TvScientific, a CTV ad tech startup focused on digital marketers, has had a busy start to the year. April saw the company close $20 million in Series A Funding, followed by an announcement with strategic investor NBCUniversal to help power Peacock’s new Ad Manager platform.
On Tuesday tvScientific announced a new partnership with mobile marketing analytics platform for CTV measurement Adjust, to enable mobile app marketers to integrate CTV into omnichannel strategies. The partners are using tvScientific’s proprietary, deterministic ID technology alongside with Adjust’s attribution data so that mobile marketers can attribute cross-device with full visibility into CTV impressions and the ability to drive app installs. Bringing Adjust into the fold means marketers can analyze the performance of their campaign inside Adjust for a complete picture of strategies across all channels.
It's the latest for Los Angeles-based tvScientific, which is looking to bring fresh advertising dollars from digital-first marketers to the connected TV sphere.
Founded in 2020, tvScientific has raised $23 million to date including $20 million in series A last month after $3 million in seed funding. The Series A round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from strategic partners NBCUniversal and Heart Ventures. The tvScientific-powered Peacock Ad Manager was recently announced and launches in the second half of this year.
And as new partner Adjust has a lot of clients, tvScientific co-founder and CEO Jason Fairchild said he’s sure “many of them will test app user acquisition marketing with tvScientific’s NBCU partnership.”
To be clear, tvScientific isn’t proactively going after the 500 or so legacy TV advertisers that dominate the $70 billion traditional TV market, according to Fairchild, who believes they will find the company over time. Instead, it’s generally going after the top 20-25% of Google and Facebook marketers, whose budgets typically go to digital and who are performance oriented, meaning cost per lead, website visitor sale.
And the digital performance market represents a much bigger pool of around $150 billion compared to traditional TV, according to Fairchild.
“If we can bring $50-$75 billion from digital to TV it will literally double or more the size of the TV market,” he told Fierce Video during an April interview.
It’s also the reason publishers are so willing to work with tvScientific, which enables marketers to execute media buys against 95% of the ad-supported world with 1:1 deals, asbringing in digital marketers represents net-new dollars for publishers.
“Now we’re pulling from a pool of millions of advertisers, dollars that they wouldn’t get otherwise,” Fairchild said, adding those are “really easy discussions” with publishers.
In terms of digital marketers tvScientitific is going after all sizes, from direct-to-consumer (think Dollar Shave Club), to app-install (like meditation or gaming apps), to local and regional.
The company’s self-serve platform is built for performance marketers and connects with 95% of AVOD streaming apps through direct deals. It allows any marketer, from P&G to the local flower shop to quickly set up their own campaigns and targeting, execute media buys against most of the ad-supported world and measure results in a digital first way, within one platform.
It currently has well over 100 customers on the platform, according to Fairchild.
Fairchild was involved in the early days of paid search as head of business development for GoTo/Overture/Yahoo where he executed the industry’s first paid search partners deals. He said it hasn’t been since then that he’s seen “anything that drives such immediate high impact and measurable results” as campaigns with tvScientific early beta platform users, specifically pointing to an example of a local flower shop located in Portland, Oregon.
In that scenario, using a channel partner sales organization, they sold a $500 campaign to drive website traffic over a weekend, which resulted in 800 website visitors in just three days. This was notable for several reasons, he said, including being less expensive on a cost per website visitor than Google or Facebook, as well as the broad reach of TV versus the narrow consumer behavior of search.
And while the flower shop is one example, “we’ve seen that play out over and over again at the regional level,” he noted.
Two elements tvScientifc prides itself on is radical transparency and massive datasets.
Marketers or data science teams can see everything on the platform from log-level time and date stamp of ad impressions delivered, all the way through connecting the dots to an order ID and everything in between, he said. Marketers are allowed to export data to their own internal or third-party platforms to stitch together a complete view of the consumer journey.
So for example, a viewer sees a Dominos ad on TV and 20 seconds later pulls up a Google search and clicks a link for a local Dominos store, everything will show up in the dashboard – meaning users can know that the TV commercial inspired a need for an order, even when the last click came through a separate channel.
“If we can show all of that data, all the way down to time and date stamp of ad delivered and order ID, then marketers have total confidence and trust in making their TV investment decisions,” Fairchild said.
Another aspect is the ability to see what’s working or not within a day or two of launching campaigns, allowing to optimize and adjust “mid-flight” to put money towards what is resonating and leave the rest.
“When you can adjust a campaign in mid-flight you can radically impact your return on investment,” he explained, compared to a traditional TV ad that put up say $150,000 and not know results until after a 30-day run.
Down the line, as tvScientific starts to learn about specific use cases it will verticalize its product for certain customers. At this point the gaming category is the largest. tvScientific in April unveiled a solution specifically designed for video game publishers and developers.
Fairchild said that will be the first of what will likley be multiple templates to deliver results for certain classes of customers.
As for fresh funding, it will go to scale up sales and customer support, hiring for marketing (Fairchild noted that about 90-95% of customers they talk to don’t know its possible to buy TV the same way as digital and measure with similar precision). Finally, it plans to invest in technology such as data science, product and engineering to complete its goal of building a Facebook-like auto-optimized platform that leverages AI/ML so marketers can set their goals and budget, push go and essentially “set it and forget it.”