Voices of Video
Explore the inner workings of video technology with Voices of Video: Inside the Tech. This podcast gathers industry experts and innovators to examine every facet of video technology, from decoding and encoding processes to the latest advancements in hardware versus software processing and codecs. Alongside these technical insights, we dive into practical techniques, emerging trends, and industry-shaping facts that define the future of video.
Ideal for engineers, developers, and tech enthusiasts, each episode offers hands-on advice and the in-depth knowledge you need to excel in today’s fast-evolving video landscape. Join us to master the tools, technologies, and trends driving the future of digital video.
Voices of Video
Demystifying CTV Ads: Simplifying TV Campaigns for Local Businesses
Discover how Jonathan Moffie, a pioneer in the CTV ad tech universe, is revolutionizing television advertising for small businesses with his company, Streamr. Join us as we unpack his journey from launching some of the first fast channels at Yahoo to leading video ventures at Shutterstock, and how these experiences culminated in the creation of a game-changing service that promises to put your business on TV for a mere $250. Jonathan’s insights into the world of connected TV (CTV) advertising reveal the challenges and triumphs involved in making this space more accessible and less intimidating, especially for small business owners who might find the jargon overwhelming.
Listen to Jonathan as he shares the remarkable story behind crafting a user-friendly ads manager, simplified into just 10 steps, setting it apart from the tedious processes of competitors. Learn how Streamr tackles the common obstacle of businesses lacking video ads by offering a cost-effective solution that makes TV advertising as easy as pie—perfect for your local pizza shop or neighborhood café. This conversation shines a light on the transformative power of innovation in CTV advertising and its potential to level the playing field for businesses of all sizes.
Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.
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Speaker 2:Well, good morning everyone and welcome to this new edition, next edition of Voices of Video. Hey, I'm Mark Donegan and I am here with Jonathan Moffey. Jonathan, welcome to Voices of Video, mark thanks for having me. Yeah. So you know, we're going to jump in and have a great conversation about CTV advertising, which you know. I don't think there's anybody who's working in video today who doesn't care about that. Right Agreed.
Speaker 3:For sure yeah absolutely so.
Speaker 2:I know you built the company Streamr, but before you know, I let you talk about Streamr, what you guys are doing, and then we have a conversation around um, you know, I let you talk about streamer, what you guys are doing, and then we have a conversation around uh, you know what's happening in the world of ctv advertising. I think you brought a video right to tee up this whole thing.
Speaker 3:Let's check it out, our first promo video oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:yeah, it's like one minute long, so let's roll the video.
Speaker 1:Business owner add on TV for free Well, not free cheap. Already interested? Visit streamerai If you need more info. Keep watching $250, two minutes your ad on TV. You can show up to our website with nothing at all and we'll create an ad for your business in less than a minute with nothing at all and we'll create an ad for your business in less than a minute. Let's summarize visit streamerai, upload or create ad with one click. Pay 250. Your ads on tv. Your future customers are watching. What do you want them to see?
Speaker 2:wow, 250 bucks and I can put a business on connected television.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. Well, why don't we start here? I always like to give our guests an opportunity to tell the origin story. I think it's really important how did you get here? So why don't you tell us a bit about Streamer AI, the genesis of the company and your background, and then we'll dive in?
Speaker 3:Great, great, yeah. So I've been in the CTV ad tech business for over 12 years at places like Yahoo Whirl I launched one of the first fast channels ever for people, people TV, yahoo Finance, et cetera. I took a brief stint out of ad tech to lead the video and music businesses at Shutterstock and even prior to that I started actually my career as a producer. So I've been in the video space on different levels for over 12, 14 years. So Streamr.
Speaker 3:So my last startup I was at we built an ads manager. The goal was to build the easiest ads manager in CTV and I do believe we did that. We made it 10 steps to advertise all the different competitors out there like 25 plus steps. Even meta, which is like the Holy grail of ads managers for SMBs, is like 21 steps. So we made it 10 steps to advertise. We're like we're going to upend the market and we start meeting with business owners pizza shops, restaurants they all had the same two problems. Number one you'd be like, all right, upload your video ad and they'd be like I don't have a video ad.
Speaker 1:What video ad.
Speaker 3:Oh Jesus, all right, here we go, we'll give you an ad credit. We have the cheapest creative services team in the world. For 250 bucks, we'll make you a video ad. Let's meet in a week, come back and launch this campaign. And they'd go. Well, I only wanted to spend 250 bucks. Like, okay, well, we'll give you an ad credit. All right, here we go. So we come back, we meet in a week and we get them in the campaign setup and we're like 10 steps, this is going to be so easy for them. And they go what the hell is a DMA? And I'm like, oh good point. No one that's not in wonky advertising knows what a DMA is. A pizza shop owner DMA? No. So we're like, geez, this is still too complicated.
Speaker 3:That was about last year when we said, wow, what if we use this Gen AI craze to reduce the friction of not having a creative and build a video ad and then use AI to actually do the campaign setup and launch. So it literally takes less than two minutes. So basically, that's when Streamr was born and we started launching beta campaigns and our kind of pinnacle case study was this fitness influencer reached out all excited. He was able to generate an ad and launch it on TV in 30 seconds while training a customer at the gym, and we were like, okay, we definitely built the easiest way to advertise.
Speaker 3:However, just quickly to get into where we are today, at the same time, I had a DSP, a demand side platform, reach out. I know the founder really well, ceo, and he said, hey, streamr looks really cool, but we don't want to push our advertisers to you guys. However, we do have a problem where, five to six times per week, we have advertisers who want to try CTV but don't have a video ad. Do you have an API? And I was like, of course we have an API. We did not.
Speaker 1:We did not have an API at the?
Speaker 2:time, but our engineering team is fantastic. That's a great startup. Founder response.
Speaker 3:I love it.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes and yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, let me send over to the docs, you know, a couple of days. We're just putting the finishing touches on them.
Speaker 3:Of course, 100%. So the good news is I have, like unicorn, 100x level, 10x engineers. I have 100X engineers Built it in a weekend, closed that deal and ever since then we've been off to the races with what we call Gen AI solutions, which is basically arming broadcasters, ad tech platforms and agencies with Gen AI tech to democratize CTV ad buying. So I can talk for days. That's that's it for me, right there. What's going?
Speaker 2:on.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, yeah, I love it. I love the journey, the story, the opportunity. I think it's fascinating.
Speaker 2:A couple of things that you said, you know you, there's the setup problem, right, and any of us you know who are in marketing or worked around marketing, who've tried to set up even just like a Facebook ad, you know, I mean, I'm talking just a Facebook ad, you know, forget, you know, video on a connected television, I mean it, it, it is hard, you know, it really is, and it's and it's overwhelming. So so you had that hurdle, you know, and so you brought what was it? You said like 21 steps, which was kind of the the best in class meta, right, and you brought it down to 10. So it's like, oh, you know, we cut in half, more than half Um. But then there's the content problem, and that really resonates because video is just, it's a different beast, right, you know, as much as we all carry awesome cameras around and maybe some of us are a little more comfortable than others, you know, sort of flipping it around and going on video or whatever it's like. Still, even that you know, like you don't create ads that way, at least most of us don't. So, wow, it's amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, why don't we I think a great place to you know launch the discussion and also to give the audience you know the next level of detail behind the real problem you're solving, and then that'll be a great point for us to talk about some of the technology you've developed and you know. And then what this can really do is you brought a couple slides right, and so why don't we bring those up? And in case anybody's like, oh no, here we go, here's the pitch. I promise you, jonathan is not pitching. We do not pitch on Voices of Video, promise you. So hang in there, don't hang up here. But Jonathan put together some really good talking point slides that I thought, hey, these are the points we're going to cover anyway, so why not put them up on the screen? So yeah, so tell us about the problem around advertising 100%, yeah.
Speaker 3:So just to double click on the extent of the problem, a video ad on average can cost at least minimum $10,000 to produce and take weeks teams of creatives. But you know, 10,000 is like the minimum. A Superbowl commercial, forget about it. Millions of dollars.
Speaker 2:Can you give us an idea like that? I mean, just for those of us that don't really know, that $10,000, is that kind of at the level of you know, the local like roofing company that you know throws together something with a couple of guys up on the roof with hammers and you know, is it that, or is it something that looks a little more like, you know, commercial television or what?
Speaker 3:Even at a local level, if you're working with an agency and you know a video producer and editor again, I did those jobs. I was there. Um, I I really uh love creatives and you know they'reives and the bar is really high, but yeah, even that will cost thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 3:And then the other part that, once you have that video ad, that may be even harder is the campaign setup and launch. So when you get into these tools like you said, even meta, which billions of dollars flow through the pipes, tens of billions of dollars and SMBs are using it. It's really also agencies using it on behalf of a small business owner. Even that's complicated. I've worked in the industry for over a decade and I used to run Facebook, facebook campaigns and even that set up 21 steps, super complicated the user experience, lots of buttons and widgets.
Speaker 3:You're like I'm spending money, where am I going to go wrong? So we simplify that by basically using the AI to know where your business is. If it's a retail location, we'll automatically target the zip codes around you. We know the context of your business. So, let's say it's a retail location, we'll automatically target the zip codes around you. We know the context of your business. So, let's say it's a burger joint, we can extract metadata from your website, from your Google business profile, and automatically target burger enthusiasts, foodies, locals in your area, fine diners, and add that to the campaign targeting automatically. So really, you're just basically putting in your credit card info, picking your budget and you're launching on premium CTV.
Speaker 2:That's true, there we go.
Speaker 3:Oh, solution. Yeah, so, like I said, the solution we generate the commercials and you can go to streamerai right now. We have some strategic partnerships with a lot of the different Gen AI companies, like OpenAI. We use ChatGPT for Omni. On the back end we have 11 Labs. They're a big AI unicorn audio company. We use them as well. We use suno, another. These all these companies raise these crazy 100 million, 200 million dollars. Uh, you know, and what we do is we call it like streamer gpt. We're basically like the best ai dj remixing uh, ctv business commercials and we make it extremely easy to generate the commercial and launch. So if you go to streamerai right now, put in your favorite bar or restaurant, you could generate and see it for yourself.
Speaker 3:We don't charge you to preview it, we don't even have you sign up and maybe we should, but we like to make it really frictionless, like cut to the bone. Get all the friction out of there.
Speaker 2:Wow, yep.
Speaker 3:I think I advanced here. Oh no, okay, there we go. There are 400 million global small businesses spending over $700 billion in digital ad spend. It's going to be about a $200 billion streaming specific market by 2030. So there's just a ton of opportunity.
Speaker 3:And right now, tv on average we could go to the next slide might really drive this point home. So on average, tvs had like 500 advertisers. Your big box, procter Gamble, l'oreal, et cetera dominate TV ad spend and that was great for a really long time. But we know linear is on a major decline, whereas 9 million plus advertisers advertise on search and social spending over 300 billion plus per year. Our vision is to enable millions of new businesses to advertise on streaming by making it simple and affordable. Accelerate that by basically partnering with big broadcasters, ad tech platforms and agencies who already have a lot of ad spend going through their platforms. We're basically giving them Gen AI tools to attract SMBs so we can realize this vision faster and democratize CTV ad buying. We have a huge launch this Monday. My my Slack's probably going crazy right now while we're talking about this really big launch of a new Gen AI powered ads manager.
Speaker 2:So very exciting, yeah, yeah, the opportunity is very clear to me anyway, and I think, a lot of people, so it's great that you're going after this. I am super fascinated personally, but I think many people in the industry are especially on the creative side around Gen AI use of, or Gen AI technology, you know, to build creatives, build assets. So tell us you know how you built this and what exactly you're doing. Like, you mentioned 11 labs, so does that mean that you're cloning the voice of, for example, the business owner and that gives like a narration track? Or maybe you can go in a bit deeper into exactly how you're deploying those tools and what that output kind of looks?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, I usually at this point do a real-time demo. No, you're not supposed to just do it live, but I love just doing it live. However, I'll definitely talk about it in. Uh that are watching.
Speaker 2:Go to streamerai go to your website, right, yeah?
Speaker 3:but, uh, basically all you do is search or enter the business URL search for your business name or enter the business URL, and then on the backend, we'll generate a script based on your website, your Google business profile. There's a few more places we're looking to pull from in the future, maybe like your Instagram, because Instagram is really like the storefront for SMBs these days, and also.
Speaker 3:YouTube as well. So we'll do that, generate the script, and then we basically built we call it a mood relevant matching service on top of 11 labs and on Suno. So let's say you're a yoga studio, we will automatically write a script that makes sense for a yoga studio, but then also get a soothing voice from 11 labs so that matches what you would expect from a yogi, and then also a soothing meditation style soundtrack for Suno.
Speaker 3:Suno is the AI music and bring that all together generate the commercial. Um, and yeah, that's how it's done and so are you.
Speaker 2:Are you using stock? Um, you know video and, uh, I I guess perhaps some still images, but mostly video. Is that, then, what the actual creative consists of? And then you're overlaying the music, the custom music from Suno, as well as the narration track. Is that? Are those the elements of those are definitely building blocks.
Speaker 3:We also you can click a button, we have edit with AI so you can upload some of your own images and frames of your business. I mean even video as well and you can basically remix it yourself if you're not happy with the out of the box ad that's generated. And stock assets. I ran the video and music businesses at Shutterstock. We're definitely exploring that area. Sometimes it's not perfect. There's a good example. There's this great cheeseburger joint here and I'm in Santa Monica, California a HiHo cheeseburger, and they have very specific branding around their Wagyu beef burger and then if you then try to use a stock burger being flipped, it just doesn't sell the brand.
Speaker 2:So it's almost better to have an image that is curated for that brand than a uh, you know, generic, uh burger flipping yeah, that's um, you know that's fascinating because of course I, you know I'm a marketer and um, the the biggest problem with using stock images, stock video, anything, because sort of stock is not anymore it used to be. Sometimes quality was a little inconsistent. Now like it all basically looks good. I mean it has to to be in the library. So, you know, it's like the image is great.
Speaker 2:Usually the model or, you know, whatever the subject is, you know, is, you know, looks good, everything's good, but there's just something in the frame that's out of sync with what the message is.
Speaker 2:You know, and and I always, you know, for those that work with me, work around me, you know, I always point out, you know, the. The problem is is that there's a segment of the audience that won't even notice that, but our brains just pick up on those things. There's these super subtle cues that just don't seem right, and so the problem is that, because often I'll get feedback like, oh, no one will really notice that, or maybe we can sort of crop it out a little bit and it's like, yeah, but you know what, know what the brain is, the person viewing it it's not even going to know why they feel it's not right, but there's going to be, but they're going to feel it's not right. You know with. You know whatever the words are on the screen or on the, you know on the image or the soundtrack going along with it, the narration, you know um, whatever the context is. So that's one of the challenges.
Speaker 3:A hundred percent.
Speaker 2:What about our? Have you explored, you know, these image creation tools and these video creation tools? I imagine they're quite expensive and they also are fairly hard to control. Like, sometimes you get amazing output. Sometimes you're like oh, what's that? Eight fingers? We've all seen plenty of those. Like, everything's perfect except the person has three fingers. You're like, hmm, Yep.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I'll give you a.
Speaker 2:What are you doing there?
Speaker 3:I'll give you a little peek into our roadmap. So we're going to release what we call Gen AI 2.0 before the end of the year, which is going to make our creatives a lot better more templates, more transitions, text on screen that's more dynamic, really make the videos pop, and still with the same speed. It takes two to three seconds to generate it, so that's going to be, really great.
Speaker 3:In the meantime, we're always experimenting and I talked to the founder of pika labs, all these companies. They've raised like 100 million, uh, runway ml. Oh yeah, talk to them because open ai is a partner. We've talked to them about getting early sora beta access. I think everyone wants that Sora.
Speaker 2:They were used.
Speaker 3:There was like a Toys R Us commercial that was generated. So the reality of all those tools as you said I've talked to a lot of there's these really great Gen AI video editors that are messing around with this stuff. You know Emmy award winning editors. I've gone to a few conferences and they all say the same thing there's no one today. That's just like prompting that Toys R Us commercial. Let's stick on that for a second. It's not just like build me the Toys R Us commercial. What happened?
Speaker 3:is they are doing, prompting, thousands of prompts, pulling the assets. They're getting out of it into post-production tools that everyone knows and love. I was a pro guy back in the day, you know Final Cut Avid what have you?
Speaker 1:into.
Speaker 3:After Effects. They're putting tons of work into it, tons of labor, human labor, and then they are also basically the GPU cost to train those models and run it. These are getting to the same levels that we were talking about before, whereas 10,000 plus to produce. So it's not there yet. The Gen AI video from Runway, et cetera, is not there yet. That being said, we're always testing, we're always looking to integrate. Our kind of master plan and talking to these folks is we will continue to integrate the best of Gen AI, large language models and as they get better, we'll integrate with their APIs and our creative will get better. But our goal is always to make it really fast and frictionless and then showcase the best of Gen AI on streaming TV. So they're not doing the ad tech piece, but we're clearly in the ad tech domain. So that's kind of the long-term vision is once one of these is faster, cheaper and more reliable, we'll be there to integrate and showcase it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amazing, yeah, amazing. So let's pivot the conversation from creation, which I would love to spend another hour just talking about that, because I think it's super interesting and it's very relevant to the reasons that we specified. But I'm not sure that everybody is familiar. You know, earlier you mentioned demand side platform and you know DSP. I think anybody working in video, at least if you're around entertainment content that is advertising as a component probably has heard DSP and some of these other acronyms, which I'll let you explain. But why don't you give a two or three minute primer on how the ecosystem works, how it's structured, who the players are and just how these platforms even work? Because I think this also is very important.
Speaker 2:A lot of discussion today and I like that. You came, you have experience building like Whirl, for example, so there's a lot of talk on the. You know, in the streaming side vendors and you know analysts, observers, that you know fast is going to like be this huge boom. You know it's going to save the industry, you know it's this panacea and and yet you know, we know that you know some companies are, are doing well and they're, they're making a go of it. Others are, you know the economics aren't quite there yet and everybody has their theory as to why. And half the time the conversations I'm in, I'm like maybe we better explain how all this actually works. Yeah, because it's you know. The implication is, you know and I'm intensely not going to name names, but you know, platform XYZ.
Speaker 2:You know they just need to charge more and then they're going to be profitable, you know or they and it's like you know, let's look at how, let's look at who all the players are and how the money flows, and so give us a primer on this, because I think the audience it'd be helpful and I'm sure there's somebody out there who's like yeah, tell me exactly how this works.
Speaker 3:Totally. I just want to make it clear that you asked me to explain ad tech, which is a daunting task. The most acronyms per square inch in any industry.
Speaker 2:So, nate, you know there's the 40,000 foot view. Why don't you do about the 80,000 foot view?
Speaker 3:Well, I think the problem we're trying to solve does actually help explain. So we had this great piece that was written in a TV news check that I contributed some quotes about, and it talked about the embarrassingly low fill rate problem in CTV. So what's really fascinating right now is we have record audience watching CTV and everyone's getting in the ad supported game, Even Netflix, who for years was like we're never going to do advertising.
Speaker 2:Now they have advertising.
Speaker 3:There's rumors now Apple is doing it, they are going to do it, everyone is doing advertising, so that's great. That's one reason to be very excited when you're an ad tech guy in the industry. So the reality, though, is there's so many ways my brain's going. With Linear, you got your money from advertising and from retrans fees from the operators who kind of distributed your content. For now, at least, there's no clear path where those retrans fees will carry over into CTV, so you're losing a major source of revenue if you're like Comcast or NBCU, et cetera. So we really need to rely on the advertising ecosystem, the CTV advertising ecosystem being robust. However, the reality is that, on average, the programmatic fill rate so programmatic is, you know, buying and selling via kind of auction style advertising on Netflix, hulu, et cetera, through a demand side platform, the biggest kind of independent one being the trade desk, the Walt, the Walt gardens being Google and DV 360. And there's some really interesting antitrust stuff going on there. Google and DV360, and there's some really interesting antitrust stuff going on there.
Speaker 2:Yes, there is.
Speaker 3:And then Meta as well, but Meta's not for CTV, meta's social and mobile and programmatic's kind of the growing way to transact. There's also you can buy direct to the platforms and usually that's the bigger guys will get these big direct spends. They have big sales teams et cetera. So we're trying to figure out with broadcaster partners how do we help them solve for that super low 38% average fill rate. And one way to do that is to attract millions of SMB advertisers into the ecosystem that are looking for alternatives to just mobile and search, because now there's more ways to target in CTV and we're doing that by reducing the friction with Gen AI and then those are direct spends on their platform, which kind of bypasses all of the problems with the programmatic auction. You can think of programmatic as the stock market. It's like buying stocks and there's lots of transactions, billions of transactions and ad requests going on in real time and there's just issues with the pipes sometimes and we're trying to help with a solution to solve that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a whole lot more to unpack. But you made the reference and sort of skipped over and I'm not sure everybody understands what you meant by low fill rates, fill rates. And then you haven't mentioned yet CPM't mentioned yet cpms. And in the conversations I'm a part of, I find that that a surprisingly high number of folks in the video streaming world don't really have an understanding of even how cpm relates to the profitability potential of a fast service and and and they're almost like these decoupled things and so it's like advertising.
Speaker 2:Is this? You know, 400 billion whatever the number is I I don't know, you know, but you know, for traditional TV advertising. And if we just capture this, you know some percentage of it, we're all going to be. And if we just capture this, you know some percentage of it we're all going to be gajillionaires. You know, that's like the. That's the tenor of the conversation, right? Then you kind of go hold on hold on folks, cpms, let's do a little math here. You know like the numbers don't pencil out. So, with that set up, explain, go into more detail about bill rates and then talk to us about how that's related and then and then cpms and and then how all this fits in to why, um um, you know, traditional linear tv, that whole ecosystem is still printing piles of cash and, and you know, the fast services are not, are not quite at the profitability targets that you know they certainly would like to be.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the good news that I think everyone watching probably does watch TV, so they've likely been annoyed by this analogy. That will explain fill rate. So you know, you have a certain amount of ad breaks per hour. If you're Netflix and now you have ads in your content and usually there's like two minutes ish per break, and you have maybe like one, you know, four ads, 30 seconds or 15 seconds, and the fill rate problem is when, instead of showing an ad during those breaks, what you likely see you don't see dead air, you don't just see black.
Speaker 3:You'll likely see what we call an ad slate, which is something like we will be right back, we will be right back. Everyone hates we will be right back. So we're trying to get fewer. We will be right backs in place. Increase the fill rate to put more businesses there that are hopefully relevant to you. You're searching for a new pair of sneakers on Instagram and then we could actually retarget you with that same thing on CTV. Now there's a lot more digital audience targeting capabilities in CTV, so that's the goal is to increase those fill rates, which increases the broadcaster's revenue and hopefully makes it actually a better user experience instead of seeing either the same ad frequency.
Speaker 2:Well, that's, I think, the problem that at least that I can relate to. It's like OK, I like the Jeep Cherokee, but I'm not in the market for a car right now and I see the Jeep Cherokee ad on every single. You know like come on, guys, show me something different you know and I'm just picking on Jeep I you know that hasn't been the most recent one, but for a while it was 100%.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that's the frequency problem of you know. There's only so many advertisers buying, and so they're just showing that same ad over and over again, which obviously is a horrible user experience.
Speaker 2:It, it is. It is, yeah, exactly so, programmatic. Um, you know, I think everybody has certainly heard the term and understands kind of the concept. Like you said, it's sort of the stock market. You know, there's this auction system, buying and selling. Um, maybe you could explain a little bit more about what the components are like. Who are the players in a in a programmatic transaction? Um, yeah, you know, maybe even name a couple of the key companies or players that are involved, because there's multiple players involved in this, you know, yeah, and then and then, something that I'm curious about is is the?
Speaker 2:Is the ability to do the hyper-personalized? Is the ability to do the hyper-personalized, hyper-targeted, just like what you said? So you geolocate and you say, hey, mark is in the Phoenix metro area, so they're probably going to show something, phoenix metro. But how cool would it be if and some people may not think this is cool, but I actually think it's quite useful, you know if not only was I shown some advertisement by a business in the Phoenix metro area, but somebody who was in the same zip code as me, you know so a restaurant that was in, you know. So it's within a. You know, I don't know. You know, mile, two mile, three mile radius, however big the zip code is, I don't really know, but it's not that big, but yeah, so explain first of all programmatic what does that ecosystem look like? And then what's required to do this? You know, hyper personalized, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's actually I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I'm so in the weeds in programmatic ad tech that I'm probably going to keep assuming too much.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll ask you to clarify, because I'm not in the weeds All right, I'll give it a go.
Speaker 3:So let's take like a broadcaster. I don't know why NBCU keeps coming up like Peacock or something. I don't know why NBCU keeps coming up like Peacock or something. And then they're going to work with a lot of SSPs supply side platforms, which have connections to a lot of supply that will actually put their ad requests up for auction in the programmatic marketplace. And there's a lot of SSPs. And then there's DSPs, demand-side platforms, who kind of aggregate demand, and that's the different advertisers that will go in and looking to buy that supply.
Speaker 2:So sorry to jump in, but just to clarify for me and for the audience. So an SSP would be a publisher in the traditional sense or a streaming service. Right, that would be an SSP.
Speaker 3:Well, an SSP basically aggregates. So DSP and SP are both kind of aggregators.
Speaker 2:They represent. Sorry. They're not the platform. They're the front door to those platforms, I guess.
Speaker 3:Yeah, ssps represent the publishers and aggregate up the supply.
Speaker 2:That's what I meant, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yep, so like Pubmatic, magnite those are some of the biggest ones and then DSPs represent and aggregate up the demand. So the trade desk is like the biggest open market one, and then they're kind of all setting a floor price for a CPM. So let's say like a $25 average CTV CPM. And then you can, a DSP can bid on buying if it's Peacock I don't want to hurt their feelings if I'm putting their CPMs too low or what have you.
Speaker 3:And then- Anyway, $2,500 for Peacock, yeah, they can buy exactly they can buy uh the ad requests that peacock is selling through maybe their ssp, pubmatic, magnite, etc. Um working in the industry. The reality is a lot of broadcasters, the publishers, um end up thinking, okay, if I just keep adding more ssps that can connect me to more demand, I'll increase my fill rates. And unfortunately that's not always the case uh. So now some of these publishers are working with like 12 to 14 ssps and a lot of them are just like reselling other uh impressions. So it's just taking a cut of a cut of a cut. What we're looking to do with our ads manager is give uh the publisher a direct way for an advertiser to be able to buy their supply. So it's outside of the programmatic auction, so it's guaranteed to deliver Um and it's a more direct relationship with the advertiser. They can now email, market to them, they can offer them discounts, et cetera. So that's kind of our way to help the ecosystem increase revenue and fill rates.
Speaker 2:So you are primary, so your primary relationship is with the DSP.
Speaker 3:I don't want to pigeonhole us as a demand-side platform. That's likely the best analogy when you're buying through us in Ads Manager. We're Gen AI tech, we're, we're gen AI tech, but yes, we're. We do basically aggregate up the advertisers to buy through us. We work with ad servers then to and SSPs to then display the ads on publishers yeah, yeah, okay, got it.
Speaker 2:And, and then the advertisers. You were advertisers. I jumped in so, as you're starting to talk about the advertising side, because there's a whole set of companies and technologies that represent the advertisers right aggregator.
Speaker 3:Obviously there are self-serve platforms like us who work directly with the advertiser, mainly SMBs, and then there's also agencies that will like kind of aggregate up a smaller pool of advertisers and help buy advertising on behalf of those advertisers across, maybe, various demand side platforms or do direct buys with a broadcaster. So really direct buys are like the Holy Grail. That's what the upfront TV upfronts are.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:And it's the big guys that take advantage there, sure.
Speaker 2:Because the commitments have to be huge to do a direct buy I mean I mean tens of millions or even more. I mean, what give us a scale?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, tens of millions. Uh, amazon's now a new big player with their prime video offering and they had like one of their first up fronts and had, like you know, record success, but maybe you know vague with the numbers, but great success, great, great great success Well what does that mean?
Speaker 2:It was amazing. Blew away our expectations Exactly.
Speaker 3:Exactly so those really big platforms or broadcasters are still going to have their big sales teams getting those direct campaigns. What we're really trying to do is give you know maybe those big platforms will give them Gen AI, but also medium-sized broadcasters, fast channels. They can have their own ads manager in self-serve way to have direct spend on their platform. So they're still going to plug in to the programmatic ecosystem. Just, the reality is at least right now and there's companies solving for this the fill rates are like 38%. It's not good. It's not enough money to make a viable business. So you need other ways to have a direct relationship with the advertisers and get your fill rates up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, interesting, yeah, yeah, interesting Boy. I just I, I can. I I'm always amazed at how many hands are in the cookie jar when it comes to advertising. It's just so. It's such a um, uh, complicated ecosystem and uh, yeah, but it's amazing. Well, uh, this has been a really wonderful conversation and thank you for sharing what you've shared, and I really can't wait to see the launch of the Gen AI tools and just the evolution of the platform. When we first met I think within five or 10 minutes of you explaining what, what you were doing, I remember saying we need to have you on voices of video, and this is something that just even personally, I'm I'm super interested in and so really see a lot of potential. So best of luck, you know, to you and the team. We do have a couple questions that came in, so mind, mind taking some questions yeah, let's do it I, I think, I, I think these will be easy to manage.
Speaker 2:So, um, yeah, so it's one of the advantages for those who are watching live. By the way, um, feel free to type into the chat of whichever platform you're watching on. I, I know we're streaming on I don't know how many platforms right now, but more than one, but go ahead and log in or type into the chat and we'll try and get to those. But okay, so, so here's a good question. So what's the most unusual use case that can be covered with Gen AI today? So now, this is, I think, just with all of your experience building using Gen AI tools. So I don't think this is really advertising specific, but yeah, I mean, in all of your experience as a creative.
Speaker 2:I think you'd have a good perspective on this.
Speaker 3:So yeah, so I actually have a recent case study that is, I think, I think, really unusual and awesome. So we have a law firm out here in California that we work with that's advertised to our platform multiple times and one of the partners texted me he's like hey, crazy idea, there was a injury at an Amazon warehouse out here in California. Could you turn around like a workers comp ad today that would target potentially other people that have been injured at warehouses and blanket their zip code so we could see if anyone else will come forward, because for them that's worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars and, oh yeah, 250 minimum personal injury attorneys.
Speaker 2:I, I'm clear with that business. That's yeah, that's the side of law.
Speaker 3:They are printing money or they potentially can yeah that's so we did, we did it, we did it wow and ran the campaign. Uh, turn it around in less than 24 hours. And he's like I'm going to hit you up every time news breaks and run campaigns. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you just literally gave me a new. You know, I'm supposed to be the innovator with the great product roadmap. I'm like breaking news Gen AI commercials Like that is. You have to play to the advantages and the speed and the personalized audience targeting are the advantage Gen AI brings, and if you would, have brought that to a creative shop that'd be like great give us two weeks.
Speaker 3:We'll get that back and he's like two weeks. It's in the news right now. We want to show it to people that are going to be like oh wow, look at that Amazon thing, I also got hurt, maybe I should come forward. So it I'm like oh, this is a whole new roadmap thing. I'm like, hey guys, we need to figure this out. So it was awesome.
Speaker 2:I, I, I, I love it and um, you know not to be, um, you know we're, we're, we're, we're not advocating for. You know, trying to profit off. You know off. You know terrible situations but a corollary that I recall I remember hearing years ago and I had family a long time back in Florida and you know, of course, you have. You know, in the Midwest you have. You know tornadoes and you know, in Florida you have hurricanes and you know tornadoes and you know, in Florida you have hurricanes and you know. So there's weather and you know one of these comes through and you know, all of a sudden there's hundreds of homes that need new roofs. There's, you know, there's all the damage, right, and they actually used to call the roofers storm chasers and they were, you know. Now, it usually was not a good thing because usually the work was a little shoddy and you know.
Speaker 2:But they swoop into town because the insurance companies are almost just standing there writing checks yep you know, and they would come in and you know you think like, wow, how amazing, um, if you could get an ad that's hyper relevant for some you, you know, for some you know news or something that's really relevant at that at that moment and in that area you know, um, wow, that is. I mean, that's a whole new frontier for advertising.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I thought it was. Uh. I love when, like, a customer blows your mind and put something on your product roadmap.
Speaker 2:I'm like wow that's a cool product market fit. Yeah, cool. Well, there's another question that came in and I don't know if you have worked in the India market, so if you haven't, though, maybe you can still comment. And the question is just how do you see CTV advertising working in like India? But if you have experience there, answer it for India. If not India, what's happening in other markets around the world, or other countries, et cetera?
Speaker 3:100%. So that's another amazing Gen AI specific use case that can be solved. So because we partner with 11 labs, we have over 32 languages and even more dialects that we translation and dialect. That's right, so we actually have run campaigns internationally. We did one uh, where we uh basically automatically uh put it in uh mandarin and in different. It was a company, company in Asia that wanted to hit different parts of Asia that spoke different languages.
Speaker 3:We're able to create a version of those commercials with the different languages and different dialects. So in India Hindi, tamil. We can support it.
Speaker 2:Sure, wow, wow, that's cool. Yeah, I can definitely see the language translation as being super powerful. So talk to us then also about another question that came in is just and this one, I guess, is kind of general. I feel like we kind of touched on it, but maybe it's a good way to wrap things up. The question is I'd love to learn about Gen AI revolution in CTV, and I feel like this whole interview, the whole discussion has been around really centered on both the applications, the tools, the use cases and really the value that Gen AI can bring. But maybe where we'll end is, you know where is this going? You know, and if I could don't make it so crystal ball, like well, in 10 years, you know, but like maybe the next, like three years, like where is all this going? You know, in terms of Gen AI tools, what you're working on, advertising on CTV, just the whole thing.
Speaker 3:I can't help but plug yet another streamer-specific thing, and I wish.
Speaker 2:I had the video, if you see the video.
Speaker 3:I think it's a pretty amazing video. So we have a product in beta. We call it Streamer Gen AI Infinite amazing video. So we have a product in beta, we call it Streamer Gen AI Infinite. And the idea here this, to me, is the biggest game changer that Gen AI is going to have on advertising. So when I was at Whirl, the parent company app loving multi-billion dollar mobile performance demand side platform, and they would have a big team of creatives that would for every campaign let's say, DoorDash is an advertiser they'd create like eight to 10 variations of the creative, changing subtle things to try to drive an action, and they run those eight to 10 creatives on small percentages of traffic and whatever one performed the best, they'd shift the budget over to. So multivariate testing or A-B testing.
Speaker 2:A-b Gen testing yeah, AB Gen AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah, gen AI completely upends this. So we have a product in beta, like I said, gen AI Infinite where we can take this so many steps further, where there's an infinite amount of variations we can create, basically in real time and not just testing, like different colors of buttons. It's literally different scripts, different call to actions, a funny ad, a dramatic ad, a serious ad, and then different voices, et cetera, to really hone in on and personalize the advertisement for the user.
Speaker 2:Incredible.
Speaker 3:That's kind of one piece, and then I'll go the holy grail. So here's the user Incredible, that's kind of one piece. And then I'll go the holy grail. So here's the holy grail. We're talking to companies about doing this and I think this is going to happen in less than 10 years If you're able to, as a broadcaster or publisher which they are pass us the context of the show you're watching. Say, you're watching House of Dragons on Max.
Speaker 3:So you pass us the context in real time through the bid request and advertising. We could then, at the next ad break, automatically create, let's say, a Nike commercial with dragons in it that plays at that commercial break. Now that is crazy.
Speaker 2:That is crazy and I love that we're ending there because, yeah, I just think, boy, you know there's. You know we can live our lives, you know, with sort of this general, you know with optimism, with you know a feeling abundance, and we approach everything that way. Or we can live in fear, right, and I know, around AI in particular, it seems to be either one it's like a zero or one. It's either zero we're all toast the world's over, you know, like I'm gonna go buy a bunker somewhere and never see the sun or it's like this is just going to unlock, you know, new experiences, realities that you know we could never even have dreamed of. And I'm very much in the latter camp.
Speaker 2:And you know, and a lot of it is just one comment that I was going to make early on is I've seen many, many, many studies and you probably even have a lot of the data to back this up where people actually do not hate advertising. What they hate is irrelevant advertising. They hate the repetitive, irrelevant advertising. They hate the repetitive. They hate showing a Jeep ad 18 times when I'm not even in the market for a car. So it's not like, well, I am looking for a car I'm not so much interested in SUV, but it's like I have no interest in a car, but I've seen a Jeep ad 18 times in the last two hours, or know, or whatever, whatever the corollary is. And so with that, you know, it's just super exciting to me that all of these tools are going to be able to make messaging so much more relevant to me.
Speaker 2:You know, based on what they know about my, my geolocation, or, you know, using all the data that's available, right, and they're going to be able to target, and then I'm going to feel, wow, that actually was valuable and useful, and I'm really glad that I saw that, because I didn't know that company existed, or I'd heard about them, but I forgot about them, or whatever the situation is. So, yeah, that's cool. Well, let's end there, jonathan. Thank you for coming on. Voices of Video. Thank you, mark, and we will. I'm sure you know we'll be tracking your progress and we'll have to have you back as you launch, you know, the new platform. So Great, cool.
Speaker 3:Sounds like a plan. Cheers, have a good one. Yeah, you bet, great Cool. Sounds like a plan. Cheers, have a good one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you bet. This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NetInt Technologies. If you are looking for cutting-edge video encoding solutions, check out NetInt's products at netintcom.
