VideoAmp will work with Snowflake, a cloud data storage company, to offer “multi-party cloud environments” for data collaboration – effectively, a way of pooling audience data with rules and privacy baked in.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, VideoAmp CEO and co-founder Ross McCray explains how it works, and why.
“In today’s best practice and approach, what we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of contractual commitments in trust-based systems, where you sign a DocuSign, you’re saying, ‘I won’t do this. I won’t do that with your data’,” McCray says.
“(You) send it to some third-party identity partner who is a trusted source to get all the raw data to create these anonymous based systems and send it back across the wire.
“We don’t believe that’s putting the consumer first. There’s a lot of holes with that approach.”
VideoAmp has already been using multi-national Snowflake for more than three years to run analysis.
Now it is joining Powered by Snowflake, a partner program, which will see it use the cloud computing resources to change the way data expectations are forged,
“A lot of the legacy measurement systems haven’t been able to really accurately count in those more modern ways of digital and streaming,” McCray says, “and to look at it in a more holistic view, which should increase their yield and opportunity for where their audiences are going.”
He adds: “The way that we’ve architected this system with Snowflake is that we’re able to do a multi-party computing join – there’s never a circumstance where the data that’s owned by the publishers has to be shared with someone else.
“We’re unable to ever process the individual-level data, but we’re able to get much more accurate in terms of how we’re doing the identity resolution.
“(That) allows for advertisers and agencies and media owners to process secure data in a way that allows us to get access to things that you wouldn’t have in more of a trust-based system.”
Seven-year-old VideoAmp’s platform offers software and more for linear TV, over-the-top and digital video, including TV viewership data, campaign performance insights and buy optimization.
This year, the company raised up to $75 million from Capital IP, comprised of $50 milli0n in debt with an option on a further $25 million.
Although its valuation is now increasing, McCray says he has no intention to join the latest wave of ad-tech sales.
“We’ve seen a lot of companies sell early and cut themselves too short,” he says. “We really want to be able to create a long-term vision of creating a new system and alternative currency of how media is bought, sold and valued.
“We’ve been approached over the years, many times for acquisitions, but it just doesn’t make any sense. We really want to win, and we want others to be able to count on us for that long-term vision.”
]]>At least, it may look like that from the outside. The Santa Monica-based outfit spent plenty of time perfecting its platform before taking on a $15m first venture round in November, the latest in German broadcaster RTL Group’s ad-tech roll-up.
Now VideoAmp CEO Ross McCray says 2016 is primed to be “the year of execution” for the company he co-founded. So what does VideoAmp bring to the party?
A “cross-device graph”, McCray says: “We associate multiple device IDs to a user, we append intelligence to those devices. We’ll say, ‘here’s everything those devices have consumed’; it watches these ads or shows on TV.
“Today, we over 150m unique users in the United States and over a billion devices associated underneath those users, and consumption data across all of them.”
That means advertisers will get to more smartly target ads based on a holistic understanding of who exactly is behind the many devices that are now used throughout households.
McCray says an earlier seed round had funded the engineering build-out, but the effort in 2016 will be about sales.
This video is part of a series of interviews about the transformation of television produced at CES and sponsored by SpotX.
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