In this episode
Bob Regular, CEO of Infolinks Media, argues that the ad tech industry’s push toward supply path optimization has been mistaken for a strategy: the shortest path to inventory is not reliably the best-performing one, and buyers who cut every indirect route lose the benchmarks that would tell them what they gave up. He and Greg Kihlström work through what actually makes inventory valuable — Regular’s “primary impression,” the combination of proprietary media and proprietary data — and why deterministic signal is deprecating permanently, pushing advertisers toward predictive signal, contextual analysis, and sentiment matching. The conversation closes on the media operating model itself: how to translate curated inventory and smarter paths into the shareholder-value language a CEO and CFO already use, and why declining attention makes memorable creative a threshold condition rather than a nice-to-have.
Key takeaways
- The shortest supply path is not automatically the best path. Regular compares it to Google Maps: the shortest route often routes you through stop signs and traffic, while a longer highway route delivers the better experience and the better outcome.
- Most ad inventory is mediocre; value is concentrated in specific placements. All inventory has some value, but the high-value inventory is defined by engagement, attention, performance, and specific outcomes — not by volume.
- A “primary impression” is proprietary media combined with proprietary data. That combination, not path length, is what Regular argues advertisers should be buying.
- Cutting off every indirect path destroys your control group. If a buyer eliminates all alternatives on philosophy, there is no benchmarking left to prove whether those alternatives were delivering value.
- If every buyer runs the same SPO playbook, no buyer has an advantage. Everyone competes in a smaller funnel with fewer options, which mostly means bidding prices higher.
- Deterministic signal is deprecating and will not recover. Privacy law, walled gardens, browser changes, and shifting user behavior — more AI use, less open-web surfing, more vertical video — all reduce it, so advertisers have to move to predictive signal.
- Contextual targeting has outgrown keyword counting. The 2007-era model required the word “mortgage” on the page 25 times; today the match is made on sentiment, mood, and whether the page conversation fits the audience.
- Brands have to analyze their own contextuality before targeting anything. Regular’s example: a Rocket Mortgage buyer and a Wells Fargo mortgage buyer are contextually different products with different audiences and different definitions of an outcome.
- A CEO’s KPI is shareholder value and growth — “building the brand” is a euphemism for it. Media decisions land when they are translated into that language, not into acronyms.
- Declining attention makes memorability binary. If the creative isn’t memorable, Regular’s position is that you didn’t make a small impression, you made none.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Why “shorter path” is the wrong ad tech goal
- 1:45 — Bob Regular’s background: in-text advertising to the proprietary movement
- 3:13 — What makes an impression “primary”: proprietary media plus proprietary data
- 6:09 — Supply path optimization, and where the logic breaks down
- 7:05 — The Google Maps analogy: shortest route vs. best outcome
- 9:30 — “Cut all indirect paths” — the directive that removes your benchmark
- 11:16 — If every buyer runs the same playbook, where is the advantage?
- 13:18 — Signal deprecation and the move to predictive signal
- 16:31 — How brands should analyze their own contextuality
- 19:03 — Translating smarter paths into CEO and CFO language
- 22:36 — Principles for an operating model that survives the next cycle
- 24:22 — Declining attention: memorable, or no impression at all
Why the shortest supply path is not the best supply path
Supply path optimization is logically sound — buy media efficiently, remove unnecessary intermediaries — and Regular calls it a smart movement. His objection is to treating it as a rule rather than a hypothesis. Other routes to the same media may carry better data, better engagement signals, better pricing, better formats, or proprietary placements that the direct path simply doesn’t expose. Evaluating that requires a buyer sophisticated enough to ask whether they are on the direct path or the best path, and to accept that those are different questions.
The primary impression: what actually makes inventory valuable
Infolinks’ current thesis, in Regular’s framing, is that the industry has matured past treating inventory as broadly interchangeable. Most of it is mediocre. The valuable placements are identifiable by engagement, attention, and measured outcomes, and Regular’s term for the best of them is the primary impression: proprietary media paired with proprietary data. Because Infolinks works directly with thousands of publishers and places its own proprietary units on them, it is structurally an indirect path to those publishers — which is exactly why blanket SPO rules can cut a buyer off from the inventory they were trying to find.
Cutting indirect paths removes your control group
Regular describes senior executives instructing agencies and hands-on-keyboard teams to allow direct paths only. The measurement problem is immediate: with no alternatives running, there is nothing to benchmark against and no way to learn whether the excluded routes were producing value. He frames the correction as a return to first principles — define the KPI, define the measurement, then test whether the pathway is delivering on it — and notes the market is already swinging back toward that more moderated, analytical position.
Deterministic signal is deprecating — contextuality is the practical replacement
Privacy regulation, walled-garden changes, browser changes, and user behavior shifts are all draining deterministic signal, and Regular’s view is that there will never again be enough of it to grow marketing on alone. Predictive signal is the replacement, and contextual signal is the most available form of it: present everywhere, valuable, and no longer dependent on crude keyword density. AI has moved contextual matching to sentiment and mood analysis, letting a buyer ask whether the conversation on a page fits the audience rather than whether a term appears often enough.
Translating smarter paths into CEO and CFO language
Regular, speaking as a CEO who talks to his own CFO, is blunt that most chief executives do not want an SPO briefing. The KPI at that level is shareholder value and business growth, and “building the brand” is functionally a euphemism for it. The productive translation is to ask whether the media plan is delivering that growth, and whether restricting the plan to a narrow set of pathways is quietly costing more while returning less — a question a CEO can act on without learning the acronym.
Attention is fragmenting: memorable or invisible
Regular’s structural read is that attention will keep declining and fragmenting; there is no return to broadcast-era concentration, and each platform cycle assumes it is the shortest attention span possible right before the next one shortens it. More noise raises the bar on creative. His test for every CEO, CMO, CFO, and agency is whether they made an impression today — with impressions being the literal unit the industry sells, an unmemorable one doesn’t count as a partial win.
FAQ
What is supply path optimization (SPO)? SPO is the practice of buying media through the most efficient route between advertiser and publisher, usually by removing intermediaries. Regular describes it as a logical, well-intentioned industry movement — the assumption being that a shorter path yields a better outcome.
Is the shortest supply path always the best one? No. Regular’s position is that the direct path is often better but not reliably best, because alternative routes can carry better data, engagement signals, pricing, formats, or proprietary placements. He uses navigation apps as the analogy: the shortest route is frequently not the best experience or the best outcome.
What is a “primary impression”? It is Regular’s term for the highest-value impression available: proprietary media combined with proprietary data. The underlying claim is that most inventory is of mediocre value and that the valuable share is identified by engagement, attention, and specific outcomes.
Why is deterministic signal declining, and what replaces it? Privacy laws, walled-garden and browser changes, and shifting user behavior are all reducing deterministic identifiers, and Regular expects that decline to continue. The replacement is predictive signal — with contextual analysis and contextual sentiment as the most widely available form.
How should a brand start with contextual targeting? By analyzing its own contextuality first: what the product and message are actually about, who the real audience is, and what counts as an outcome. Regular’s example is that a Rocket Mortgage buyer and a Wells Fargo mortgage buyer are contextually distinct even though both sell mortgages.
How do you explain curated inventory and smarter paths to a CFO? Skip the acronyms and connect the media plan to shareholder value and growth. Regular’s framing: if the KPIs and measurement are clear, the question becomes whether the plan is testing all the pathways that could deliver growth, or whether it has been restricted in a way that costs more and returns less.
About Bob Regular
Bob Regular is a long-established pioneer in the digital media industry with over 25 years of advertising experience. As CEO of Infolinks Media, he drives the company’s mission to provide innovative contextual and native advertising solutions to web publishers and advertisers worldwide. Bob has founded and scaled multiple digital businesses, generating over $1 billion in revenue, and he is the founder and managing partner of Delivering Yield, an investment and advisory firm focused on advancing digital media through strategic investments. With extensive experience in capital raising, he has successfully secured over $250 million in funding and excels in operating ad platforms, developing products, training teams, and implementing efficient processes to meet the industry’s evolving needs. Known for his entrepreneurial spirit and visionary leadership, Bob continues to influence the future of digital advertising, significantly contributing to Infolinks’ success and the broader digital media ecosystem, with a mission to transform the landscape by leveraging data, technology, and creativity to enhance advertising effectiveness.
Bob Regular on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rregular
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlström: In a world obsessed with optimizing the ad tech supply chain, what if the focus on shorter paths is a complete misdirection from building smarter ones that actually align with brand value? Agility requires brands to move beyond incremental optimization and fundamentally rethink their media operating models. It’s about building a framework that’s inherently resilient to platform shifts, privacy changes, and evolving audience expectations. Today we’re going to talk about the disconnect between the technical ad tech conversation and the strategic needs of the brand. We’re gonna explore how leaders can bridge this gap by focusing on smarter media paths, curated inventory, and an operating model built for long-term value. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Bob Regular, CEO at Infolinks Media. Bob, welcome to the show.
[00:01:35] Bob Regular: Hey, Greg. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:38] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to, to the conversation here. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Infolinks Media?
[00:01:45] Bob Regular: great. Sure, happy to do that. so I’m CEO of Infolinks Media. I acquired the company, with a couple of partners in 2018. but the company has a, a very storied, wonderful history. It was born in 2007, which is, you know, basically 20 years ago now-
[00:02:02] Bob Regular: … close to 20 years ago, which in digital media, as you know, is a long time.
[00:02:08] Bob Regular: So we’re obviously doing something right. we pioneered back in ’07 some really awesome movements. the first movement that we sort of pioneered in ad tech or digital media was the in-text advertising movement. The idea, you know, when you go to your website and there’d be a highlighted text link, on, on the words on the editorial page. Could be the word mortgage or could be the word, you know, a car loan or whatever it is, and when you roll over it, it would open a bubble or show an advertisement related to that. So we pioneered that back in the, in the early 2000s, and that sort of led the contextual movement, the concept of keywords on a page, sentiment on a page. And, and now we’re, you know, we’ve evolved a lot now to, sort of driving towards what we call the proprietary movement. the proprietary
[00:02:53] Bob Regular: movement is, is a movement driven off sort of the maturing of the industry, which is most ad inventory is not very valuable. All inventory has some value, but most inventory is of mediocre value, and there’s very specific placements and very specific inventory that has really high value.
[00:03:13] Bob Regular: And that value is defined by things like engagement and attention and performance and specific outcomes. And so, you know, a- as the leader of the company, I’m moving the company in the direction of, of what I’ve sort of defined as a primary impression, which is the combination of proprietary media with proprietary data combined together to create a primary impression, and this primary impression is the best impression, you know? I think one of the biggest challenges, as you probably know, in, in building a company is finding your customer, and the customers we found are advertisers that need to get outcomes. They, they need solutions. They need to spend their money, and they need to spend it wisely. And they don’t have time to just experiment and spend lots of money on what doesn’t work.
[00:03:59] Bob Regular: And so we’ve spent so much time seeking what, you know, what I defined as this primary impression that we’ve sort of mapped, a, a methodology now for several years of having this proprietary media that works, and it’s, it’s gone really, really well for us. You know me personally, I’ve been doing this now for over 30 years, which in some respects I’m super proud to say, in other respects I’m just shocked. Uh-
[00:04:24] Bob Regular: … you know? It’s like I still remember saying that about old people, and I’m now an old person, so I’m not sure how that happened.
[00:04:30] Greg Kihlström: Right, right, right. [chuckles]
[00:04:31] Bob Regular: but I’ve been doing this for 30 years in, in digital media, building essentially marketplaces, and they’ve been on the advertiser buy side for a long time, and they’ve been on the publisher sell side for a long time. And, Infolinks is the mixture in, in bringing the two together to create a marketplace of the buy side and the sell side. and I love it, you know? It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s really great. It’s challenging. This, this market changes, like, every five minutes, and it’s– I’ve grown up with it. You know, when I, when I started in it, I was evangelizing the concept that, that, you know, we know– what we know as advertisers today that they should have websites. “You should have a website.”
[00:05:08] Bob Regular: “It’s very important. Let me tell you about dotcom.”
[00:05:10] Greg Kihlström: I remember that. Yeah.
[00:05:11] Bob Regular: I literally went company to company to company evangelizing that having a website was important and you should have one, and that if you had one, let me build it, and after you build it, let me advertise it. So-
[00:05:24] Bob Regular: … that was the late ’90s, and it sounds kinda crazy, but you literally had to convince people they should have a website.
[00:05:30] Bob Regular: And then you had to give it to them for free because they didn’t think they even needed one. So-
[00:05:34] Greg Kihlström: Right. I remember those days, yeah. It’s, I mean, it’s, it’s crazy to think back, but, but yeah.
[00:05:40] Bob Regular: But you’re here.
[00:05:41] Greg Kihlström: Well, yeah, let’s, let’s dive in then and, you know, start with, talking about this from the, the m- media strategy standpoint. And, and one of the things that you’ve noted is that the industry conversation often focuses on shorter supply paths as the primary or at least one of the primary goals. Why do you see this as a distraction? And, and, you know, what’s, what’s a smarter path?
[00:06:09] Bob Regular: Sure. well, you know, I, our industry goes through a lot of sort of advocacy movements that are very important. There’s a lot of these movements that are a result of abuse, or they’re a result of, you know, improvements that, do a better job of essentially making, advertisers successful or publishers successful. So one of the movements for, for a couple, three years has been what’s called the supply path optimization movement, SPO. We love acronyms in digital media-
[00:06:36] Bob Regular: So there we go, SPO, the obligatory three-letter acronym. And SPO is, is a very logical, smart movement, right? Which is, you know, if you’re going to buy media, can you buy it the most effectively that you should? And, and the sort of underlying theme there is the shorter path to get to the media should ultimately give you a better outcome. And I think that’s a very logical, you know, Adam Smith economics even, right? Like it’s just logical.
[00:07:05] Bob Regular: but there’s a lot of nuance into that, and so not always is the shortest path necessarily the best, highest-performing outcome path, and a great analogy for that is, is Google Maps or, or, or Waze. You, you go on Google Maps and you say, “I wanna go to a destination,” and it’ll give you three options, and the shortest option is not necessarily the best experience, and it’s not necessarily the best outcome. It may bring you through a neighborhood with a lot of traffic stops and, and a, and a lot of stop signs and traffic lights, and you don’t like that. You’d prefer to take the highway, and, it’s a much better experience and a better outcome.
[00:07:40] Bob Regular: So this is just a, a nice analogy to life, right? But similar-
[00:07:44] Bob Regular: … in media, the direct path is often the better path, but there are also other routes to go to that media that may have better data on it, it may have better engagement signals, it may have better, pricing, it may have better formats, it may have proprietary placements. There are all kinds of explanations, but those explanations require sort of a more sophisticated buyer that cares to know, right, how am I getting the best outcomes? Am I going through a just a direct path, or am I going through the best path? And I think that’s, that’s something that I’ve learned, going back to the concept of the proprietary placement and the primary impression, is, you know,
[00:08:29] Bob Regular: the s- the direct path, I’m often surprised. It’s not always what’s driving the best outcomes for, for my advertisers.
[00:08:35] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and I think, th- that’s a good segue to the next point, which is I think a lot of media buyers and, you know, brand leaders are feeling perhaps disconnected because there is, there are several routes to take, for instance. They feel a bit disconnected from the technical execution of the, how the media buys are done, and, so something like shortest path probably makes a ton of sense because why, you know, again, to your point, economics-wise, it makes tons of sense. It seems, it seems smart, but, you know, the devil’s in the details, right? So how can a brand leader better effectively translate some of their business objectives into
[00:09:22] Greg Kihlström: how this actually gets done rather than just kind of, again, feeling that disconnect or just assuming a lot of things are happening the, the best way possible?
[00:09:30] Bob Regular: Sure. Well, there, there, th-this movement of SPO has led a lot of media executives, sometimes even senior executives, just to say to their agencies or just to say to their media execution, hands-on-keyboard people, “Only direct paths. Cut off all the indirect paths.”
[00:09:47] Bob Regular: “Just do that because it’s a logical philosophy.”
[00:09:50] Bob Regular: I think we’re swinging back the other direction now, which is sort of more moderation, more analysis on whether or not there are other pathways, other media types to successfully get the outcomes you want, and there’s a lot more sophistication starting to come in. I won’t say we’re, we’re, like, wildly sophisticated yet, but it’s getting there.
[00:10:09] Bob Regular: And I, and I think the underlying, part of the advocacy needs to re-embrace the core tenet of, of digital marketing or marketing in general, is what is the measurement and what is the outcome you’re pursuing, and is the pathway, right, is the methodology and execution of the pathway delivering on that?
[00:10:29] Bob Regular: If, for example, you have a clear outcome that– or KPI and outcome, a clear measurement, and you just cut off all the alternatives and only pick the direct, how will you know if the alternatives bring you value?
[00:10:43] Bob Regular: Right? It’s not, it’s not very-
[00:10:44] Bob Regular: … helpful if you have no benchmarking and no control groups. So being led only by philosophy, right, is, is not necessarily the, the right approach. You need to have a good mixture, right, of testing and examination.
[00:10:58] Bob Regular: So I, I would say, first and foremost, do you have clear measurement, and are you experimenting with all your options, right? Are you seeking that? And the last thing I would bring it back to is if everybody’s doing the same thing, how are you getting an advantage as a media buyer executing the campaign?
[00:11:16] Greg Kihlström: Good point.
[00:11:16] Bob Regular: If everybody’s doing SPO and cutting off every indirect option, right, and, and getting lean and mean, then what exactly is your advantage against-
[00:11:27] Bob Regular: … all the others doing this? w-where, where are you going to get the be- all you’re doing is bidding your prices higher, competing in a smaller funnel with lesser options. And so I would en-
[00:11:39] Bob Regular: … you know, I would, I encourage our advertisers because, you know, one of the things that Infolinks, does is works directly with, with publishers. We work with thousands of direct publishers, and we put our proprietary placements on those publishers. That, that makes us an indirect pathway to that publisher, but our, our, our thesis is that we’re gonna put the best impression on the publisher. We’re gonna put the best placement on the publisher. So our, our positions, our pathway actually finds a really, really great primary impression on that publisher that the advertiser will want to buy.
[00:12:12] Bob Regular: If the interme- all– if intermediaries or all other steps to get to the publisher are gone, they’ll, they’ll never know about it.
[00:12:19] Bob Regular: So, so the execution is in the hands-on keyboard, the philosophy is with management. And, and I think management is starting to sort of swing back into a much more, you know, sophisticated point of view.
[00:13:18] Greg Kihlström: with all of this while also optimizing for the right things, not just kind of the idealistic philosophy type things as well? I know that’s a big question, but, but yeah. [chuckles]
[00:13:28] Bob Regular: It’s a, it’s a, it’s a big question, but I can synthesize it down into some simple concepts that I think are useful. there’s a tremendous amount of conversation around signal, right, which is sort of interpreted as cookies or, or some sort of, signal that lets you deterministically know if this is your audience. And that rolls back to a, a core philosophy is you’re trying to reach your audience so that you don’t waste your money reaching the wrong audience, right?
[00:13:57] Bob Regular: Which is, which is logical. The unfortunate thing is because of privacy laws, because of changes with the walled gardens, because of changes with browsers, and frankly, changes with user, behavior patterns, right? They’re using AI more, they’re surfing the web a little less, they’re spending more time on vertical video. Like, patterns of users. Okay, you take all of that together, right, and, and signal is deprecating. That’s what’s happening. It is continually deprecating, and as a result, over time, there will just be less deterministic signal. And, and frankly, and, and we’re going to move, and we’re going to have to accept we’re moving greatly towards a predictive signal environment.
[00:14:36] Bob Regular: And the beauty now that we have AI sophistication coming into our analysis, it’s, it’s important that advertisers start to embrace the fact that there’s not enough deterministic signal, right, with absolute match, whether it’s absolute match of cookie or absolute match of an email address or absolute match of something else, to really, really grow your marketing. It’s j- there’s just not enough, and there’s not going to be enough.
[00:15:05] Bob Regular: So as a result, you have to embrace predictive signal. And contextuality is one of those predictive signals that are really– that it’s present, it’s everywhere, and it’s valuable, and if you can bridge using contextual and contextual sentiment, that’s another great way where you don’t get completely hung up only on deterministic signal.
[00:15:25] Bob Regular: So I think AI has entered now this era, and we’re leveraging it inside of Infolinks, where it really helps you, analyze information, right, the context of the information to get better sentiment and match it against the advertiser’s audiences, and it’s not like the old days in the two thousand seven, two thousand eight Infolinks was, you know, if you have a mortgage advertiser, the word mortgage has to be on the page 25 times.
[00:15:48] Bob Regular: And if it’s on the page 25 times, then absolutely this is about mortgages, and so you, you do the match, right?
[00:15:54] Bob Regular: We’ve definitely evolved where you can see if the sentiment is related to the type of audience that you’re looking for, whether or not the conversation on the page is related to what the audience is looking for.
[00:16:04] Bob Regular: Is the mood, is the mood of what’s on the page, positive mood, negative mood, you know, all these things matter, right, to the match.
[00:16:13] Bob Regular: And so going back to the essence of your question that this stuff is really complicated, I would say it just gets more and more complicated if you are hanging on only to the deterministic, because the deterministic is, is falling away.
[00:16:31] Greg Kihlström: Going back to the, the contextual signals then, you know, certainly agree they’re, they’re, they’re a critical part, of this for the reasons you, you mentioned. How do brands best take advantage of them? I mean, it, you know, it makes sense what you’re saying as far as how they’re, how they can be utilized, but how does a brand make the best use or set themselves up to be able to make the best use of those contextual signals?
[00:16:55] Bob Regular: Yeah. So, so I think the first and foremost is brand really has to understand what the contextuality of its product, its message. You know, let’s, let’s say do a contextual analysis.
[00:17:09] Bob Regular: What is this brand about? Let’s use the mortgage, advertiser as an example because it’s a historical one. Is that a mortgage advertiser that’s looking for people that are looking for higher-end mortgages or distressed mortgages?
[00:17:22] Bob Regular: Is that an advertiser that’s looking for a massive lead gen funnel of applicants, and they’re gonna filter them out at the end? Or they’re looking for very distinct audiences that have super high credit score, that are only looking to buy McMansions? And so-
[00:17:37] Bob Regular: … who are they, and what is the contextuality of their product, their message, and what they consider to be success, right? Like, what is an outcome?
[00:17:44] Bob Regular: a, a Rocket Mortgage is a very different product than a Wells Fargo mortgage.
[00:17:50] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right.
[00:17:50] Bob Regular: And even though they’re called mortgages, right, they’re very contextually different. And so advertising with, with– I’ll just do a shameless plug, but if an advertiser comes to Infolinks and says, “I, I’m a mortgage company, I wanna contextually target,” we’re gonna analyze what is the contextuality of the brand and the service, and we’re gonna look against all the pages, all the apps, all, all the inventory options that we have. We’re gonna find a contextual relationship match when that audience is on that type of contextuality, and we’re gonna bring the advertiser and the supply together at the same time. And so then you don’t have the problem of only looking for a user that’s 18 to 34 and lives in a very
[00:18:35] Bob Regular: specific, you know, zip code and– These are valuable too, right? But the contextuality gets you, gets you much further. And so that, that’s how we address it, and I think this is, also blessed by a lot of the capabilities of AI and what, what we’re using is you can now read all this information and extrapolate a lot more learnings from it to, to help that advertiser. It doesn’t become as binary as just is the word on the page at this time.
[00:19:03] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right. And so let’s, let’s talk a little bit about measurement of this. And so, you know, maybe going back to the, the shortest path co- path conversation, or even just, just in general, you know, how do you work with marketing and, and media leaders to articulate, you know, some of these things to a CFO or, or a CEO? You know, things like smarter paths, curated inventory, all of this, and, and tie it to those, those KPIs that they’re looking at, you know, lifetime value, long-term, you know, long-term gains and, and stuff like that.
[00:19:38] Bob Regular: Sure. Well, as a CEO, right, I, I empathize with the, struggles of a, of a CEO.
[00:19:44] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right.
[00:19:45] Bob Regular: As somebody who talks frequently to my CFO, right, I, I empathize with the pressure I put on the CFO to deliver good financial results. [chuckles] So-
[00:19:53] Bob Regular: … I relate to these people because I’m living the dream. and I think that CEOs and CFOs, have a very clear KPI for them, right? And we have a very cl- It’s creating shareholder value and growth.
[00:20:05] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:20:05] Bob Regular: That’s what we’re, we’re hired to do. That’s what we do in the companies we own. We’re trying to make them successful.
[00:20:12] Bob Regular: And so when we look to our CMOs, when we look to our media professionals that then look to our agencies, what we’re really looking for them is to ultimately deliver on building the brand, which is really genuinely a euphemism in a way for are you delivering on shareholder growth, right?
[00:20:30] Bob Regular: For building business growth. Y- you know, we get caught up in an awful lot of terminology, right? Word salad.
[00:20:37] Bob Regular: But really in the end, is, is this media buy, right, delivering on building my brand, selling my product, delivering, value? It, it’s not that complicated when you think about it conceptually. And so when those folks that are actually hands-on-keyboard executing media and are thinking about the nuts and bolts of SPO, which the– most CEOs are like, “What the heck is SPO? Why, why are you even talking to me about this stuff right now?”
[00:21:05] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:21:06] Bob Regular: So, so, you know, when the, when you, when you try to connect the dots, I go back to what I said earlier, is ultimately if you have clear KPIs and clear measurement to d- to drive growth and shareholder value for the business, sell the product, are you going through all the different pathways that can do that? Or are you restricting yourself to a media plan that is extremely limited and restrictive and may actually just be costing you more and not bringing the value? I’m not saying it is, but I’m saying you don’t know if you’ve put yourself in a very limited situation. So I think ultimately it just comes down to that.
[00:21:47] Greg Kihlström: And so then let’s talk a little bit about, as much as possible future-proofing all, all of this and, and, and, you know, we talked a bit about agility in the, in the operating model but, you know, we know as, as careful as we are to build an, an operating model for today, we’ve also gotta make it resilient and, and, and able to adapt over time. So, you know, what– Having, having seen this for, you know, as, as you talked about your history in the industry and as a CEO, you know, as someone who’s, who’s scaled a business through multiple market cycles, what are the principles that brands need to have beyond, beyond the specifics of, of, of the day or the year even? What are some of those principles that they need to adopt to be
[00:22:32] Greg Kihlström: able to anticipate or at least weather what’s next?
[00:22:36] Bob Regular: Sure. I’m really, really happy to sort of dig into them because I think if you are a business owner and you’re CEO, you feel, because I know I do, you feel that the industries you’re in, the markets you’re, you’re living in are constantly changing faster and faster than ever before, whether it’s things related to macroeconomic or tariffs or, or changes in, in how consumers are behaving or… It, it’s just a rapid movement, and everyone is seeking stability. And so how do you seek stability from utilizing your media in a way that, you know, delivers predictable or reasonably predictable, outcomes?
[00:23:18] Bob Regular: And so I think there’s some core things that every leader needs to think about, and hold true, and number one is that your audience, your customers are, are living in a mixture of these movements, so you have to clearly understand at any given time who your real audience and consumer, or whether that’s B2B, but who your real audience truly is. It changes frequently. Maybe going back to that mortgage example, maybe your audience, your customer, is more distressed than they were as a mortgage-
[00:23:51] Bob Regular: … intender before, and maybe they can’t qualify as much now as they could a year ago. So maybe as a result of that, you’re targeting, your contextuality, needs to adjust-
[00:24:02] Bob Regular: … because it’s not the same consumer or it’s not the same circumstances. So the consumer are a mixture of movements, and they’re constantly moving their circumstance, and you need to stay very attached to those movements so that you can keep adjusting your media to accommodate the adjustments of your business and your audience. So I think that’s a very core tenet.
[00:24:22] Bob Regular: And I think the next thing is, attention is continually declining. Right? It is not gonna get better. We are not going back to the days of broadcast television.
[00:24:34] Bob Regular: We’re going to further fragment, you know, and you, and you can– Like, I’ve, I re- I was close to the MySpace people, close to the Facebook people, knew the, you know, every evolution. Now the TikTok people. It keeps getting shorter.
[00:24:47] Bob Regular: And every cycle, every movement, right, thinks that this is the shortest it can get, and then it gets shorter.
[00:24:54] Bob Regular: So the attention span is getting shorter, which means you have more noise, and when you have more noise, you, you need to break out. It’s very, very difficult to break out, so your message and your creative has to be memorable. When you have less time and less attention span, you, you have to do an extraordinary job with your message being crisp and clear, and it be memorable.
[00:25:19] Bob Regular: If you do not make it memorable, then you will not make an impression. And if you think about what you spend your marketing dollars on, you’re buying impressions, right?
[00:25:28] Bob Regular: It is the underlying word we use for our whole business is we’re selling impressions. Well, I ask every CEO, CMO, CFO, and then their agency, “Have you made an impression today?” Right? Are you really making a memorable impression? And if you are, then you’re, you’re being effective to your audience, and if you’re not, y- I’m gonna tell you, you’ve made no impression. Not a little impression, no impression. And so I think those are some core tenets. If you can hold onto them and keep asking yourself quarter after quarter, you know, you’ll stay on track.
[00:26:02] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Love it. Well, Bob, thanks so much for, for joining today. Got a couple last questions as we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[00:26:16] Bob Regular: you’ll probably be talking to the Bob AI.
[00:26:18] Greg Kihlström: [laughs]
[00:26:18] Bob Regular: well, we’re definitely gonna be talking about AI and the transformations AI has made. I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m sorry to sound very cliche. I’ve, I’ve witnessed many movements. I think AI is an extraordinary movement. It’s a real movement, unlike-
[00:26:33] Bob Regular: … for example, blockchain, which did not disrupt a whole heck of a lot, but was talked about endlessly.
[00:26:38] Bob Regular: I do think that AI will transform digital media. I do think it’ll transform digital marketing, and, and I think it will… Frankly, it already has, but will dramatically transform our time. And so I, I think when you take all those things together, you can expect that a year from now there will be changes, and, and we’ll be talking about those.
[00:27:00] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah, love it. And last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:27:07] Bob Regular: I listen to your podcast. I mean, let’s-
[00:27:10] Greg Kihlström: Oh, well, thank you [laughs]
[00:27:11] Bob Regular: Let’s, let’s be clear. Get that first priority done, right? and, and then, you know, I consume information like crazy. I’m listening to podcasts all the time. I’m, I’m paying attention to industry and non-industry trades. You know, I’m reading economic news. I’m reading, you know, philosophical stuff. I’m reading current event. I, I f- personally, I’m a very curious person, right? But I find that you, you have to consume information all the time, not just to be informed. Being informed is, is nice, but it’s better because it, it gives you the critical thinking skills to really understand how to adapt to all of these options and, and react to them. So I, I love it. I love consuming information. I, I suggest anybody that has the patience to do it and enjoys it, you know, it’s a better hobby than, than flipping through TikTok at, at a million miles an hour.
