AdRise is a connected TV advertising platform that can deliver ads across multiple devices, providing what the company describes as a ‘TV commercial experience in a lean-back environment that is targeted, measurable, interactive, and in some cases dynamically generated’. VAN spoke with AdRise CEO, Farhad Massoudi, about the AdRise proposition and the latest developments in connected TV advertising.
With so many devices on offer, there’s a lot of confusion in the market when it comes to defining what constitutes a connected TV. How would you define a connected TV?
A connected TV is any device that delivers a lean-back TV experience via IP. These devices are the technological convergence between computers and television sets. We’ve identified and focused on four connected TV verticals: Smart TVs and Blu-ray players (there will be 500 million of these devices sold by 2015), game consoles (such as PS3 and XBOX), OTTs (such as Roku and WDTV), and tablets. In the past 18 months, we’ve seen tremendous growth in video stream consumption on these devices while they are already delivering over 50% of Netflix streams.
One thing is clear, streaming is the future of TV. In fact, even large MSOs agree on that point and are already launching streaming solutions under the TV everywhere umbrella.
What’s the biggest challenge the connected TV advertising has to face?
Fragmentation. Unlike the mobile world which is dominated by Apple and Android devices, there are over a dozen connected TV platforms that are viable. Content owners must consider having a presence on most of these devices in order to see a significant reach, and as you can imagine, it’s very challenging and costly. At adRise, we are focused on solving this problem for premium content owners by providing a platform that creates and monetizes video apps on connected TVs, for free. We recently launched this platform with Starz and today, we have the largest footprint and we continue to grow it.
What type of targeting and data is currently available for connected TV advertising?
Today, there’s no significant cookie footprint on connected TVs, which is the main mechanism for audience targeting on the web. In the mean time, we can target geo, content, and platforms. However, we’re going to make some exciting announcements on this topic very soon.
What would an advertiser require to have in place before they start advertising on connected TV? Do they need to have specific video formats and can they use traditional online technologies like ad servers, DSPs etc?
Our technology is fully VAST compliant. That means, we can report on ad completion rates and support 3rd party tracking. We are already working with most of the largest video ad networks and DSPs. In fact, not only we simplify this process for advertisers, we encode each video ad on-the-fly to comply with each TV platform requirements. We only ask for high resolution videos to take advantage of HDTV delivery.
As TV advertising becomes more interactive, what will users be clicking through to i.e. what should connected TV ‘landing pages’ look like?
Building a landing page on TV is simply a bad idea and not scalable. They usually have very limited functionality, due to interface limitations, and therefore result in a very poor user experience. Having said that, there are various other types of interactivity features that we support in order measure engagement beyond ad delivery.
How do you think the market is going to evolve over the next couple of years?
Simply put, the era of spray and pray is over. The same way Google and other Internet giants revolutionized DR advertising with scientific and measured ad spent, connected TV will do the same to brand advertising. I’m excited to see this market grow.
