The CMO is a dying role, says Digitas' Amy Lanzi

Support for Decoder comes from Uber Advertising. Whether it's ordering dinner, booking a ride, or shopping for groceries, we live in a world where we make decisions the moment a need arises. But these moments aren't just when people choose Uber, they're when people choose brands. Uber Advertising helps brands understand the context behind those decisions, the moment, the need, and the mindset, across mobility, delivery, and commerce. So brands can show up with greater relevance when people are ready to act. Uber Advertising, where life's movement becomes your brand's momentum. Learn more at uber.com/advertising. Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Ipatel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We've got a special Decoder today. I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzy, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber Villa at the Cannes Lion Advertising Festival in the south of France. I know, it's a hard gig, but I do it for you. Amy's been on Decoder three times now, and she's one of my very favorite people to chat with. She is clear-eyed about what the advertising industry really is and does for brands, and what all that money sloshing around the ad-supported internet really accomplishes. In fact, you'll hear her say directly that she thinks the traditional chief marketing officer role is done for, that her job is driving business results using data and analytics. That might sound straightforward, but it was a shocking statement at Cannes, which is where the entire advertising industry gathers every year, drinks rosé, and convinces itself of outrageous nonsense. This year, the big trends everyone were talking about were creators and, of course, AI. And Amy and Digitas' parent company, Publicis, weren't holding back when it came to calling out the AI nonsense for what it is. Publicis actually put out an ad before Cannes listing all of the false promises being made about AI when it comes to advertising. So I asked Amy about that, and what AI might actually be good for, beyond just generating slop and slop headlines. And for all, Meta and the rest of the big platforms were all at Cannes, talking about generating more and more ads with AI, something that threatens almost every other company in the industry. Of course, we also talked about the creator economy, and how all of the creators at Cannes were openly calling themselves marketers, essentially turning themselves into small ad agencies of their own. On top of that, the biggest creators in the world almost always end up launching their own products, something Amy and Digitas see as an opportunity, because those companies will need operational scale if they're going to be successful over time. There's a lot in this one. Like I said, Amy is as sharp as they come, and I really enjoy talking to her about how the money really works. Okay, Amy Lanzy, CEO of Digitas North America, live at Cannes. Here we go. Hello, everybody. I'm Neil Ipatel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, and the host of Decoder. Hi, Amy Lanzy, CEO of Digitas, part of Publicis Group. I'm very excited to be here with Amy. Amy, we have to stop meeting like this. We only talk during Decoder podcasts. I know. We do. We have to do this more. We both live in New York. We should get together more, like IRL. Yeah, we only travel long ways to talk to each other in front of live audiences, which is wonderful. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to Uber for having us. I have a lot to talk to you about. It seems like every year, we hang out, and the entire advertising industry is in a new form of chaos. And that chaos doesn't really get resolved, and we just kind of move on to the next form of chaos. This year, it's AI. Yes. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone in this room. Everywhere here at Cannes, the conversation is about AI. Let's just get started. Publicis put out what you would call a fake ad, a documentary ad. It's called The Wrong Promises, and it is basically just a series of vignettes of promises people are making in pitches, including, you don't have to pay us until you win a lion, which is incredible. And it says, this is real at the bottom. Yes. Tell me about what you are hearing in these rooms that are leading to these crazy AI promises getting made. Thank you for bringing up our fun video. And it was really designed to stimulate conversations like this. And in the business right now, it's kind of crazy. I've been in this business for a long time, and we are seeing all kinds of partners offer wild things in the pitch process. Different than it's been before, whether it's all the things that were, of course, hyped in that video, but also just insane commercial deals that are just generally bad for people and the business. And they're coming in all different types, whether it's about free AI, free platform, free whatever that is creating a dynamic that is not good for all of us in this industry because we all need to work together. It is a people business and that all of those things really long-term create a people problem. Not to get all Toy Story 5 here, but the conversation that you and I are constantly having is about the pressure of the tech platforms on the media ecosystem, whether that's publishers, whether that's agencies, whether that's creators at some point. We'll come to that. But the idea that the platforms have enough scale to promise you business results and then deliver them, whether or not that happens, but they certainly can make those promises, is leading to, I think, some of these outcomes, some of these promises about AI and what it might be able to do. Is there any reality to that or is that just a reaction to the pressure the platforms are putting on the ecosystem? So whenever this conversation comes about the promise of AI, I always go back to the promise of programmatic. How many of you remember when programmatic was a thing? No more people. It was all going to magically... No one in this room admitted that they remember the programmatic advertising. Right. Exactly. Right. So, and that was a time when it was all just going to magically happen, and it magically still needs people, still has the nuance of brands and the marketplace and all of the things that we do to define our partnerships and what are going to be game changers. So I go back to that because I feel like the AI story is the new programmatic story with the promise of everything just being absolutely automated, and that absolutely did not happen. And so, again, when programmatic was rising, there were all those promises at that time as well. And now we are living that, but what is different here is it's coming from either agency partners or tech and platform partners. So that creates a different kind of chaos to where you start it. Publicis, Digitas, you also have huge investments here. You were early, right? You bought influential in 2024 to do analysis of how the creator ecosystem was doing. You have Digitas AI, which I think is two years now. You're into it. How do you think about those products and those platforms in an ecosystem that is full of these promises? So for me, and I'll talk about Digitas AI in particular, we started to make our people better unicorns, as we talked about the last time we met. So it was really to say, okay, everyone, look at what's on your desk, like what's in your day, and think about what you absolutely could build an agent to do and that way we free up our time to do this. So that's where we started. And then what was fascinating is the magical things that were able to be built by the young talent in the industry that is solving a working problem, but eventually a business problem. That still holds because every day, I always say as a Gen Xer, I'm like, hackers wanted. If you have a hacking mentality and you're curious, you can actually do better things than I did when I was a hacker in that age. So it enables us to use our agents, use our data to get to better ideas, better workflows that are more of a surprise and delight to clients than what you might have brought in the first round. Because you can do many rounds before you actually get to the final product. And that's how you get to the unique outcome. You can tell that Amy is a Decoder pro because she has led directly to the Decoder questions. I'm very curious if AI, at least in the enterprise, is a top down or bottom up change agent. But you just restructured Digitas, right? You put in a bunch of new roles. You have a new chief intelligence officer, a new chief systems officer, my favorite, a chief transformation officer. He turns into a robot. I hope he hears this because that's going to make him laugh anyway. It's very exciting. Toy line is going to be great. What are these roles for? How are you changing the structure of Digitas? You've always inspired me with how do you structure yourself and how do you make decisions? So the first time we talked about it, I had been in this role for just a little bit of time. And we had set our culture, which is we're fearless, inventive, and generous. That still holds on how we make decisions. org structure-wise, we needed to figure out exactly what you just said is, how do we do things in the underpinning of the agency that will enable all of our different practices to be able to scale faster, leveraging intelligence, and of course, AI. Intelligence is code for AI in this story. So that's why we have our chief intelligence officer, which was a pickup from data and analytics into like liberating that into an intelligent platform that all of our agents are built on Andromeda system is kind of the biggest example of this. It's either going to feed it with AI creative. You're going to let them do it or you're going to have your own AI creative system or you're going to let a million creators and influencers do it for you. How do you plug a growth engine into a world where that's what the platforms are all saying? The more you are closer to your consumers and all the places they're spending time from a data identity. However, you're systematically doing that is the most important thing. So you can see how they are reacting to said, what did you say? Creative and targeting. I've never heard this phrase. I don't like it. It's terrible, right? It's terrible for a business. Creative is targeting. Only because it sounds horrible. Creative is emotional and lovely and magical. How can it be emotional and magical if it's targeting you? Those are two words that don't go together. So to me, the brands that I think are doing really well are deciding not to do that or to do it in a way that feels so contextually relevant because they know so much about Gen Z on meta that they've decided that they need to do this to be able to drive velocity for a certain type of brand. And that feels fit for that brand. But I think we are not in a world where we need more content. Does anyone want more content? We are not in a world where we need more content. So that idea, creative targeting assumes that we have endless amounts of content and impressions as a concept. And I think those are two worlds that still need to be decoupled. But when they're put together, it needs to be in a way that you are constantly learning, how did that do? Did I gain, you know, more attention from a certain type of growth audience I'm trying to get to? Can I push you on this? Not to support meta's ideas here, but let me do it. I'll just make the argument because you and I have talked about it before. The way in particular Mark Zuckerberg talks about it is at some point, they know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody or they want to know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody. And they will just deliver the right creative to that person at the right moment. This is the same argument as programmatic. Only now they have acres of GPUs with which to do it. And the argument there is, yes, the army of unpaid teenagers will make the fun stuff that you watch and the advertising will just show up magically on the platform and find the right person at the right time. Again, I read that as, you should just let meta make the creative for you. You just give them a picture of the shampoo bottle and they will put it in the right place on the right background. For me, it will be pictures of trucks jumping over things and exploding. And then shampoo will appear at the end. Like, that's the shampoo for me. It's terrible, right? It's terrible for a business. Creative is targeting. Only because it sounds horrible. Creative is emotional and lovely and magical. How can it be emotional and magical if it's targeting you? Those are two words that don't go together. So to me, the brands that I think are doing really well are deciding not to do that or to do it in a way that feels so contextually relevant because they know so much about Gen Z on meta that they've decided that they need to do this to be able to drive velocity for a certain type of brand that feels fit for that brand. But I think we are not in a world where we need more content. Does anyone want more content? We are not in a world where we need more content. So that idea, creative targeting, assumes that we have endless amounts of content and impressions as a concept. And I think those are two worlds that still need to be decoupled. But when they're put together, it needs to be in a way that you are constantly learning. How did that do? Did I gain more attention from a certain type of growth audience I'm trying to get to? Can I push you on this? Not to support meta's ideas here. I'm going to do it. I'll just make the argument because you and I have talked about it before. The way, in particular, Mark Zuckerberg talks about it is at some point, they know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody or they want to know more about the viewer of Instagram than anybody. And they will just deliver the right creative to that person at the right moment. This is the same argument as programmatic. Only now they have acres of GPUs with which to do it. And the argument there is, yes, the army of unpaid teenagers will make the fun stuff that you watch. And the advertising will just show up magically on the platform and find the right person at the right time. Again, I read that as, you should just let meta make the creative for you. You just give them a picture of the shampoo bottle and they will put it in the right place on the right background. For me, it will be pictures of trucks jumping over things and exploding. And then shampoo will appear at the end. Like, that's the shampoo for me. Yes. It would work. If any of you need a good idea to target me specifically, that would work. That is, like, no agency is ever going to make something that niche. Right. But you, for example, Publicist just bought LiveRamp to take all that data out. It's still in the situation. Yeah. Uh-oh. I mean, it's out there, but the deal is not done. But so the, presumably, the goal of buying LiveRamp, which is a giant data platform, is to lever up against meta and say, actually, we know as much about these customers as you do. Right. We can distill information across all the platforms and we will actually do a better job for our clients of placing the creative in the right place at the right time. This sort of implies that meta will participate. Why would they do that? Because people are complicated. Yeah. And today, you know, look at how often on this beach there are different players on the beach. Everyone doesn't stay in this position forever. And people are complicated. I would offer that I think if I started seeing your wonderful ad 50 times, I would say, I don't want to see this anymore. I actually don't like that shampoo. That's what happens when it's just left to go on its own without someone thinking about suppressing messaging, without understanding consumers better because you actually win hearts and minds when you're doing something that's not as expected because people are complicated. So I think that there is a moment in time where to us, it's like we say to our clients, you need to work with all of them because all of us spend time on all the, in all these different places for different reasons. You know, why you choose to spend time on Pinterest versus meta versus Amazon versus Walmart connect. All of them are different roles in terms of how the platforms work for you in your life. So why would you put all of your dollars in one place? And so for me, those players are shifting in and out depending on what we think that growth audience is doing and how they're thinking about intersecting with that category. Are they good at participating in an ecosystem in that way? This is something that strikes me every time. Some of them are and some of them are not. Yeah. And the more they start to see headwinds, they are more leaned in to participating in a way that we, you know, ideally, we want to do data collaboration with these partners because it's better for our clients that we can say, we knew more about this growth audience on platform. And I'm not going to say X because that's not, I'm not saying X on platform Y. We know more about them. No one knows anything about X. Right. And this is how we're going to grow your brand. And that's a good joint story for a platform and an agency partner to come in to talk about because we've been able to actually share data and look at that in a way that's beneficial for the consumer in the end. I see a lot of, I mean, there's only two business models, right? Bundling and unbundling in agency world. There's a lot of bundling going on right now. There's a lot of bundling. Honestly, Publicis is huge. Omnicom just bought IPG. CAA is out here. They've invented creators this year. I don't know if anyone heard. And they're very proud of themselves. But, you know, they have a $250 million fund to take stakes indirectly in creator businesses. There's a lot of scale. There's a lot of bundling going on. What do you think is driving that? It's the desired state of a system. So for me, hence why we have a chief systems officer. There are capabilities that we've built. The last time we met or two times ago, I talked about building the commerce capability and the acquisition of Profitero that I led. That was really to get to a unique set of data so we could build a better commerce capability so we could advise our clients on how they should be investing in some of these retail media partner spaces at the time. How do you win the digital shelf was really the business problem to solve when we made that acquisition. That holds true for the acquisition of Influential. How do we create creator as a channel? How do we harness the creator in a way that's also easier for clients? If you don't bring those things into a bundled offer, it's actually really hard for clients because there's seven different versions of Profitero calling on them. There's seven different Influential partners or those types of partners that are calling on them. And then you're now looking at a distracted set of technology or decentralized. And it's again, not tied into a single, ideally, data identity spine. So the more you have them connected, the more you can So that dynamic has changed and that makes the negotiation between they need both each other to grow. So when they've transformed into media partners, this changes that equation significantly. This is the whole retail media conversation. That is still, so are they a media partner or are they a retail partner? That's much more still of the conversation. I would say that... Has AI changed the dynamic of that at all? Yes, because the more AI-oriented products they have, it puts more focus on more media investments with them because of these magical products. It's not necessarily solving a core shopping problem. We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back. Support for Decoder comes from Uber Advertising. Whether it's ordering dinner, booking a ride, or shopping for groceries, we live in a world where we make decisions the moment a need arises. But these moments aren't just when people choose Uber. They're when people choose brands. Uber Advertising helps marketers understand the context behind those decisions. The moment, the need, and the mindset across mobility, delivery, and commerce. So brands can show up with greater relevance when people are ready to act. Uber is the largest mobility and delivery platform in the world with billions of insights from millions of people taking real-life actions when they ride and when they order. And because people are constantly making everyday decisions with Uber, brands have the opportunity to connect in ways that feel timely instead of disruptive. Whether someone's heading to the airport, ordering late-night food, or planning their weekend, Uber Advertising drives brand impact through actions instantly, intuitively, and in sync with people's lives. Uber Advertising, where life's movement becomes your brand's momentum. Learn more at uber.com slash advertising. We're back with Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi. Before the break, we were talking about how the advertising and marketing industries are contending with AI and fundamental changes to the web. Now, I wanted to dive deeper on the creator side of the equation and specifically what Amy thinks about the growth of creator-led businesses. Let me flip to the other side of this because so far we've talked about tech and data and scale, and I think that is the promise of AI. We're going to automate everything. It is going to be magic. We're going to do programmatic again. All you need is data, and they need your money. The other side of this, and I'm just walking on Cannes, is creators everywhere. Something vastly more human, vastly more bespoke. My theory, and I was just wrong on this, so I'll cop to it. I thought creator rates would fall drastically this year as there was more AI content, as the platform has got more and more punishing about what would work on their algorithms as they started doing their own content. Instead, I look around, and everyone here at Cannes is just so proud about how cost per minute of video is skyrocketing again. What's going on? Again, I think it's all about supply and demand. And so when you get to certain, once creators start moving into a more famous space, then they're suddenly, they're worth more. And the last time we talked about this, we talked about the difference between a creator, an influencer, and a celebrity. And I still think that holds true. And there is more. Unilever went out probably this time last year saying that they were going to spend 50% of their dollars with all creators versus creative. To me, what is an interesting conversation is what is creative now? If you're putting it all in the hands of a creator, what does it mean to be a brand that delivers creative? And how do you make those things work together? Because we can't have another thing that is also prices out of the market, and there you get to a point where you're ceding so much control to the voice of the creator that that's probably not going to build your brand over time. The creators see themselves as marketers, at least the very best ones here. I mean, they're here at Cannes. They are all small media businesses of their own. Some of them are very large media businesses of their own. And they are very open that what they do is marketing for brands. That comes right up against agencies. It comes right up against your creatives. All the creators I know, they want more control. They want the brief from the brand. They want business results. But you say, leave me alone to do it. I'm just going to do it however I want to do it. What's that dynamic like as you start working with the bigger and bigger creators? We still hold true to brand fundamentals. Strategy matters. What the consumer insight is for that brand, that has to be something that's an exchange between a brand and a creator in order for the creator work to really build what's unique about that brand. And so it's still the idea of freedom in a framework that that creator is briefed on. They control how they're going to do it. But there are some sort of tone and voice and things that if a creator is actually going to buy into this, they need to buy into that. That still is really the exchange. That's always been the exchange, especially when you remember when UGC started in Tangle. Do you remember that whole thing? It was the same thing where we, I was working on Johnson's Baby and we were trying to figure out how to really create authentic first-time expectant mom stories. And we had this great debate about how we're going to get the new creators, like mom bloggers was the language, to get them to tell these stories. And so we had this, like this is what the brand stands for. Here's some things, but you need to buy into this and believe in it. That exchange still exists. We just call them creators now. And then you can do it in a more scaled way through a system like Influential. I guess maybe my new prediction is it will see a more barbell-shaped creator economy where the biggest creators are making more and more money than ever. And kind of the middle gets squeezed. Either you got to get big, you got to be able to command rates because you're a celebrity, or you end up towards those UGC rates, right? Where you're just doing infomercials on TikTok and that's the business. What's left of the middle? It's a really good question. I don't know the answer to that. I do think there's so much demand for this space that that middle, there's a lot of demand for the middle. So you could use it as a way to eventually launch yourself into this, you know, upper echelon of creators. Someone said to me, I heard this, that creators are daytime stars from soap operas. Which I was like, this is pretty interesting. Because they're in your house? Because they're just so on. It's not noise, but they keep you company. They keep you busy. And then all of a sudden, one of those people becomes a movie star. Which to me is a little bit of that middle of what you just articulated. Where we know the creators. I think I've watched my daughter over our years. I've watched my daughter and all of her creators that are now, you know, Emma Chamberlain was a creator on YouTube that's now a star that's doing, you know, Estee Lauder ads or whatever she's doing. She's really a celebrity now. But she started as a tiny creator making adorable shows on YouTube. One of the things that you and I were briefly talking about before we came on was, at some point the creators hit scale where their businesses need to be businesses, right? And that's where you might need an agency to come in and actually operate your business. That scale is still pretty huge, right? Like it might just be Mr. Beast is that scale and needs to operate a full business. But we see, I see lots of creators. I think it's fascinating that the creative economy is the only one where people routinely transition from selling bits to selling atoms. Right? Like it's crazy to me that the Paul brothers are like, bottled water is a good business to be in. Historically not a great business to be in. Like shipping water around the world is vastly more expensive than just making one more video. But there's no business in making one more video that scales. You have to make physical products and sell them to people and that scales. Is that becoming a bigger and bigger line for you? We're going to go find the biggest creators and make them products and scale that up? We, the last time we met or two times ago, I had predicted that there at some point there are going to be these creators that become enterprises. Let's say a Mr. Beast that actually needs an agency and it has happened. We are now starting to see briefs from these scaled, started as a creator that have now turned into enterprise businesses where they need an agency partner and they also need someone to help them to figure out how to invest their media so they can grow. Is that just because Mr. Beast himself cannot flip over the bars at Walmart like he was doing at the beach awards? I think it's unique. Just like people need consultants. You need someone to help you. No one has ever looked me in the eye and said people need consultants. I call myself a consultant. Look me in the eye. I have your Accenture just bought Wailer, which is like an all-time nonsense decoder phrase. But okay. Yes. Yes. So for me at some point, you as an enterprise owner or as an owner of a company, you need help to figure out how you're going to get to your next growth path. And this is what's happening with some of these businesses, these creators that have turned into an enterprise that are wondering like, what is next? Gee, it's expensive to ship water all over the world. What do I do? How do I do this? What types of partners do I go to? How do I figure out ways to grow my brand in unknown ecosystems? Because that's the quickest way to grow your brand, not just in your own channels. There's this term that I've been of a team that was speaking, and it was fantastic. It was a case for Virgin Cruises. And they were talking about building these beautiful long-form content stories. And the creatives were talking about how they used AI to be able to get to the concepts faster, curate from static art to digital art, to really make these beautiful multimodal boards to bring this to life faster. But it wasn't the core of the idea. They had used their brains to come up with the idea. You know, it's interesting, in our newsroom, we do a lot of first drafts now with AI, with art, not writing, because it lowers the stakes on saying things are good ideas or bad ideas. And just that has empowered people to have more ideas. I see a lot of that. I would challenge you. I think at some point, the bottom end of the creative, the UGC world, that stuff gets taken over. I would say, so for me, everyday creative, I'll give you an example. Product display pages that are when you search on Walmart or Amazon and that page that it gives you all this information. That, if it's not done with robots, you're not doing it right. Because that is a, that's like looking at the back of the packaging. And if you really do it right, you are, you can make it dynamic. So it knows what you bought the last time, and it can be magical. That's like everyday creative that we need in order to get to personalization. We should be using those tools to be able to do that versus someone making those in an analog world, which is where we all started on that. So for some things, but I think when I think about big creative and storytelling, it still needs humans. Yeah. I'd ask you a GEO several times. I'm asking you in lightning round format. Okay. Is this just another wild goose chase? GEO? Yeah. No, I think it's, well, I think it's a, for certain platforms, it's a recast of search. We're seeing this happening where we're, you know, you need to be able to be, instead of being found, you need to be known for. So that's the GEO response. But I also think it's a better curation of information. I think it's a harder work on marketers because you need to be figuring out how you are leveraging Reddit or all these other different places so that you are showing up in a positive way with the LLMs. But I do think if we've all been talking about the concept of personalization at scale, we should be delivering on that. So GEO allows us to do that. Have you had to change your SEO practice to account for that? We've had, talk about a practice that you thought was not going to be, you know, when you look at the capabilities you have and what you don't think is going to be continued, is going to be a high growth engine. Our SEO team has exploded into GEO. It's one of the number, in addition to new websites, this is a big one. And that is really a conversation around influence. So it's how you're showing up and how you're also influencing LLMs when you actually get into that. Is that something you can measure? I worry that LLMs are inherently sort of non-deterministic. Every result is different. Do you have a system of measuring those results? We do. We do have an audit format to see what is your share of voice within that so you can sort of identify where you are in the moment, but it's a movable feast in comparison to share voice for search. Yeah. But it is something that we have an audit so we can start to see, like, what are the different levers we need to be pulling? And by the way, the LLMs are also fed by different things. Recently, one of the new ones is long form YouTube content. That kind of makes sense. That tracks. Why do you think we only make podcasts now? Everyone's just trying to get to three hours of YouTube content. I don't know if you can have it like a lightning round question that starts from a place of existential dread, but here we go. I feel like we're all here in the, do you all see Adam Mosseri's post about customizing the Instagram algorithm two weeks ago? This is maybe one of the most important posts in the history of media. I'm not kidding. And of course, he issued it as like an Instagram carousel, one of the least consumable forms of media that you can possibly have. It's also on threads. If your brain is broken and you use threads, you can go look at it there. But it's very long. And it's about how offering the ability to customize the algorithm was previously impossible because no one could describe the series of matrix multiplication equations that led to your algorithm showing you a piece of content, except LLMs can now, right? So it can tell you why you're seeing content in a very direct way. And then you can talk to the LM and it can customize the algorithm for you. And he said, this is great, and we think this will give people a sense of agency. And then he went on, and he was like, soon I will customize all of Instagram for you. And the app will be different for every single person. Some of the experiences will be interactive. Some of the, literally the UI controls will be different and how we organize everything will be different. And you can see how this is the obvious future for us. And then he went on again and he said, this might be bad. This might ruin the shared fabric of truth that we all rely on every single day. Which for a Met executive, remarkably prescient, but he didn't say he was gonna do anything about it. He was just like, here's what I'm gonna do to you. I look at all of Cannes and I look at all of our talk about the creator economy of measuring the data. And I say, Adam Mosseri is gonna make Instagram different for every single person. That is a stated goal. He said it two weeks ago. And he knows that this might distort literally our shared sense of reality. Like the media experiences we all have. This is the lightning round question. It was a big build up to lightning round question. Is that good? It's terrible. Okay, is there anything we can do about that? Not engage in it. How do you not engage in Instagram? If I told you about my, you know, my oldest stepson who is an absolute, absolutely analog, that's why. I think we are seeing more and more consumers. The more you see that, the more you're like, think about it. If you sat down in front of your TV and it was like, we've made all these decisions about you and you're only allowed to do this based on what, it feels like Black Mirror. And if that happens to you, you would say, I'm not going to engage in this anymore. I'm going to go read a book. And I think, and it's also counter to the value prop of, you know, a social platform around community. It was designed to make this connected world. So that's the most disconnected world. People are lonely and isolated. So the more you're just in your doom scroll, it will be terrible. So like we need shared community. I think one of the things that's really interesting and a bright spot about creators is creators show up and they have a community. They listen to their communities. They're not influencing. They're creating, they're talking to their communities in a way. And brands that do this right are really bringing community along. So we're seeing the rise of IRL. People wanna get together and talk about things. Is it just gonna be that sort of competitive pressure that keeps them honest, that keeps them from, like I look at the creator economy and I'm like Instagram is a load bearing part of the creator economy. Right, like disrupting that, maybe you break the whole thing. What keeps them honest? What keeps them from going down this path that they very clearly said they want to go down? Is it just people switching away? I think people switching away. I think the, you know, when brands stop putting media dollars there, all of those things together, you might realize like, wow, they're not buying what I'm selling and this is not going to work for me. I mean, there's plenty of, plenty of platforms that are no longer, if you think about it. Yeah. Big Blue Facebook. It's there for my parents. It's even on their own platform. This one's really easy. What's next for Digitalis? What should we be looking for this year? We are very much focused on marketing systems and how we are helping brands build out their growth engines so that it's not just about your media needs, your creative needs, your CRM needs. It's how we can really make all of those different capabilities work together so that it's easier for our brands to grow. Okay. Great. Thank you all so much. We're out. Thank you. I'd like to thank Amy Lansy for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. To let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, send us an email. We're at decoder at the verge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads or BlueSky and we're on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're at DecoderPod as well. And they're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge. I'm part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox, Nick Stat, and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Support for Decoder comes from Uber