LAFAYETTE CA – After rebranding from ZypMedia to ZypTV, the San Francisco-based company is planning three big initiatives:
- A self-service connected TV ad-buying platform for small and medium-sized ad agencies and brands.
- A drive to limit connected TV ad fraud.
- Real-time forecasting of ad inventory and audiences.
Founded seven years ago, ZypMedia has until now powered local broadcast companies’ digital and over-the-top (OTT) TV offerings.
In July it rebranded to focus on the exploding connected TV segment, and is launching something geared toward ad-buyers themselves.
Growing demand
“If you look at the options available today for buyers who want to do in-house buying – I’m talking about smaller and midsize agencies and brands – buying CTV on a self-service basis is challenging, time-consuming, and it needs constant human intervention,” says co-founder Aman Sareen in this video interview with Beet.TV.
So ZypTV plans to release a self-service buying platform in Q3 this year.
EMarketer in November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.
That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie.
Ad buyers are getting interested by the ability to target specific audiences or households, the ability to use other data in doing so and the ability.
Despite ad buyers’ predictions of overall ad spend to decline in the second half of 2020 due to the effects of #COVID19, most digital #advertising channels will grow considerably with #CTV being number one on the list. Get the details here: https://t.co/0IhQU66rWy @USAToday
— ZypTV (@Zyp_TV) July 24, 2020
Even as the overall US TV ad outlook trends down, the growth in connected TV viewing is prompting a renewed leaning toward over-the-top ad opportunities.
“The video or connected TV ecosystem (is at) the same level of sophistication as mobile app infrastructure was it was in the early part of the last decade,” Sareen says.
Fraud & forecasting
But Sareen sees other trends on the horizon.
“Because OTT is brand new and it commands really high CPMs, there are some bad actors in the ecosystem,” he says.
“So we also feel that one of the things that we need to do is provide more education to the buyers and also make sure that we are preventing any fraudulent actors to come in and start taking up valuable dollars from good publishers.
“Real-time forecasting of inventory and audience at market level is a major pain point across the ecosystem.
“Even for large publishers, they don’t know how to forecast their inventory at a local level. And we have been working very hard to solve those problems.”
