Investor, industry veteran and former SpotX CEO Mike Shehan returns from the ad tech sidelines to join the C-suite at Telly, a startup that gives away free TVs in exchange for viewer data.
Ad tech insiders are likely familiar with Shehan’s history. He co-founded the video SSP SpotX in 2007, which was acquired in full by European entertainment network RTL Group in 2017. Shehan led SpotX as CEO until 2021, when Magnite bought it from RTL for $1.2 billion. Since then, Shehan has acted as advisor and investor to an array of different tech companies, including Telly.
And on Tuesday, Telly announced that Shehan will officially join as the company’s first CRO.
“I [was] doing everything possible not to be an [ad tech] operator again,” Shehan told AdExchanger. But the monetization opportunity of Telly’s core business model is what ultimately drew him back to the ad tech world, he said.
The tale of Telly
Telly was founded in 2021 by Ilya Pozin, co-founder of Paramount-owned Pluto TV. Telly began operating in 2023 with a plan to give away 500,000 smart TVs for free within a year to users who sign up on its website and agree to allow their data to be used for targeted advertising.
Telly collects data such as household income, the number of people who live in the household and what kinds of cars they own, just to name a few examples. If consumers want to opt out of any data sharing later on, they have to send the TV back.
According to Shehan, Telly’s core value prop is the fact that its product is free for consumers. “Nothing scales faster than free,” he said. Consumers don’t have a reason not to try it – unless, of course, they don’t want to share their data. Human nature suggests people generally opt out of personal data collection when presented with the choice. But, in this case, Shehan argues that consumers will opt in to sharing data with Telly because they get a sleek new TV for free, potentially saving hundreds of dollars.
Shehan asserts that Telly’s free TVs are in high demand, and not just among consumers that can’t or don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new TV. “There are millions upon millions of customers that’ll take [us] up on that opportunity,” he said. Nearly half a million households are currently on a waiting list, according to the company.
But for right now, those numbers are still just an ambition. Telly declined to share how many people have a Telly device, and it also declined to share why it didn’t ship 500,000 units last year as planned. But a spokesperson said thousands of households in 48 states currently have Telly TVs.
A dollop of TV data
Telly has a trick up its sleeve, aside from the free TV gimmick and data.
National advertisers, including automotive and insurance brands such as Kia and State Farm, buy ads on Telly TV screens for the same reason they buy home screen inventory on other smart TVs – it reaches people who otherwise only stream ad-free. Telly also sells advertisers on the smaller, second screen rigged to its TV devices, which gives marketers the opportunity to advertise without interrupting what a viewer is watching and to include clickable ads.
For example, Telly can use automatic content recognition to detect when an ad is playing on the main TV screen. It then runs an accompanying clickable ad on the side screen with a prompt, such as ordering a pizza or scheduling a test drive. Mazda and State Farm are examples of advertisers running these types of ads on Telly.
The real monetization trick is, of course, the data. Telly creates a panel with its viewership data, which it believes can help fill gaps in the current TV ad measurement landscape (which we all know is a mess). Telly says it doesn’t worry about privacy run-ins because consumers opt into sharing their data before they receive their TVs.
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