Greylock Presents: The Intelligent Marketer

Mike Duboe (0:00)

Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Intelligent Marketer. I'm Mike Duboe, partner at Greylock.

Rishabh Jain (0:04)

And I'm Rishabh Jain, co-founder and CEO of Fermat. This is a show where we talk about the intersection of AI marketing and commerce, what's changing, what's working, and where things are headed.

Mike Duboe (0:14)

So we're going to bring in guests and share what we're seeing in the field and try to make sense of how marketers could actually use this stuff. Last week, we brought in Eric Sufer, a good friend and favorite of Rishabh and myself, to talk about the next iteration of his Everything is an Ad Network thesis.

We also covered the future of marketing and ads and LLMs, something that we'll continue to explore with future guests. So thanks for hanging out with us. Let's get started. All right, Eric, thank you for joining us. You have the honor of being the first guest on this new series that Rishabh and I are doing around kind of AI and marketing. And, you know, for those who don't know Eric Sufer, he's probably the, who I believe to be the most insightful analyst, writer, thinker on all things advertising and really kind of marketing related. He writes mobile dev memo, which is one of the best sources of content out there on all things advertising and specifically kind of mobile advertising, but much more than that nowadays and invests out of Heracles Capital as an advisor to many successful companies on their ad strategies as well. We've had Eric on the podcast two years ago to discuss kind of the future of marketing in the post privacy era, the post ATT era. And I felt like a good place to start would be going back to that. So when we spoke two years ago, we talked about how everything was changing now that ATT is a thing, and we're kind of squarely in this post privacy area. We discussed a few areas where we thought the ad stack would be transformed. So maybe we could look back at those and see where we were right or wrong and kind of what marketers should be planning for going forward. I think one of the first areas we discussed was measurement. And I think one of the biggest challenges that marketers were facing at that time was this direct attribution model that we had all been trained to had kind of broke. And so marketers were scrambling to test incremental lifts and build more probabilistic methods. Maybe just jumping right into it, like via measurement or otherwise. I would love for you to just comment on, if you think about kind of the era of post-privacy marketing over the last couple of years, what's been most notable and what kind of themes come top of mind to you?

Rishabh Jain (2:14)

Yeah.

Eric Seufert (2:14)

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's an honor to join you to be the guest on the first episode. Appreciate it.

I think that measurement was the thing that changed most meaningfully as a result of ATT. And what's really interesting now is we're experiencing what I've called the privacy shuffle, right? So we had this period where the privacy parameters around using consumer data for targeting and for measurement, those parameters kind of became much more restrictive. And I think there was generally a sense that like, we need to prepare for the worst, right? So like ATT was pretty bad, but it could have gotten worse. And my sense was like the kind of prevailing wisdom was that it will continue to get worse. Like this is just going to be like a regular drumbeat of restrictions. And my sense is now that is not the case. The prevailing wisdom isn't there yet, but I think it will be in six months that actually we've seen the worst. There may be actually even some capitulation, and there has been actually with Google, you know, kind of doing a 180 on cookie deprecation. I think they're probably not going to deprecate the GAID now. So we have seen a little bit of stepping back from the edge of the cliff, but measurement did get overhauled kind of utterly, right? Like fundamentally, as a result of ATT. And I think what people are realizing is that yes, that was catalyzed by ATT and like other privacy restrictions, but it would have been a good idea even absent ATT and absent those privacy restrictions. And everyone's kind of glad that they did it. And that actually stays with us, even if we do see kind of a privacy shuffle and there's less of a priority on privacy and that we're probably at the end of any sort of like big radical platform privacy changes. Everyone realizes that yes, making the change to probabilistic measurement was beneficial and it was productive and they probably should have done it sooner than they did.