Harry Kargman wants to “decommoditize” advertising in the new era of connected television.

In 2003, Kargman founded Kargo, a company developing creative ad formats for mobile publishers.

Now Kargo is acquiring VideoByte, a company doing similar for CTV.

Taking a byte

Founded in 2020, Austin-based VideoByte offered an ad server which supports supports custom ad placements on CTV, including:

  • relevance to in-show moments.
  • overlaid images and logo watermarks.
  • bidding signals generated from AI-based inspection of video content using computer vision.

Many CTV executives are settling in to the idea that the CTV experience is a lot like that of traditional linear TV, with enhanced targeting offered within otherwise similar commercial breaks.

But others believe consumers are already showing sufficient disdain for advertising to necessitate a closer integration of ads with content, greater interactivity or both.

VideoByte had gained integrations with hardware from Viacom, Tegna, LG and others, Kargo said.

David Naffis, CEO at VideoByte, will join Kargo as General Manager of CTV.

Art in advertising

“Kargo has been known to deliver these incredible high-impact rich experiences, what we call ‘creative science’, on the mobile phone, now desktop,” Kargman says in this video interview with Beet.TV .

“VideoByte has created these overlays and these incredible transparencies as well as these new formats that fit within the 30- and 60- and 90-second pods on these CTV services.

“Our vision for the future is to bring that incredible design and creativity to the TV screen.”

“We’re consistently trying to decommoditize the experience by building brand new creative experiences that we can prove through science actually breaks through and gets much better results for those clients.

“It’s bringing A-R-T which exists in advertising into ad tech, and it creates this next generation of CTV innovation that we think will serve the market well.”

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews