Amagi, which helps bring streaming channels to CTV platforms, is partnering with IRIS.tv, whose technology mines video for data that can be passed as ad targeting signals, to enable contextual targeting for some of its channel partners.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, IRIS.tv co-founder Richie Hyden explains what is happening, and what they future looks like.
Excited to work with @amagicorp to provide streaming TV with seamless onboarding of their video data, so it can be activated for contextual targeting across connected devices and smart TVs. #connectedtv #programmatic #adtech #contextualadvertising https://t.co/yt37w2JhKY
— IRIS TV (@iris_tv) September 9, 2021
“The partnership is built to enable transparency between both buyers and sellers, simply as to the content that a consumer is watching on a connected TV device, and most importantly, what they’re watching at the time in which an advertisement is shown to that consumer,” Hyden says.
The deal means Amagi channel partners – which currently include the likes of Vice Media, Bein Sports and Fremantle – will get to use IRIS.tv to pull out video-level contextual and brand safety signals, information that describes the inner meaning of their content. (Announcement).
This can then be activated through the streams enabled by Amagi, which delivers to like destinations like Samsung, Roku, Vizio, Xumo and Pluto TV, plugging in SSPs and DSPs to enable programmatic advertising.
In other words, it enables contextual advertising for linear and on-demand TV play-out over connected TV.
Amagi recently raised $100 million in new funding.
IRIS.tv is all about peering into the inner meaning of videos, pulling out contextual labels that describe the content and making them available as signals for ad buyers and platforms.
It uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata.
Hyden says information about videos typically lives in a publisher’s content management system. He aims to make meaning of it, and help distribute that information to ad-tech systems.
Tune into the webinar, 'Instant gratification: The exploding opportunity of FAST TV' to learn how content brands & platforms are working on growing their audience base & ad revenues in Free Ad Supported Streaming TV!https://t.co/fgpW0PkSOt#Amagi #OTT #Cloud #FAST #AVOD #CTV
— Amagi (@AmagiCorp) September 15, 2021
Usually, these kinds of innovations are offered to sell-side operators. But Hyden’s says IRIS.tv’s roadmap involves embracing ad buyers, too.
“We’ll be expanding that to the buy side, leveraging our persistent ID that we call the IRIS ID,” he says.
“That will enable brands and agencies to enable traditional pre-bid targeting out of their DSP of choice in a very similar way that’s done for page-level analysis and targeting based on text on the page.
“You’ll see more announcements for us working with our DSP partners there, and then also enabling the data to be used for post-campaign reporting and verification, something that we know is really important to the brands and agencies.”
]]>The LA company offers a contextual video marketplace which uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata, helping ad buyers decide which inventory to buy against.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, co-founder Richie Hyden explains what is happening.
We are on a mission to build the data infrastructure for the future of video and Connected TV. Excited to announce our $18M Series B led by Intel Capital! We look forward to supporting our customers and partners with access to video-level contextual data!https://t.co/n5i0Jbhyev
— Richie Hyden (@richiehyden8) April 7, 2021
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.
The new round is 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.
Hyden explains how IRIS.tv will use the money:
“Expanding our team and really focusing on ‘How are we bringing in a world-class developers, to help us continue to build on our API framework, making all of this data available to different partners?’ But then also, ‘How are building the team of market experts and really the data marketplace environment that helps us our partners, whether that’s brands and agencies and DSPs on the buy side or the SSPs ad service publishes data properties that we work with, the team expansion in that both in the us and abroad?’
“We’ve got a lot of different developer tools and APIs that are available to our partners and customers to leverage connecting these different data sets for different outcomes. And we’ve got a very large roadmap ahead of ourselves to expand on those integrations.”
“We work with a lot of different constituents through the market – by no means are we done. And so we’ll be building on our partnerships with our data partners, publishers and buy- and sell-side partners in order to make sure that this data is available on every shelf for any type of buying, you know, targeting, verifying, and measuring.”
We’re thrilled to welcome Lauren Gabriele to the team as VP of Publisher Partnerships! Lauren will be leading https://t.co/N8iiatmCxF publisher partnerships so reach out to Lauren if you are a publisher looking to introduce video-level contextual targeting to your inventory! pic.twitter.com/maX3F2jOvt
— IRIS TV (@iris_tv) February 22, 2021
For Hayden, the mission is all about solving two key problems – data accessibility and transparency.
He says platforms like YouTube and Facebook have done a fabulous job at connecting the data on their platforms around what a consumer is engaging with, so that brands can answer questions like: “What’s the right type of content that my brand campaign should be associated with?”
IRIS.tv is all about peering into the inner meaning of videos, pulling out contextual labels that describe the content and making them available as signals for ad buyers and platforms.
Hyden says he wants to make information that describes video contents available far and wide, even in content delivery networks (CDNs).
]]>Instead, it got preoccupied with technologies which promise hyper-detailed targeting of individual users, regardless of the content they are consuming.
That was until privacy regulation put the brakes on advanced audience targeting techniques.
What’s coming next is what came before. In other words, to find their audiences, ad buyers are turning back toward the old method of “contextual” placement. But, in 2020, context comes with a difference.
“In the privacy era that we’re now in … what’s old is new again,” says Comscore activation GM Rachel Gantz. “Contextual targeting was quite popular from a digital perspective for a long time. It really took a back seat to audience-based approaches.
“We’re now seeing, because of all the privacy focus, the pendulum swing back towards connected TV and towards contextual offers.”
We're excited to introduce @Comscore to our Contextual Video Marketplace. This partnership represents our continued focus on privacy-driven innovation to meet brands' needs for CTV advertising and the next step in expanding contextual targeting to CTV. https://t.co/r4Vv0eBK6I pic.twitter.com/04tMD6Pawy
— IRIS TV (@iris_tv) March 2, 2020
Gantz’s Comscore this week announced that its segments for describing the brand safety and contextual categorisation of content will be available to IRIS.TV.
The latter, an LA company, offers a contextual video marketplace which uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata, helping ad buyers decide which inventory to buy against.
Gantz says that advertisers are growing weary about connected TV because they expect to be able to use the get the brand safety effectiveness to which they have now become accustomed in other digitals channels also in OTT environments.
And she says the looming death of cookie-based targeting will further spur the drive back to contextual.
“I think it’s going to mean that people are focused on much more privacy centric solutions, like contextual,” she says. “I think it means that people are just going to pay a little more attention … to exactly what are the mechanisms they’re using to be able to reach the audiences and content that they’re after.”
The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
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]]>But what if emerging technology imperatives said that both sides could now benefit more from shared interest?
“When you look at the kind of the technologies that underpin this entire industry, you’ve always had this world of advertising technology and then content technology,” says Daniel Harrison of IRIS.tv, a video technology vendor. “But very rarely have they really spoken together.
“If you really want to deliver on the concept of relevance and create that personalized stream from the ads you see to the content you experience, and then ultimately tie that to some outcomes for an advertiser … you have no choice but to start to link these tools together.”
Harrison is chief revenue officer of the LA company whose technology is already deployed on many broadcaster and publisher sites, for which it uses natural language processing to automatically add and structure video metadata.
That data now also signals the context of videos to ad buyers, and IRIS.TV even allows buyers to buy ads right in its own publishers’ video units.
“We actually bring both the content decisioning and the advertising decisioning much more closely together,” he says.
MediaMath, a digital ad-buying platform, has just teamed up with IRIS.TV to provide a “sentiment score” brands can use in their buying decisions.
The company took Series A funding in 2015 from investors including Sierra Wasatch, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Progress Ventures and Machinima founder Allen DeBevoise and executives from Nielsen, AEG and Lionsgate.
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>“You’ve got a lot going on, but ultimately each of these companies needs to figure out a strategy that ensures that the video that they’re producing and that they’re delivering is getting watched and that it’s being monetized to build a business,” the company’s CRO says.
On the publisher side, IRIS.TV has a video personalization and programming platform that drives more views and guides content strategy and makes your site. For marketers it’s a marketplace for distributing branded video and sponsored content in-stream alongside editorial video across the company’s publisher clients.
Through integrations across the ecosystem of video players and content management systems, IRIS.TV acts as “a brain in terms of helping to decide what is the best most relevant video that any individual should be seeing at any given period of time,” Harrison says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event.
The company’s focus is on the “core video environment” of major news, sports, lifestyle, entertainment media companies. More people watching more video ultimately results in more ad inventory being created.
“And if there’s more ad inventory, then it’s also about ensuring that you are highly relevant in terms of the advertising that you show,” says Harrison, who joined IRIS.TV a year ago from Oracle Data Cloud. “So we start to match up the context of the video to the actual context of the ads which solves for both sides of the equation.”
The key has always been about finding “the right mix of advertising or subscriber based-models” against content, something for which companies like AT&T Disney, Fox and others are spending considerable resources. The end goal for all, according to Harrison, is “to be viable.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>“We ingest the archive from a publisher, look at the content and meta data on the content, structure and classify it so that the content is more easily discoverable over time,” Garthwaite says in an interview with Beet.TV. “We match the right video to the right viewer in real time.”
This translates to several hundred million video views through the IRIS.TV Video Programming Platform each month. “Some of our customers alone have over a million videos,” says Garthwaite.
For the average publisher, about 80% of its audience “will actually leave before the first video ends,” according to Garthwaite. But the other 20% is there to watch as much as they can. “They will stick around and watch another video and basically, like science, IRIS is able to consistently drive another four to eight videos for those kind of super users we call them.”
The company believes that while the majority of video viewing has been on social media, companies and marketers experience poor unit economics and lose control of their audiences. Not surprisingly, Facebook and YouTube are some of the only video players IRIS does not work with.
“On a monthly basis for a typical customer, we’ll see a 70 percent increase in views,” says Garthwaite. “So if you’re doing 10 million views a month, you can expect that we’ll take you to 17. Which is really significant if you’re selling all that ad inventory.”
IRIS.TV recently launched Campaign Manager, which lets marketers serve branded campaigns to targeted audiences organically on premium publisher owned-and-operated destinations. Campaigns programmed by IRIS.TV are ad-blocker resistant and are served only to engaged users.
We interviewed him last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.
]]>Iris integrates with all major video players, and any ad server or ad network, he says. “We are platform agnostic. The company is positioned so multichannel networks…with their own brands and owned-and-operated Web mobile sites can generate better ROI and increase video views,” Garthwaite says. The company recently raised $1.7 million in angel funding and aims to expand into international markets this year, and grow its publisher base in news, sports and lifestyle, he says.
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