In a fresh take on Victor Kiam’s style of business – the US entrepreneur who famously liked his Remington shaver so much he bought the company – Monaghan’s Ciarán O’Kane loves advertising technology so much he cofounded First Party Capital, a venture capital company that backs some of the sector’s rising stars.
Companies in its portfolio include research specialist Lumen and Bedrock Platform, a programmatic trading platform.
O’Kane is also founder of, and adviser to, WireCorp, the London-based publishing group behind ExchangeWire, RetailTechNews, TheGamingEconomy and DTCDaily, a provider of news and analysis on digital advertising, marketing technology and programmatic advertising.
All this positions him perfectly to see what’s on the ad tech horizon. When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), he’s not buying the hype.
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For starters, the giant tech firms pushing the current transformational change narrative, “pretty aggressively”, all have their own agenda, he suggests. At the same time, AI will inevitably change consumer behaviour, he says. “How we get information is changing as we speak,” he says.
Like so many of us, O’Kane already routinely uses generative AI to find information for simple things, such as the optimum time to cook a joint of meat. “It’s stuff like that, in idiot-proof, bullet point, snackable form that I can read, instead of having to wade through all the ads,” he says.
It’s why bottom of the sales funnel advertising activity, in which search “was king”, is being so disrupted by ChatGPT style LLMs.
“That changes marketing and changes ad tech, but the fundamentals remain the same,” he says. “If everything is pushed to the prompt, you still have to have the want for, or need of, a product, to put into the prompts, so mid- to upper-funnel advertising becomes even more important.”
It’s why one of his favourite forms of advertising is actually good old fashioned analogue advertising. He identifies out-of-home advertising – which consumers encounter in public spaces – as a perfect example of Halo, a new anti-AI investment trend currently sweeping Wall Street.
The acronym stands for Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence, and refers to investors’ growing desire for natural defences against asset light software companies, in the form of firms with tangible, physical infrastructure that AI can’t disrupt.
“The idea is that companies with fixed assets, like oil refineries or railroad track infrastructure, are AI-proof. They’re almost like a hedge, and out-of-home is very much about fixed units. You’re not going to see AI disrupting that,” he says.
AI is also giving rise to concerns around trust. “Nobody is trusting this stuff because AI slop is everywhere,” he says.
Again, it’s an issue out of home deftly side steps, another reason why mid- to upper-funnel brand building activities is set to become increasingly important in an AI-powered age.
“Meta, Amazon and Google are piling a tonne of money into it, because they don’t want to lose that lower funnel surface area interaction with consumers,” says O’Kane.
That’s good news for advertising. “It suits our industry. Whether it’s agencies or ad tech, these ‘destination’, or mid- to upper-funnel pieces of media and advertising are going to be really, really strong; and we’ll all still be in jobs in 20 years, basically.”
‘Brand-focused news sites, with brand equity, are going to be in a very strong position. They are going to do really well in the new world’
He points to French-founded, New York-based ad tech start up Vibe as a case in point. The company is a self-serve connected TV advertising platform, designed to bring the targeting, tracking and accessibility of digital advertising to the TV ecosystem.
Yet even this savvy ad tech innovator has been running billboards in Silicon Valley, to raise awareness. “The building of brand becomes even more important in the world of undifferentiated slop,” he says.
Right now the concern is that AI, being shiny and new, will become the next industry gold rush, just as programmatic did initially, before all the efficiencies it offered were obscured by “a lot of bloat and a lot of layers, as people took margin all over the place”, says O’Kane.
In some ways, that’s just the name of the game, he says. But AI, today’s hot topic, is actually just about workflow, he points out.
“People want it to be something bigger, because valuations depend on that. But the doom mongers who talk about unemployment as a result of AI are not just wrong, he suggests, but disingenuous.
“They are trying to hack their value, and the more ‘bad news’ stories there are about the demise of the white-collar worker, just jacks up the valuations of Meta or Google. It’s a game,” he says.
In the meantime, the value of trusted news brands, such as The Irish Times, Guardian, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, will grow, he predicts.
“They have brand equity. People trust their journalists, their politics and their writings,” says O’Kane, reiterating how important such mid- to upper-funnel media offerings are going to become.
It’s why publisher worries about the way in which large language models prevent people from landing on news sites are way overblown, he predicts. Consumers might be happy to have their “snackable bullet points” served up that way, as O’Kane is with his recipes, but for real insights and analysis they will rely – and increasingly – on trusted publishers.
“In a world with trust issues, you will gravitate towards [them] to get the full story,” he says. “Brand-focused news sites, with brand equity, are going to be in a very strong position. They are going to do really well in the new world.”
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