#70: Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews
With Philip Allin, Co-founder and CEO of Overtone.ai
Reading Time: 7 green shoot minutes
Welcome back to Quo Vadis Green Shoot AdTech Interviews.
In this series, we step into the shoes of “AdTech Equalizers” — the green shoot companies changing how the advertising job gets done. We delve into their worldview and unveil new strategies, tools, and thinking that make advertisers (and investors) better off.
Today we have the great pleasure of speaking with Philip Allin, Co-founder and CEO of Overtone. Overtone connects newsrooms with the sales team. Anyone (or anything) who interacts with news, from reporters and salespeople to other algorithms, can use Overtone’s data to understand more about their world and act on it.
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Q: What’s the problem Overtone is tackling – from 30,000 feet?
A: Philip
The internet is overflowing with content. It’s getting harder and harder to find something readable, useful, and relevant – even via Google. And now it’s getting even harder given everyone now has access to generative AI to spew unlimited content. There are no guardrails, few standards, and little agreement on what to do.
And there are two lenses through which to view this problem.
One is all the obvious effects we hear about — loss of trust in online sources, the spread of misinformation- and disinformation, news avoidance, and societal unrest. Those things are serious and harmful and need to be fixed. But it’s not easy to see how it gets solved or how to do so sustainably.
By sustainably I mean profitably. That’s the other lens. The internet is losing money on content. This is not immediately apparent. Look at a bunch of charts on advertising and media revenue online: you see a gradual trend upwards, with some weird fluctuations during Covid. But Overtone took a deeper look at the revenue generated by the volume of content, and here’s the dirty secret: it’s actually been declining for the past decade, by something like 10% year over year. In other words, the unit economics are not working for news publishers.
So that means the content, advertising, media, marketing, and the publishing ecosystem has to — has to! — simply create and publish and share more content. More words, more audio, more everything. Just to hit those quarterly targets. So people are adrift in a growing ocean of content, and we end up with new problems like Made for Advertising, or generated garbage.
It’s really important, I think, to understand the core issue here. Revenue from online content – revenue per user per word – has been dropping for a decade. That’s huge! It’s terrifying! That’s the problem. And we can quantify it.
Q2: So why isn’t everyone aware of this?
A: Philip
It’s easy to carry on like you were last month, last year. We see this all the time when we speak to newsrooms. Those teams are creating and crafting the content that people need, to understand what’s going on in the world.
We speak to editors and publishers and they are terrified. Terrified they’ll lose their jobs to a computer, or their publication to a slow death of sinking revenue. We want to help these people, but they’re often caught in lengthy internal review processes, restricted budgets, and falling staff numbers.
What are they supposed to do? They hang on if they can. Meanwhile, the chief executive of Reach says “Disappearing newspapers are an inconvenient truth”. So the publishers don’t have much clout. Advertisers, traditionally, have leaned more on tech solutions to amplify their message than on editorial insight to hone their message.
And it’s easy to get lost in performance dashboards and engagement metrics. Is your number up from last week? Great, you must be doing a good job. But that straight number chasing isn’t working anymore. It’s hitting limits, and so I think now the tide is starting to change – people are becoming more aware of the problem. There’s more press on junk news sites, and the paucity of search engine search results. And Google boosting AI-generated garbage.
This is a polycrisis – a hundred different ways to fail. And with so much going on, and people’s livelihoods at risk (and in some cases, people’s actual lives), it’s easy to see that few people have the space to really think through what’s going on here, or to try to fix these structural issues holistically.
Luckily, I think there’s an opportunity, particularly for larger outfits with some freedom of movement.
Q3: Right, let’s talk advertising. How do you help?
A: Philip
We help them figure out what content is brand-safe and brand-suitable, by just looking at the content itself. We can do that by looking at entities – say, the Quo Vadis newsletter or AdExchanger or Digiday just to name a few players that hit close to home – or by article, or at the domain level.
I think that’s useful as advertisers are being squeezed through more regulation, privacy, and ever-changing technology.
One effect of tech advances is MFA. Made for Advertising sites. It’s helpful to dive in a bit on what that is. Basically, MFA is filler-type content that is filled with SEO keywords and that looks like a great place for advertising if you’re a crawler. In fact, it’s so great that it attracts more crawlers: bots that generate more traffic, which in turn attracts more bots. But it’s bunkum content. Read some – it’s really uninspiring, it’s irrelevant, it’s not valuable. Because no one – like really no one – actually organically goes to these sites.
So, to SEO analytics and engagement dashboards, these sites look super hot. But there’s no human traffic, so there are no purchases. CPM doesn’t equate to ROI. So what does an advertiser do? After a month or so, they say: “nix that site. It’s no good”. But an MFA creator has meanwhile set up 10 other domains like it. And how is the advertiser going to assess 100,000 domains, or 100,000,000?
Check out our post on MFA Arbitrage Math + Model to see how MFA sites make money.
Without accurate data on real, human interaction on a site – which of course we don’t have until some time after the site is up and running, so necessarily there’s a delay – the only way to assign some advertising value to a domain is to actually review the content on it. That’s what Overtone does.
We’re working right now with a DMP that serves advertisers. So they come to us and say – here’s 10,000 domains. Which ones are MFA? Which ones are brand-safe? And we can go in and tell them.
So advertising has a similar problem to PR, marketing, or publishing. How do you reach a relevant audience, with relevant content? Anyone now can auto-generate vast amounts of content, throw it up on a domain, and generate traffic. You can be your own publisher or SSP. That’s huge.
At Overtone, we thought about this, and other changes we think are coming and decided to build an AI analytics tool that focuses just on the text. We teach computers to read that text the same way a human would.
Q4: So Overtone helps publishers – or advertisers? Or anyone online?
A: Philip
We can help anyone who needs to process a large volume of public-facing content. I’m talking thousands of pieces of news, blog posts, or Facebook comments or tweets. The process is key too: different industries have different ways of interacting with content, and so we fine-tune our output accordingly.
For example, a publisher comes to us and says – I have some premium and some free content. Can I change the mix to optimize my paywall performance? Or a PR firm comes to us and asks – what type of structure and tone of content is my target publisher most likely to resonate with, so my client gets published in their outlet? Or an advertiser asks us – can Overtone figure out what the relevant domains are for this brand, both in terms of brand safety and brand suitability?
And in all these cases, our answer is yes, we can. Because really, they’re all asking the same question: is this content relevant for my audience? And we understand the content.
Q5: So you use AI? What are the longer-term implications?
A: Philip
Yes, we use AI. We custom-build models for what we call analytical AI. We’re not in the generative AI space. Everyone can write stuff now – that’s great. We’re interested in – who’s going to read all this stuff? Overtone reads it.
We started this work 3 years ago, and of course, over the last 12 months or so, AI has worked its way into every conversation and nearly every job. I’ve seen a growing number of key roles arising. They’re people who combine newsroom skills – like researching, writing and – with boardroom skills – like resource allocation and people management. These are roles like ‘audience director’ or ‘content scientist’.
This is fascinating – Overtone is seeing a real change in the way newsrooms are organized, indeed how the publisher’s whole org is structured. As a direct result, teams who work with publishers are also changing. Those audience director roles – they’re appearing in marketing, brands, PR, and advertising too.
It’s part of a broader trend, I think. The distinction between publishers and advertisers will blur. Brands will forever seek that human connection, and hyper-personalization of content, of the whole experience, is the logical continuation.
Take that a step further: When anyone can be both an editor and a salesperson, both DSP and SSP, then monetizing the internet changes. The whole structure of the internet changes.
On an individual level: the difference between a producer and a consumer is less pronounced. You end up with what we can call prosumers. More and more, people are going to both buy and sell, so it’s going to be really hard to bucket a target audience as simply “30-34-year-old, employed, interested in dishwashers.” Advertising is going to be much more involved. Audience behavior will change, jobs will change, industries will change, and our economy and culture will change. It’s exciting times!
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