Seedtag’s CTV business is beginning to blossom.
On Monday, the contextual ad platform announced its acquisition of Beachfront, a supply-side platform that specializes in TV and video.
The deal represents Seedtag’s ambition to become an omnichannel marketing platform with CTV at the forefront, Brian Danzis, president of Seedtag’s North America business, told AdExchanger.
Beachfront has roughly 30 employees, bringing Seedtag’s global headcount to more than 630.
The company declined to share a deal price.
Seedtag was mainly attracted to Beachfront’s direct integrations with TV and streaming publishers, which is something Seedtag doesn’t have much of. These publishers will attract new demand and more scale for Seedtag’s contextual ad products.
Beachfront will also help accelerate Seedtag’s growth in the US, Danzis said.
Seedtag entered the US market in 2022. But it wasn’t until earlier this year that it launched its first CTV-focused contextual ad product that allows advertisers to apply contextual targeting signals to their streaming buys.
More advertisers are now looking for addressable alternatives in light of signal loss and privacy concerns, which, in turn, is driving more interest in streaming ad products.
Hence Seedtag’s decision to buy rather than build in order to capture that growing demand. Beachfront operates both a video-focused supply-side platform and ad server.
Seedtag sprouts a CTV business
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Seedtag began life in 2014 as a Spanish supply-side platform and later evolved into a global contextual ad network for open web display after GDPR went into effect in Europe in 2018, which made interest-based advertising more difficult.
After expanding to the US, Seedtag had to adapt again. It was clear that more and more ad budgets were destined for CTV and the company wanted to capitalize on that.
Seedtag developed a streaming ad product of its own, but for the CTV business to really grow, it needed relationships with more TV publishers.
Beachfront has its roots in streaming video and expanded to include linear after a private equity buyout in 2017. It’s already done the work to integrate with TV programmers, distributors and streaming services, including Comcast, Charter, AMC, Paramount, Univision, Vizio and LG.
These are complicated relationships that take a long time to form, Danzis said, since programmatic is much newer to TV advertising compared to on the open web.
Though he declined to specify how many sell-side clients Beachfront brings to the table, he did say the deal “greatly accelerates” Seedtag’s direct connections with programmers and streamers.
But there’s also value for Beachfront, the company’s CEO, Chris Maccaro, told AdExchanger.
“Our CTV publisher partners will benefit from access to global demand sources within Seedtag’s portfolio and new monetization opportunities in contextual [advertising],” Maccaro said.
According to Danzis, Seedtag works with major global advertisers, but paired with Beachfront’s self-serve ad platform, more premium TV inventory should be a draw for advertisers. Self-serve ad platforms are a common way to attract smaller regional advertisers.
Seedtag seeks out context
But Seedtag needs more than just scale to realize its CTV ambitions, and the differentiator it needs also happens to be its bread and butter: contextual advertising.
Seedtag believes it can sate the buy side’s desire for more information about the programming delivering the ads, Danzis said.
To do so, the company’s AI technology, which it named Liz, analyzes publisher sites for keywords and images that help deduce the genre and tone of the content.
Seedtag extended this product into CTV earlier this year with automatic content recognition (ACR) data from smart TV makers to deduce viewing patterns. Liz also analyzes how consumers talk about streaming titles online, which provides a fuller understanding of the general theme of a particular episode or specific scenes.
Through new integrations with Beachfront’s publisher clients, Seedtag expects to include more ACR data to strengthen its contextual TV ad product.
It will take some time for the two companies to fully integrate their ad tech stacks, Danzis said. But once that happens, he said, Seedtag hopes to blossom into an end-to-end ad platform with a CTV specialty.
