How M&A in CTV Is Redrawing the Power Map with Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 0:45

Why is Fox prepared to spend $22 billion for Roku? What does it mean that Walmart acquired vibe.co and who the heck is gonna buy NBCU? What's going on with Comcast? Welcome back to this day of streaming podcast. I'm your host, Tim Rowe. And if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow along wherever you're listening or watching the podcast. Because today I'm sitting down with Justin Ruiss from BWG Global, who leads all of their media insights. Justin is a wealth of knowledge, and specifically, his day is spent inside this industry in a very intimate way with context from other verticals. So, really, you're getting a synthesized perspective on why Justin thinks these deals matter and a whole lot more. Enjoy. Justin Ruiss, BWG Global. Thank you for joining us. In a

Welcome And Guest Setup

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 1:42

word, can you tell us who BWG Global is? Like what problem do you solve and who do you solve it for?

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 1:48

One word insights, right? That's insights.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 1:52

That's a good word. That is the word.

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 1:54

It's an overused word. It's too, it's used too much. Why? Because we have so many insights, and everybody has insights to share. What sure? Off to a good start. What we do, BWG Global, we are a primary research firm, which means we talk to folks within respective ecosystems live on either forums or through concentrated interviews to garner different types of insights and opinions and learnings about these respective different sectors or industries, et cetera. I cover the media, e-com and leisure and entertainment industries. So we talk to a number of different uh brands or agencies, all the way down to you know, movie theater operators, theme park operators to garner a lot of these rich insights and supply information

How BWG Gathers Real Insights

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 2:51

back to either the investment community or other types of clientele that are out there.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 2:56

So you're like frontlines, intelligence collecting, getting it, getting it right from the source. It's it's really deeper than like a headline. Is that fair?

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 3:07

Yeah, very much. And and the way that we do it, the way that we collect all of this is through one-hour QA sessions, either one-on-one with industry executives or experts, or we do it in a forum setting, which is one of the way, way more popular settings that we do it in, where we'll talk to maybe five to seven different people over the course of an hour about what's going on, and industry folks can sign up and listen and network and grab as many insights and download as much as they can as possible on one of those sessions. I host about 30 of them a month. I guess Jeopardy's next for me. I don't really know what the next step is, but uh game show hosts would be nice.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 3:47

Yeah, that that would be a natural stepping stone for you.

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 3:50

I think we could probably have our own like BWG game show and then just quiz people.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 3:56

Well, today's gonna be a warm-up for that because I've got three recent deals that I'm going to to pick your brain on. We're gonna talk about the Walmart Vibe.co acquisition. We're gonna talk about Comcast spinning out NBCU and Peacock, and then we're gonna talk about everyone's favorite news, Fox and Roku. Why it makes so much sense? I think what's interesting still about that is even though the news is a few weeks old, seems like there's an opportunity to fill a knowledge gap there. So yeah, uh, I'll pick your brain on that, but thank you for the primer on BWG Global. It sounds like you get to talk to a lot of interesting people and and create and cover a lot of interesting different content. What's the most exciting part of that for you? Every day is a different conversation. Oh, that is fun.

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 4:42

You know, sports programming this morning. I'll be talking to travel and leisure people about corporate travel trends this afternoon. Tomorrow is, you know, e-commerce activations and platform preferences, and later on this week is paid media and programmatics. So every day is a new conversation, and it's you're the tip of the arrow of information flow. So it's great to hear all of this stuff live and be able to react as quickly as possible. And it's just funneling all this information in and figuring out what to do.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 5:19

We're gonna get into these headlines in a second, but you must see some interesting through lines across all of that. Do you want to tease what's like an interesting insight, a theme that you've seen across all of those different industries?

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 5:34

You know, it's funny, it is funny because it actually bleeds, I think it bleeds into the conversation that we're having, that we we will have, but you're still seeing a lot of the ad dollars accumulate and grow as a piece of the entire pie, right? The entire pie is growing, it's getting expansive, and you're seeing all of these different types of media channels come to the forefront with more than the average value

Ad Dollars Shift To New Channels

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 6:04

offering that something like you know, traditional search or social has. And it becomes conflicting in that you have to figure out how to execute these media plans as best as possible. OpenAI now has an advertising channel associated with it. Walmart's advertising channel is getting up and running and extremely competitive. Amazon has been there for quite some time, getting competitive as well. And you have all of these massive gravity wells of ad dollars performing incredibly well, and now creating a point of well, where should I be executing the best so that I can get the best returns? And a lot of times it's a healthier mix and it's a more prolific way of looking at the media space because you want to be able to do as much damage on the brand side, you want to be able to funnel as many people down on the performance side, and all of this stuff coexists in a really nice way. And some people can get very lost in the weeds and they can get very siloed in their own media planning journey. But when you zoom out and you look at the entire picture, you understand you're starting to see more of these things that are newer fitting into the funnel really nicely, and it creates this very interesting, more evolutionary point where the media buying journey or just the media deployment journey is going, which I think is really cool. Like you're starting to see like Reddit being this channel that's become so powerful in many brands' conversations and and their journeys, and the authenticity that comes alongside the conversations that happen on that platform, it's really cool stuff.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 7:58

It it really is. I was catching up with our friend Greg at player driven earlier, and we were chatting about the the size of the Xbox addressable audience and how that's that's on par realistically with someone like a Netflix. And then when you think about that audience, and he had made such a great point about you know, when you're on a gaming console, you don't have your phone in your hand, you have the controller in your hand. Like, so now we're into the conversation about audience durability, quantifying attention, something that we were chatting about obviously earlier in this conversation. We'll continue to. So let's let's zoom out for the media planner that maybe is on their own journey trying to make sense of a few of these headlines. Let's uh I'm gonna pull some content up on screen here. The first one that I want to talk about with you, Justin, is the Walmart and Vibe acquisition. Why did this deal matter? Why did it matter to Walmart? What does it what does it all mean?

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 8:54

You know, the a lot of this comes down to you know where Walmart was, I believe it was two years ago when they bought Visio, right? And you're looking at a retailer getting involved with a TV manufacturer and potentially an ab network, and then really taking that to the next level, right? And that was something that was always viewed by the industry as a really positive type of thing. A lot of concerns about whether or not, you know, Walmart would push somebody like Roku out of the picture and basically

Walmart Vibe Deal And Full Stack

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 9:27

say, Well, we only sell Visios now, but that didn't that didn't happen. And Walmart's pretty like agnostic to you know any of that kind of stuff. You can sell it, you can sell it in Walmart, right? So it's all good. This becomes an interesting play because now they have a technology partner that helps them execute across their owned and operated and across their CTV platform. Now, does this mean that these things are going to start to materialize in-house outside of something like Walmart Connect, which is powered by the trade desk? Signals could move there, and some folks do get concerned that you know the tides are shifting and all of these things are moving to like in-house technologies. If you adhere to what everyone always says, Walmart's chasing Amazon, right? They're chasing them in every instance, and they've caught up in some pretty unique ways, right? They're effective at delivery, they're effective at you know, they're they're in-store promotions and really competitive on all those different types of avenues, but in-housing their own ad tech technology, sort of like what Amazon DSP is, could be one of those tide-turning moments that puts them in real competitive running with someone like Amazon. And that's maybe an internal conversation of you know, keeping the fees to themselves instead of having that margin get split with another provider. I think one of the things that some people sleep on is the fact that they've activated Yahoo and their DSP, they're tapping into Magnite, they're really spreading out their inventory and their buying capabilities across many different avenues. And I think that tiered level of service where it's white glove top data, their own DSP, somebody else maybe white labeling it, allowing for a different level of service to exist there, and then having just the inventory available on other types of platforms that may come with your own data or maybe some kind of cleaner and technology that helps you build your own audiences off that exists and it becomes a you know good, better, best model for advertising capabilities. But those are the reads that we typically get on that. And the the vibe.co is sort of it's not a canary in a coal mine, but it's a it's a it's a signal that I think there's more to come on the horizon from them, and that they're they're you know, Visio was maybe them getting serious, vibe is way like forget serious, they are you know grinning their teeth, gritting their teeth, and ready to tackle into the competition.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 12:17

Agreed. Our read is is similar on the situation. It takes and really completes a full stack for Walmart and the conversations that we're having with ad tech leaders. It's how can you get my creative to the supply in as few hops as possible and then pump the data back into my own reporting UX UI? I want the data to come back to me in an owned and operated fashion. It is not dependent necessarily on the the technology accessing the inventory as much as it was, maybe, maybe historically. So exactly that Walmart exclusive once with the trade desk has now become a more ecosystem play. Great read. We love it. Walmart making moves in the space, which I think is really interesting. We talked about Xbox there for a minute. 30 million active households, Walmart 90. If you put Prime at 88, 89 million, that kind of starts to give you a sense of the universe that we're really talking about here. Yep. So it's all about addressable, it's all about who has the audience, who has the best story. Speaking of stories, let's talk about Comcast. Comcast has been making news really all year. I think Comcast is just another powerhouse company in the space. They spun out Versant earlier this year. Versant making a lot of interesting moves. I think that they're not properly assessed as the company that they are, but most recently spinning out NBCU and Peacock. So uh, did you have that on your radar? Did you see NBC U and Peacock being spun out from Comcast?

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 13:57

I stopped keeping a bingo card a long time ago. It's just it's not worth it at this point. I keep buying them and then I keep throwing them out for some reason. No, I didn't see this.

Comcast Spins Out NBCU And Peacock

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 14:10

I think transparency-wise, it's great. Less clutter within that ecosystem signifies more amplification and visibility on their media businesses, right? And we can kind of get more, you know, we'll we'll see more in the quarterly filings how these things actually perform instead of under the umbrella of a conglomerate, right? Which is great. So I I I'm really happy about that aspect of it. I think a lot of the opportunity that exists on this one, at least the read that I've been hearing about, is you know, free will becomes the crown jewel in a lot of what they're trying to accomplish on that side. And and that's good because I think free will still continues to be independent. You know, if you think about free will getting picked up and then vibe getting picked up, it's almost like that one looked like a steal. So it puts them in a very interesting position to be able to execute. And I think pure play, uh, you know, if you look at their opportunity on the CTV side, CTV continues to grow. It's still there's still plenty of bleed left on the linear side to shift over to CTV. Budgets are still materializing for connected, so it's it puts them in a very good position to capitalize on so many of these rich ad dollars that are flowing into uh that medium, which I think is really good. And you know, maybe in this uh divorce, one side looks a little bit better than the other. I can't speak to the you know connectivity side of it too too much. It's not my area of expertise, but uh you know, as a pure play CTV and media business, it does start to look way more attractive because you can get more insight and you can garner more transparency out of them and can be competitive even, right? It puts them it still puts them in the same conversations with so many other different platforms and publishers that are out there. So it's it's a it's looking much more positive than anything.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 16:21

Is there anyone that you think isn't being talked about that should be?

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 16:25

You know, it's it's funny because if you can say, and that kind of does bleed into the next topic, it's because you looked at somebody like Roku, who is so powerful and strong in the industry, they almost seemed to be overlooked despite how strong their assets were compared to the Amazons and the Netflixes of the world. So why why do you think that that was? Why do you think that Roku was overlooked? I think there's there's one major reason is because Amazon switched everybody over to an ad-supported model basically overnight, and it created this scenario where now Amazon has to be part of the

Why Roku Got Overlooked

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 17:06

ad buying or the CTV buying journey. You have Thursday night football, you have top-tier programming, you have massive distribution, and you have data. Forget a double-edged, it's it's all edges of the sword, right? It's a it's a mace at this point. So it becomes the topic de jour, and while Roku is still very strong, the growth story swells around Amazon. And while yeah, that growth story came at the expense of somebody like a trade desk and other types of players that are out there, it just cast a very, very large shadow on so many of the other players that are out there. And while some may have slept on Roku, you know, Fox clearly didn't, and they understood the distribution points and they understood the data and they understood the household graph, which is really powerful and strong. It's just some of these titans of of industry just be got too big very quickly.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 18:08

I'm just gonna list off a few of the the names that are actually impacted by Fox and Roku getting together, and I'm probably gonna miss a few, so you're gonna have to help me out, right? We've got we've got Fox proper and everything that comes under that umbrella. We've got FS1, we've got the Fox One app, we've got Tubi, we've got Roku TV, we've got Roku channel, we've got friendly TV, and we've got Howdy. I know that I missed something in there, but holy moly, that's a ton. Like, I know that there's the the we even covered the just the the pure attention share that Fox and Roku getting together, more than 10% of attention share. That's great.

Fox Roku Strategy And Execution Risk

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 18:54

But more interestingly is the actual business infrastructure impact that all of those things touch. Do you have a take on on exactly how that comes together?

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 19:09

And I think that's I think the key to a lot of this ends up becoming we bought this asset, we sort of know how it's it's used, and you don't want to mess that up. And that becomes a situation of we don't want to take resources away from that, we want to amplify the resources that are already working and that are that are there. So in essence, it becomes a question of is Fox's leadership going to understand what they bought and then execute accordingly? Because you don't want to diminish any of the efforts that they're doing on that side. You want to you want to create as much of a vacuum as possible for these ad dollars to come in and execute, and that comes across all of the properties that you just mentioned. It comes across the fact that you have audience segmentation, comes across that you have premium and free ad-supported inventory, not to mention sports, like the the gold tier inventory. It it's understanding and leveraging that content across the distribution point, which is Roku. That's good. And the distribution point can't be messed with, right? So it's it takes leadership to understand that hey, that's our point to really push so much of this good content through, and the ad dollars will start to materialize. And and not to mention, you have a almost like a one-stop shop for CTV to be really, really good. And I would argue punch above their weight, right? So really get into the conversations of like, hey, I just listed off so many of the great things an Amazon does. However, the Fox Roku combination gets so much of what I'm aiming to do, maybe at competitive CPMs at that point, but it's doing so much of what I need it to do to be competitive against somebody like an Amazon or a Netflix or a Disney ESPN Hulu, etc. So I I think it puts them in such a great competitive advantage. It just it comes down to whether or not leadership knows how to deploy this the right way. And yeah, like will there be like sales efforts that can be combined? I think there will be. I think there there has to be on those efforts, and those seasoned Fox sales teams probably have a ton more to offer in a lot of different ways since it's skirting, you know, linear end on the streaming side. So there's probably a lot of good things to be learned in either instance. I don't know if that comes at the expense of you know jobs or anything, but there's definitely insights to leverage from both sides of the equation that can put in a really powerful position.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 22:06

And and that seems like the the bridge to to ultimately cross, which is yeah, hey, we've got all of these great technology assets, really smart teams that that that understand that piece of the business. Then we have our traditional media arm which understands that. Can we can we merge those two things here to really unlock that value? I've got uh I've got a visual that I was just working on actually before we jumped on here that I wanted to share. So, what Looper looks at is Looper looks at essentially the shelf space value on CTV. And I asked them, hey, could you give us a slice just for the WNBA across connected TV in Q2? And Roku for the WNBA generated. Now, this is quantifiable shelf space, right? How it shows up on the home screen, eyeballs, addressable attention, $23 million in addressable attention generated on Roku TV. The next closest, I've got I've got the numbers here. Next closest Apple TV 513,000, Xfinity 297,000. Like we're talking

Roku Scale Example With WNBA

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 23:20

about completely different stratospheres when we talk about the scale and the impact of a Roku. So magnitude, right? Like orders of magnitude, and and you can see it, you can see it in the in the record viewership numbers, WMBA and and professional women's sports in general doing a really great job of I think finding distribution in a way that makes sense for their growing leagues, and and that story continues to evolve. So Justin, I'm sure that we've got a part two in our near future here. Uh, how do folks get in touch? If they want to learn more about yourself, BWG, what you're covering, please do check out BWG Global's website.

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 24:00

We're happy to take any inquiries there. I am way too active on LinkedIn. So Justin Ruiss on LinkedIn, you can definitely find me there. I'm not really much of like a socials guy, so you can you know definitely reach out to me via the professional social network known as LinkedIn. Certainly reach out on our website. We have information there. If you want to join any of the forums, we have ways and forums to sign up so that you can be part of it. And I will have a personal conversation with you if you do, just to get you you know acquainted and accustomed to what we do. And

How To Connect And Closing

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 24:36

you know, I'll talk to anyone. I'll talk to a tree. Awesome.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 24:39

So if you see Justin talking to a tree, just know that he's also a man of his word.

Justin Ruiss, SVP Media at BWG Global 24:45

Yes, uh also call my wife and tell her that I'm okay.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 24:50

Do do indeed. And and we'll include all those contact details except Justin's wife's number in the chat. Please don't. Justin, thanks so much for being here. Thank you, Tim. If you found this conversation to be helpful, please share it with a colleague or a client and start a conversation yourself today. We'll see you next time.