting.

Some crossover, some programmatic style people, Triplift had booths, definitely like Pacview is there. I know you're on the board there. Great conversation. I think we have two interviews I did there. They're both going to be on this podcast channel, so you'll be hearing me talk about some of the new Amazon products. Thanks for inviting me and it's been an interesting time.

Eric Franchi (2:36)

Awesome. What's up with these pills that you posted on X?

Ari Paparo (2:40)

Yeah, they're terrible. Basically, I went by the TripleLift booth and they're all dressed as doctors, and they are giving out these weird little, I'll show you for those, I don't know if you can see it. The TripleLift, it's in a pharmaceutical packaging, and it says, Patient Commerce Media Activation Team, and it's called Curated Deals, and you open it, it's just like chock full of orange tic-tacs. And I'm excited about this, orange tic-tacs are the best tic-tacs.

Eric Franchi (3:10)

Yeah.

Ari Paparo (3:11)

Oh, yeah. I'm going to eat some on the bottom, getting some pit tic-tacs. These are just like awesome. But I'm kind of scared to bring them on the plane, so I think I'm just going to leave them here.

Eric Franchi (3:21)

Just kill the bottle. A bottle full of orange tic-tacs never hurt anybody.

Ari Paparo (3:26)

I've eaten a lot of them. I mean, because there's so many, you can't really see, it's like a lot. I mean, this is like, I don't know how many packs of tic-tacs per pharmaceutical bottle, but it's good.

Eric Franchi (3:40)

All right, good stuff. I hope you get through customs or security or TSA safely.

Ari Paparo (3:45)

Luckily, I'm not crossing any borders.

Yeah, so let's just, you know, we're going to mix things up. Let's just run right through the news. We'll do the interview second. So let's hit the news, Eric.

Eric Franchi (3:56)

Absolutely, okay. We're going to talk about a few things. So we have to talk about this whole late breaking TTD blocks from serving ads on Safari. We do want to talk about one or two of the announcements from Unboxed, and then a couple of other things. But I've had a lot of people reaching out asking for a specific follow-up on last week before we do anything, and that is Muse. Apparently, you downloaded Muse.

Adam Epstein (4:22)

You've been working with it. You've been playing with it.

Eric Franchi (4:24)

The people want to know.

Ari Paparo (4:25)

Yeah. So I've put out some sarcastic tweets. It's very hard to tell what I'm really thinking by reading my tweets, which I acknowledge. You know, Muse is a very nice product. I really appreciate how well-crafted it is. It's easy to use relatively compared to writing some of this yourself.

I have experimented with a couple of things.

I use Spotify a lot to listen to podcasts, and I can't stand their recommendation algorithm or their UI. So I said to Muse, log in to Spotify, find all the podcasts I had liked, and then on a weekly basis create a playlist that's any new episodes of the podcast I like in sort of a random order. So I can just go to the playlist instead of dealing with the Spotify UI. And it's kind of a weird use case, but it's much better. So that's one thing. I did the classic find me recurring charges on my Amex. That may have worked a little bit. There was one or two that might be saving me some money. You know, I still don't think this is for ordinary consumers. Like, I think, like, we're still, like, in the white-collar elite user world. Even as easy as Meta has made it, it's still, like, you have to have a mental model of, like, telling an agent to do something for you and how to shape what it does. It's just not for ordinary people, right? No matter how I slice it.