Ep 24. AI Is Making Ads Better — But Where Is All That Money Actually Going? with David Danziger, Dstillery

The New York Times says AI is making digital advertising boring. Meta just posted its biggest earnings quarter ever. Google's CapEx story is looking smarter by the day. And OpenAI is quietly building toward a $100 billion ad business while the three-headed AI monster — Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT — keeps getting more tangled by the week. This week, Shiv and Miles sit down with David Danziger, SVP of Partnerships at Dstillery, one of the leading independent targeting companies in advertising. David has spent his career at the intersection of data, partnerships, and the open internet — with stints at LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo — and he brings a practitioner's eye to a week full of big numbers and bigger questions. David breaks down why the NYT's "boring" framing is ironic at best and wrong at worst, why Meta's CapEx story looks very different from Google's when you factor in the infrastructure play underneath it, and why the open internet is going to see real AI benefits too — not just the walled gardens. He also explains why a wrapper on an LLM isn't enough anymore, why ChatGPT ads are essentially search ads with more granular intent signals, and why the companies with real data assets underneath them are the ones that will win. They also get into how MCP is replacing what APIs used to do — faster, easier, and already happening in production at Dstillery — why multimodal AI means any input can produce any output and what that actually unlocks for targeting, and how a workflow that used to take two days of back-and-forth emails now takes fifteen minutes inside Dstillery's agentic tools. Ready to level up your AI skills? Join the U of Digital AI Accelerator. Starts May 12th | Use code EARLYBIRDSLEARNAI for 20% off https://uof.digital/ai/accelerator/ Sponsored by Hightouch New episodes every Monday. Get your AI Edge here.