LOS ANGELES — Contextual targeting is nothing new. In fact, you could say the new limitations on audience identification are driving the industry back to the old practice of content adjacency.
However, what has become standard practice for web articles is a different ballgame for streaming TV.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, IRIS.TV co-founder explains how his company is making video and TV shows buyable by context.
Three steps to TV context
For Hyden, whose IRIS.TV analyzes video content and generates buyable signals, it’s all about three steps:
- Ingest – “It’s all about ‘How do we ingest the raw metadata about their video libraries?’ We do that by integrating with their content management systems and integrating all that rich data into our system – titles, descriptions, keywords, the URLs of those videos, perhaps close caption files.”
- Normalize – “The data from all of those different publishers is in different nomenclatures. So we have to go through a normalization process and standardize that data so that it can be addressable across the ecosystem.”
- Enrich – “We connect that normalized data to industry-standard contextual and brand safety vendors that want to analyze that piece of content in their own unique ways, very similar to what’s done by analysing text on a webpage.”
The new contextuals
Once upon a time, ad placement software didn’t have to think so hard.
Even for the 2021 variant of contextual targeting, systems have a relatively easy time picking signals out of text articles, for example.
When it comes to video, however, this get a little harder.
“The ecosystem supported the concept of page URLs,” Hyden explains. “That video ad opportunity … never goes to the DSP, and it’s never able to be analyzed and to be crawled.
“In order to provide transparency in a CTV world, you had to build a very different set of infrastructure.”
Future of TV
IRIS.TV Lets Finecast Buyers Target Through The Eye Of Context: Garthwaite
The application of contextual targeting for connected TV got a leg-up in November when GroupM’s Finecast announced it would make IRIS.TV’s contextual targeting and brand safety tools available to its US local advertising clients.
The company took Series A funding in 2015 from investors including Sierra Wasatch, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Progress Ventures, Machinima founder Allen DeBevoise and executives from Nielsen, AEG and Lionsgate.
An $18 million new round this year was led by Intel Capital, with participation from investors including WISE Ventures, Quest Venture Partners and Mirae Asset Venture Investment, plus dataxu founder Mike Baker, SpotX founder Mike Shehan and Beeswax CEO and Ari Paparo.
You are watching coverage from Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2021, presented by FreeWheel, IRIS.TV, Samba TV, TransUnion & Warner Music Group. For more videos, please visit this page.
