One reason performance advertisers love search advertising is because they can easily see the return on their ad investment. Based on that insight, Jason Fairchild co-founded tvScientific and raised $1.5 million in seed funding from prominent names in ad tech and search advertising.
The platform aims to deterministically link someone seeing a commercial to that same person buying a product. This ability lets marketers only purchase ads that lead to purchases.
“The big opportunity is to do what we did for paid search, back in the day, which is to make this valuable [CTV] marketing channel accessible to millions of marketers that don’t participate in CTV today,” Fairchild said.
TvScientific was co-founded by Bill Gross, founder of GoTo.com, and received funding from IdealabX, Tim Cadogan (OpenX), Tom Chavez (super{set}, Krux), John Gentry (OpenX, Overture) and Kent Wakeford (Integral Ad Science).
Last year, tvScientific started building its tech with a dozen employees and an outsourced development team. It’s been testing with a dozen advertisers since late last year.
Marketers can either activate their ad budget themselves within tvScientific’s platform, or if they can’t or don’t want to self-serve, they can use the vendor’s managed service option. The dashboard presents CTV ad spend in terms of cost per actions. TvScientific charges a transparent fee of roughly 10% to 15%.
In order to present marketers with CPA measurement, tvScientific collects IP addresses and creates a household device graph before an ad is delivered to understand what other laptops or phones are in the household. It uses partnerships with other tech companies to understand the identity of people seeing ads.
That data of who saw the ad gets packaged into an exposure file. A marketer that’s tracking sales receives a pixel and creates their own log of sales outcomes. TvScientific compares the two files to figure out what sales had been exposed to a CTV ad. Marketers can see results within tvScientific’s dashboard or within an existing site analytics tool like Google Analytics.
But is this methodology in sync with the current push for consumer privacy? TvScientific believes its solution holds up to consumer privacy concerns and regulation that may come out of those concerns.
“Of course we’ll be in compliance however those rules evolve,” Fairchild said.
Also, much of CTV buying, even when activated by a DSP, happens by negotiating directly with programmers.
TvScientific says it works well within that existing framework.
“They can easily bring their own dealIDs or PMPs to the platform, and target the same media they’re buying on another platform,” Fairchild said.
When marketers buy through tvScientific’s platform, it can bid in real time through connections it’s built to other platforms, or do a tag-based implementation with a CTV publisher. “We have over 90% access to inventory,” Fairchild said.
Part of tvScientific’s pitch to publishers – in order to gain access to inventory for its clients – is that it’s bringing in new marketers. Performance advertisers wouldn’t normally be advertising on CTV anyway without the assurances of a “cost per sale” model.
Ultimately, tvScientific wants to serve marketers of all sizes, from P&G down to local flower shops, Fairchild said. These marketers want to put their hands-on keyboards to control their CTV budgets the same way they control their search and social budgets, he said.
“The big direct-to-consumer, digital-first marketers don’t want to hand over control. They want to do it themselves,” he said – and tvScientific is designed to help those marketers buy CTV on their terms.
