The man who founded early ad platforms Tacoda and Real Media is ready to have another go at running another ad-tech company with a self-service model.
Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan tells Beet.TV his current company, which helps advertisers and agencies link consumer purchase behaviour to set-top box data, will switch on a software-as-a-service model in the next couple of months.
Until now, Simulmedia was working manually with its customers to tackle the emerging opportunities in advanced TV ad-buying.
“We built a lot of our tech platform anticipating that, at some point, it would be made available as software,” Morgan tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“My previous two businesses both had standalone software offerings. We started last year to start unbundle that so we could disconnect the activation of the media service from the predictive analytic part of our platform and our user identity graph.
“We’re going to be launching our first beta customers over the next month, two months, and we’re going to have this in full production by the end of this year.”
In the last few months, we have covered moves by Time Inc’s Viant and AOL’s ONE to acquire and launch online software platforms as services that let ad buyers control more of the process.
Morgan says TV advertising has traditionally stood apart from – and, arguably, behind -other media channels, which have come up to speed with data-driven targeting techniques.
He says TV advertising should no longer be an “opaque silo”, with proliferating, fragmenting viewing across new channels meaning measurement is now full of holes – gaps that a a range of vendors like Simulmedia are trying to fill in.
We interviewed Morgan last week at the LUMA Partners Digital Media Summit.
