That is what seems to be happening with internet-connected T right now – and that’s what is happening for Innovid, too.
The ad delivery and measurement platform for connected TV has been working in the area for 14 years. Now, with the CTV waves crashing ashore, it is going public to raise $403 million in a deal valuing the business at $1.3 billion.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid co-founder and CEO Zvika Netter says the company’s vision never swerved, and he wanted to quickly capitalize on CTV’s COVID-era growth curve.
Visible vision
“(We aim to) support the growth of the company, (so that) our clients and our partners could see that and not think, ‘These guys raised all this money and they’re going to sell it to some big tech firm and move to Bora Bora’,” Netter says.
“We’re here to work and really change the future of television for many years to come.
“Now I think everybody will understand that this is we’re here to stay for a very long time and why it’s the right route for us.”
Deal structure
Innovid’s software automatically uploads and encodes advertising creative to stream ads to any screen or device, manages the physical delivery of ads and measures performance across the MRC-accredited metrics, connecting together a host of demand- and supply-side platforms, publisher apps and CTV devices.
It claims 40% of the top 200 US TV advertisers as customers.
According to The Wall Street Journal: “Innovid is planning to raise $403 million through a roughly $150 million private investment in public equity, or PIPE, at $10 per share, and $253 million from a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called ION Acquisition Corp. 2.”
The company had taken a reported $95.1 million over eight funding rounds since 2008.
Going quickly public
After the earlier cooling-off in, ad-tech public listings are back in fashion after the pandemic revealed continued growth in key trends like online consumption and CTV ad capabilities.
PubMatic, Viant, AppLovin and DoubleVerify all recently went public, with Sprinklr and Integral Ad Science to follow.
“COVID was a delay – it’s a curse and a blessing in a way,” Innovid’s Netter says. “In Q2, we suffered like everybody else.
“But, very fast, we realised that the consumption of CTV, as everybody knows, is growing dramatically starting May and June of last year – and it’s never stopped.
“We waited for the presidential election to be over. We waited for the vaccines. We wanted to see that this is here to stay at scale. Once we saw it, we said, ‘Okay … we want to go and we want to go (public) very fast’.
“The SPAC allowed us speed. It was a way to lock this deal in a very high speed and be public, be out fast.”
CTV growth forecast
In May, eMarketer predicted 2021 US CTV ad spending would hit $13.4 billion.
The markets are realizing that linear TV consumption and classical pay-TV are unlikely to be resurrected, but that TV advertising generally remains effective.
So companies like Innovid are warming advertisers up to the idea they can deliver targeted, digital-style ads, with precision measurement, to TV-like devices. It’s a best-of-both-worlds strategy.
Innovid’s projections
Innovid wants a piece of an estimated $20 billion global CTV ad business, within a $200 billion global TV ad industry.
It projects its revenue growing from $69 million in 2020 to $177 million by 2023, 63% of it from CTV.
And Innovid boasts high customer retention, retaining 94% of core customers last year.
But it plans to double its operating expenses by 2023.
You are watching “Innovation, Leadership, and Value Creation: Strategies Explored,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Progress Partners. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Having helped to create Innovid 11 years ago to transform video experiences on the advertising side, “It’s finally here if you look at connected television. We see dramatic changes in that environment,” CEO & Co-Founder Zvika Netter says in this interview with Beet.TV. Among other topics, he discusses Innovid’s participation in special sessions featuring a roster of industry leaders at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity later this month.
Citing companies like Netflix, Roku and Amazon, Netter observes, “if you see what they’re doing, they’re basically working on the experience. It’s the selection, it’s the quality of the content, the personalization, how you navigate. Companies are trading in the billions just because they pay attention to the user and optimizing their experience.”
What Innovid is about is “exactly that for advertising,” Netter adds. “How do we create the technology and the process and structure to create a better balance between advertising and content?”
If done correctly, this balancing act produces winners in the form of viewers, publishers and advertisers. “We work with all three contingencies. We’re in a great spot in the middle and we’re growing very fast.”
Earlier this year, Innovid secured $30 million in funding from Goldman Sachs to help expand its global footprint, and the company recently hired 60 more people. “We built a three-year plan to keep expanding the company both from a product offering but also geographically,” including in Japan, Spain and soon Germany.
“Connected TV is everywhere physically in the world. There are similar needs on that front,” Netter says.
“It finally has enough scale for them to care about it to have a conversation and see what the industry really needs,” Netter says of connected-TV. “It’s not just about us pushing the great next feature to buy something from your TV to your phone. It’s actually listening to CMO’s and publishers and understand what do they need, what do they care about these days and addressing that.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“Until now it was email, text messaging, website traffic, even point of sale,” says Netter. “But not video. Video was considered TV, top of funnel advertising.”
Breaking down silos, the new solution links consumer activity in other channels with the ability to interact with video ads. In the same manner, if someone interacts with a video it can trigger a separate, targeted marketing actions.
“If you see an ad and are interested about a vacation or something and interact with it, if the brand has information about you in its database two days later it could follow up with an email about an offer,” says Netter.
ConAgra Brands—whose products include Orville Redenbacher and Bertolli—is a launch partner for the Innovid Marketing Cloud Suite, The Drum reports.
Innovid was an early pioneer of dynamic creative insertion, which can now be fueled in real time by even more customer data from non-video channels.
“What’s unique here is it’s the first time they are connected to the back-end CRM system,” Netter says of programmatic creative elements.
Based on what a marketer knows, “if you did something on the brand website, opened an email or bought a product, the next time will see ad on NBC, AOL or Hulu it would be based on other activities you have done beyond the video channel,” says Netter.
Innovid’s platform includes a Video Delivery Suite, an Analytics Suite, a Video Experience Suite and an Optimization Suite.
]]>Netter explains the product offering, the workings with brands and their agencies and the integration with other ad servers from Google and Facebook.
The Innovid ad serving solution is being deeply integrated into the Facebook/Atlas platform, the company announced last week.
We inteviewed Netter at the IAB MIXX conference during Advertising Week last week. We also interviewed Innovid co-founder Tal Chalozin on the Faceebook Atlas news. You can find that video here.
]]>Video ad tech vendor Innovid’s just-published research in to the topic shows that, whilst auto ads placed against auto videos yielded a 40% higher engagement rate, pharmaceutical ads performed 130% better when they were served against… sports videos.
“Verifying video-level content can offer valuable insights to help optimize campaigns and boost performance,” according to Innovid’s research white paper.
in this recent video interview with Beet.TV, Innovid CEO Zvika Netter explains why the company opened up its platform to allow connections with a host of video verification systems.
]]>Now it is opening up its platform in a bid to recognize the many, many ad tech vendors in the video chain and to ramp up the number of ads it can power.
“The best solution will not come 100% from us,” says CEO Zvika Netter of the revamped Innovid Atom platform. “You can choose your own vendor.
“We’re not saying ‘we’re the best at developing everything’ – were going toward a partnership model. That means realising all our APIs and allowing other vendors to interact with our system. We’re also going open the system potentially to competitors to run their product across the platform.”
Examples include allowing agencies to bring other third-party ad verification platforms to bear on ads served by Innovid. Next up, is integrating cross-platform management tools, Netter says.
Netter was speaking to Beet.TV at the BrightRoll Video Summit. You can find more coverage of the BrightRoll summit here.
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“Eighty percent of the interactive video being served … is run through our servers… used by our tool, iRoll, which stands for interactive pre-roll,” Netter tells Beet.TV in this video interview. The outfit helps agencies jazz up their pre-roll ads for user engagement and passes them on to big video destinations like YouTube and Hulu.
“Once we established the concept of interactivity within video, which is becoming standard today, we were looking for where is next frontier. Obviously, its multi-screen.”
Netter tells us making video ads interactive for the web is one thing – but ensuring engaging video ads can work across the booming plethora of devices at scale is tricky. “This is becoming very, very fragmented … it’s a lot of execution issues.”
Last week, Innovid and TubeMogul rereleased this report showing consumers claim higher brand awareness, message recall and purchase intent for products marketed using interactive ads compared with standard pre-rolls.
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