The funding round for the provider of over-the-top targeting, measurement and privacy management was led by Mithera Capital and also included Connecticut Innovations, Arab Angel Fund and Progress Ventures.

“We’ve been very deliberate and frugal in terms of how we raise capital,” Swanston says in this Beet.TV interview at the company’s fifth annual InFronts event. “We accomplished a lot with relatively a very small amount of money. To be able to have the success that we’ve had and then now have a much larger cash infusion is really substantial for us.”

Tru Optik has doubled in size “in just the last quarter and our revenue is pretty much skyrocketing,” Swanston adds. With regard to the relationship with TransUnion, he cites as main factors as scale and quality of data plus being “tight knit” on data security. As to the latter, “Those are things that TransUnion seemed to care more about than probably anybody that we’ve talked to in the industry. A lot of the diligence process was around privacy policies and data security.”

Where Swanston sees OTT/connected TV headed in the next couple of years is “we’re not even going to call it that anymore. It’s just going to be called TV because it will be the main opportunity to reach consumers across the biggest screen in the household.”

Tru Optik recently expanded its management ranks with the additions of Richard Kosinski as EVP of Sales and Jonathan Bokor in the role of Chief Privacy and Business Affairs Officer.

“We’ve always been blessed with some really talented, experienced people,” says Swanston. Really what we’re doing now is just being able to do that even more increasingly and fill gaps that we had” in such areas as sales and privacy.

Tru Optik kicked off this year’s InFronts by presenting a timeline of the company’s accomplishments and partnerships in an industry with non-stop announcements from companies announcing all manner of news. “The funny thing about it that we laugh about internally is everything that anybody has announced in the last six months, Tru Optik announced in 2018, or 2017 or even 2016.”

One of its more substantial undertakings is the recently announced integration with the Oracle Data Cloud, something that Tru Optik began working on in the summer of 2017, according to Swanston.

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. 

Kosinksi’s digital background spans such media companies as Forbes, Yahoo!, Westwood One, Quantcast and Receptiv, while Bokor hails from Publicis Media, where he was SVP of Precision Video. The hires are a sign that Tru Optik is “listening to what the market needs and bringing on the right people,” Kosinksi explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Tru Optik services content producers, broadcasters and publishers, and agencies and marketers with what it calls its “core asset,” the OTT Household Graph representing 75 million homes. “We today have mapped, via direct measurement over eighty percent of all connected TV households,” says Kosinski.

On the targeting side, Tru Optik helps agencies and marketers use precise targeting of segments “that they’re very familiar with” and can access via their DSP’s with inventory available through its partnership with SpotX.

For measurement, the company provides transparency in connected-TV households in real time, according to Kosinski. It can determine reach against an audience, frequency of those audiences and in-target reach against them.

Some 92 million U.S. households have a smart TV, which Tru Optik uses as the “anchor” of its graph. Given the proliferation of other viewing devices, the company is able to aggregate “all of these different and disparate signals” into one common, household number. It provides other solutions based on the individual devices as well.

Tru Optik is the first connected-TV DMP to utilize the Oracle Data Cloud in an integrated audience solution, as MediaPost reports.

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.

These and other topics were the focus of spirited and insightful debate at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. Following are some of the more cogent exchanges during a panel featuring senior-level TV practitioners moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel.

Tracey Scheppach, Co-Founder of Matter More Media, said waste is going to exist and when it does, there should be a lower CPM. Her take on planning starts with a client’s first-party data:

“I bump that up against addressable linear inventory, addressable VOD inventory, network index buys. Pretty much not using age and gender, but still price it out. We then look at where is the most economical place to reach the true target. Convert everything to an ECPM and look at what channels are driving conversion and adjust.”

Matt Bayer, SVP, Advanced TV & Cross Screen at Cadreon/IPG, said everything starts with KPI’s and defining the role of addressable video or TV:

“If CRM underpins those audiences, great. Doing a deep dive on CRM discovery is a great exercise but I think you have to first start with the role that it’s playing within the context of your comms plan and then back it up from there.”

Defining waste seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Here’s the perspective offered by Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange:

“It may be that some of your true target is in the waste. That waste in demo targeted TV is free. When you’re buying a targeted advanced TV buy like an addressable TV buy, you don’t get any of that free waste. All of that has to be taken into consideration.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, the agency dedicated to retailer Target, looks at everything based on return on ad spend. “That’s kind of the equalizer across all the different things we could spend money on. We also look at sales per impression, which is a measure that is irrespective of cost. Waste is actually paying a role that we don’t fully understand in driving returns.”

Ben Tatta, Co-Founder of data and analytics provider 605, has seen lots of conventional linear TV campaigns where a lot of what would be deemed waste was actually a base of households that are just more responsive to TV. “We do a lot of modification taking CRM segments and then modifying them based on those that are most responsive or most persuadable based on different types of messages,” said Tatta.

To Harrison, the “next big frontier will be for us to understand linear buy delivery at the household level and to be able to parse out effectiveness, because it’s really hard to do it right now.”

Bokor summed up what is unarguable regardless of how one tries to target and attribution television better than has been done in the past. “TV has to step up and prove that it delivers in comparison to, we talk about Google and Facebook. You want to beat them, you’ve got to be them at their own game.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

In the connected-TV and OTT space, “There are quite a few ad-supported services and those are growing,” including Crackle, Vudu and Pluto TV, says Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange.

In terms of channels or apps being viewed, non-linear viewing does continue to fragment viewership, Bokor explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. And since inventory on platforms like Roku is purchased across the entire footprint, it’s done by demographics.

“But we’re starting to see and we’re working on programmatic activation. Instead of buying demo, buying audiences on connected TV, which I think is the promising area. Fragmentation is somewhat less of an issue when you’re buying an audience across apps.”

Cable TV operators continue to enable addressable advertising technology, thereby expanding the pool of households than can be targeted with specific ads, but it’s a system-by-system approach and doesn’t yet provide anything near national reach.

“We do get sort of national reach with the satellite operators because they can be accessed anywhere, but it’s a spotty national,” Bokor says.

What’s changing is that programmers themselves are trying to up the addressable inventory pool.

“I’ve seen some outreach from a few of the larger network groups who have secured some inventory on the Comcast platform coming to us and wanting us to invest in addressable TV through the programmer as opposed to the MPVD. That’s a big difference,” Bokor adds.

Streaming pioneer Hulu “really is connected TV and it’s the largest publisher,” while Roku aggregates ad inventory it secures from programmers. “Roku has been a significant source of inventory.”

Publicis is “working very hard to identify the partners” that can provide “a programmatic pathway for our video teams to be able to access audiences on connected TV across any connected-TV device.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

This is one takeaway from a panel discussion at the recent Beet.TV Retreat 2016 on the value of advanced TV advertising. Moderated by Tim Hanlon, CEO and Founder of The Vertere Group, the discussion began with an examination of the usefulness of addressable advertising and ended with a critique of legacy ratings.

To Jonathan Bokor, advanced TV is defined as addressable, audience index programmatic and over-the-top. “These are three very distinct and different tools,” observed the SVP and Director of Advanced Media at MediaVest | Spark. “They are not currently easily melded together. That’s where we have to go.”

Larene Mantel, the Director of Advanced TV at Cadreon, said it “might not make sense for all advertisers to be in the addressable space,” a sentiment echoed by Mike Bologna, President of MODI Media. “On average, about a third of every addressable analysis we do for an advertiser the recommendation back to them is this isn’t the right approach,” said Bologna.

Nonetheless, all three panelists agreed that addressable can be a valuable, bottom-funnel tactic and that in general, TV needs to be more effective, efficient and accountable. “This is really an opportunity to deliver more frequency against your best prospects,” said Bokor. “And as a consequence, to spend a little bit less on demo-targeted media that has a lot of waste associated with it.”

But there’s still the top of the funnel, which is why traditional TV isn’t going away anytime soon.

“There’s always going to be that top of the funnel and there’s always going to be the mass GRP’s being pushed there,” said Bologna. “But now that most of these advertisers understand who their real target is, we can balance it.”

Added Mantel, “It’s finding the balance” and for advertisers “not caring where your airing but who you’re reaching and that you’re reaching the right person.”

Asked by Hanlon to reconcile increasingly longer Nielsen ratings windows like C30 with the move toward more targetable impressions, Bologna said that both are needed. “It’s absolutely both. There’s nothing wrong with improving the legacy metrics.”

Bokor was hard pressed to assign a value to C30. “The market forces that are applied to determine the value are really insufficient,” Bokor said. “We have a marketplace that doesn’t truly reflect the actual value of each impression. C30 is going backwards in the extreme.”

Bokor would like to be able to bid on every advertising impression, a situation that Bologna suggested would result in “all hell is going to break loose” because the CPM’s could skyrocket.

“I want a holistic marketplace so that it’s not just about TV,” said Bokor. “I want to look at the entire marketplace of all advertising impressions and find where the value is. And if I can truly get that, then I know exactly what I’m paying for and I might be willing to pay more.”

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

In the meantime, unless programmers and MVPD’s come together to make more inventory available for addressable ads, digital “will start to eat television’s lunch,” the Director of Advanced Media at Mediavest | Spark opines in an interview with Beet.TV.

Once all TV migrates to Internet Protocol delivery, advertisers will be able to determine what’s reach and what’s frequency—a distinction now blurred by the rise of different delivery mechanisms over the past few decades. “Eventually, all TV will be delivered by IP and I think that will open up a lot of possibilities and make things simpler,” Bokor says in response to a question from interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group.

Those possibilities include the ability to re-aggregate reach caused by viewing fractionalization. “Once you move towards all IP and now we have a limited number of identifiers that we can match in a DMP, you can know exactly what is reach and what is frequency,” Bokor explains.

Marketers will still have mass reach against broad targets, along with being able to do more granular audience targeting on an impression-by-impression basis to reduce or eliminate waste, according to Bokor. “Those two tools will be used in combination for a more sophisticated way of blending those two techniques to get at whatever goal a marketer has,” he says.

Asked by Hanlon why there isn’t more addressable TV inventory available, Bokor points to the age-old relationship between networks and MVPD’s. It’s a union that has centered on subscriber fees and distribution.

“And that has been a contentious relationship” that has typically favored the programmers, says Bokor. “That’s why those fees go up regularly and the cost of a pay TV subscription goes up regularly,” he adds. “But I think you’re starting to see that that’s fraying.”

He thinks the situation has reached the upper limit of what marginal subscribers are willing to pay for cable TV packages. “I think we’re starting to see that the two sides need to come together a little bit and hopefully they will come together and find a way to share the cost and benefits of implementing addressable,” Bokor says.

While 1% of TV spending now devoted to addressable is “pretty impressive,” the industry cannot get to 25% using just local inventory controlled by MVPD’s. This problem does not exist on the digital side, which is why digital as a whole is bigger than TV and soon, mobile alone will be bigger than TV, according to Bokor.

Digital “will start to eat television’s lunch if television doesn’t start to make these capabilities available,” he says.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.

“AT&T has taken the lead and I think they’re probably the best positioned” in the cross-screen addressable race, Bokor says in an interview with Beet.TV. “The thing that I think makes it challenging for cross screen is generally, the providers are not the same and the identifiers are not the same,” he adds.

For addressable TV, media agencies can avail themselves of a pay-TV company’s subscriber rolls, match those names and addresses to their target lists and do a match. By comparison, mobile devices are targeted based on ID’s, not names and addresses. “So you don’t have the same identifier that’s used to build the target list,” which makes it difficult to determine reach and frequency—particularly the latter, according to Bokor.

AT&T’s edge: it has access to consumer identifiers consisting of names and addresses, plus unique device ID’s. “What we really don’t want is, on some platforms that are emerging, you see the same person just getting hit many, many, many times,” Bokor says. “And you reach a point where the person is not happy about seeing the same ad over and over again.

“We need to be able to control frequency across screens and AT&T is now starting to offer that. It’s a very intriguing offering.”

While Mediavest | Spark hasn’t run many campaigns yet, “I think that’s going to become something that’s going to be of great interest over the next six months to a year,” says Bokor. He also hopes to be able to reach beyond just the AT&T user base. “But how you do that where two platforms that are not controlled by the same entity is a little bit more challenging,” he says.

The opportunity around addressable TV advertising  for AT&T is reported in an article in today’s New York Times

This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising. The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.

In an interview with Beet.TV, Bokor surveys the current landscape of addressable TV: forecast by eMarketer to hit roughly $850 million advertising spend in 2016 and approximately $1.5 billion by 2017. “That’s real money,” says Bokor. “It’s a significant amount of uptake for addressable, it’s growing every year, it’s delivering results.”

Chalk it up to being able to “do what we’ve always wanted in television,” which is linking viewer exposure to ads with any number of key performance indicators, according to Bokor.

“TV has always been something that we’ve known is effective. We’ve always known if you stop buying television that your sales will go down,” Bokor adds. Problem is, “It’s a really sort of a loose association.”

Some clients of Mediavest | Spark are return players to addressable while others are new to the game. Most active have been marketers that can come closest to matching exposures with actual sales, for example in the automotive, consumer packaged-goods and financial sectors.

“It’s been successful in those categories to the extent that other advertisers are saying, ‘Even though I might not be able to get that closed loop to a sale, that’s that’s something that I want to do,’” says Bokor.

Some Mediavest | Spark clients are also buying audience index programmatic TV, whether directly from a TV network or via a demand-side platform as an optimizer, according to Bokor.

Nonetheless, audience index programmatic and OTT “Are a little behind. We’re starting to see traction but it’s a little earlier than addressable,” Bokor says. “Addressable has moved beyond the test phase. It’s really moved ahead of the other two.”

This video is part of a series produced at the NYC TV and Video Week’s Advance Advertising summit. The series is sponsored by 4C Insights. For additional videos from the series, visit this page.

“You do have to pay a premium on a CPM basis for addressable,” MediaVest advanced media SVP Jonathan Bokor tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “However, your effective CPM is generally going to be lower if you structure the campaign correctly because there are a lot of impressions that you no longer have to serve.

“If someone just leased a car a month ago … you don’t need to serve them (ads) at that time. In a national cable or broadcast campaign, you’re going to expose all those people. With addressable, you can eliminate them from the target, and you don’t have to pay for that exposure. You’re eliminating the waste. It is more efficient.”

Bokor says MediaVest is currently placing super-targeted ads on TV for auto and consumer-packaged-goods advertisers, and is even able to trace the effect of ads all the way through to purchase. ” These are things we’ve want ed to do for as long as television’s been around,” he says.

We interviewed him last month at an event hosted by Mediaocean on the topic of Social TV.

“That’s really ignoring one of the principal advantages that VOD brings to the table for us as advertisers, which is an opportunity to get back some of the unduplicated reach that networks are losing on a year-by-year basis,” Boker says.

We spoke with Bokor during an interview with Ashley Swartz, CEO and founder of NY-based digital consultancy Furious Minds and a regular contributor to Beet.TV, at the VideoNuze Online Video Ad Summit in New York.