Will Barry

Everyone wants to talk about the leverage ai will bring brands. Here is the reality for a brands P&L: Maybe 20-30% of all revenue is the actual cogs. 10-15% is people. 3-10% is software and services. 5-15% is freight. And 30-50% is marketing. Fully embracing ai will get you 5-15% of revenue to the bottom line. But it’s not solving cogs, freight, or marketing. Meta still gets the lion share. Ai is helpful, but it isn’t going to turn the average brand into an 80% profit business.

@chaseheckendorn Thanks homie!

@itswillbarry Congrats Will! Hope you crush it at Google!

Hey friends I've made on here over the past few years... I'm starting a new job at Google this week, back in my programmatic/analytics home. Already loving it -- the team and opportunity is insane. Guise is still alive and active -- solo founder life got a bit too exhausting (and lonely) without a team around me for a few years tbh. Google and programmatic are my focus for now. re: Guise... Excited to reset a bit and think through where I'm taking the brand next, whether that's bringing in new capital (still bootstrapped), new partners, or a new direction. This ain't the end for Guise, and thanks for all the help you've provided me already.

@mattlady No kidding! Thanks Matt. May take you up on that very soon.

@itswillbarry Cheers Will I worked with stryx.com years ago for a bit before they got acquired Happy to just chat and meet or talk through any brainstorms etc

@drewfallon12 I have more energy today than the entire past month combined

every year i re-remember how brutal entrepreneurship in chicago winter is on the first sunny day of the year

@crookb0nd @stateofstreamtv Correct, analogy doesn’t hold up when looking specifically at open web/programmatic.

@itswillbarry @stateofstreamtv I agree with you. But example is flawed. Hulu impression (with same data etc) is same on TTD and Yahoo - just like stock, and youtube impression (with different user and data) is another stock with different prices.

Maybe the adtech landscape is closer to its end state than people realize. The old view was: ad markets will look like financial markets, and DSPs will become either brokerages or the Bloomberg terminal. But stocks are fungible. Impressions aren’t. A share is the same on Schwab or Robinhood. A YouTube impression is meaningfully different from a Hulu impression.

@DTCMidas Invest in top corners now and watch ROAS skyrocket in his 30's.

Who’s gonna test this placement?

Seems unlikely to me that a LLM <> programmatic relationship would be banner and video focused. Perhaps DSP’s become LLM’s demand aggregators for some kind of new, text-based creative format. E.g. if a person is researching in a product category, a “sponsored” side panel with RTB based product recommendations listed out. Like contextual on steroids.

I started the first programmatic ads product at Meta and was a huge champion of the technology. OpenAI considering an ad tech partner like TTD is wrongheaded, and the worst possible way to build an ads business for such a unique and intent-rich consumer experience. It’s banner and video ads powered by pixels firing on websites, the most legacy ad tech around. Assuming this is true, it means that likely there’s either no internal interest in building this properly, or an utter lack of ads vision.

@levelsio VC darling speedrun

Icon, the AI Admaker, just went bankrupt They paid $12M for the domain Icon.com and now it's dead

@aripap @AdtechGod @TheTradeDesk No wayyyy

We wore them out. @AdtechGod and I have been waging a campaign of harassment on the marketing team at @TheTradeDesk and they finally gave in. The most talked about person in ad tech -- Jeff Green -- will join me on stage to talk OpenPath, AI, "death of the web", and more to close out Day 2 of #MarketectureLive.

@neilpatel Isn't the inventory already available on other DSP's?

Amazon just pulled off the biggest power shift in advertising since Google took over search, and most marketers are sleeping on it. Netflix, Spotify, and Roku have opened their ad inventory to Amazon's DSP, putting purchase data from over 300 million shoppers directly behind your streaming campaigns. I've been in digital marketing for over two decades, and I haven't seen a consolidation moment like this since the early days of Google Ads. You will learn: — Why Netflix, Spotify, and Roku collapsed their walled gardens and handed Amazon control of streaming ads — How Amazon's first-party purchase data outperforms Google and Facebook targeting in a cookieless world — The way programmatic advertising works inside Amazon DSP and why one remote click can close a sale — How to know if your brand is ready for Amazon DSP and what to build toward if you're not there yet

@JaiDolwani fomo

I feel pretty behind when it comes to hands on building with the latest in AI technology Thinking of getting a group together this Saturday to all build AI personal assistants via OpenClaw... just as a learning experiment that could actually turn out to be helpful. I have no idea what I'm doing and I can't teach you shit, but we'll all learn together. DM if interested (it'll be in-person in LA).

@banyudongyong @mind1nvestor I don't think Google would touch them -- they've even cited TTD's success as supporting evidence in anti-trust cases. Amazon would make a lot of sense if ADSP doesn't catch up quickly on product.

@mind1nvestor Best outcome for $TTD is to be acquired by $AMZN or $GOOG, and I see it coming in the next 2 years.

$TTD This is where most hesitate, but it’s also where the biggest money is made. Comfort buys yesterday. Conviction buys tomorrow. PT: $210 ~700% potential. If you don’t know when or where to buy, that’s exactly what we solve.

@Nyury1011 @EricTilbury_RTB Genuinely curious. Why would a pub block this assuming there was good performance? Because they don’t want advertisers to know their inventory is available non-direct?

@EricTilbury_RTB It’s bc their publisher contracts forbid them from sharing. But they can share a top 10 list which will conveniently have all the most popular sites you know and love. Still unclear why contracts don’t get in the way of a top 10 list…

There are programmatic managed service providers that say “they can’t” show their clients a basic inventory report on where their ads ran. If that’s happening to you assume something is very very very wrong.

@mitchellw @AdtechGod Customer-facing parts of a DSP could be built quickly, for sure. Infrastructure is a different story. Large DSPs process more ad opportunities than the NYSE sees in total order book message traffic. Pretty crazy.

2 things I heard at #IABALM this week: -DSP's are dead, and will be completely replaced by Agents in the next 3-5 years -DSP's are indispensable as they provide the vital execution layer on all prog buys; and will be around for a loooong time @AdtechGod #adtech #programmatic

I think a slow burn of a few things: Price-to-sales was just too high at IPO. 12x to 8x the past year. Still not cheap. A lot of stock dumping from leadership. General concern about AI disruption in b2b saas. Salesforce, The Trade Desk, Hubspot, SNow, Atlassian all getting crushed these days.

Klaviyo stock. is down 57% in the past 12 months. What is going on?

👀 TikTok is quietly opening its walled garden. Sources and platform docs show TikTok is rolling out a pixel tool linking ads, organic posts, TikTok Shop, and Live videos to off-site sales—giving brands visibility beyond the app for the first time. adweek.it/49uV8wV

How have folks' experiences with Fulfilled by Tiktok been?

I run for 15 minutes every day and if I skip a day, I will run double the amount the next day. This has made a huge difference in my life. Tomorrow I will run for 4 months