Simpli.fi TV’s 100th Episode with Co-Founders Frost Prioleau and Paul Harrison

David McBee: Hello, and welcome to a very special 100th episode of Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Today we are joined by Simpli.fi's co-founders, Frost Prioleau and Paul Harrison. We'll be talking about Simpli.fi's Roots, what has propelled the company over the years and their vision for its future. But first, some proper introductions. Frost leads Simpli.fi as the CEO, he's known for his knack for digital innovation, and game-changing strategies that shape precise, data-driven campaigns. Frost's expertise takes programmatic capabilities worldwide, offering impactful solutions and cementing his spot as a top industry leader in the digital realm. Paul is Simpli.fi's Chief Technology Officer. He's the driving force behind a revolution in digital advertising tech. Paul's visionary leadership puts Simpli.fi at the forefront of programmatic advertising, he's all about creating cutting edge solutions that empower advertisers, reshaping how data-driven advertising works, and making Simpli.fi a trailblazer in the field. Frost, Paul, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Paul Harrison: Thanks. Frost Prioleau: Thanks David. Glad to be here, and congrats on the hundredth edition of Simpli.fi TV. David McBee: How about that? We started in March of last year and we've been banging them out and we've had some amazing episodes, and I'm so excited to have you guys here. All right, well let's start with a little reminiscing. So if that's okay with you, I'd love to hear just about the early days of Simpli.fi. Frost Prioleau: Paul, you want to go or you want me to go? Paul Harrison: I can start with maybe a little bit of the background of how we got started. So in 2008, or 2009-ish timeframe, some of the larger players in the space were looking at creating a specification around doing real time bidding for inventory. And so I was asked to give my input on some of that, and I could see what was the potential there, and how it could change what we had been doing in the traditional network space. And so Frost and I were in the process of leaving to go do other things. Neither one of us necessarily knew exactly what we were going to do, but I started kind of kicking around this idea with another one of what ended up being one of our founders, a former engineer at Simpli.fi, about how this specification could actually work. And so started putting together information, Frost of course, wanted to know, okay, well that's great. How do you make money with this, and how does it scale? And all the usual questions. And so I started working on that and Armin flew in, and it was 2009 and Armin and I met up with Frost at my house actually, and sketched it all out. I still have those pages somewhere on a board, and we talked through it and everything, and then there was some refinement that had to happen, but that was sort of where the idea came from. And then we eventually came together and formed Simpli.fi, in January of 2010. So we're coming up on our, what is it, our 14th anniversary here. So that was sort of the beginning early stages. Frost? Frost Prioleau: Yeah, no, that's totally right. We had sold Personify, and I was thinking maybe it's time to take some time off, Go travel. And so I'm very thankful that Paul and Armin corralled me back in, because it's been a great journey, great journey with Simpli.fi. I think from my perspective, and Paul was deep into the specs of programmatic, but it was just pretty clear that programmatic advertising was going to be a thing. And it was starting off very early, starting off very early, but it was pretty clear that this was going to be the way that most advertising would be, at least digital advertising would be transacted going forward. It was just a much more efficient way for advertisers to find their targets and to drive leads and to make their businesses successful. So it was clear that was going to be a way, and thankfully Paul and Armin had the smarts to figure out how to get that off and launched. And so we went from there. David McBee: But things didn't go exactly as planned, right, I imagine your original goals are very different from the goals that you pursued a year or two later, right? Paul Harrison: Yeah. Oh, I was going to say that it was kind of interesting, in the early days, the spec really just focused on display advertising, and that scaled very rapidly, but things change pretty quickly in our industry. We've always viewed them as opportunities, and I think that's a part of sort of our success here, is the ability to be nimble and adjust to what's happening in the marketplace. But you're right, display only had so many legs, then it was like the year of mobile seemed like every year for years, and then finally that wave hit and we clearly capitalized on that. And then the next big wave was of course the whole CTV wave, and that's been a big wave. I think that one still has a long ways to go, but there's been so many little iterations in there, curve balls thrown at us, browsers changing the way they do things, exchanges changing the way they do things without even notice, like deprecating IPs and things of that nature. So yeah, you're right, from an execution standpoint, a lot of curve balls, especially in the early days. Frost Prioleau: Yeah, I think also from the market side, we started off with a thing called Search Retargeting and we said, "Hey, this is going to be great. We can deliver clicks on search terms like Red Toyota, or New Toyota for much less than people were paying Google for those same clicks." So that was our first target, and what we figured out pretty soon is that that was great, but the search marketers had no budget to buy anything other than search, so they couldn't even buy display. So it turned out because of the infrastructure that we had built around unstructured data, which was really revolutionary and remains a huge differentiator today, this ability to target with very precise data and to get optimized against that data to report on that data, it turned out that that was a fantastic solution, not only for search marketers, but for any advertiser that really wanted to target very precise audiences. And so we said, "Well, we can do any size campaign, and we have lots of fortune ..." as you know David, lots of Fortune-Five hundred customers on our advertiser roster. But we said "This has some real unique benefits than some of the smaller advertisers, because it enables us to customize our audiences on the fly, and optimize them on the fly, and then also get to performance." And because of that get to performance much more quickly and also deliver reporting that's much more insightful, so we said, "Wow, this is really differentiated for some of the smaller advertisers." And so our focus became, and it's evolved a little bit, but it's say, "Hey, we're really building this over the years, as we know, into an advertising success platform, but with a lot of focus on delivering these world-class advertising tools to advertisers of any size, whether that's down to the local car dealer, or hospital or legal office, up to Fortune-Five hundred companies." David McBee: From my point of view, and viewers may not know I've been the director of training for 10 and a half years at Simpli.fi, so- Frost Prioleau: Thank you. David McBee: You're welcome. I remember thinking, I'm going to get bored training this over and over and over, but I've never been bored because it's constantly changing, it's very different. Frost Prioleau: And then you think of the matrix, we started off with one targeting tactic and as Paul mentioned on one media type and display. So as we've gone, our targeting tactics have multiplied, I don't even know how many, 10 or what have you. And then the media types have also multiplied from, as Paul mentioned, display, video, CTV, mobile, et cetera. It depends on how you want to slice media types, but the matrix now of the thing, so the early decision was we're going to be an omnichannel platform, which also was a decision we made pretty early on, and that's absolutely shaped where we've gone. Paul Harrison: Yeah, so I would say, I think if we hadn't made the decision to have the unstructured data set up, we wouldn't have been able to pivot the way we did. We also, early on in the platform, separated out the targeting tactics from the creatives, they weren't rolled into one. A lot of platforms built all around just display, and you could clearly see that there was going to be more opportunity in the future. And without those kinds of early decisions, we wouldn't have been able to pivot and do the things that we do today, and as a result of some of those decisions, another one was of course, we decided not to be heavily reliant on the cookie. Even in the early days, even when we would set a cookie, we would just stick an ID in there as a cross check against our primary mechanism for identifying users. And if we hadn't made that decision, we wouldn't be in the position we are today, because a lot of the competitors out there are going to really struggle over the next few years, as the browsers continue to evolve. David McBee: Honestly, Paul, every time I ever had a conversation with you about cookies, you just started the conversation by rolling your eyes, "This is not a big deal. We got this." And it continues to be, so I guess that leads to the question, where do you get this vision? How are you constantly able to pivot to what's coming? And like CTV is huge, and we've just started to scratch the surface, how did you see that coming so easily? Paul Harrison: Well, some of the early decisions were made because there were pain points. For example, when Safari in 2008 decided to start deprecating third party cookies as a default, that really shook things up in the data space. And I said, "I never want to be put in that position again." And so that was one aspect of it, the other was, the reason we went with the unstructured data is because I never understood where the data came from in segments, how they were built, how old the data was, and I couldn't even tell you why a segment was working or not working. And that was the most frustrating thing for me, because a client would say, I've run this segment for three months and it worked great, and now it doesn't work anymore, why is that? I had no answer for them. So understanding what was happening under the hood was a key part. But in terms of really driving beyond those early decisions and the early framework we put in place, it's really been about bringing amazing people on board. We have a fantastic senior vice president of engineering. He's just fantastic at organizing around all the things that are coming, getting people moving the right direction. We have a fantastic VP of product, he's done great work in terms of driving some of the visionary things that we talk about, taking things that Frost talks about, and I talk about, and stuff that we hear from sales, and coming out of client services, and really making those things tangible. And I think that's really made the difference, I say that all I did was provide sort of a direction, but everybody else made it so much better. David McBee: Somehow I knew you would shift the conversation off of yourselves and onto the people of Simpli.fi. So Frost, what do you think about your team and their role in Simpli.fi's success? Frost Prioleau: Yeah. Well, Dave, you've heard me say this many times. I mean, people say what's sort of been the main factor [inaudible 00:13:09] to get us getting to where we are today? We were very fortunate to hire some great people early on. Personally for me to partner with great people early on, and Paul and Armin especially, and they have gone on and hired great people. And so we've tried to make Simpli.fi a place that people ... that attracted the best in the industry where people could do great work, where people enjoyed coming to work. I hope that we've been able to do that, and that's absolutely been the number one piece of ... the number one factor in getting us to where we've grown to. Paul Harrison: Yeah, it's a hundred percent right. I could spend a whole episode just talking about all the amazing things, all the contributions people have made and the ideas they come up with, I'd have never thought of that idea, but it's sort of like they're building on this foundation that we set a long time ago. Frost Prioleau: Like the Simpli.fi TV thing. Who came up with that? David McBee: I don't know, but it's a huge feather in our caps, right? It's one of the best things Simpli.fi has ever done. What do you want clients to know about Simpli.fi? Anybody who is a current client or is considering working with Simpli.fi, what do you want them to know about you? Frost Prioleau: So we're very much focused on their success. And so when we talk about this set of solutions that are evolving, that we've both acquired, built, and we're continuing to integrate, they're all focused around how can we make our clients more successful? How do we roll out to them an advertising success platform, advertiser success platform, that helps them get greater ROI, helps them drive customers, that helps them be more efficient in what they do. So as we do that, and part of the reason we do that is, we want to be the best partner they have. So if they think of like, "Hey, who can help us?" Whether it's the advertisers agency or our local media companies who work with us, that we want to be seen as a partner in their success, that we're very focused. We know that if they're successful and we can help them get there, then that will make us successful, so that has been our focus. We encapsulated that and we're very focused on moving, we work with a lot of customers very deeply on what we consider partnership levels. We have some customers we're more transactional with, and so we'd like to move as many of those customers as possible, where it makes sense, to be more partner level where we can deliver more value to them, and they feel that value in their success. David McBee: All right. So what does the future of Simpli.fi look like? Frost Prioleau: I'll jump in first there and Paul can, as well. I mean the best, as you always hear, as you hear often, absolutely the best days of Simpli.fi are in front of us. We have a huge opportunity in advertising, if you think about what we've been doing from day one, or very shortly after day one, has been bringing the state-of-the-art advertising technologies, as I mentioned earlier, to advertisers of all sizes. And that opportunity to continue, we're just barely scratching the surface with the number of advertisers that we're working with in the U.S. We will in a typical month as work with 40,000 or more advertisers with 130,000 or so campaigns, and that's a small percentage of what's out there. So as we continue to build our tools around making it easier to give great results from advertising across all the digital channels, and other channels that we work with, there's just a huge opportunity for us to expand that footprint and be helpful to more and more advertisers. So I mean, we've got a long way, a huge, what they call TAM, huge available market to us, and we're just very early on in scratching that surface, especially as you get into CTP, and retail media, and a whole host of legs, trajectories along which advertising is growing. Paul Harrison: So to drive that vision, we made some very strategic acquisitions. We're in the middle of modernizing those platforms, and integrating those platforms, so that you can do the entire lifecycle of a campaign, from planning to execution, optimization, reporting. So we have all of the tool sets available now we're bringing them all together. And so that's sort of the driving force, that's the next few years of roadmap is all about that. And one of the key areas in there is, we're working to unlock the linear dollars into the CTV dollars. You can see a lot of the tool sets we're doing are translating CTV into classic linear language, so that linear buyers can transition into the CTV world much easier. And then that also opens up other opportunities into the whole omnichannel, and the other parts of the funnel. David McBee: Good stuff, guys. All right, well before we close the episode out, I ask all of my guests if they have a favorite book, or a favorite podcast, that they feel has been instrumental in their success. Do you guys have something along those lines? Paul Harrison: I do actually. Frost introduced me to a book called Four Steps to the Epiphany. I have put together actually an outline for Four Steps Simplified, as a follow-up to that book. I sent it to the author, he liked the idea, but our journey's not quite done. His book was written largely on his experience in building the CRM epiphany. That probably dates me a little bit, but that was a great CRM in the nineties. So as we build out, the rest of Simpli.fi, and I continue to add to those notes, hopefully we will see a follow on to the Four Steps of the Epiphany. I always recommend that book to people, especially entrepreneurs. Frost Prioleau: Yeah, maybe it'll be a movie someday. Who knows? David McBee: What about you Frost? Frost Prioleau: I'm a fan of Michael Lewis books, and if you go back to one of the older ones, was Moneyball, which I thought was just super interesting as a way to look at a industry, in that case, baseball through a totally different lens using data-driven insights and that. So I would say if I had to pick one, I'd probably say that one. There's some others that have impacted in other ways, but I'd say probably Moneyball. David McBee: Awesome. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining me on this hundredth episode of Simpli.fi, I appreciate you very much. Frost Prioleau: Thank you, David. Paul Harrison: Thank you for having us. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored of course, by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee, be awesome, and we'll see you next time.