SAN FRANCISCO — Once conceived as an ambitious cable industry effort to insert ads in interactive TV, Canoe Ventures says it is now making headway after pivoting from its original goal.
The venture flipped three years ago to help TV content owners benefit from ad sales in their own content when it is hosted on cable operators’ platforms.
“We have over 140 programmers signed up to use the platform,” says product sales and marketing head Chris Pizzuro, citing a footprint of 30 million US homes. “We have over 200 ad campaigns come through the platform on a weekly basis. It’s taking off … since we refocused the company.”
Even this prospect sounds like a tough task, but benefits from a shared business goal, Pizzuro says: “Programmers have their content available online but (are) not able to serve their ads in to that content. The operators said ‘We want more of your better content’. Programmers said ‘We’ll do that for you but we need dynamic ad insertion in order to monetize it’.”
We interviewed him at the TV of Tomorrow conference. You can find more Beet coverage of the event here.
