TripleLift COO on the AI Disruption Hitting Retail and Advertising

Alex (0:00)

Welcome back to Next Trend Investing. As we welcome in our next guest, it's Rob Deichert, the Chief Operating Officer at TripleLift, here to discuss shopping trends as we apparently are already kicking off the holiday season, Rob, as you kind of make the case that the deal days, these big Amazon, Walmart, Target events are just continuing to pull back that demand. Curious your thoughts on that, what it means as we roll in to the holiday season here for 2026

Rob Deichert (0:33)

Well, thank you for having me, Alex. Yeah, we're continuing to see tremendous momentum. Just looking at some of our data, we're up almost triple digits in terms of spend. We're a global ad exchange, so a lot of these retailers, as well as the people selling manufacturers on these retailer sites will advertise through us.

So we get to see that kind of spend data come through in terms of how they're trying to draw people in to start purchasing. And obviously, the prime days, we just kicked them off, and we continue to bring more demand earlier in the cycle. Just like you start to see Halloween stuff like in summertime sometimes in some of the stores.

Alex (1:15)

Yeah, and so when you look at that, we've also spoke with some different guests who've kind of said, hey, shoppers are really spending around household essentials on these deal days. They're trying to take advantage of things when they can.

But we know Americans and those worldwide included as well, really do try to spend on holidays whenever they can. Americans certainly do. But as an executive in this advertising space, we're also watching how we're influenced for the goods we want to purchase, or how we're marketed to be disrupted quite significantly with the introductions of the Claude's, and the ChatGPT's, and the Gemini's. How is that space influencing what you and your business do, but really just commerce in general here in real time?

Rob Deichert (2:10)

Sure. Well, I think you touch on two key themes. One is the large language models, the generative AI is definitely been picking up. People are now, instead of maybe searching for something, they might ask a prompt of what is the best product for X or compare these products. I know I've done it looking at cars, for example. So that is now giving consumers, they'll probably spend less time researching on the sites, and then they'll come in with more intent because they've done all the research potentially off the retailer site before they get there.

Now on the flip side, from an advertising standpoint, because a lot of this discovery and this research is happening off-site, marketers need to start to think about their off-site marketing efforts versus just the on-site marketing efforts. So the first phase of retail media was, I'm going to put ads on the actual retailer site to help direct someone to purchase their product if they're looking in a certain category. Now you want to get those buyers, those shoppers, when they're in the consideration phase and doing research. So whether that's on social, on the open web, in the LLMs, it's all over the place.

Alex (3:29)

Okay. So when you look at that at the same time, you have the Amazons and the Walmarts identifying opportunity to advertise within their own platforms with their reach as well. We know Meta has certainly been a major digital ad player for a long time as well.

When you're looking at the disruption and the reach that these companies have, how difficult is that when they enter a new space to compete within that?

Rob Deichert (3:59)

Look, the whole space has been evolving so quickly over at least the last 20 years. So the good news is it's technology and you're moving bits and bytes in most cases. Most of the retailers can move very quickly.

The people that enable this, such as ourselves as an ad exchange, can move very quickly. So it's not like we have to build stores or do brick and mortar. This is all digital. So people continue to innovate and innovate quickly, and as well as fail fast if something doesn't work.

Alex (4:31)

Are you, all right, last one for you. I know we kind of discussed this, but are you surprised how quickly, I guess, the technologies of these sort of, you know, agentic chat bots has really taken hold and is already being used for recommendations? It took a while, it felt like, for other technologies to really disrupt traditional advertising, but it really does seem that the Gemini's and the Claude's and the ChatGPT's have kind of punched above their weight pretty quickly.

Rob Deichert (5:04)