Cannes Lions: Bringing Together Relevant Ad and Content Experiences for Video

Beet.TV's Andy Plesser sits down with IRIS.TV CRO Daniel Harrison to discuss the latest trends at Cannes Lions and how the company is playing a role in the emergence of contextual ad targeting for video.

Below is a transcript of their conversation

Daniel: What's really interesting for me as I've been walking around in closed-door sessions or panel discussions is the degree to which contextual relevance, brand safety, has come up as a key topic in our discussions. It's clear that transparency matters. What's important about that is the degree to which everyone wins when you start to link advertisers' messages to the actual content that aligns most with that brand's message. And so a lot of benefits, a lot of need, but not a lot of people are speaking about if that's even possible, and how do you actually do that, especially within the realm of video?

Andy: So tell us how your conversation is going in progress with IRIS TV.

Daniel: Right, so as it relates to the comments that I was making a moment ago for this need for relevance of advertising as link to content, in video there's really no easy way to solve for it.

In digital display advertising, it's quite straightforward. You scrape webpages and you look for using natural language processing what it is that that page or that article consists of and then you can sell brand advertising against it.

In television you have a little bit of contextual type advertising in part because of the ability to know what show on what broadcast network, maybe the show title, but again not a lot of fidelity in terms of what is the true nature of the content the viewers are watching in order to connect that to back to advertising, to tie them together for a truly relevant personalized experience.

So this is where it's become very interesting because now that's starting to change. For us, we were naturally being asked by virtue of our very large publisher and broadcaster client base, "Hey if you understand everything about our video content, "if you understand everything "about the consumption of that content, "on behalf of our business helping us "to drive more engagement, "keeping an audience watching more video longer, "can you reveal some of that information back "to our advertising side of the business "so that we can package up "and better differentiate our available ad inventory?"

And the answer was, "Yes, absolutely possible. "We're already integrated with every player "and every content management system in the market." This has begun the first real push into solving for creating a means for contextual brand-safe based ad targeting in video.

Andy: Great, and your clients are, your customers range from?

Daniel: So a range of the tier one broadcasters and digital video publishers, and we work in every market globally. Can't really say the name of this specifically, but in the past two weeks, two brand new clients, one of them top three, a major broadcaster here in the US signed up with us, and another major OTT platform as well.

Andy: Great, and you guys raised some money from Bertelsmann recently?

Daniel: Well it's not that recent, BDMI earlier on, but what's great about our business particularly as it relates to investors is that the core offering that we've been going to market with hasn't really changed and it's only found more resonance as an industry ripe with disruption right now is looking to figure out and fight for building audiences.

The classic case here in the world of ad tech is that if you don't have audiences, you have nothing to monetize against, whether it's ad-supported or it's some subscription model. So you must have audiences. So coming at it from a content-first perspective is where we really built our chops.

You know Andy, real classic thing, when you look at kind of the technologies that underpin this entire industry, you've always had this world of advertising technology and then content technology, and the stacks, and then the teams and the organizational models and the economics that support and utilize to deliver value, these stacks, but very rarely have they really spoken together.

Because of our unique position within this market, we actually bring both the content decisioning and the advertising decisioning much more closely together, and frankly if you really want to deliver on the concept of relevance and create that personalized stream from the as you see to the content you experience, and then ultimately tie that to some outcomes for an advertiser or brand that says, "Yes, actually targeting these individuals "in these ways has driven this amount "of uplift and product movement or some other deliverable," you have no choice but to start to link these tools together.

I mean look, Facebook and YouTube. They're good examples of businesses that do it but we all know how successful they've been, unfortunately to the detriment in some cases of many other media properties and advertisers where we've heard loud and clear, they want the ability to reach a broader set, through a broader set of different partners, their audiences. They just can't put all the eggs in that basket. A lot of 'em, not all.

To learn more about our latest partnerships to enable Contextual Ad Targeting to Video click below:

• MediaMath Launches Contextual Ad Targeting Solution for Video in Partnership with IRIS.TV
• IRIS.TV integrates Microsoft Video Indexer for Video Recognition
• IRIS.TV and Telaria Execute Contextual and Brand-safe Ad Targeting for Programmatic Video

Sell and execute contextual targeting through your current CMS, video player, SSP, and ad server in order to offer new and differentiated inventory to buyers at scale.