There are a lot more self-serve CTV buying options out there than there used to be, but that doesn’t mean managed service providers are going away.
Case in point: On Friday, CTV platform Strategus announced a majority investment from private equity firm CIVC Partners.
Although terms of the deal were not disclosed, to date CIVC Partners has invested more than $2.6 billion in over 80 different mid-market platform companies in business and media services.
Current Strategus CEO and Co-Founder Dave Miles will step into an advisory role, while Todd Porch, who joined the company as president in 2021, moves into the CEO role.
The opportunity in CTV is only just getting started, Porch said. For example, Strategus had a team of 17 when he joined less than four years ago, and is now up to 70.
Joel Cox, who co-founded the company with Miles in 2013 and now serves as the EVP of strategy and innovation, told AdExchanger that this new funding will allow Strategus to continue developing “cutting-edge” methods of CTV attribution for its clients.
“We’re in such a cool time for CTV in general,” he said. “The suite of measurement products that exist today will be the least robust that it will be looking into the future.”
A CTV-first strategy
Strategus frequently describes its approach as being “CTV-first,” which Porch said is intended to distinguish from other platforms that treat the channel like an add-on to display, mobile or online video campaigns.
The company also claims to have run the first-ever programmatic CTV campaign in 2015, using a combination of tech from The Trade Desk, Roku and the Facebook-owned SSP LiveRail (which, according to Cox, got shut down mid-campaign).
These days, Strategus functions as a managed service partner – the “only pure play managed service provider of connected television that’s transacted programmatically,” as Cox put it – for small independent agencies and brands that weren’t linear TV advertisers, but are willing to try streaming media.
Those smaller companies don’t have the luxury of ignoring CTV anymore, said EVP of Sales Rachel Dillon, who also joined the same time Porch did. Just like search or social, CTV is now “a required part of the marketing mix.”
“Daisy-chaining solutions”
Investment discussions between Strategus and CIVC began a little over a year ago with the help of M&A advisory firm JEGI CLARITY. During those talks, Cox said CIVC Partners stood out as the best fit to capitalize (pun not intended) on the momentum in CTV.
Moving forward, Strategus will use these funds to invest in new and emerging types of data, build out the company’s existing attribution suite and develop new methods for cross-system measurements.
Becoming “omni-ecosystem” is an especially important goal, said Cox, because the audiences targeted by its advertisers exist across a wide and increasingly fragmented TV landscape.
“We still have open internet and we have walled gardens,” Cox said. “But we as television watchers don’t care, and we’ll bounce from YouTube TV to Hulu to Netflix.”
Keeping track of those bouncing eyeballs is tougher than just adding a new point solution or a checkbox product release.
“We look at daisy-chaining solutions together so they become more valuable, more measurable,” said Porch. “It’s not just having a roster of solutions or attribution products.”
