FLOC Party

This episode is actually barely about FLOCs, which it turns out are one of the least important topics up for discussion in this current transitional era, but look, when we were workshopping titles, there were just dozens of very funny FLOC related ones and we never could crawl out of that rabbit hole.

 

We go birdwatching with Larissa Licha, Chief of Staff + Product + Design + Engineering at NextRoll. Specifically, we kick things off keeping track of the FLOC of bird codenamed Google products that are ruffling the feathers of a great many advertisers. The truth is that while things are presently quite confusing, how worried you should be about the G-Fox depends heavily on how you built your henhouse. Lots of people are clucking a bit much for never even having counted their eggs or sorted their baskets in the first place.

 

All bird jokes aside, Larissa does actual work on proposals for the Google working groups with other companies, such as NextRoll, on actually developing the prospective solutions being put forward to resolve the tension between identity and privacy in online advertising.

 

Larissa's recommendation is to start by identifying your actual existing dependencies on third party cookies and work from there, utilizing any first party data you have to bridge what gaps you can, and then do something like move more towards incrementality-based marketing frameworks, which really you should have been doing this whole time anyway. Larissa used to tell people to turn off her own product if that was what it took to get the incrementality train going, which undoubtedly pleased lots of AdRoll P&L people to no end.

 

We touch on how digital media as a navigational aid is real, and there are situations where last click isn't the worst thing in the entire world, which is the opposite of most of the marketing world, where a bunch of people who have in reality never even done any other kind of attribution in a meaningful way spend their time talking tough about how much they hate Ye Olde Default Attribution Model.

 

The future congress member from Brooklyn by way of Germany speaks at length and in-depth regarding how this really might all be worst for small businesses, and Larissa seems a lot more earnestly concerned than a certain Jessie Eisenberg lookalike who had his scribes pen a humble missive in a local paper. The scale at which many small businesses operate, especially in terms of recording valuable website actions, is simply too small for these new privacy measures in most cases.

 

The group discussed that SMB is a huge opportunity that deserves a new and novel approach from many types of marketing platform. Alas, the average slouch of slugs comprising many enterprise-sized marketing solution teams CAN'T HACK IT! Hopefully some bold new challengers ready to forge their future products in the hot, hot crucible of SMB services emerge soon.

 

Digital media on real TV screens seems very effective as a format, except when it's not. Larissa is never going to buy a car, but can sing the Ford jingles from memory because certain providers neglect to cap frequency. Lee talks about how Hulu in particular is extremely bad about this, and kind of keeps kicking this long-dead horse for a while, despite being a very satisfied customer of the actual video product itself. In fact, he pays extra for that lovely service so he doesn't have to look at the absolute frequency-of-fifty-plus dumpster fire that is the ad product. David worries we'll lose cheap but charming local TV ads.

 

We also talk cashback offers in banking platforms and how they tend to be only big brands, which gives everyone a chance to engage in some very high quality coastal elitism. Atlanta company Cardlytics comes up as the principal purveyor of overdraft notice adjacent temptations, which in Randy's case includes some pretty incredible deals on Golf Digest. Larissa thinks being too margin focused and fearing SaaS pricing holds many ad tech companies out of great opportunities, including those with SMBs.