EP 334 – Why Media Has Always Been a Tech-Driven Industry – Rob Bradley – CNN International Commercial

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Michael Waitze 0:06
Hi. This is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast. Today. We are joined by Rob Bradley, a Senior Vice President Digital Revenue Strategy and Operations at CNN International Commercial. This should be a good one, Rob, thank you so much for coming to the show. Let’s give our listeners a little bit of your background. Just for some context,

Rob Bradley 0:25
it’s great to be here. Michael, thanks for inviting me. Appreciate it. My background, the way that I consider myself is a commercial leader, really, first, first and foremost. So I’m probably not as techy as some of your guests. You could say, the way that I sort of view technology, and the sort of background I have is, you know, ultimately, I drive the business towards hitting a number a revenue goal, in this instance, predominantly through advertising sales. However, as we know, the media industry, you know, is very much now a data industry, you could say a technology industry. You know, it has to deal with all these different endpoints where audiences consume our content. So we have to use technology to meet our goals. So for me, it’s about, you know, driving a strategy, utilizing technology, particularly operations and data driven technologies, to hit commercial outcomes. That’s

Michael Waitze 1:14
awesome. And can you just broaden out a little bit to me, because I want to get back to this tech thing. I also want to get a little historical for people and for you, because I think that’s going to be fun talk to me exactly like, what does digital revenue strategy and operations mean at CNN International Commercial?

Rob Bradley 1:30
I mean, it’s a mouthful of a title. It’s got too many words in it, so it is confusing. But ultimately, you know, the strategy piece is like listening to the market and do we have our clients, ultimately, and consumers, and how they do we have the right solutions and go to market strategy to win business so win advertising budgets from our clients. So how we present ourselves the commercial solutions that we present to them? Are we going to win, you know, against some of our competitors and other places that our clients can spend money on advertising to reach an audience. Got it. The operations part is very much a technical operations team. So this is a group of people that you know follow the sun around the world, are having a number of different countries around the world that ultimately are using different platforms to deliver the ads that we have to understand who our audiences are, to make sure they’re seeing the right kind of advertising, to make sure that we’re meeting our clients, KPIs and goals, that they have to meet their their advertising goals, their campaign goals, and basically making sure we deliver what we say we Will for our clients. So there’s a big delivery piece, yeah, but you know, the whole industry is full of data now, so a lot of it is making sure we deliver, but then we prove what we’ve done has worked. So there’s a big part of that evidence based delivery as well.

Michael Waitze 2:54
Awesome. Okay, I want to do a little bit of history, if you don’t mind. And I’m sure I’m older than you, because I’m older than almost everybody that I know, this because, exactly because I think if you’re working at CNN, if you’ve been in the media industry for a long time, and you have for almost two decades, you will know this because I’m sure you and your teams have talked about this over time. This idea that the tech or the disruption in the media industry is new is not true. I remember, and I’ll go back to 1972 when I was seven years old, right when HBO was founded and first released. I was only seven, so I don’t remember that, but I do remember in 1975 one of my buddies in New Jersey saying, I’m going to be able to buy this box and watch movies at home. And it felt like magic. It really did, but it was completely disruptive. And I thought, what are you going to you’re not going to go to the movie. The movie theater. Like, how does this even work? And he said it was cable TV. But just think about, like, being a nine year old in 1975 and 1974 excuse me, thinking they gotta pull a cable to everybody’s house, just all this stuff, right? It was, seemed really disruptive. And then when I was older, so when I was 15 in 1980 that’s when CNN started, and I remember thinking Cable News Network. It almost sounds quaint when you think about it today, right? Because that’s how it started. And there was some dude in Georgia named Ted Turner. It’s like, what are you doing? And why is it on 24 hours a day? But I just wanted to set this up that, like this disruption that’s happening is not new. It’s been going on for almost 50 years, right? When I was a kid, ABC, CBS, NBC, and now all of that is gone, right? So can you talk to me about automation and data and how that changed the game 15 years ago, and how it’s just completely changing it now?

Rob Bradley 4:35
Yeah, so ultimately, you know, technology’s in the way that audiences, so people, all of us, people, listening to this, consume their content, is ultimately driving, you know, changes in how media companies operate. So it comes down to kind of human behavior, almost, right? You know, how are humans behaving with the technology that’s available to them in the way that they can consume, consume content? So if you, if you think of. Of, yeah, that that cable innovation of cable and Ted Turner, thinking, you know, I think the world, I think news has an important place in the world. I think, you know, there’s a purpose there. I now have this platform that means, hey, I could own a whole channel. And actually, I think there’s always something going on in the world that people should know about, yeah, and I have a distribution for it now, I’m going to embrace that that was like real innovation at the time. And then he did the same for kids, right, with Cartoon Network and so on. So that is real innovation, you know, nearly 45 years ago, as you said, but you fast forward and, you know, you think about the constant disruption, you know, when I joined, yes, two decades ago, but when I did start in media, I was selling quarter page ads, or whole page ads, if I was lucky, in a local magazine in a small town called Eastbourne on the south coast of England. You know, straight out of university, I did a sports science degree, which is completely different to what I do now. But you know, was, you know, the media industry was full of, you know, quite fun, gregarious, you know, I think sports people, you know, quite they like working as a team, and they enjoy social life. Media represents all of that. So it was good fun, but I was waiting by the fax machine for a deal to come in, right? I might have even posted the contract to someone for sure, right? That’s not that long ago, yeah. So over that next 10 years, what really happened was the rise of programmatic advertising and data driven advertising, alongside the rise, of course, of social media and platforms. You know, platform is a bit of a word I’d like to delete in the industry, to be honest. Because, like, what? What is a platform? Yeah, of course, you could say meta is a platform. You could say CNN is a platform. Cables are whatever it is. But, you know, different touch points that say with audiences around the world, but from an advertising perspective, my specialism, you know, I was a salesperson. By then, I had moved to companies, you know, in London, bigger companies, worked in News Corp, worked IDG, which is now foundry, big, big American corporates. I’ve kind of always been at. There was this thing called programmatic advertising and data management platforms. This is like 2008 let’s say 2009 10. No one was doing it. And you know, I was like, this sounds pretty interesting. I can sell more ads more efficiently, using technology to define who an audience is and make sure I’m serving the right ad to the right person at the right time. The Holy Grail of advertising, that’s what advertisers want, right? So if you think of using technology to do that, and just as a salesperson, I said, I’ll do it, no one even was really that interested. And fast forward to today. You know, up to 80% of ads are traded in this way. And for people that don’t know, programmatic advertising is the automated buying of audiences against data sets on media platforms or social media and so on and so forth. Long answer, but the last thing I you know, the way I’d link it to today, though, and why that’s constant innovation. When that happened, everyone was like, sales we don’t need sales people anymore, right? Because the machines are going to sell the ads. Yeah, yeah. And automation has taken over and but let me fast forward to today. Actually, what you’ve got now is people like me, who was a salesperson and my team, who now have to be data experts, technologists. We all everyone on the sales team needs to understand what data management platforms we have. And actually, we’ve embraced the machines to do what they do best, which is scale, and then we’ve embraced the human side of creativity when it comes to storytelling and making content for our clients. So it’s just changed what we’ve done that was 15 years ago. So it’s not the first time automations come in. No,

Michael Waitze 8:53
no, not at all. And so that brings up two things for me. The first is, you said 15 years ago, nobody else was doing this like to me, I’m maybe more of a techie than you are. For me, I’ve been watching this forever, and it just seems like this kind of programmatic advertisement has been going on since I was a kid, which is not true, but maybe I was just following it. But when you jumped in to introduce this as a non tech guy, I guess my question is, what was the tipping point for you? What did you see? Like, how did you see this? And why did you know that it mattered? And then the second part of that question is, what did your bosses or your colleagues say? Like, this guy’s nutty or, Hey, this could be a great idea. Do you know what I

Rob Bradley 9:29
mean, I had a great boss, a guy called Dan Shaw, who was ahead of his time with it within this space. And actually, the reason why I heard of a data management platform, where I was very early, you know, and launched, you know, what we believe is the first publisher trading desk in the UK at this point, is because your IDG ventures had actually invested in a platform called crux. So I was early. I heard about it early, right? So I always say this to people on my team. Hear about something that’s interesting, and you think it’s early, and you believe in some of this disruption, embrace that, yeah, let

Michael Waitze 10:06
me know.

Rob Bradley 10:08
Yeah, yeah. So, so, so, so, you know, I suppose, motivated from a career point of view, motivated from delivering from our clients in a sales world. If I could be better for them, I’m going to hit my bonus, you know, all of these things, and if you can use technology to hit those same goals, but in a smarter, more efficient way, then why not? So actually, yeah, it did feel like a little bit of a skunk works in the corner. You know, I was onboarding these tech platforms myself as a salesperson, right, and dealing with these people. And to be honest, hardly any of them worked in the way that they said they would. At that point, the industry was like, figuring it out, right? Yeah. So, you know, the PowerPoint was a little bit different to the delivery that say, from from some some of the platforms, they’ve obviously sorted that out now so many years later. But, you know, it was just a case of believing in something could be disruptive and making it work for you and your business is kind of what I say. And I think that’s my firm philosophy around technology in the media machines, is you have to understand it to see if it can work and make it work for you, rather than letting someone else disrupt you. And being behind the game, in

Michael Waitze 11:12
a way, was a great time to be introduced to it, right? Because, because the platforms weren’t delivering as they said they were. I mean, all this vaporware, Microsoft was super famous for this, right? They’d be like, we can do this. And you’re like, well, it doesn’t really do that. But still, really do that, but still, you get to test a whole bunch of different things, and in a way, you can’t fail. But it’s also a good life lesson, right? This idea of just because it’s new, it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it could be great. And if we do seven of them, if one of them works, we win, right? It’s a great thing to teach to, um, to your junior employees. The other question I was this, because you said, and I think about this a lot in the context of AI, which we can talk about later, but you’re basically describing a hybrid mechanism, right? Use the tech for the data gathering, the data analysis, the data stuff that it understands the things that it can do way better than a human can, but leave the creative side to people who now have way more time to think about what should the content be. And I’m curious is, as you got to the programmatic side, and you started becoming more efficient, and you started to be able to get audience right very specifically, did it then change the way you developed content around it, and did it segment stuff even more than you had expected.

Rob Bradley 12:21
Yeah, 100% Yeah. I think, I think the two, the two main outcomes of how we change our strategy and what we drove were one I’ve kind of touched on it already, was everyone had to get a lot smarter. Yeah, so I think the whole industry got smarter, which is exciting. So we upskilled ourselves, right? So the technology didn’t make us lose jobs. It actually made us more valuable. Yeah, salaries went up, right? Because you’re not just talking about being a salesperson that just has to take someone to lunch, have a couple of drinks and make them sign a contract, right? You have to be you have to really understand technology. So, you know, the industry got smarter, and we, and we and I think the industry, you know, on the whole, got paid better as a result. So technology allowed us to upskill, which, when we get onto AI, I think is an interesting, an interesting discussion, and then on the other side, it’s, well, we’re now. I mean, I remember going, you know, I was 32 you know, nine years ago, when I joined Turner. And, you know, I was invited to an executive off site in New York. I was so excited, right? It was like my career just suddenly bumped up, right? And, you know, I did a presentation to, you know, 100 execs from around the world in New York and, you know, and I had these slides on what programmatic does. And I said, I can sell a billion ads with three people, right? And they were like, Isn’t that like, oh, you know, the ads people were not. Everyone in that room were as people, right? And I didn’t even mean it to be shocking. I was just telling the truth, right? I was just like, I could sell a billion ads with three people. And, you know, at the time, that was like, I was like, public enemy number one from a few people around the company. And, you know, however, the next slide I had was, what we actually do is tell stories at this company, right? We’re storytellers. We’re the best storytellers in the world from HBO. So sopranos, which is still the best thing ever made, right? In my opinion,

Michael Waitze 14:28
succession might be up, maybe just so you know, I’ve never seen one episode of The Sopranos and not one episode of succession, because I was living outside the United States for the last 30 something years, and there was no HBO outside the United States. But I’ve never seen it. So please go, Okay,

Rob Bradley 14:43
well, there’s time you need. You know, you need a lot of time because it’s long, but succession, I would, I would say to you, or any of your listeners that haven’t watched it, I mean, if they’re interested in the media industry, is is unbelievable, because it’s exceptional. But, you know, we’re. Storytellers, right? And if you, if you focus on what brands do from an advertising perspective, what they really want to do is get a story across to a consumer about, you know what their product is, why it suits them, why they should invest in that company. And then today, even more so, why? You know the purpose of that company, which could be around sustainability, climate tech, to solve problems, should align with that consumer’s own beliefs and brands and so on, and what they believe and what they want from their brands. So really, we should be focusing on that. Let’s sell the billion ads over here, and let’s work with our clients to tell their story which is more like we’re a video company, right? Let’s make videos with them, branded content, which allows them to sell story, sponsored content, a content led sale, which is much more around creativity. Yes, we have data feeding what content works and all of this piece, and there’s AI involved in that now as well, of course, yep, but it’s very different than just selling a box on a page or a box on a screen, which is still very important. But we let the machines, you know, we balance the machines versus the storytelling part.

Michael Waitze 16:13
I want to go back and tell you that this idea of everybody got smarter is something that really resonated, resonates with me, and I’ll tell you why. On the trading desk, we had the same thing happening in the same way. You could sell you said I could sell a billion ads with three people. I said to my bosses when algorithmic trading started, which is no different than programmatic advertising. Excuse me, I was like, we could do 10 times more business, lower commissions, and make way more money. And I was like, you? I was like, non grata, because they were like, really? And I was like, yeah. And for seven months, I’ll tell you this, for seven months at Goldman Sachs, I executed every single trade by myself using technology. And the only reason why we had to hire a couple more people was because I was starting to get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Rob Bradley 16:58
I’ve got that too, by the way, I know exactly what that is.

Michael Waitze 17:01
You can’t make it up, but, but the point was, we literally did way more business and made way more money. We went from an $8 million year business to $135 million year business because of technology and the idea that the same thing was happening on the ad desk, essentially at CNN or Warner Brothers. It’s not shocking to me, but interesting that it was kind of going on all at the same time, same time, because we’re sitting there in our little bubble thinking like we’re geniuses over here doing all this cool stuff, and you’re sitting there doing the same thing and taking the same trip to New York that I was taking from Tokyo, and having the same conversation. So I think that’s actually kind of cool. I want to ask, I want to ask you this, though, talk to me a little bit more about branded content and in sponsored content, and how that’s changed, the kind of tenor of content that gets served to people, that gets served to people, right? Because I think that’s really interesting, because that’s a big difference from like the 50s, 60s and

Rob Bradley 17:53
70s, right? Yeah, it is. It is, and I think it can, yeah, the industry has a job to do in, yeah, making people aware of what’s driving. It driving, you know, I suppose an ad run business today. I mean, look the advertising spaces across our platform. So let’s just say it’s web app, you know, CTV now, so connected TVs, and, you know, still, still traditional linear TV or cable. You know, all of that is still vital to our business, and sometimes we are just an audience where a client has made an ad to get in front of an eyeball, right? We are that still, however, to really make our commercial model work now we need to do so much more, and that is where branded and sponsored content come in. So branded content is where, you know, let’s take CNN. CNN has a tone of voice. It has a trust against what it says. It has a style of production. It has a global audience and global app capabilities when it comes to production, you know, we can light up teams anywhere in the world, very few people in the way that we can. And what branded content does is it’s labeled as advertising, but ultimately, it’s a video or a piece of written content or an infographic where the brand actually has a voice on, on, you know, how it’s made the content that’s in there, you can feature a device. Let’s say it’s a, you know, for a mobile company. And you can be, you can be very advertising with it. Let’s say, right? However, ultimately, what they’re doing is they’re, they’re buying a CNN tone of voice and style of production, and then the audience that it reaches in the back of it. A good example would be, you know, if you know, take Samsung, one of our biggest clients, you know, we made incredible piece of branded content about the accessibility of their televisions, you know, and you know, for how it could enable the heart of healing to interact hard of hearing, to interact with their you know, with their devices. Ultimately, you know, we found. Found, you know, a gentleman that went viral for doing sign language on the side of a stage while Beyonce was performing, told his story. The product is featured throughout it, but ultimately, you know, it’s a human led story. It delivers some sort of emotional response when you see it. It’s quite motivating, but it still has the Braddock, the brand in it, you know, the TV the reason why I’m telling stories, it’s a very authentic, interesting story, still, yeah, ultimately, it’s advertising, though, where

Michael Waitze 20:29
does where does that get published? Though?

Rob Bradley 20:32
It gets published on the site and it’s labeled as partner content or branded content. So it’s labeled in a way which is different to every other type of content across our site, but also it goes into social. So this is where we make the social platforms work for us, right? And we push it out across social. So that’s where we can make money out of meta and, you know, Google and Tiktok and all these other platforms that we have to be on today because our audience exist there. Yeah,

Michael Waitze 21:01
interesting. So you produce this content specifically for, in this case, Samsung, right? Which sounds a very interesting story. The guy doing sign language while Beyonce is singing, is performing, and then you take that, you cut it up, or do whatever to it, and then you put it on social, and you also put it on your own website, but then you link back to it as well. Because,

Rob Bradley 21:18
yeah, yeah, it’s pushed out as much. You know, we have to guarantee engagements against it, right? This is a, this is a commercially paid for video. So we’re, you know, we’re going in our own environment first and foremost. But then, like with our editorial content, we have to go into social platforms, because that’s where audiences are today. That’s where they’re getting a lot of their a lot of their content from. The reason why you would do that with CNN is, you know, the social platforms in the media space is incredibly cluttered, right? Very much, super noisy, very It’s so noisy. So if you have CNN, and it’s aligned with another brand that someone might know, it cuts through that noise, as well as being a story that can resonate with an audience. So it’s about cutting through, using the brand. So it still comes back to CNN as a brand that cuts through the noise and is trusted. So

Michael Waitze 22:04
what is the creative process like? And I guess, I don’t know if this is controversial or not, but does this mean that you’re disintermediating, disintermediating, excuse me, these big advertising agencies, which seem to me, you don’t have to comment on this if you don’t want to, but it seems to me like they’re an anathema, right? Because you’re the media companies, whether it’s CNN or any other media company, or the ones dealing directly with the brand, and you must have your own creative division, right? Because, like you said, you can serve now to all of these platforms. Internally, you must have your own creatives that go right to the brand and leapfrog kind of the ad agencies, I’m guessing, yeah. So internally, you had this, sorry, go ahead.

Rob Bradley 22:40
Yeah, it’s actually quite a symbiotic world, all of it, all of it still, and I’ll explain why it’s a mixed, you know, it’s mixed. In some instances, it’s brand direct, and some instances, is still for the agencies and execute for the agencies. And there’s a strong role that they play. However, you know, I often say, you know, I sort of touched on and it’s sin, and can’t just be a media company anymore. We are a media buyer, right? We buy media across social, right? Against this video that on, on branded content, we are a creative agency. We have a full service creative agency called sin and create, which is a huge part of our business. Up to 70% of our revenue touches that that agency creates content, you know, from TVC ads or banners right to this branded content video series I mentioned. And you know, we’re a data company and a research company and all these things, right So, but the agencies, you know, still become very important when it comes to execution, management of client administration, reporting, the contacts and relationships they have with media owners are very important, and it’s not we’re not always making a con sometimes, of course, just the ads that our clients have are made by creative agencies, and then media is bought through agencies as well got it. So it’s all mixed and works and works together in some respects, in a way where everyone plays a strong role.

Michael Waitze 24:05
So how do you how do I phrase this the right way? I have this phrase that I like to use, that no one succeeds alone, no matter how big you are, right? And again, you said, there’s a symbiotic relationship with external ad agencies and stuff like that, and with everything being digital today, how do you use technology at scale to build and enhance existing partnerships and new partnerships? And what does like an ideal partnership look like? To CNN,

Rob Bradley 24:35
yes, good question. So an ideal partnership is one where, you know, I spoke, I’ve spoke about kind of research and reporting a couple of times, right? Our best relationship, some of our clients, been with us 20 years for sure, and they’re spending a lot of money each year. That’s because we’re proving it works, and because we’re even if it’s. Let’s say it’s an agency is involved, and a brand involved. Often, if it’s a bigger deal, the brand is involved, and the agency and the media owner, right? So all of you are involved, because if it’s including a lot of content, branded content, or they’re sponsoring a TV show and sponsoring a digital series, whatever it is, they really going to want to know what it’s about, who the characters are, you know, what reporting they expect. So you need a deep relationship with everyone in that buying chain, let’s say, because ultimately, the technology enables a lot of data and insight from what you’ve done, right, what you know you might have made six digital videos, right? That you post it across your own website, and then you post all across social you not only will say, well, actually, these one and two got the most views now, now you can understand the semantics. How do people feel about that video. You can get emotional response information from what people have commented, or the likes or the keywords, right. You can understand whether positive or negative. You can understand you know which bit really popped or which characters popped across this. So you’re then learning, okay, we’re going to put that into the creative process, and the next videos are going to be even better, even more on point, even more influential, let’s say, and we’re going to learn about what audiences work and resonated and then, you know, you can do things like look alike, modeling, where it’s like, hey, these guys really, really loved this video, right? That these guys look a lot like these guys, these guys and girls and everything too. So then you can expand that audience so you’re constantly learning, and that means you need a real, trusted, open, honest relationship about what works, what doesn’t, so that you can always get better and better, and the technology enables that to scale through doing it efficiently.

Michael Waitze 26:41
Do you worry about audience capture at all?

Rob Bradley 26:45
What do you mean? What do you mean by audience?

Michael Waitze 26:46
Like the audience then ends up driving all of because you you surf stuff to the audience, you have all this data. So back in like in the 1970s in the 1960s you had Nielsen, and Nielsen would put boxes in everybody’s house, and they’d be like, I love happy days, and they’d walk out of the living room and not watch it anymore, right? Yeah, yeah. You could do that today. You could put on a YouTube video and, like, walk out of the room in five devices in your house if you really wanted to support somebody. But I don’t think a lot of people are doing that. There are ways to game it in ways not to but I think at the end of the day, right? Those are edge conditions. You can tell what people like and don’t. But if you want to do something really creative and really different, you run the risk that your audience has already told you, I want to see this stuff, I believe in this thing. And does it limit at some level, the creative aspect of it, where you’re like, let’s try this new thing, and the audience is like, we didn’t ask for that. That’s audience capture. Yeah,

Rob Bradley 27:35
yeah, yeah. I get it. I think. I mean, CNN reaches 500 million house of households and people around the world, right? So you’re starting with half a billion people. You got a big, you know, over 200 million people following us across social just and seeing it. And you go into the Warner Brothers discovery universe, right, right? And you’re touching, you know, the majority of people in the world at some point are seeing some sort of Warner content, or have a touch point across social and, you know, in the billions of people. So you’re starting like, like, you know, very wide, I suppose, what data you know, and data management platforms, and you know, programmatic platforms allow you to do is, you know, build tribes and understand who’s interested in what and how they could consume and share content. The challenge, actually, which goes into what is a big problem in the in the media industry, is assumptions around what people want, and technology creating echo chambers, what people might totally enforce that right to reinforce their beliefs, which we’ve seen a huge problem, obviously, you know, with fake news and echo chamberlas around conspiracy theories that people get themselves into and all of the myriad of issues that that that changes. But then also from a brand, you could limit your potential audience, right? If you’re going, you know, too far in on it has to be this audience on this platform at this time of day, you know, because you can do all that now they need to see this ads, and then the next ad needs to be this ad. And it’s like, well, actually, maybe you’re cutting out, you know, a huge amount of your potential audience, which could be both, you know, on the consumer side or the B to B side. We do a lot of B, B to B as when, because, you know, let’s take technology, right? I’m a sales leader, but I’m signing off budgets for technology platforms, probably more, you know, more than a lot of people in the company, like 10s and 10s of platforms. I’m not a CTO, right? If you’re just targeting CTO your platform, I mean, this is not a new story, right? Which is probably why you’re laughing. But hey, I’m a commercial leader. If you want to get some technology in here, you need to hit me just as much as the CTO, just as much as the CDO, whatever it is. So you know, you need to make sure that you’re you’re sort of open and listening to the data, but open to not listening to the data sometimes, and maybe the more human side,

Michael Waitze 29:55
exactly. And this gets back to this hybrid idea that we were talking about earlier. I see this all over the. The Tech ecosystm, and I don’t want to get to AI yet, but I do want to cover it. I want to ask you this, though, where do like, well funded and kind of very targeted media companies fit in? If you don’t mind me asking, like, the daily wire has like, 3 million subscribers, right? And TYT has 6 million subscribers, and the minus touch network has like, almost three and they’re growing pretty fast. Like, how do you how do you deal with those guys? I’ll use the term guys, because they’re mostly guys that run these companies. And does it matter? And do they inform anything that you end up doing? Do they you learn anything from those guys? And so what is it?

Rob Bradley 30:37
Yeah, we have to be looking at what other people are doing constantly. Go back to what you said, you know, Ted Turner launching a cable network. We’re still around and still the biggest news company in the world on many metrics, because we constantly innovate and disrupt ourselves. Right? Sometimes it’s hard because we’re so big and, you know, all those challenges that come with being in a corporate and and so on. But you know, we have to make sure we’re looking at again, human behavior, what they’re interested in, what competitors doing, where they’re winning, or new startups, and see again, can we make that work for us? So of course, we’re always doing that, but in terms of where those people have a place to to play in the industry. I mean, you know, humans are quite complex, right? Think of all the things you’re into, I’m sure you’re not just into podcasts and media, right? You’re into many different things in technology, right? You’ve got all these hobbies, just like me and and, and, you know, there are, there is room, if you can fund them now. And I think subscription models and subscription emails mean that niche companies don’t just have to rely on advertising, yeah, which is where they don’t have scale, they’re going to struggle, right? In some respects, that they can play a very important role in hitting, you know, in hitting a person who’s complex with many different things. They may be interested a specific niche of that person. So I think it very much complements what, what, what someone like CNN does. And I’m all for it, you know, I think you’ve seen, I mean, that the new space is interesting. You know, everyone might have judged whether CNN would still be around, still be as strong as we are when, you know, Buzzfeed was the hottest thing, Vice was the hottest thing all of these different startups. And then you look at some of the challenges there, however, you know, the bit different than a very niche startup,

Michael Waitze 32:29
yeah, I would say this. I was laughing when you said BuzzFeed. And I can’t remember the name of the other one, because it probably doesn’t matter anymore. What was the other one? You said, vice. Yeah, and vice. The thing is, though, those guys were never going to be around for that long. I wished I had been a fly on the wall at CNN when those companies were there just to be inside, like, the internal meetings, right? It was the same thing when I was at Goldman Sachs. You’d have all these little brokers pop up, right? Going, like, we’re going to use this tech and we’re going to disintermediate this and you’re just sitting there going, we’ve got a $25 billion balance sheet, and it’s just going to be really hard to compete with that as good as you are. Because the other question I was going to ask you is, and Microsoft used to do this all the time. If you have an M and a team, if you’re really worried about somebody, I mean, I’m not telling you what to do or what you were doing, like you just wave them in if they’re that good. If not, you just ignore them, because you’re right. It’s going to be really hard to get to the same scale as CNN and some of the other businesses, particularly at the water level, right? Like, that’s hard,

Rob Bradley 33:29
yeah, it is. And it’s, it’s, it starts kind of with something quite old school, which is like a brand, yeah, you know, any coffee shop in the world, right? You say, CNN, they know what you’re talking about, you know. So, so you start with that point. It doesn’t mean we don’t have challenges, though, right? So I don’t want to be like, like, it’s all positive, because the challenges we have are not necessarily that BuzzFeed is, it’s that our audience is now, you know, consuming all our content and meta where we don’t control the data there we don’t, yeah, you know, we’re arguably building an audience in someone else’s platform and someone else’s business model, right? That’s a challenge. You know, the challenge of some advertisers are avoiding news for their advertising. At the moment, they’re spending in social where there could be all sorts of misinformation, but they’re avoiding news which is defunding news in some respect, which is a real big problem, because they’re blocking and, you know, blunt, kind of key words that could be around. I mean, it was a good example in during the European Cup where, you know, words that were blocked, like, you know, football, I’m talking about football, soccer. Don’t do

Michael Waitze 34:37
don’t do that to me. Yeah,

Rob Bradley 34:41
you know, advertisers programmatically in a platform, you can put a word like strike or attack, right? And it will block all content that has strike and attack. But if you’re talking about football or soccer, people are striking and attacking all the time, yeah, they should be all day. Or athletics, whatever it is, you’re blocking some of the most. You know, hard earned audiences on the internet because you’re and therefore you’re blocking a lot of news content. So it’s not like we don’t have challenges, but, and they’re very real, but it’s different than we’re not worried about BuzzFeed coming to eat our lunch like perhaps you were a few, a few years ago. Yeah, it’s

Michael Waitze 35:17
funny. Most sports analogies are war analogies, like George Carlin used to do this whole thing about the difference between baseball and football. Right, in in football, you have a bomb. In American football, in baseball, you have a fly. Like, it’s just hilarious, but you’re right. If those words get blocked, then you can’t have the search for it, then you can’t get the ads around it, because and exactly so what happens to news and again, like I remember when I was a kid, right? ABC, NBC, CBS, nightly news was on all at the same time, seven o’clock at night, or six o’clock, and then 11 o’clock they do the late news. I never felt like they were that different. There was just like a different guy reading the news, and it was just like, did you want Peter Jennings or did you want Dan? Rather, and they didn’t seem to be saying anything different. I can’t believe I remember those names, by the way, that’s right off the top of my head. But now it’s so fragmented. And news used to be a loss leader, but now it’s not anymore like how has that changed the delivery of news and the trust around it as well? If you know what I mean,

Rob Bradley 36:17
yeah, it’s I suppose I’m a commercial leader rather than an editorial leader. I know. I know.

Michael Waitze 36:23
Are you still to sail against it? Right? Yeah, I

Rob Bradley 36:26
do. And I think, look, there’s like, there’s a utility and purpose of news which is vital, yeah, I think. And I mean that, I mean it quite seriously, right? Everyone, I may be a commercial leader. But everyone that works that wakes up in the in the morning and works with us, you know, feels like there’s a purpose to what we do. That could be someone delivering an ad campaign on a tech platform, or it could be a salesperson or editorial, obviously, a journalist who on the frontline. The reason being that there’s kind of a utility to news, right? By uncovering what’s going on in the world means that, you know, one, you can hold power to account. Two, you can uncover what’s happening to drive policy changes. And there’s plenty of an example. There’s a whole study called the CNN effect, if you’ve ever heard of that, where it’s the it’s, it’s, you know, the disproportionate effect that 24 hour news channels at the time were having on government policies and things like this, like we have a, we have a campaign called the Freedom Project, which looks at modern day slavery. We’ve driven policy and law changes, you know, in countries around the world, and have had, you know, charities funded, you know, out of the content we’ve had, so, you know, that’s news, you know, uncovering something and then driving real change right, and then, of course, you know, making sure that we know what’s happening on in the world to live a, hopefully a better life through understanding and making decisions about what we do. And that could be something big around how we vote right based on a policy against what’s happening in a war. It could be a dinner table discussion over like, you know what happened in sport? It could be where to travel next, right? Yeah, so CNN is news, but actually, you know, it’s also we have a lot of content, of course, in business, on travel, on style and fashion and art and architecture and all these things as well, right? And that’s just a case of like, hey, they said education and culture and all of these things. So there’s this kind of purpose for it. I’m not sure I answered your question, but you can tell I’m passionate about what I do, hopefully,

Michael Waitze 38:29
but this was the whole point. Then that’s why I asked you this question. Actually, you remember when we were prepping, I said that smart people and educated people and hardworking people can be good at anything they try. But what I try to figure out is, why do you do what you do? Why do you care? Because if you care at it, then you have the potential to be great at it. Clearly, you’re very great at this because you care. And that’s you’ve just demonstrated that, and that’s kind of why I asked again, it’s not a political question. It’s not that that wasn’t the point. The point was that there is an essence inside of what you do, that you care about it, that you wake up every day and care. It’s not just like we press a button we go home, right? That there is a mission there, and that’s important for people to understand, right? Because I think at some point that gets exactly and I wanted to expose that, right? So that’s important to me, you know it? Yeah, so talk to me now about another elephant in the room, and I think it’s gonna be similar, no, because I think it’s gonna be similar to be similar to other industries, but I do like this sort of connectivity, of like, it’s happening here in finance, it’s happening in insurance, right? It’s happening in writing. But how is artificial intelligence and generative AI affecting the way you, at least, think about your role in cn CNNs role, and how that stuff gets used and deployed?

Rob Bradley 39:40
Yeah, yeah. It’s, I mean, I start from a place I mentioned earlier, which is like, embrace, understand, and make it work for you and your business, right? So I have that as my mantra, let’s say, and try and get that across the teams and within, within, you know, the bit of the business that I influence five years ago was one. And the sort of main launches, I suppose, of we have a tool called Sam and CEP. It stands for semantic analysis, moderator catching and it’s a machine learning tool that I mentioned. It links quite nicely to what we were just discussing. Right these programmatic platforms that block keywords are actually missing huge amounts of engaged audiences, and these are off the shelf technologies that are deciding these things, right? So our view is, well, actually it shouldn’t be some tech platform judging what content is suitable for a brand or not. We understand why a brand might not want to be against, you know, war versus football, of course, or soccer. So we built our own tool, right? We didn’t want to have something off the shelf, so we built our own tool that really understands, from, you know, uses machine learning to understand the sentiment of an article. The example I would give would be, you know, a sub subjects around cancer, let’s say, yep, right. It’s very different having, you know, an article around, you know, the challenges and the death rates of cancer, how someone, something, might be increasing in a certain part of the world without access to health care. Very different to an article about an innovation which might be utilizing a new medicine or technology to you know, uncover how to test for a cancer very early, so it can be treated very early. That second article is positive. It has innovation in it. It has technology in it, all these things that ran an off the shelf to a block block that one as well as the first one. So our tool understands whether an article is has a positive sentiment or negative sentiment, and unlocks these audiences.

Michael Waitze 41:46
Suck. It pretty cool, right? Yeah, it’s super cool. This is the other thing I want to ask you, if you go back to the beginning, because I saw this again, the same progression in my business. When I was in financial services, we weren’t. At some point, I realized we weren’t a trading company anymore, and we weren’t an M and A company anymore. We weren’t an investment banking business. We were a tech business. And in the same way that you this kind of loops back to something you said earlier in our conversation, but you said like people had to be smarter. I presume you actually had to hire different people. We went from hiring I always call them like wise guys from Brooklyn to be traders. That’s what it was. Though you could say whatever you want, send me an email if you don’t like what I said. But the flip side of that is, by the time I was leaving the business, we were hiring PhDs from MIT to sit on the trading desk because they didn’t understand the tech and they couldn’t write the algorithms. They didn’t understand how the back end was working. They couldn’t do the trading. And that’s not just on your side, the programmatic stuff, but I do believe that, like the tech teams must have really expanded bigger, because all the stuff you’re doing now is tech related. Did that kind of surprise you, not just from an AI perspective, but just overall. You’re like, Yeah, before there were three you guys, now there are 30 of you kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.

Rob Bradley 42:59
Big, Big time, big time. All the operational tech teams have obviously grown, you know, it’s an extraordinary amount. And our version of your wise guys were lads. We call them lads in London, right? You know, I have a global role, but I’ve always been based in London. We call them lads, right? And, you know, they’re, they’re kind of what I was, to be honest, I would say at sports, you know, in sports, you know, like going to the pub, which we all do in London, too much, right? But loud, and we go out and get excited and loud in the office, and there’s still a nice portion of that, and that gives like a really fun, exciting culture to be in. But all those lads, now, they may not be, you know, operating the platforms, but they definitely understand what the platforms do for our clients. And then the other side is, yeah, I mean, you know, absolutely there are PhDs in the office. Of course, there are the tech team, you know that have, you know, either studied some sort of engineering, you know, software engineering, as well as just, I suppose, operational leaders. That’s grown hugely. And the biggest part of my team now is that, is that right? So, so and again, they’re smart, and they get paid well, and that uplifts the industry and so on. So, you know, from an AI point of view, going sort of looping background. I spoke about that five years ago. You know what we did there? That tool was just getting smarter and smarter, right? And it’s, we have a job to make sure our clients know about it. But now, you know, in the creative studio, you know, they used to edit by hand. All this one object is in the screen, right? And they spend hours, right? Taking this thing out, they just press a button now, color grading in that as well, right? So it means they can focus on the storytelling, and maybe they are, you know, getting some of that story from from generative AI, and then looping that into the narrative itself, always checking it, and sense checking it. We’re very fact driven, of course, but it’s just driving efficiencies and meaning that people getting smarter, understanding these technologies, maybe hiring new people and everyone’s able to. Do a better job, and therefore, maybe, arguably, a smarter workforce gets paid more. People are happier all these things,

Michael Waitze 45:07
yeah, and look, George Lucas did this in the 1970s right with his imagine, I can’t remember the name of it, illusion, something, studio, right where he when he was making Star Wars, people would go in when they first, when Star Wars first came out and they thought saw that spaceship just kind of hovering over them people. It blew people’s minds. And back then, that CGI wasn’t so great, but it’s the same thing, right? And I think this is, you know, you were making fun of me a little bit earlier when I said I was older than you. You’re like, Yeah, you look like you are. But one of the benefits of this,

Rob Bradley 45:35
not that much, but one of the benefits of this actually, is that you

Michael Waitze 45:39
see multiple cycles. And I think for you as well, the more you see these sort of business cycles and technical cycles, you’re now able to adapt much more quickly, because you’re like, This is the thing that’s going to work. And these things are not going to work because I understand where they fit in, and I understand, like in the past, how this has happened. And I think because the tech world is moving so much faster now than it used to. You have to make those decisions faster. And I think it’s easier for guys like you that have a lot of experience, because you’ve seen the cycles. And that’s the only point I was going to make. Same thing with it, yeah, definitely,

Rob Bradley 46:11
yeah. It is all always these cycles and and, you know, I feel like I can be optimistic about it, because, yeah, you know, I told, I told, I remember, go back to those execs that I said, three people been in ads, right? And everyone, but no, the sales teams have just got smarter, and the other teams have grown, and all these things. So look, of course, there will be some other disruption. I’m sure there will be some negative parts of some of this rise of AI. But you know, at least by understanding it, at least by trying to make it, trying to use it, be at the forefront of it. You know, you give yourself a better chance of winning, that’s for sure, rather than fighting it and being slow

Michael Waitze 46:50
Absolutely. Look, I’m gonna, I’m gonna end on that optimistic note. You have to come back. I’d love this conversation with you. I learned a ton. I had fun. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Rob Bradley, a Senior VP Digital Revenue Strategy and Operations at CNN International Commercial. You were awesome. I appreciate your time. Thank you again for doing this, man.

Rob Bradley 47:08
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it anytime, anytime I love the format. Great discussion. Cheers, cheers…