This week I interviewed not one but two really smart people, at the same time. Personally this was one of my favorite interviews to date because:

I didn’t fuck up the recording Did you see #1?

I assume most of you already know Andrew. He’s the President and CEO of Index Exchange (formerly Casale Media for us old timers). He’s really smart and has probably been to your office once or twice to sell your boss on header bidding.

You may not be as familiar with MSG but he’s very well known in the industry. He has a secret email chain with high level media people where he goes over various industry trends and what he sees for the future. He’s also a consultant for many of the top publishers and brands in media and pretty damn smart too.

There’s a lot to talk about in this episode. The first one I like so much I’m gonna to a blockquote

“When it comes to deals, unless the spend is directed, which is a sales driven function, deals are meaningless.”

- Andrew Casale

See. Everything looks better as a block quote. But basically what Andrew is saying, while seeming obvious, isn’t actually how the industry ran last year. A large amount of spend was (and as of right now still is) flowing through “evergreen” or always on PMPs. These aren’t generally sourced by a sales rep, they’re usually brought in by the exchange or through mass invite.

But he has a point, this definitely seems to be where the puck is going. It’s just very strange to hear that deals (PMPs mainly) are meaningless when all I’ve been hearing about for the past 2 years is how important it is to increase our PMP number.

Something else I found interesting is MSG’s concept of “leader” brands as far as marketing is concerned. The short version is that for every buyer category there are one or two leaders. These are the Netflix’s (which also got a shoutout from Andrew later), the P&Gs, the Priceline’s. His theory is that they are so much better than other companies in their cohort that the actually act as the sun to that category’s mini universe. All the other brands strategies revolve around whatever the leader brand is doing.

I can’t quite grasp the repercussions of it (or if it’s even a bad thing) but I’m hoping someone smart will point it out in the comments.

Finally, MSG did some digging into the $SNAP S-1 and we tried to make comparisons between them and Facebook/Google. I gave my personal opinion that this is a company that is closer to (and should be valued like) Twitter than either of the wonder twins.

It’s late and I’m tired so instead of trying to force more words on here I’m going to treat this article like a breaking news story

This article will be updated as news comes in…