How AI Is Replacing The Media Planning Cycle | Josh Hudgins, CPO at VideoAmp

Why Outcomes Matter More Than Dashboards

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 0:45

In a media world drowning in complicated data dashboards, how do you actually find the insights that drive real-world business outcomes? Today we sit down with Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer at VideoAmp. Welcome back to the State of Streaming Podcast, and today we are unpacking how the Video Amp performance media platform connects ad exposure directly to real-world outcomes like store visits and purchases. We also explore how AI is acting as a semantic layer to completely reinvent performance reporting and media planning. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Now, onto the show. Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp. Thank you so much for joining us in the State of Streaming podcast.

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 1:37

Yeah, thanks, Tim. Great to be here.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 1:39

We were chatting a little bit there in the lead up about "AI native", which feels like a buzzword, but you're doing some really interesting work as it relates to performance media, which is so much of the TV conversation that we're having today. Maybe we could spend some time talking about that, but I'd love if you could give us the primer. Who is VideoAmp? What problem do you solve? And who do you solve it for?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 2:03

Sure. Yeah. So VideoAmp is primarily a performance media platform. What we do is we help folks both on the buy side and the sell side understand, plan, optimize, and run media in a way that demonstrably

What VideoAMP Is Built To Solve

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 2:17

drives outcomes in the real world. And that closes the gap that I think people are most interested in closing. It's like if you're if you're running media somewhere, ultimately what you want to understand is how much change or impact does that media drive in the real world. And so that's fundamentally the problem we're focused on, which is helping everyone understand the connections between consumption of ads and content and then what actually happens in the real world. Do they buy products? Do they go to stores? Do they search for things? And then that loop helps people make advertising more effective.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 2:49

You use the keyword there demonstrably. The ability to demonstrate that this is closing the loop. How do you do that?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 2:57

So we, from the very beginning at VideoMp, have been about large data assets. And so rather than try to run these things out of different panels and small-scale data assets, we started from a foundation of first building an enormous, at the time the biggest in the industry, linear data asset by combining data from set-top boxes, from smart TVs, and then building a unified, deduplicated, commingled data asset that let us understand linear viewership. Over time, what we've added to that, that's sort of our entrance into the world. We've added streaming data assets to that. And our strategy around streaming has been to work directly with the streaming platforms and the publishers to get log level information about everything that's happening on that platform. We use

The Data Stack Behind Deterministic Measurement

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 3:41

clean rooms a lot to preserve the privacy of those things. But we have complemented our original linear data asset now with these very large-scale streaming data assets. So we can understand at a household level deduplicated viewership across all of these different platforms. And now what we've been investing in since then is linking that at the household level all the way through to outcomes, whether that's purchase information, whether it's store visit information, whether it's subscriber signups. And so helping people understand in a deterministic way, in a deduplicated way, the effects that seeing an ad or watching season two of some show is actually having on future viewership or purchase behavior or visit behavior in the real world.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 4:25

And so much of the conversation that we've been having recently is about the ability to reach an incrementally new or unique audience so that I can drive those business goals. What I'm what I'm hearing you describe is it sounds like it's leading towards that. Am I delivering strictly inside of a streaming environment? Is this on linear also? Is it all things video? How do you think about the media application?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 4:50

And that's that's the exact right question because ultimately, if you're an advertiser, what you're trying to do is figure out how to reach people and then reach the people that will do the thing I'm trying to accomplish. And so that's that's an audience question. And one of the things we've been at the forefront of driving is understanding advertising, not so much in the historical like age and

Finding Unique Audiences Across Video

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 5:10

gender demo buckets, like the way media has been measured for much of its history, but to let you measure discrete, purpose-built audiences of people, and then to figure out where those people are and where you can uniquely find them and where you can efficiently find them. And ultimately this starts to look like a media planning problem. And that's that's one of the areas that we've been investing a lot in, is if you're an advertiser helping you find the people you want to find efficiently across all of these different platforms so that you can reach those people and then ultimately drive the outcomes you want to drive.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 5:44

When we think about that applied to the media planning workflow, where does VideoAmp start to layer themselves in?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 5:52

Well, and this is why we've started to talk about VideoAmp more as a performance media platform as opposed to maybe planning or measurement. Historically, what we have had in market is we've had a planning solution that that's done really well. And then, of course, we do a lot of measurement. But increasingly, what people want to do is connect all of these things in an integrated workflow. And this will ultimately be where we can jump into this AI conversation. But if you think about planning, right? Like you build this ambitious plan for how you want to reach people, what you really want to be able to do then is execute that plan, pace it as it runs, understand if it's doing the things you wanted it to do,

One Workflow From Plan To Performance

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 6:28

optimize against it in the areas you can, and then ultimately measure how well you did at accomplishing your objectives. And that's that's an integrated workflow. And so the big focus for us for the last year has been connecting all of those pieces so that you can drive advertising campaigns and objectives from end to end across the optimization and the planning all the way through into the performance measurement space.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 6:52

Let's take it there. Let's go to the AI piece because it seems like AI has unlocked a lot of capacity and the ability to do new and interesting things. How is VideoAmp using AI?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 7:04

Well, we just launched a product that is going to reinvent how you do performance reporting. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. But like if you think about you're an advertiser today or a marketer or you're an analyst or a publisher, you are inundated with measurement data. Like there has been a pro across the space of all of these different tools that give you really complex dashboards about different facets of what's happening. Your challenge really is not getting data or information, it's now making sense out of this picture.

AI Reporting That Surfaces Real Insights

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 7:36

Increasingly, it's like, what really matters to cut through all of that noise and figure out what are the insights you really need to adjust what you're doing, to improve or optimize what you're doing going forward. And that's the problem we're setting out to solve. People are drowning in information. We want to help them distill it down into the insights that they really need to do their jobs more effectively. And so that's where we're putting AI to work to start. We've built an entire new reporting and insights experience where instead of being confronted with these monolithic dashboards with visualization after visualization, we have this interactive experience that basically tells you what's important about your campaign or whatever it is you're analyzing. It's like, hey, you ran this campaign across these platforms. This was what performed really well, this is what didn't perform really well, and then it becomes interactive and it sort of invites you into a dialogue about how to understand what's happening. And that's proven to be really, really effective at distilling the information you need and giving you the things you need to do your job better. And we've gotten really good feedback on that so far.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 8:39

And I bet those are very interesting, different things than we've traditionally seen in reporting reach frequency, maybe total consumption and some measure of traffic from exposed audiences. But what are you seeing? What does the data start to reveal when you're applying that?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 8:56

Once you combine audience information at a really granular level, you can report and understand performance at the creative level all the way through to outcomes across all of the platforms you're running media on. The kinds of insights you can generate off that information is incredibly powerful. And it's gotten kind of to the point where there's so much information there. You can't just throw the kitchen sink at people and expect them to be able to extract the insights that are meaningful to them. And so that's that's where the AI has proven to be really, really useful. So we've built a semantic layer across all of these things that allows the LLMs to really understand what's happening at an atomic level without it actually being the creator of the numbers, right? So we still apply our same rigorous measurement methodologies that make us a currency provider in a lot of contexts. What the AI does is it interprets the data for you and it gives you insights and it gives you, it's it separates noise from signal and it points you in directions and then lets you sort of go on that journey with it and to dig in and to find out more. And so that's that's the kind of user experiences we're seeing our clients start to do more and more of. Where it's like, oh, here's this interesting insight. It turns out that this particular audience, combined with the content on this platform, was really effective at driving lift

Semantic Layer That Separates Signal

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 10:15

for this set of products. I would have never expected that particular alchemy to have been as impactful as it was as an advertiser. So I drill into that and you get more and more insights around what's working, and all of a sudden, you have the nucleus of the idea for how you want to structure your next campaign. And where we're going in the future is you'll be able to just follow the AI journey all the way through into like, okay, now create me a media plan based on this set of learnings that I just extracted from this analysis. You'll have your media plan, and then before you realize it, you're now orchestrating that entire workflow we talked about agentically through AI, which removes a lot of the heavy lifting and the manual labor and the shipping spreadsheets around and having to pull in data from six different measurement vendors and BI vendors. And it just will make your life so much more, you know, labor-free, but also impactful because you can find the things you really need to find and drive the impact you want to drive.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 11:10

What I hear you describing is it sounds like a little bit of a paradigm shift. We've heard kind of the growing trend over the past few years of maybe those traditional channel teams being collapsed into more collaborative sort of structures. But what I hear you describing is we're getting down to audience attention, activation, how fast can we go? How smart can we be? How well can we execute on those insights? That's a completely different model than what we've known to this point.

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 11:40

Yeah, and it's really going to accelerate the cycle, right? Because like if you think about this, maybe it's running in a quarterly or even an annual kind of cycle, all the way out to like media mix models where you're seeing this kind of optimization. You're compressing the speed at which you can learn

Faster Learning Through Midflight Optimization

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 11:54

and the speed at which you can respond to what you're learning. And as an advertiser, that's incredibly compelling because like I can start to constantly adjust what I'm doing in almost real time. And we're working on that with several different publishers where the mid-flight optimization that's occurring all the way through to outcomes can be acted upon in near real time.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 12:16

It would seem if if you have that much of an intimate understanding with what's happening when the audience sees it, could there be an application where it's informing supply chain planning for an advertiser for a company? I'm thinking like a an automotive application. If I'm able to see this is what happens when the audience is exposed and the creative, and could it start to inform some of the decisions I'm making as an OEM?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 12:43

Yeah, that's where it gets really, really interesting. Because if you think about the cycles they've run this in in the in the past, is you you start at sort of the annual cadence, you have your media mix models, those tend to be fairly static, and then you make your allocation decisions for the year, and then you just kind of wait and see what that did over the course

When Media Signals Shape Supply Chains

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 13:00

of the year in terms of the impact it had on your business. And auto is a really interesting example because it has a famously long sales cycle. If you think about the funnel for that, it goes all the way through. Like when I first see an ad and I visit dealerships, I do research online, you know, I test drive cars, and that can take months to you eventually see that show up as a transaction. But with what we're doing with being able to show you the relationships between exposure to media and then some of the upper funnel signals as well as the lower funnel signals, we can now start to see: well, did it drive dealership visits? Is it driving like site search visits on auto research sites? You can connect that back to media exposure in real time and be optimizing that on a weekly basis. And then what does that mean for how you actually operate your business? What signals are gonna flow back into like what we need for supply chains for inventory? And that's sort of gonna be the new frontier as you start to understand like impact. These are signals you're gonna need to actually logistically run your business. And so it's a whole new, a whole new model for how to think about these things. A lot less guesswork, I think, will be the end result.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 14:06

It's interesting. And it seems like it could, right? That that powering, making the flywheel spin faster. Can we get through more sales cycles? Can we be more efficient businesses? Can we create a better consumer experience? I think that's uh that's a world we'd all like to live in. So so thank you for contributing that piece of it. What are you most excited about over the next six months? We're about halfway through 2026 here into 2027. What do you see coming on the horizon?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 14:32

So I'm first and foremost a technology guy. I'm a technologist. I come out of a tech background. And watching how AI tools are transforming how systems integrate and work together is super exciting for me. And so one of the things we're starting to see and hear and do a lot more about is all of these different folks, whether it's where it's agencies, whole codes, whether it's streaming platforms, traditional media companies, everybody is now starting to think about how do we integrate all these workflows together with agent-to-agent integrations? And basically in the past, what you would have to do is you would build these really brittle API integrations.

Agent To Agent Integrations Take Off

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 15:12

And the workflows you could accomplish were super highly structured. They were very brittle. They took a long time to build. If you needed to improve them or change them, it was a whole ordeal. And now we're we're building these systems where, like that workflow I just described for you, different folks that participate in that workflow, different entities have their own agents that are making inventory available or that are trying to figure out how to buy inventory on behalf of a client. Their agents are now talking to our platform via our agents, and you're seeing this ecosystem come into being amazingly fast. And the kinds of things it's going to unlock as a technology person are very, very, very exciting to me because we're going to be able to expand new use cases, offer new capabilities at lightning speed compared to the old world. Whereas, like, well, we need to build an integration with so-and-so. Well, that's going to take 12 months. Now, like these things, you can hook them up in a matter of weeks, and you're up and running, and you're unlocking new value and new use cases almost immediately. It's very, very exciting.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 16:13

Something that excites me as a kind of a former local media guy. It's what I hear you describing is more time to be human, less time filling out my spreadsheet, less time sending or replying to an email. Like, hey, the agents can do all the busy work. Let's get lunch, catch up, and talk about what's going on in your business or which what's going on in your life. Like, we're not we're not stuck in the busy work.

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 16:36

Well, and I'm I'm an optimist about these things, and that's exactly how this looks to me as well. Is what a lot of these changes are gonna do is just that. It it lets us dive in further to the human part of the experience. And so, like, if you think about advertising as an ecosystem, I think you could find this this in any industry, but it's gonna be like let's focus more on like what content is

Less Spreadsheet Work More Human Work

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 16:58

really, really engaging and is going to affect people, what kind of creatives or what kind of brand positioning is gonna really resonate with people? And it will take out a lot of the the busy work of blocking and tackling and targeting and running campaigns and optimizing them, and let's focus more on human connection and ideas and really driving impact across communities. And I that's exciting to me too, because that's the kind of things I want to do, also is you know, like you want to deal more in the human element of things, and I think this unlocks more of that. Nobody wants to just you know email spreadsheets around to people all day. We want to deal in what drives connection and makes us unique, so that's exciting too.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 17:38

That is exciting thinking about the humans, the humans in our audience. I've got a a question for you, Josh. What are you watching on streaming? Do you have any great recommendations for us?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 17:47

So I I have teenagers and they kind of set the viewership agenda in my house. They're um surprisingly fascinated with vintage content. Ooh. Stuff like Arrested Development or you know, like some of the older stuff. That's cool. Yeah, and the stuff that I I watched when I was their age, almost in some case, Seinfeld, surprisingly. Like that's a Netflix standard in her house. So we'll sort of rotate through a lot of those things. I'll occasionally watch new things as they come on, you know, like the stuff that most people were watching. I thought Severance was great, I thought Succession was amazing. That was one of my favorite ones. Two great records, yeah.

Streaming Picks From A Teen Household

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 18:23

I watched Plurribus. Honestly, I'm mixed on that one.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 18:28

It seemed to the it seemed to be mixed, mixed emotions.

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 18:31

As much as I love Vince, uh, that one was interesting. Paradise, I thought was good. That was a good one.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 18:37

Enjoyed that as well. Yeah, so it sounds like you're an Apple TV guy. Is that your is that your go-to streaming app?

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 18:43

That one or Max, I'm probably on more than any other ones. And then like Netflix seems to be the the go-to for like the historical library stuff. So when we're pulling that stuff out, it's Netflix. If I'm watching stuff alone, it's probably on Apple or on Macs.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 18:58

Just watch rewatched Breaking Bad on Netflix for exactly that reason. Yeah, and uh it this sounds a little bit counterintuitive being this streaming guy, but I recently bought a DVD player. And do you know how much fun it has been finding DVDs that I used to I know I had in my collection, but going like Salvation Army and secondhand stores and getting DVDs wrapped still in original plastic. There's something very nostalgic. It feels great to rip open a DVD.

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 19:28

It's so funny you mentioned that. This has been a fascinating thing for me to watch. My kids have grown up on Spotify, so we'll talk about music for a minute. They love owning physical media, it's an obsession, and it's not just them, it's like their

Physical Media Nostalgia And DVD Ads

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 19:42

generation is kind of this way. There's something magical to them about having the album, and they'll hunt that down, and they then they have records and they have CDs, then they play them, and and there's something about the collecting aspect of it and being able to like have things that I think maybe that we've lost a little bit, but it's interesting you're like that with the DVDs because I I think that's sort of a related thing as well. There's there's this magic to like having the tactile experience of having the media.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 20:12

You know, it was funny too. When I popped the DVD in the you know, first day I had the DVD player, I got some DVDs I wanted to watch, and I popped it in. I forgot there were previews, I forgot that the DVD was ad supported too. Everything we live in an ad-supported world. So, Josh, thanks so much for teaching us about performance media, about how VideoAmp is approaching that. If folks want to learn more about VideoAmp, where should they go? Give them the give them the lat and long.

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 20:38

Yeah, videoamp.com is a great starting place, and we'd love to have a conversation with you.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 20:42

Awesome. We'll make sure that's linked close by. And we look forward to uh a part two of this. I feel like there's going to be a great follow up conversation to see how these things play out.

Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer of VideoAmp 20:51

We'd love to do it. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Rowe, Host at State of Streaming 20:53

Thanks so much for being here. And if you found this conversation to be helpful, please share it with a colleague or a client. Start a conversation yourself today, and we'll see you all next time.