Guillaume Kendall is the Founder of Zedosh and Attention Exchange, which is working to build a safe place for advertisers, publishers, and consumers to all benefit from fair access to human attention.
Chad talks with Guillaume about open banking, changing up who the beneficiaries of consumer attention and data are, and giving companies opportunities to advertise without interrupting consumers with ads.
Zedosh (https://zedosh.com/)
The Attention Exchange (https://attentionexchange.co.uk/)
Follow The Attention Exchange on Twitter (https://twitter.com/attnexchange) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-attention-exchange/).
Follow Guillaume on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillaumekendall/).
Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/).
Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots!
Transcript:
CHAD: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Guillaume Kendall, the Founder of Zedosh and the Attention Exchange, which is working to build a safe place for advertisers, publishers, and consumers to all benefit from fair access to human attention. Guillaume, thank you for joining me.
GUILLAUME: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real privilege.
CHAD: If I'm not mistaken, you and I first met in person for lunch one time in London when I was visiting London in; I think it was...I went back and looked at my calendar. It was March 10th, 2020, if I'm not mistaken, either that or it was that Friday of that week.
GUILLAUME: It must have been one of the last weeks pre-pandemic.
CHAD: It was. I literally woke up on Saturday morning for my flight to come back to the U.S. to the headlines that all flights from Europe were being shut down. [laughs] And I almost dropped my phone until I realized, oh, that's the headline, but the real detail is I can get back. It's all the rest of Europe, not the UK, yet. That was the following week. I made it home, and then the world changed.
GUILLAUME: I sure did, didn't it? [laughs] It's funny, isn't it? Because the two-year period in between seems to have flown by. It feels like just yesterday. I remember I think, even what I ate.
CHAD: [laughs] And at the time, you were working on a new application, and we were talking about that. But I want to fast forward a little bit to today. Tell me more about Attention Exchange, and then we're going to rewind a bit to how you've arrived.
GUILLAUME: So the Attention Exchange...by way of background, I come from the fintech space rather than adtech. And it really, ultimately, the Attention Exchange is a matching engine, using financial terms, that matches the right video content to the right consumer based on their spending data rather than their browsing data. So it's a matching engine.
And it looks at rules that ultimately we're able to derive, or actually, I better use the phrase, we can bridge the gap between attention and intention based on our audience's spending patterns. And the reason we can access those is because they give us explicit permission. We have something called open banking here in the UK. It's actually across most of Europe now. But it enables the consumer to own their data and share it outside the bank if they so wish to with other regulated third parties.
So we're such a regulated third party, and they share that data with us, as I said, to be matched with video content from brands that are relevant to their spending instead of their browsing. What it ultimately means is we're very well-positioned in this apparent post-cookie world that seems to be heading our way eventually because we don't rely on any other tracking technology to spy on our audience. They voluntarily give it to us.
And I guess the kicker which is...people are probably asking themselves, why would they do that? That's be