Justin Ruiss, Senior Vice President of Media Research at BWG Strategy, discusses how retail media fragmentation, cookie deprecation, and AI are reshaping internet advertising. First-party data and clean-room technologies are becoming essential as attribution grows opaque, while AI tools can automate planning and free up creative focus.
Chapters
Being in the video industry. Did you go to NAB, by the way?
I didn't, no. I host some— like, this is the problem. Like, I have people in the gaming industry asking, like, oh my goodness, like, are you going to GDC? It's like, I'd love to go to GDC, but you're asking me to take like a week out of my forum schedule. Yeah, that's like 8— that's like 8 forums to go. Yeah, like, you know, or I could do something there. I get it, but You know, it's, it's, it's a lot.
Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. Especially when it's like 60,000 people and attendees and it's just a mind-numbing amount of booths and yeah, I've, I've been to them and it's a lot. So I don't blame you. I, I don't blame you. You wanna get away and Sit on a bus for an hour trying to get back to your hotel. It's a great way to do it.
I'll shed my single tear here.
Yeah, cool. Well, let's go ahead and make a start. So I think maybe where we start, just give like brief background on yourself and brief on story and then where you're at now and what you guys are doing, what your business does. And let's start there.
Yeah, sure. So Justin Ruiz, I am currently the Senior Vice President of Media Research with BWG Strategy. We're a primary research platform that helps service the investment community by putting on hour-long forums with industry executives and experts to share insights, opinions, opportunities, challenges across a number of different sectors. Like I mentioned, I cover the media space, so everything under the sun as it relates to search, social, television, CTV, retail media, gaming, and even some e-commerce for that matter. Prior to this, I hosted similar conversations for a company, uh, that was also in the primary research space, as well as, uh, spent almost, uh, 5 and a half years in sell-side equity research, uh, where I basically started my career. And here I am now, uh, hosting some— hosting somewhere in the vicinity of over 350 different conversations Across over the, over the year. I think my goal last year, I think I did 345 or something along those lines. So somewhere in that vicinity.
That's nuts. How's your, how's your voice doing after all of these? That's one per day, including weekends on average, which means you're doing about 2 per workday minimum.
Some weeks are light, some weeks are heavy. Like I mentioned, and some of them are question and answer sessions. So it'd be like, you know, Sean, you and I going for an hour discussing a topic or an actual live forum where there's, you know, 5, 6, 7, up to 15 different participants or listeners or speakers who join in and we kind of moderate our discussion around that. My voice takes a lot of coffee, takes a lot of tea, Diet Coke. People, these are all, these are all non-video virtual. So I always joke around with people, they're like, how do you do it? And it's like, I, a lot of fingernail biting is kind of what it takes.
Yeah, I just have a good mic setup and, you know, you're walking treadmill around the house and yeah, that's fun. Yeah, I mean, that's how we got together is, uh, it's been a few years, um, where I've been attending or invited to some of these forums and I haven't been able to make all of them for obvious reasons, but they're really high value because in, I don't know, the better part of a half an hour, you get like the senior executives. And I came from like video streaming from a PE shop that did the video streaming roll-up strategy thing. And so I, those were the ones that I was joining and it was like 10 people who were working at, you know, the top tier and see all the trends and I just, yeah, you kind of see exactly what is real very quickly and what people are contending with. And one that stuck out was when I think it was Disney and Amazon, everybody were talking about free TV and then ad supported. And it's like basically streaming videos becoming cable television all over again.
Weird, right?
But yeah, they're super valuable. Like for all the listeners, I'd recommend, I mean, you learn a lot really quickly.
And all walks of life too, right? So it, you know, from, you know, entry-level positions, people wanna comment, sort of give their, their 2 cents all the way up to the C-suite. So we have a number of different contributors and, and folks who give some really good insight and feedback. And it's a great, it's a great way to, to share insights and to sort of, I like to, I like to tell people it's, it forces you to do your homework.
Yeah. Don't say anything bad. I mean, I remember the side conversation we had, this was in the fall and it was, we were talking about where's growth gonna come from.
Oh, okay.
And that was the big question because it's like all the subscribers have been subscribed and the major platforms have consolidated and now it's like, oh, we wanted a captive content library, but oh, we need more revenue growth. So now we need to license that content back out. And it's just like the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth and back and forth. And I remember my video platform days, one of the big things was the broadcasters had to have 2 separate teams and workflows, one for the cable and one for the video platforms. And the really big effort to try to consolidate into one, that was the big major internal initiatives. So I don't know, have you heard anything in that world, like how that's going?
Expand that out. To like all of retail now. So like when you think about from a retail media perspective where—
E-com.
Exactly.
So, yeah.
So you have shopper marketing teams and trade dollars and teams that are working on that who are securing their budgets with, you know, the Walmarts, the Targets, the round, you know, the Krogers of the world who then are also working with the digital teams from brands And the left hand doesn't know that, you know, what the right hand is doing. So you almost have a situation where Peter is robbing Paul.
Yeah.
You know, I'm probably butchering that, but you have a situation where the budget should all be flowing towards the same goal, right? Hey, we want to generate sales lift. Hey, we want to retain customers or we want to target new customers. And you have the dollars flowing into the traditional sense of actual store marketing versus the digital sense where you have, you know, a TV component or a digital out-of-home component where the retailer wants to satisfy those and actually create minimums and set guidelines of where those dollars should be allocated. So, so a little bit of kind of like what you had mentioned, like a little bit of like old is new again in terms of being able to combine some of those efforts together and sort of internally consolidate. But those are, those are conversations that we have, especially on the retail media side. As you see the growth in CTV, as you see the growth in digital out-of-home programmatic for that matter, these teams are starting to either combine or starting to have more of these internal meetings to kind of understand, okay, what are our media goals and how do we deploy capital in the best sense?
Yeah, there is, that's the billion trillion dollar question is like, let me isolate all the marketing and advertising channels and do some inexpensive hypothesis tests to see what's driving the best conversion rates on brand awareness and purchase behavior and then roll it all up and see all of it changing in real time. Like that is the holy grail and it's very, very difficult. It's the old adage, right? Like 50% of my budget works. I just don't know which 50. So half of it's like, well, something.
Interlace that with cookie deprecation, more privacy, more privacy coming on board. It's gonna be harder to prove out attribution, harder to get conversion. It leads to a lot of conversations. And when you have so many different ones in specific verticals, when you zoom out a lot, you can kind of get the sense of like, oh, I'm starting to understand where like major frustration and pain points exist because you have brand new channels that are emerging like generative search and where that lays into that, where that fits into the model. Exactly the point of like, well, what's working from a generative search perspective if nobody's clicking out of Google and going into a website, right? If all of their answers kind of just magically appear in a, in a search, How do you really kind of prove out the attribution? In theory, the impression count goes down and, you know, your conversion should improve because you have such intent there. But it's leading to a lot of questions and more things popping up from a channel perspective that just makes the media buying journey and the media exchange journey that more complicated.
Yeah, it's the whole rise of the LLM AI thing. It almost feels like in the cookie thing you mentioned in privacy, it almost feels like it's this whole like consolidation and disaggregation piece where the consolidation happened with Google and everything over the last 20 years. It almost feels like every company is trying to get their own CRM and bring on their own data in-house and like turn things off so they can't go elsewhere and then they still need all the information of the people visiting their websites and their properties as they get. But then you're left with like every quote man or woman is an island, every company is an island. And some of the research that we've done in one of my deep tech portfolio companies, it's biologic intelligence. It's like beyond LLMs and it's this idea of small world networks and it's how the nervous system in the body works. It's honestly how chat and messaging works, these small, like your best friend circle, your fave 5s, if people remember that. And then the inner, the interlacing of those and the overlap of those is how things spread virally. It isn't just like one massive thing gets put in front of a billion people. It's like the SNL skit gets shared from one person to the next person to the next, you know what I mean? Like, Yeah. Ryan Gosling saying it's Avatar. Avatar's logo is just papyrus in bold. Yeah, this is so hilarious. We can't stop laughing about that.
So you describe it in a way more like scientific way. Mine is a little more classical. Like my analogy is like, it's like Italy in the 1800s. It's just city-states under, but we all kind of know it's one country kind of thing. That's kind of the way I've been describing it. And to that point, You know what you were saying about amassing first-party data and the idea of adopting clean room technologies and building out customer data platforms and all of this stuff. It's the idea that the walls of the garden aren't getting higher. It's that the gardens are getting lusher, right? They're getting greener. So it's whatever you can do to sort of keep your ecosystem like irrigated and fresh and thriving. That's the I think that's the end goal for a lot of these different organizations. So it's, it's quite frankly why I think the Walmart Vizio acquisition is probably one of the most important from this year because of that rich inventory that they can get from an OEM perspective, selling the TVs almost even to a degree of even kind of telling Roku like, this is our platform now, right? Like this, tell the other platforms like we have our own everything. Similar to Amazon. But yeah, I totally agree. I think it's, your analogy is a little more under the microscope, I would say.
Yeah. Yeah. My own inherent bent. So where do you think, I mean, the Walmart thing is interesting just to touch on that quickly. Do you think the TV is their distribution channel for their the products in their store either through the web and their web marketplace and their store marketplace? Is that, you think they're over like their most basic strategy is like, I wanna own the device, the access device.
I think the opportunity. So shoppable commerce is always like the big, that's the holy grail, right? That makes a lot of sense. I get that on paper, but I think the idea is This is a distribution point. And when you talk to, or if you think about it from the lens of like a CPG, the ecosystem makes a ton of sense. Walmart can couple together a media offering or like a mixed media model that makes a ton of strategic sense from a, here's your television campaign platform. Here's your in-app, here's your mobile, here's your onsite, here's your digital offsite, here's your, here's the rest of offsite, right? So all of it makes a lot more compelling ecosystem sense for an advertiser to want to go into the Walmart ecosystem as opposed to like, you know, figuring out like what your TikTok versus what your Reels strategy looks like, right? All of this kind of encapsulates under one media plan and media budget with Walmart. Now, the problem is you have so many different walled gardens that you'd have to run X amount of different campaigns across. And that's tedious and tiresome and, and so forth and so on. But the, the answer to that, or the quote unquote answer, is something like, you know, an open exchange where you could integrate with the Trade Desk or a DSP or, or somebody for that matter. But it— I think you're right. I mean, like when you think about the television and being able to push those screens through store and then really push the CTV advertising through it, why not? I mean, if the TV is already smart and connected, you don't have to You know, add in a device or anything to that matter to really get your smart channels or to get your apps running on your television.
Yeah, they're kind of turning into a big tech company in a lot of ways with the like Costco model as well. They just haven't employed, well, maybe they have the Costco business model which has the Lollapalooza effect. So where, Here's my fundamental question, then I want to get into the gaming stuff and some of your thoughts there because I want to help me get smart in that area. But where do you think if you had to design something from scratch or I don't know, but let's say put a bunch of companies together to create some type of value offering, where do you think the real opportunity is? Like, take everything that, you know, all the conversations you have and put them all together and like, is there a golden thread that goes through all of this and meets all the requirements? Or do you think it's like just a fragmented soup and you're, we're just still in the place where there isn't a good answer and it's just that is the essence of marketing and advertising, the sales and marketing divisions inside the company and that's just why they have jobs is this insane amount of fragmentation and data and trying to like drive conversion and it's changing all the time and who fricking knows.
Yeah, that's tough. Someone needs to, I think one of the big things is kind of like what I alluded to before, somebody needs to make the buying the media buying journey, that media purchasing journey a lot easier. And I think a lot more fluid and frictionless across so many walled gardens. The retail media aspect is not going away. Retailers, I mean, Wawa has their own retail media network. If you're familiar with the, you know, New Jersey, Pennsylvania convenience store, like they're popping up everywhere. Chase is implementing a media network within their app. Planet Fitness has a media network for their own gyms. So the value of first-party data is just, it's, somebody said it today on one of my forums, it's gold bullion, right? It's not getting any less valuable and everybody wants to execute against it and everybody wants to hoard it and utilize it to do better targeting and all different sorts of goals, right? Generate lift, what have you. And I think that's not going away. I think the first-party data aspect is crucial. So making the execution of media buying for first-party data needs to become more and more frictionless, which I think it will. I think that's— I think it's gonna trend in that way. Smart, smart people are gonna figure it out and I could lean on the crutch of AI to help kind of build the construct. I mean, AI is like synonymous for like nanomachines or black magic at this point, but like it's something to help in the, in the journey of making that a little bit easier. I think there's also something to be said about just the regular customer purchasing journey and how people are discovering new products. I think there needs to be something. I think there needs to be better improvements. This actually can translate into the gaming world well, but better, better improvements for discoverability overall. You have TikTok Shop, you have Temu, you have Shein, you have direct-to-consumer sites, big box retailers, so many pushing sponsored products and all different types of all different types of items through their onsite or offsite channels. I think the personalization and the idea of creating like the super customer, like the superfan of certain brands will potentially come to fruition as more targeting and more personalization gets better. But I think that's something that would help a ton in the realm of like discoverability. Which, if you're like, if you're a music fan or, you know, film or any kind of entertainment or media fan, discoverability is like the biggest challenge. Like, where do I find new? Where do I find the best? Who's gonna be the next, I don't know, like Cut Copy, or who's gonna be the next, you know, Strokes or something like that? But it's, it's very much an idea of like, how do I create this sticky very active customer and how do I feed them something new? And I don't know if that's something that could be amalgamated through a bunch of companies or if it's something, it's a new technology that could help. But whoever cracks that nut, I think is gonna, I think is gonna be able to afford whatever real estate on the moon at this point. But yeah.
Yeah, it's like, when is an ad not an ad? When it's something I need right now. And it's I mean, this is what I've been noodling on for years because the internet is just one giant matching marketplace. That's all Google does. It's all Facebook does. They just take a take rate on matching up buyer and seller. They just called it like an ad platform and media buying and all this stuff. But really, it's all you really need to figure out is do we just have a spreadsheet with every human's email address or phone number and it says, this is what I need. Like need, not some stupid tchotchke, but like, this is what I actually need. And then it's like I wake up and it's, I have 3 options and I can push the button and pay for, I mean, that's the dream. But the problem is we don't have need. And so Facebook made you, Google made you search, which is like not really a subset of need. And then Facebook said, fill out your profile and like post stuff to Instagram. And that's not really what you need either.
Yeah.
So it seems to me that the opportunity is trying to figure, is trying to match up need and offering because that is the essence of product management.
Yeah.
And business building and investing in the whole thing and it doesn't exist. I don't know how to do it, but perhaps AI can help with that intent in some way. Actually, there is one product that's attempting this. It's Apollo.io. They're the sales platform and they have that one thing in there which is like intent, and they're trying to do it, um, and it's better than nothing, you know. But so yeah, rather than I just watched Dune 2 and now I'm being sold Demobaza clothes because it matches what Zendaya was wearing or something, I don't know. I just watched that movie, which is awesome, so that's why it was fresh in my mind. Okay, um, let's switch to gaming. Make me, make me really smart really quickly. What's the What's happening right now in the ecosystem and in the world and what are people struggling with and where's the value at?
So a few things, and there's things that people are struggling with that are more in the zeitgeist and there are things that I think are more, you know, my own bespoke thoughts as it relates to the gaming industry. But right now you have 2 pieces of the pie that are extremely big, the PC and console gaming business, which think of as your traditional video games of buying a PlayStation or an Xbox or a Nintendo and sitting down on the couch and playing with friends or playing online or what have you. The other side of it is the mobile gaming landscape, which is way more fragmented, but really only runs through 2 storefronts, either iOS or the Android, the Google App Store. Now, one of the things that's been challenging on the mobile side is this idea that Privacy Manifest, which is a new initiative from Apple, which is going to make the attribution of actually finding and converting new players for games much, much more difficult as more privacy more privacy measures are kicked into place. Essentially what a lot of people have been talking about on my forums is this is, this is essentially the removal of fingerprinting. So much more harder contextual targeting, all types of, all types of aspects like that which make marketing a mobile game to mobile game players much harder. A lot of folks on these forums have been talking about different media channels, whether it's TikTok, um, or other social channels, to be able to market these games and create buzz and awareness around some of these mobile titles. Remind— here's, here's the reminder: there are a myriad of mobile titles that are out there. So many.
Yeah.
I'm currently addicted to Honkai Star Rail. Which I probably shouldn't be saying out loud because I've definitely spent my fair share of time and money on. But it's very, very challenging and it's very, very fragmented. You have a lot of folks talking about the idea of cross-platform, i.e., going from mobile to PC or console, being able to create the ecosystems in both ways. That way it's a little bit easier to market to maybe a console base who will then adopt the platform on mobile.
Yeah.
And even just community outreach, right? Whether it's through Discord or some other type of community building site to be able to reach your fans and deliver the messages directly to them, get real-time feedback on what needs to change or what needs to improve. That's one of the major challenges in mobile. And I think it's going to continue to be a challenge and put pressure on mobile developers to really figure out how to market their games. Some of the, some of the, let's call it, solutions here are opting for franchise or big IP and brand to be able to kind of move your game. Whereas just others with larger budgets are able to accomplish a lot of it. There's a lot of debate on where Monopoly Go from Scopely sits as they just crossed $2 billion in revenue. But how much did it really cost for them to actually achieve those types of numbers?
Right.
That's one of the bigger issues on the, on the mobile side. The console side, I think, is running into a little bit of— and this is a really interesting conversation we had not too long ago. I think there's a little bit of like older fatigue, like older demo fatigue, or I think generational shifts that are happening within the mobile space. I'm sorry, in the console space that really are kind of like the end of an era. And I'll give an example. We used to see in the console space games cross 1 million units sold.
Mm-hmm.
At $60 a pop between the split of the publisher, or I'm sorry, the publishing platform and the consoles. Most developers and publishers will be able to walk away with 1 million copies sold with their heads held up high and actually generating some strong return.
Yeah.
It's gotten way more challenging to prove out or to achieve higher levels of profitability off of limited sales on console and PC. The reason why? Budgets continue to scale up for higher quality, higher— just, yeah, higher quality games for that matter. And that means multiplayer support, server support, Better fidelity in graphics, no issues with latency, more and more development capabilities that go into the actual product that yields something as amazing as, you know, what Call of Duty looks like, or, you know, an Alan Wake 2, or even right now Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. All of these games require very, very large budgets, which make the break-even a little Just, just more and more difficult. I think that's definitely apparent. No one really disapproves, or nobody disagrees with that, that sentiment there. The thing that I think is, is troublesome is you have this wide addressable market of players, and you have folks like myself who range on, you know, the wrong side of 35, who have grown up with you know, the Nintendo, Super Nintendo, the 64, so on and so forth.
Yeah.
You have those levels of players who are almost at a point of maybe not aging out, but carving out less and less time for their games. Throw in a type of game where there's no barrier to entry outside of buying a console— Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone— All these free-to-play titles that really all they require is an internet connection, a console, a TV, and a controller, right? You put into what you want for that game, and Fortnite will deliver its experience back to you. I think the bifurcation of free-to-play and premium has created this, this hole of share of time rather than just share of wallet, but share of time.
Mm-hmm.
For players in my age bracket. If you're playing 2 to 3 hours a week, most likely you're using it in the social sense of jumping into one of the games that I mentioned, or even like a discount, like a, a lower priced game like a Helldivers 2, where it's fun with friends. But really what the entry fee was, $40. So it's a little bit easier to stomach.
Yeah.
That's one side of the, the addressable market that I think is challenging. The other side is the younger demographic, and that's not necessarily a let's just build awareness and maybe these people will come and maybe they'll recognize our franchise or so on and so forth. I think there's a, there's a behavioral shift with the younger player, and that behavioral shift, I think, is going more towards the social aspect of gaming. And that's something that traditional game makers, while incorporating a lot of those different capabilities into their games, I think other platforms like Roblox or even UEFN, UEFN for that matter, Unreal Editor and Fortnite, I think those platforms are set to capture those younger demographics and create stickier players because of the social aspect. It's not just a chat room with machine guns anymore, which was Call of Duty in the past. This is more the playground. Like, this is the sandbox. This is the actual, like, let's hang out on the monkey bars and talk about, like, you know, how bad social studies is, right? Like, it's, it's that level. And then couple in this factor of, well, we can play a myriad of different games or create our own.
Mm-hmm.
And I think the social and the younger, the younger social player is gravitating towards those experiences. Now, mind you, is is UEFN or Roblox or those types of platforms the quintessential ones? I don't even think those have been even created yet. They we may be on the cusp of something completely brand new. I don't want to go into like you know is it going to look like Ready Player One, which you know I I kind of think that movie was a mess and just that platform is a mess in general, but. That's one of the things I think is, is one of the bigger questions to ask as to like, what is the younger player really caring about when they see video games, right? And it used to be just Mario Kart and being able to get people in the, you know, in their den to play for hours on end. And that was your social, that was your social interaction with gaming. Now it's completely different. So It's a little bleaker, or it's bleaker on one side of the equation, but way more opportunistic on the other. And I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with, with some of these takes, but I think some of the, the facts of the matter remain. These larger tentpole, critically acclaimed games aren't getting the love and attention or seeing the growth and appreciation that they really should be. I implore everyone, take a look at Alan Wake 2. It's a fantastic video game. But if its capacity to generate real revenue based off of the target market that it's going after is not appreciating or not materializing, that becomes a tougher challenge for publishers to stomach. And I do think you end up seeing a little bit more of let's kick the tires on some other socially created games. But those are those— I would say in a nutshell, those are kind of the 2 areas that I've been focusing on most. I think you have other areas like Web3 and the crypto aspect being— having an impact here. And they're still like very nascent. I think there's a lot of activity and a lot of investment going into Web3-created games and this idea of sharing assets across different types of ecosystems. Systems and really creating player marketplaces. And there probably is an opportunity there. I just don't see it. I can't put my hands on it just yet. I can't really kind of walk away with something compelling on that front. But real smart people are working on it, real smart people are putting their efforts into it. But right now, I think it's still so nascent to even tell what could what could really come out of it. Again, I'll probably suffer some slings and arrows from maybe members of the community. But I do, I'm hopeful for the opportunity. But I want to see, I do want to see what more could come from, from those areas. But that's my little spiel on the market.
No, it was very, I mean, I just feel like you're right on the money on so many things, as you should be, because you've been I mean, seriously, I mean, you've been literally doing, for lack of a better term, product management across all of these industries with very large players and the executives who are making decisions on it and seeing the research and the usage patterns. And so I think it's really smart. And one of the things, so I was listening intently to what you were saying and a thesis started to develop as I was listening. And I think if we zoom all the way out to the 100,000-foot level, it feels like to your point on monkey bars and why people hang out at Starbucks and why people hang out in Fortnite and the whole Mario Kart back in the day with the baseball team like I used to do. It's like the thing we do while we're doing something and it's like that's where new businesses are going to be created. It's where new concepts are gonna be created. And really what it is, is it's You're creating an environment either in the real world or the digital world that enables this very social, deeply written human behavior aspect of us human beings to emerge. And I just, the internet to me is, at the same scale as planet Earth. And so really what I think is happening through these experiments, through these games, through social networks, through these video platforms, it's like the internet is trying to figure out what that environment is such that an entire global population of humans— there's 5.4 billion humans on the internet now and 17 billion machines. What does it look like to have a collective experience such that there's organic and real-time emergent behavior across the board and commerce can happen and magic can happen and, you know, all of that. And I think our, that's really what's happening. I mean, it's so young, it's 30 years old. I mean, 30, in '95 it was 100 million people on it. And now it's 5.4 and it's grown 15% per year every year. And we only have 66% adoption, only two-thirds of the human population. The only thing with bigger adoption is oxygen, water, food and energy and shelter and then internet and SMS.
That's it.
Like internet is right there with oxygen. You take it away, you don't realize it's there until it's gone and then it's the only thing you care about. So it's, I think you're right. I think the new or the younger generation that's emerging is they're spending their social time there instead of outside of the gas station and it's easier. And I think the old, the legacy social platforms, Facebook, even TikTok have not enabled that pathway to develop. You know that old analogy, like we're at a schoolyard and you got the sidewalks that are square and then all the campus people, attendees and the students are running this diagonal path through the grass. And I feel like we're, we haven't yet found that diagonal path through the grass to your point. And I think if we collectively figure it out, I think all this stuff that we talked about is the problems might click into place with the matching engine at internet scale, like with brands, with products, with services, with the companies and the people that need them. With the games, with the social things. And I guess the question is like, will it be one thing, a million things? You know, who knows? But I think you're right on the money there because games are really just— it's just engagement and share of time. We all got 24 hours. So where do we spend our work time and our social time and our free time? And it's a mix of real world and digital and both.
And you look at the, you look at the, the play patterns and you look at what, what, you know, younger demographic and the research, the research points to it. You know, every time you see something released, it's always that the Gen Z and Gen Alphas are way more akin to spending time on, you know, within gaming and less listening to music or less engaging with streaming, you know, maybe on the— maybe on social media a little bit more. But gaming is always one of the top-tier things that they want to do. And I think it's— I think it's a little bit of like human nature of like not maybe not necessarily wanting to compete, but wanting to do something together, you know. Um, and work isn't— work isn't like the one thing you want to do together. You kind of want to like do something fun together. So I think that really kind of I always kind of come back to the idea of something— you kind of touched on the fact of a singular thing being so encapsulating and putting everybody into this one kind of mindset. I think of chess. It's one of the oldest games out there, but everybody can play it. It takes no time to learn, or it takes limited time to learn.
Yeah.
And an eternity to master, but anybody can play it, right? It's something that you can do, and it's one platform with one set of pieces. Now you can dress them up as much as you want or maybe amend the rules in certain ways and maybe create a little more dynamics to it, but chess is still chess and it's still transferable. It's almost like a language. So to me, a lot of this is like trying to find that one language that we can all speak. And I think you have a lot of kind of like the idea of the city-states with Italy. You have a lot of competing zones that really try to capture your attention and time. And I don't think that's ever gonna go away. I think that's just the nature of competition. people creating better mousetraps and better movies and better games and better music. I think that's always going to be the case, but I think there's going to be a strong fight to get as— to amass as many in one ecosystem as possible. And I don't think that's stopping anytime soon.
Mm-hmm.
Which then ends up becoming a conversation of like, is— does intervention, or is there The necessity for intervention or anything like that, which is something I can't really—
I, um, the monopoly piece, right?
I can't really—
yeah, FTC.
The only monopoly piece I'll say is that the Schnauzer is the best because I have a Schnauzer. So that's my like monopoly piece joke there. But yeah, um, it, it definitely is this idea of people trying to amass as much as possible and You know, when you play together, it's, it's more fun. Look, it's, it's, it's a lot easier to get a match in Fortnite when there's 120 million, whatever, or, you know, 80 million daily active users or whatever the numbers are. Don't quote me, but when there's so many there, Mm-hmm. easy to play as opposed to, you know, sitting in the park waiting for somebody to sit down next to you and, and play chess. Even though somebody could definitely do it.
Yeah, you're at planetary scale rather than park scale. So it's just, just easier. Yeah, I wonder if that— where you touched on crypto, I wonder if that's where the decentralization comes in. I mean, I feel like the whole incentive design made the crypto thing go off on a tangent. Because they made it all about like investment returns rather than like structural hardness of the system and like system design. Because the internet, to your point, the internet is a city. It's not a company. And cities last forever. Companies do not. And the reason is because it's decentralized and it's the quote unquote free market. I mean, political stuff aside, but it's because the digital transformation is happening all day, every day in real time because of what you said, competition.
Yeah.
For eyeballs and attention and to sell products. So yeah, it's an interesting system dynamic conversation. Well, we've gone—
Yeah, I was gonna say crypto is definitely what was supposed to be water was turned into oil. Like that's the way I think people may have taken that one.
Yeah. And it got a bad brand. It was like self-driving got a bad brand because we were iterating in public and people lost money and got into car crashes.
Yes.
So it's like, it's—
Trust me, I would love to fall asleep in my car and wait and like basically time travel and wake where I'm supposed to, supposed to be.
Well, give it 2 months and, you know, we're always like Elon's saying, we're always like a year away from level 5 self-driving. So I'm, you know, I'm hoping I'm not—
I'm also not opposed to being shot out of a cannon either.
So as long as you got a big safety net, like, you're fine, you know? Like, and it's reliable.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, this has been— this has been rad, Justin. I mean, I— yeah, this is— this is awesome. So I guess to wrap up here then, we kind of covered everything. I mean, normally I'd be like, what What did we miss? Or like parting thoughts or such sweet sorrow. But what, what is, what is your repeatable soundbite or something that is the primary takeaway or like where your head's at with all of this at the end of the day to just keep on trucking or what is it? A little bit.
Yeah. I think the, I think the thing is continue to ask questions, right? There's, there's so many different avenues and evolving spaces and old things are becoming new again and new things are becoming challenging. And I think there's always opportunity exactly to the gaming point, right? Where I look at the challenges that traditional publishers are under the gun for and the tiredness that maybe some IP or brands are suffering. The fatigue that's in there. At every other corner, there's somebody willing to create. I think that is something that we need to reward more. I know it's difficult. I know it's difficult to sit there and tell somebody you have endless budget to create what you want and quality is not an issue. If I gave myself that budget, I'd be nowhere. I think there is the the need or the necessity to go a little bit deeper. And I think AI will bring us there. I think as we automate a lot of different— automate the minutiae of a lot of things, I think it'll give people the opportunity to focus on the detail and actually create something compelling. I also think it's going to give a lot of people who didn't have the opportunity to actually be part of these conversations The, the ability to be, which I think is really, really important for— from a perspective of like diversity and kind of enablement of people who don't have the means to be able to actually compete and, and show their ideas. So I, I'm really encouraged by that part. But I, I think where, where the challenges seem bleak, the opportunities on the other side seem equally as strong. It's balanced.
Yeah.
So I would say from a media perspective, that's something that I would continue to look at. Don't be so, I don't wanna use the word narrow-minded, but don't be so glum or don't think things are so grim when there's an opportunity that could be equally as strong.
Yeah, the yin and the yang is well said. Yeah, media is the programming language of humans. So it's not going away. Yeah, you know, it is just not going away. It's been here for cuneiform tablets and we're just getting newfangled types of media. So I like the old is new and new is challenge. That's, that's interesting.
The Greeks created it a long time ago, right? Tragedy and comedy.
You can choose which one, which lens you wanna view it through. I like to choose comedy. It's at least more fun that way.
I like to laugh.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Cool, man. All right. Well, this has been great. Thank you for spending some time. I'll forward you the recording and then I'll publish it and I'll tag you on it and yeah, super simple. And yeah, stay in touch, man. I think some fun stuff's gonna keep on happening and Internet media and it's not going anywhere.
This was so much. This was the best meeting I had on a Friday in a long time. Anytime you wanna like do more stuff like this, get deeper, like ping me, man. I'll make time.
Yeah, I have a guy, I won't name him on here, but he's a good close friend of mine and he's like a world creator. And has worked in toy entertainment media. Like, he's right up your alley, but he's, I mean, he goes like, like way out there, but he brings it all back. He's like one of the most well-read, well-researched gamer philosophy science. So it would be kind of a rad convo to have like us 3 and do, maybe I'll do that the next one.
Yeah.
He's doing some stuff over the next couple months, but then Yeah, maybe like summer, late summer or something, because he's going on a spiritual journey quest right now to figure out like what does it all mean after doing the big tech thing for a little bit. So we'll see what happens.
Like my spiritual journey right now is to my Nespresso machine, like just constant pulling the lever, like hoping for gold coins to come out. Honestly, that's the next one is like that you should do. You should have one where it's just like It's— has my addiction to stimulants just become that much more unmanageable at this point as I continue to pour more Keurig and more Nespresso in my body?
So, you know, that's a perfect product for Vegas, is like add casino gaming to the single-serve coffee espresso machine, and once every 100 you get the Willy Wonka golden ticket. Like, I guarantee you that is an experiential activation. Like, sales would skyrocket.
Oh yeah.
Like the lottery.
You're like, that's hazelnut.
People are just like, oh, all right. Well, that's a weird way to leave the episode, but hey, why not? It's a Friday.
Yeah. Awesome.
Cool. All right, man, thanks for your time today. And yeah, let's catch up soon. And that other project thing, we'll probably— I'll ping you on if it starts kicking off in the next couple of weeks or something. Yeah, cool.
Have a great weekend.
Talk to you later. Bye.
