Eyeota CEO Kristina Prokop and Adstra CEO Rick Erwin discuss how ALC became Adstra

In conversation: Eyeota CEO Kristina Prokop and Adstra CEO Rick Erwin

Adstra CEO Rick Erwin sat down with Kristina Prokop, CEO of Eyeota, for a friendly catch-up over Zoom in November 2020. These selections have been shortened and edited for clarity. Click here to watch the full interview.

Kristina:

Adstra (formerly ALC) is a partner of ours and we've been working together over the last years to activate different data assets that they have. Adstra has recently gone through a rebranding and has a lot of new products in market. We wanted to take the opportunity to invite them and Rick to talk a little bit more about what's going on behind the scenes at Adstra. Maybe just to start off, can you tell us a background of Astra, what type of data you guys operate with, and a little bit more about the rebrand from ALC to Adstra?

Rick:

Two years ago we brought a team of 10 data industry veterans together and we bought ALC, which was the precursor company to Adstra, and we did it with a plan to greatly expand what ALC was doing for its clients. ALC is a well-established first-party data monetization company, particularly in direct marketing circles - one that's well known in that part of the industry. My team of veterans is well-known in enterprise data and identity for marketing. And so the rebranding was really about making a splash to show that we're something new and different, while at the same time reassuring the 500 or so ALC clients that we have this new name Adstra because we're now able to do new things, we're still the same company that you've relied on for 40 years. In some ways it was fortuitous to do it in this environment because it allowed us to cover a lot of ground with a lot of clients and partners and help them understand what the rebrand was all about.

We start with two fundamental premises. One is that as every form of advertising media has become people-based, and every consumer brand and their partners need to have their own identity spine. It's just a critical asset. At the enterprise level, 10 years ago, it wasn't important for every consumer brand to have an identity spine, and that’s why most of them don't today. Surprisingly people based data is still not used in the vast minority of all advertising impressions. And so we do two things: We built a platform that translates any form of consumer identity into any other form, and we license that data that comes from our platform to help brands and their partners either create or strengthen their identities. We do that with persistency in a privacy compliant way. It's portable and it's people-based. We call that our core piece, but what we’ve done in essence is to create a new core piece, and that’s the second part.

Secondly, we make it easier and more economic to use people-based data in every possible insight, targeting and measurement application that you can. In doing those things we intend to disrupt what is really a very stodgy data industry. It’s time to retire that notion that we used to all say freely, that there's offline data and online data, and the way I view it, there's just real-world data. There's only real world data that can be used to better understand us as consumers and better target advertising to us. What we're doing is bringing as many forms of that real-world data together connected to a very accurate persistent identity spine and making it economic to use in any application.

Kristina:

I think the burning question in our ecosystem right now is this evolution of the way that we transact. Looking at the future of ID sharing, the eventual deprecation of third party cookies, how is Adstra adapting in that environment or at least preparing for that environment? Right now there's a lot of preparation going on, but we're quite not at the point yet where we're transacting in that new way.

Rick:

It's funny because when we began with Adstra and creating this disruptive company, we really weren't planning on the deprecation of third-party cookies. It turns out the platform that we built is perfect for that. I'm being careful not to take credit for us being so prescient to have seen that coming. We really just wanted to create a platform that could translate any form of identity to any other, but as it turns out, that's exactly what brands and their partners need from us in a world where we might see a deprecation of third party cookies, because every form of identity is represented in that platform with the ability to junction between them seamlessly. And so there is no one form of identity which if deprecated would harm us. We would like to see all forms of identity being free and open for use in marketing.

That would be the best thing for everyone, including consumers. But if that was not to happen, our platform positions us well to simply translate to the other forms of identity that are represented in our platform. What you see happening today is a great deal of emphasis on first party cookies. And our match partner network is dominated by first party cookie identity, which is federated. So, we're feeling like our platform is very well situated to allow us to continue to help brands and their partners, whatever the future may bring.

Kristina:

I've been in the industry for about 22 years. You've been in the industry for quite a long time. Just looking at the size of this shift - is this really comparable to anything that you've seen along the course of your career? Or is this larger than what we’ve seen in the past?

Rick:

Such a great question. I think we act like that in our industry, we act in the present as though what we're experiencing is the worst thing we've ever seen. I actually don't feel like it is. I feel like the one thing that's constant in our industry is there's a seismic shift. And when I say our industry, I guess I'm casting a broad net, all of marketing and advertising and all of its forms. There's always something seismic. I mean, in 1996, if I'm not mistaken, was the telecommunications reform act - the cable act. And that was what gave birth in the US to this notion of notice and choice, and choice was invented at that time as a way to get the industry to a place where there was more privacy protection and yet a free and unfettered marketing and advertising business. Talk about seismic. That was, you know, level the field, maybe all marketing and advertising would stop. It was a massive thing. I prefer to think of these things as, you put two hands on the steering wheel and you keep riding because there's always going to be something like this. It doesn't mean that we won't go through turbulence and hit some potholes on the way we certainly will, but we'll get through.

Kristina:

Yeah, it is. If I had to think one of my other frustrations sometimes with our industry, but I guess it really applies to that sensationalism that happens from the media. I see a lot in people who are relatively young to the industry or early in their careers where it feels like this is something that will make our industry implode. But in reality, if you've seen, you know, you've lived through a couple of these large transitions before and you see actually what comes out of the other end is most of the time a much better way of working than we did before. I see it very similarly to you. I think there's actually a lot of opportunity out of what's happening, and I think it's a good transition. It's something that I think we all need and it was inevitable in some way shape or form.

Rick:

I agree. We’ve written a piece which equates some of this phenomena to that scene in Austin Powers with the steamroller very slowly advancing toward a collision, and all the guy does is panic for what feels like 10 minutes on the screen. I think a lot of these big issues are like the slow-moving steamroller, where we're spending two years on one topic, but in that two years, it's not like the steam roller has moved that far. It's just that we've all been in this sort of a hopped up panic mode. And I think that's why I say the two hands on the steering wheel, because a person who is now a 24year-old media buyer, who's living through this, but who in 20 years will be 44 and looking back and saying, “Oh, I remember in the year of the pandemic.”

Kristina:

Yeah. Speaking of the year of the pandemic - it's obviously been a pretty roller coaster year one, I think with a lot of takeaways for all of us. Is there, is there anything in particular that, that you personally, or that Adstra has taken away from from the year?

Rick:

One of the things is for me personally, and as a business leader is the power of distributed labor. And I really had, I think everyone's got at least a casual appreciation even before this, that we can do a lot more remotely than we used to be able to, but I'm not talking about that casual awareness. I'm talking about a really big awakening to the power of distributed labor and I only claimed to be at the very front end of this, but I think that we have a chance now to learn how to get work done differently, not just do work remotely and do it the same way we would have in the office, but to work remotely and work differently. One of the things I'm most excited about is I just think it has massive upside for diversity and inclusion because we can perform a work at an A grade anywhere with any type of talent.

I've been surprised at how resilient the advertising industry has been. It's been challenging. And certainly, you know, you can see agencies that have taken some real hits and had to recover from them. But here we are in the worst global pandemic in a hundred years and people are buying things and people are responding to advertising and advertising is still thankfully allowing a lot of content that otherwise would cost consumers more than they could afford.

It's allowing it to be free. And all of that has been much, much more resilient than I thought it would be. The resiliency of people in our industry has been pretty amazing. We all know that being remote and unable to be together at industry conferences and events and even just meetings has changed the way we work together. And it's really created for a lot of people a feeling of some isolation, and we're all gonna have to learn to get past that as we reopen up hopefully next year. But I think it's, it's also highlighted the resiliency that people have, the fundamental ability people have to pick themselves up and do their job and provide value to clients and move the needle. And I think that's all very encouraging.

Kristina:

Yeah, same here. You know, I've been, I've been really impressed with the way everyone's pulled through and thank goodness, you know, I feel very lucky that our industry has turned out the way it has. Maybe just to close it up for today, if you look at taking your crystal ball out, looking into next year, are there any, are there any big predictions that you have for 2021?

Rick:

Yeah. I don't know how big they are, but I do see certain things unfolding. We talked about that slow moving steam roller, and we should all expect there to be even more gnashing of teeth and clutching of pearls than we even see right now over the next year, because that's what our industry does.

More importantly, I think we may see a delay to the ID deprecation that we're talking about. I think we'll see, I think we'll see a bit of a postponement to that.

I don't think anybody should plan their business around that postponement, but I see enough in the tea leaves that I think that it would be prudent for Google and Apple to take a breath and maybe not make that the Hill that they want to die on. And I don't think that the DOJ will become instantaneously ignorant to this issue or friendly to them in a changing US presidential administration. So I think I would expect a little bit of a delay to that ID deprecation.

Kristina:

Rick, thanks so much for joining today. It's been a pleasure as always.

Rick:

Thanks, Kristina. Great to see you and talk with you. Be safe.