Millions of Americans are watching the same World Cup match and caring about completely different things. Greg Joseph explains how AI finally lets brands speak to each of those communities individually.
The World Cup has US audiences from South America, the Caribbean, and Europe watching the same matches and caring about completely different things. Greg Joseph says brands finally have the tools to show up for each of those communities individually.
As VP of Inventory Development at StackAdapt, he works where CTV inventory meets the AI tools rewriting creative production. He explains how buyers now run 20–30 tailored video assets per campaign instead of three, how an ad can change in real time during a blowout game, and why most AI hallucinations trace back to sloppy inputs rather than bad models. He also names the martech skill he values most: the willingness to break processes with millions of dollars attached. Subscribe to 10 Minute MarTech for more sharp marketing conversations in under 20 minutes.
3 Takeaways:
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Chapters:
[00:40] CTV meets AI
[02:39] AI video at scale
[03:45] How to prevent hallucinations
[06:39] The personalization playbook
[08:42] Top marketing skill: willingness
[12:36] Greg’s MarTech hot take
About the Guest:
Greg Joseph is VP of Inventory Development at StackAdapt, where he leads the expansion of premium supply and strategic partnerships across channels including CTV, DOOH, audio, and digital. He focuses on building high-quality, context-driven inventory that enables advertisers to reach audiences in moments of peak attention and drive measurable performance.
Connect:
Greg Joseph: www.linkedin.com/in/allanmalcolm
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com
Voxel: http://voxelai.com
[00:00:00] Sara: I'm Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.
[00:00:05] Greg: The World Cup is gonna be very personalized to people all over the US. Brands, as they're thinking about showing up for these communities, they have to be as personalized as possible. To have that level of personalization has been great, and we're seeing a lot of buyers dabble with that, which I think gets me excited on the innovation that exists with artificial intelligence that historically hasn't existed in the past.
[00:00:25] Sara: That's Greg Joseph, VP of inventory development at StackAdapt. Let's [00:00:30] get started. All right, Greg, I actually wanna start by asking you a little bit more about connected television, or CTV. How do you think that fits into a well-thought-out martech strategy? And how can marketers be thinking about it in an era of AI?
[00:00:55] Greg: So maybe one of the things I'll do for the CTV, in kind of answering your question, is [00:01:00] look back like 30 years ago.
So when you looked at 30 years ago, when folks were primarily buying linear TV, they'd essentially buy TV in bulk. So you bought every single user independent of whether or not those audiences were relevant to your brand. CTV has allowed for all of that to change, where you can be as selective as you see fit, where you can target individual markets, individual audiences, meaning that your brand can find the right person at the right time.
I think one of the ways AI is helping CTV is when you [00:01:30] think about the [unclear] creatives that are more specific to subsequent audiences, but being able to do that at scale. CTV creative productions are very expensive costs. AI is now, one, reducing the cost, but creating more automation and more efficiency, where buyers don't need to spend countless hours thinking about all the different assets they need for a CTV environment.
They can essentially upload it to a platform like StackAdapt, create the ads within a few minutes, and be able to run on connected televisions. But the [00:02:00] additive piece is really the audience component. And today, CTV is one of the many devices that offer the ability to do so, unlike linear TV, which buyers had to just buy in bulk and had very little data on what audiences they were reaching.
Now they can use platforms like StackAdapt as well as others to find those audiences at the right moment and the right time to allow brands to resonate with some of the audiences they're trying to reach.
[00:02:25] Sara: Yeah, that's very cool. I mean, when you think about it, we've been talking about personalization for a long time, right?
And so [00:02:30] when you add CTV with AI, you actually have that opportunity for hyper-personalization. [Greg: "That's exactly it."] Yeah, and I love your comment about creating content at scale. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I know when we talk to guests here, there's often this concern that AI is gonna create slop.
Can you give some examples maybe of how you've seen it done well?
[00:02:52] Greg: So what we're seeing — so a few weeks ago, we released our AI video creator, where essentially we're giving buyers the ability to put in a link, [00:03:00] and we'll create a video asset for CTV in real time, and that ad can also shift. So as we think about CTV and then live sports, there can be instances where you're watching the Knicks and Spurs go head-to-head, and there's a blowout with the Knicks beating out the Spurs.
You may wanna change your creative asset in real time — and when I say in real time, within that four-hour window of the game — because this blowout game, you wanna have a sentiment that is more linked to the users watching it. Now, you have the ability to do that with AI, where you don't have to [00:03:30] wait weeks or months to get the right creatives in front of the users watching content.
You can now do all of that in real time and really find a scalable solution for something that historically has not been scalable.
[00:03:42] Sara: Yeah, that's great. And yeah, I mean, to be able to do something that quickly. Are you finding with your platform that you're able to eliminate — I mean, hallucinations are a part of AI, but in that real-time creation, are you seeing that that's not really an issue with your — with the [00:04:00] creatives?
[00:04:00] Greg: Yes, at the moment. Yeah. So one of the things we're very intentional about is the inputs.
[00:04:05] Sara: Yeah.
[00:04:05] Greg: So quite often, for many platforms, input a number of different things into their platform, where AI does hallucinate from time to time because [Sara: "Yeah."] it has too many things that it's looking at, and [Sara: "Yep."] folks are not being as descriptive as they need to within their platform. What we've done is we've not only added AI solutions, but we've added people to kind of monitor and check things along the way to minimize risk to a business. Because one of the worst things someone could ever see [00:04:30] is running an ad that has the wrong messaging on it because it pulled in the information from the wrong place.
So one is, how do you still add a people layer to things that you're working on? And while artificial intelligence does solve with automation, quality assurance is just as important. So how do we make certain we're solving for making certain things are the way it's supposed to be? Which I think has been key for us.
But being very intentional with the inputs is the most important thing. What is the AI reading within your platform? And [00:05:00] if it's reading the correct things, then great. When you have too many things — if you have a database of 200,000 items and you're forcing it to read it in real time, it will then start to make a lot of mistakes.
So intentionality has been a big part.
[00:05:13] Sara: Yeah, that's great. Now, would you have any recommendations for people? And going back to the comment that you made about prompts — like if your prompt is not right, obviously it's gonna cause issues. And humans are messy, and communication can be all over the place.
Do you have any guidance for people who are trying to learn to be [00:05:30] better prompters? We're all becoming prompt engineers, whether we want that title or not. How would you coach somebody to think about prompting?
[00:05:40] Greg: One of the things that I think is very important as people are utilizing AI tools is, one, are you willing to spend the extra time to kind of go through what the data's pulling or what it's putting out?
The output is just as important as the input. So how do we make certain that we're giving the extra eye on the output? [00:06:00] I think a lot of people miss that, and while it seems very, very basic, it's actually a very big issue, because if you're getting the output that's incorrect, the input's kind of useless.
And I think that's one of the things I would recommend to anyone who is now dabbling into artificial intelligence and its uses for their business. Do not throw away kind of the additional additive part, which is the last layer. I think just double-check things, and that's no different than double-checking your ad and making certain the spelling is correct.
Words are very important. So [00:06:30] for me it's the double-checking of things which I think is the most important as people are thinking about how best to utilize artificial intelligence.
[00:06:39] Sara: Yeah, you guys work with a lot of different brands, a lot of different customers, a lot of different clients.
Are there any interesting or unique things that you can share with us — campaigns that people have run or programs that they've run recently that are showing that personalization at scale, or have really moved the needle in a way that [00:07:00] even surprised you guys?
[00:07:02] Greg: Well, I can't share individual campaign examples, for obvious reasons, to protect our clients. [Sara: "Right."] What we're noticing is that a lot of our clients are now, with our AI tools, creating like 20 different video assets. Where historically when we would run with them, they would essentially use, let's say, three, four, or five video assets. Now they're able to have as much as 20, 30 plus to use for campaigns.
And what that's allowed, which I think has been successful in our platform and gets me excited, is [00:07:30] now they're being much more intentional on how they break out the campaign and how they think about showing up for communities. So I'll use the example of the upcoming World Cup. The World Cup is gonna be very personalized to people all over the US.
You have some people from South America, some people from the Caribbean, which my parents are from. You have some people from Europe, and all of them are gonna be watching their countries play and participate in the World Cup. Brands, as they're thinking about showing up for these communities, they have to be as personalized as possible.
So if you're showing up for a [00:08:00] community — let's say a Brazilian community — there may be messaging that you want in the creative that's very different than showing up for a community in Western Europe, and very different from showing up for a community in the Caribbean, where all of them care about different things tied to their team.
So to have that level of personalization has been great, and we're seeing a lot of buyers dabble with that, which I think gets me excited on the innovation that exists with artificial intelligence that historically hasn't existed in the past.
[00:08:24] Sara: You know, especially when you start thinking about global campaigns and global programs [Greg: "Yeah."], really thinking about [00:08:30] how can you be efficient, as you mentioned, but also that hyper-personalization that goes beyond the "hello, first name" or, you know, let me just target you [Greg: "Most definitely."] because you're in a specific region. What do you think right now is the most important skill a marketer or a martech professional could have today?
I mean, we've touched on a number of different things, but if you could narrow it down to one thing, what do you think that would be?
[00:08:55] Greg: The one thing I'd probably say is willingness. So [00:09:00] right now if you speak to many agencies, a lot of them follow processes on a day-to-day basis.
Most of them don't break those processes, so if anything falls out of those processes, they'll just not do. In order for any company to be successful today is that, one, they have to realize that innovation is a real thing, and that processes need to change, and they have to be willing to break those cycles in order to improve their businesses.
So while it sounds like something very easy and simplistic, [00:09:30] it actually is very hard for companies to do, because sometimes you have not only like tens of thousands, maybe millions of dollars associated with processes that you have in place, and breaking away from that comes at a risk. But the benefit — there's always upside to a risk that you're willing to take, and for me, it's always that willingness, or can you break away from legacy processes?
And then I'll kind of go back to like artificial intelligence as well. A lot of companies are finding that they need to change in this age of innovation, and they need to start embracing more technology. [00:10:00] The companies that will be left behind is companies unwilling to take the step forward and unwilling to break processes and drive innovation and automation through some of the tools that artificial intelligence is helping to build.
[Sara: "Yeah."] So my biggest recommendation is break away from cycles and be willing to embrace change, and that willingness alone goes so far in most companies and businesses.
[00:10:26] Sara: Who do you follow for inspiration or information right now? [00:10:30]
[00:10:30] Greg: Okay. I'm gonna take a slight pivot to this one because a few weeks ago I was at StackAdapt's [unclear] conversion event, and we had a phenomenal speaker on stage that most people wouldn't expect.
Her name was Bethany Hamilton. She was a surfer, had her arm bit off as a [Sara: "Yep. Yeah, yeah."] young girl. [Sara: "Yeah."] But one of the things that impacted me — and I actually did some research on her — was the way she kinda spoke about her perspective on life through the lens of gratefulness. Putting things into perspective, and then [00:11:00] resiliency, which I think for all of us, as we think about, like, our day-to-day life, what is...
Gratefulness is such a great way to think about life because, yes, a number of different things could go wrong, but finding positive outlooks to things around us is probably the most important thing that we have in life. And then resiliency — I think when we think about work today, most of us run into challenges, whether it's with work, our families, with a number of different things.
Resiliency's such a good thing to have top of mind when we think through, now, how do we get past [00:11:30] this issue? How do we overcome obstacles? And really think about that on a day-to-day basis, versus quite often it can be easy to give up on things because there's a number of different routes we can go.
I'm a big person where I like to focus on things, so one of my hobbies during the weekends is I love to farm. I love to grow vegetables. There are times when it takes me six hours just to do one thing. But it is great for me because, one, I get to think about it a little more and understand what I'm doing wrong. [Sara: "Yeah."] I get to understand what I'm doing better. So my tomato plant will actually grow tomatoes [Sara: "Right."] [00:12:00] and not just die out within a few weeks. So I think the notion of resiliency is so important. So I'd probably say Bethany Hamilton, because she comes top of mind [Sara: "Yeah."] and her perspective has been great.
[00:12:09] Sara: Yeah. That is fantastic. Wow. And she is incredibly inspirational. But I do love the sentiment of gratitude and resiliency. You know, I think we talked a lot about resiliency during the pandemic, and I haven't heard people talk about it quite as much since then.
And I think it's one of those skill sets, [00:12:30] especially when it's going hand-in-hand with gratitude, that really will take you far. So that's wonderful. One last question for you.
[00:12:38] Greg: Yes...
[00:12:38] Sara: Do you have a MarTech hot take?
[00:12:41] Greg: The amount of people coming out of college and going to the workforce today — I think one of the things that's gonna help them a lot is how do they build experience in before they come to the workforce?
Though artificial intelligence, yes, is able to do a lot of kind of day-to-day responsibilities that's more operational in nature and that's focused on [00:13:00] entry-level positions. But one of the benefits to that is maybe some people do spend more time going for their master's in schooling, or spend more time on taking internships with companies, which StackAdapt would love, because there's a lot of value in training up the next generation.
So my hot take is AI is here to stay, but people will not go away. People will always be part of the equation, which I think is important to note.
[00:13:23] Sara: Yeah, I love that. And I've really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you so much, Greg.
[00:13:28] Greg: And thank you for having me. [00:13:30] Appreciate it.
[00:13:30] Sara: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I'm Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.