WURL’s Mikey Garcia on How AI and Contextual Intelligence Are Reshaping CTV Advertising

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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AdTechGod (0:30)

Welcome to the AdTechGod Pod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to the AdTechGod Pod, where I speak to the product leaders of our industry. Our guest today has spent more than a decade building products, which I always love. He's currently Vice President of Advertising Engineering at WURL, where he owns both product and engineering across WURL's advertising products. He joined WURL back in 2017 when the company had just 15 employees and helped build the infrastructure that powers fast channel distribution across platforms like Samsung TV Plus, the Roku Channel, Vizio, and more. I'm really excited to chat with Mikey today. Just a full disclosure, this is a sponsored episode.

Both the guest and the sponsorship of the episode are by WURL. So, thank you for joining me, Mikey. Thanks for being on the show.

Mikey Garcia (1:27)

Hey, thanks for having me. Mr. God, I always wanted to say that coming on this podcast.

AdTechGod (1:32)

You can say Mr. God.

I get God. ATG is like the casual way, like we know that we're friends and we chatted before.

Mikey Garcia (1:38)

Has anyone ever said Mr. God before?

AdTechGod (1:41)

No, I feel like that maybe is the first time.

Mikey Garcia (1:43)

I was literally about to go and build a podcast crawler of all the transcripts that you have just to bring up facts, but I didn't have enough time. But I'm really honored that I could be the first person to be saying Mr. God.

AdTechGod (1:55)

You sound like such a product guy. Mikey, prior to the episode, we were chatting a little bit about your background and what you guys are doing at WURL. But before we dive into that, I would love to hear more about you.

What got you to WURL and just kind of like your career progression, having worked at Maker Studios and now WURL for such a long time, almost, what, how long has it been? 10 years?

Mikey Garcia (2:16)

I think I'm running up on nine.

AdTechGod (2:18)

Yeah, that's pretty wild. Nine years is a long time, especially at a company like WURL where you guys have changed so much and grown so much post-acquisition by App11.

Mikey Garcia (2:27)

Absolutely. Yeah, so definitely I've seen all the different phases of WURL, but I'll take you back how I got into all of this, which was basically I joined Maker Studios as an intern back in 2011 I was supposed to be a social media marketing intern, but a guy named Rob Castle had different plans for me. He offered me the ability to go and work on websites for top talent on YouTube at the time, and we were building a website for the top creator, Ray William Johnson. In today's world, that would be the equivalents of Mr. Beast, and building a website for Mr. Beast, and I was super young, 20 years old, and I was hooked. I can build things with tech, I can learn about operations, I can learn about video, and I kept that going. Little did I know that was the introduction for the launching point of my product career. And so, turned that into a part-time gig while I was still in college, working 30, 35 hours a week, and eventually got hired as a junior product manager. From there, I was able to then continue to own more and more ownership of Maker Studios' various products. I think the most relevant one for this conversation was we created a distribution business. And so in order to do that, we had to have a video management system. It took all the YouTube content, built packages that were short form video packages, distributing to all the early streamers back in the day. This was like Sling, PlayStation View, Canal Plus, Verizon Go 90, even some that like don't exist anymore today. But it taught me a lot. I got a lot of experience with video tech. And then came one day where I saw that a lot of my co-workers had a huge smile on their face. I was also happy.

But my smile was not as big as theirs. And that was the day where Disney bought Maker Studios for about 800 mil.