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• Transcript

  James Kotecki (00:06): 

  This is CES Tech Talk. I'm James Kotecki with another conversation that I recorded live at CES 2025 in the C Space Studio. You can get all those interviews on the CES YouTube channel, but we're bringing this one right to your podcast feed. Enjoy. Hey, welcome back. You're in the C Space studio sponsored by Integral Ad Science. I'm your host, James Kotecki. Here at CES 2025. We are talking to luminaries and thought leaders in the areas of marketing, media, branding, and advertising. And joining us now is the CEO of our sponsor, Integral Ad Science, Lisa Utzschneider, thank you for coming back to the C Space Studio, and joining you is Jen Wong, the COO of Reddit. Thank you so much for coming for the first time to the C Space Studio. Welcome to you both. 

  Lisa Utzschneider (00:50): 

  Thanks, James. 

  Jen Wong (00:51): 

  Thank you. 

  Lisa Utzschneider (00:51): 

  Thanks for having us. 

  James Kotecki (00:53): 

  Jen, tell me about how Reddit and IAS partnered together, how you got together. 

  Jen Wong (00:57): 

  Yeah. Well actually, Lisa and I have known each other for a long time, but IAS is obviously one of the leaders that customers really value in terms of working with other partners. And we announced today, our partnership in brand safety. So Reddit is greater than 99% brand safe, based on findings from IAS. We did an integration, and we also actually announced earlier last year, a pre-bid solution around using IAS' brand safety rubric. So our customers really value the thought leadership of IAS here, and so we're happy to bring that third party capability to Reddit. 

  James Kotecki (01:39): 

  And Lisa, tell me about what that brand safety looks like on Reddit. Because if someone is just coming into this conversation saying, "Well, Reddit? Well, anyone can just say anything on that platform," so then how do you look at how to actually make that a brand safe environment? 

  Lisa Utzschneider (01:51): 

  Yeah, so Reddit is such an important strategic platform for IAS, and we're thrilled that we continue to strengthen our partnership together with Reddit. As Jen mentioned, today, we announced launching brand safety and suitability on Reddit. And the way to think about that, is when you look at a platform like Reddit with its explosive growth, and an important revenue stream is advertising revenue, advertisers, when they're running ads on Reddit, they want to rest assured that where their ads are running, it's adjacent to content that is brand safe and brand suitable. And so we've launched our technology and we're doing just that, and growing with Reddit and also with their advertiser base. 

  James Kotecki (02:41): 

  And Jen, are these ads that are... I'm A Reddit user, as I'm sure many people watching, are, are these the ads that are kind of in the thread itself that kind of look like Reddit posts and it says that they're sponsored posts? 

  Jen Wong (02:52): 

  They're both. They're both in the feed, as well as in the conversation, which is in the comments, which is obviously the most valuable part of Reddit... 

  James Kotecki (03:00): 

  I see, yeah. 

  Jen Wong (03:00): 

  ... and the best of Reddit. 

  James Kotecki (03:00): 

  It's what I always say on Reddit. The real answer's in the comments. 

  Jen Wong (03:04): 

  It is, that's where the gold is. 

  James Kotecki (03:05): 

  Uh-huh. 

  Jen Wong (03:06): 

  Yeah. 

  James Kotecki (03:06): 

  And so is part of that too then based on Reddit's ability to kind of show... Because people are upvoting and downvoting things on Reddit, obviously, so I imagine that part of this equation is that if something is getting a ton of downvotes, that might be a signal that maybe that's not the most brand safe place to be, potentially. 

  Jen Wong (03:22): 

  Not necessarily. I mean, just for context, we do our own first party adjacency checks, et cetera. So that's obviously really important for how we serve our ads and think about brand safety. And then obviously customers can work with IAS to have their third party technology as well as an option. Posts, they can be upvoted, they can be downvoted, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the brand unsafe or brand suitable. It's really about giving the advertisers choice and controls over what's important to them. And that's very different per advertiser, what is sensitive to them. And so that's what it allows them to do. It's less about the voting and more about the context that they want to be in. 

  James Kotecki (04:04): 

  Interesting. Lisa, congratulations on this announcement with Reddit. What are the overall trends that you're looking at as we head here into 2025? What are some things that you want to tell the industry that they should be focused on? 

  Lisa Utzschneider (04:16): 

  Yeah, in addition to announcing our partnership, continuation of our partnership with Reddit by launching brand safety and suitability, we also announced today that we launched total media performance. And the way to think about that, it's an evolution of IAS' solutions. The company, we've been around for 15 years, we're a leader in global measurement and optimization, offering solutions like viewability, invalid traffic detection, brand safety and suitability, ensuring for brands and publishers that they are operating in a transparent environment, we are helping brands drive greater efficiency. We're now evolving it into performance. And that is a big theme you'll be hearing from IAS this year, is helping brands and platforms, and publishers, drive greater performance, greater efficiency, while they're also ensuring that the environment for the brands is brand safe and brand suitable. 

  James Kotecki (05:21): 

  And what are advertisers saying? I know it sounds like you've recently just announced this, but are advertisers getting excited about this in terms of... My understanding is that it's kind of like you take all the learnings about how to stay away from the bad stuff and now you figure out how to get more of the good stuff... 

  Lisa Utzschneider (05:33): 

  That's right. 

  James Kotecki (05:34): 

  ... and figure out how to go at the things that matter. 

  Lisa Utzschneider (05:35): 

  That's right, exactly. So things like dynamic optimization, driving greater ROI in programmatic environments, taking the black box out of the buying process for the brands, providing greater transparency, so again, it's helping them drive higher ROI. 

  James Kotecki (05:56): 

  And Jen, how does technology like IAS' technology and that partnership, how does that enhance the brand of Reddit itself? Because again, I wonder if you get different levels of advertisers' understanding or comfortableness with Reddit when they first might think about advertising on a platform with social media, user-generated content platform like Reddit. So then how important is it to have partnerships like this to get that Reddit brand itself where you want it to be? 

  Jen Wong (06:23): 

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we believe in giving advertisers choice, right? Different advertisers and different brands have different perspectives about the content they want be around, and whether they want third-party verification or they want to lean on first-party verification, and the things that we do with our technology. And we believe that that allows them to get the outcomes that they want. So it is really important, because a lot of customers really value the third-party technology and capability on top of the first-party. I think, look, Reddit's a place of immense conversation. It's growing so quickly, covers every topic in the planet. It's so vast. Our business is growing, we're adding new advertisers all the time. So yes, it's a great opportunity for advertisers to see, "Okay, what is the best way that I want to show up on Reddit and be given all of the options that they want to show up on Reddit in the way that they want?" 

  James Kotecki (07:16): 

  Lisa, do you see brands investing more in social media and video platforms? Why are they excited about doing something like that? 

  Lisa Utzschneider (07:22): 

  Yeah, brands want to be where the consumers are. And when you take a look at the trends over the last few years, it's short-form video adoption, it's social platforms, and brands want to be there. And the reality of many of the social platforms, it's user-generated content, a great example is Reddit, it is dynamic, it is unpredictable, but brands want to engage with the consumers in these environments. And what's critical is that we continue to invest in our AI-powered technology, the technology is accurate, it is sophisticated, it's granular, and again, we're ensuring that the brands are running in brand-safe, brand-suitable environments. 

  James Kotecki (08:08): 

  We spoke with two of your leadership members here in the C Space studio from IAS, always about AI, the conversation never stops being about AI here in the C Space studio, and so I'm glad you brought that up too. Jen, how are you thinking about... I'm sure there's a lot of different answers to this question, so maybe just from your perspective as the COO, how are you thinking about AI when it comes to Reddit, generative AI or just AI generally? What's your, I guess, philosophy on that? Just in the way you frame it up, because it's evolving and changing all the time, but what are some of the core philosophies you think about as you think about how that gets used? 

  Jen Wong (08:41): 

  Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, AI touches what we do in so many different ways. I mean, first of all, Reddit's corpus of human intelligence and conversation is actually a source of training for AI models. The way AI intelligence is powered is by human intelligence, which is by Reddit, and it's the biggest corpus there is. So we play a very important role in developing that technology and contributing to it. AI is also an incredible opportunity for our platform, for the experience of our users and our moderators and the way that they can build tools, we can build tools for them, to help them moderate and help people be successful in posting. We use AI for machine translation to enable, I think what is an incredible opportunity to have a global conversation. Things that are universal, where you can take language out as a barrier. Parenting, life experience, frankly, products that are global, discussions about media, entertainment, pop culture. 

  (09:39): 

  You can take the language friction out with AI, so incredible opportunity there. And then in the work that we're doing in our advertising platform, I think just the ability to generate creative variants that really are tuned to the Reddit audience, that increase the performance and the resonance and the engagement, that's an incredible opportunity. And then packaging that all together with insights. I think that's the most important part. I think performance is incredibly important, and you see a drive in the industry toward performance, that's great. But it can't just be a black box. What you really want is the insights, and I think AI allows us to enable translating all the success into insights that allow marketers to be more strategic and better, and I think Reddit is a real trove for that. We see that as a big opportunity. 

  James Kotecki (10:28): 

  And I love to see the passion about that. Lisa, do you have an AI philosophy that you use as you're guiding your team to make decisions about how to build products and interact with customers? 

  Lisa Utzschneider (10:35): 

  Sure. I mean, similar to what Jen has just said, so eloquently IAS, we've been leveraging and working with AI for years. Our multimedia classification is incredibly sophisticated, granular, classifying video, image, audio, text, near real time within live feeds. So leveraging open AI for things like language translation, misinformation detection, which is highly nuanced, deep fake detection. And the beauty of AI, and it's something I've noticed at CES this year compared to a year ago, a year ago, the AI buzz was everywhere at CES. It was sort of the word topic du jour. And what I love is this year, is everyone's coming back to Vegas and sharing real use cases. 

  James Kotecki (11:29): 

  Be more pragmatic with it. 

  Lisa Utzschneider (11:31): 

  More pragmatic, more specific, here is how we're leveraging AI, and IAS is doing just that every day on behalf of our customers to ensure our technology is more sophisticated. 

  James Kotecki (11:43): 

  Well, Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of Integral Ad Science, Jen Wong, COO of Reddit, thank you both for joining us here in the C Space Studio. 

  Lisa Utzschneider (11:50): 

  Thank you, James. 

  Jen Wong (11:50): 

  Thanks for having us. 

  Lisa Utzschneider (11:50): 

  Thank you. 

  James Kotecki (11:51): 

  And thank you of course to Integral Ad Science for sponsoring the C Space Studio. I'm James Kotecki, more conversations are just ahead, so stay with us. This is CES 2025. 

  (12:02): 

  Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation from CES 2025. That is our show for now, but there's always more tech to talk about, so if you're on YouTube, please subscribe and leave a comment. If you're listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartMedia, or wherever you get your podcasts, hit that follow button and let's give the algorithms what they want. You can get even more CES at ces.tech. That's C-E-S dot T-E-C-H. Our show produced by Nicole Vidovich and Paige Morris. Our C Space Studio episodes are produced and edited by Cramer. I'm James Kotecki, talking Tech on CES Tech Talk.