San Francisco based adRise (which has raised a seed round of money) has launched “the first Ad platform for connected TVs,” the company says. The platform will give publishers a chance to “earn TV-like ad revenue, via a real-time bidding exchange.” Founder and CEO Farhad Massoudi explained his company’s new push to take on the traditional TV advertising model.
Lost Remote: How did you come up with the ad platform? What were you doing before?
Farhad Massoudi: I was head of product and engineering at SocialMedia.com (acquired by LivingSocial) which was the largest social ad network (on Facebook, MySpace, etc apps). I learned two big lessons at SocialMedia.com: 1) New platforms provide a great opportunity to innovate and grow as we saw this on social and mobile and 2) The best advertising medium for brands is still TV and that’s why only less than 10% of brand money is spent online. The reason: TV commercials are far more engaging banner ads. Those lessons lead to build adRise which combines the best of the both worlds: a living-room, lean-back TV advertising experience combined with ability to do targeting, interactivity, feedback, and analytics. We believe this is the holy grail of advertising.
LR: Who are your clients, and what are you providing for them?
FM: While I can’t share the name of our clients, I can share that they range from TV game applications to VOD apps such as music videos, movies and shows.
LR: What brands are you working with?
FM: We’re currently working with some of the largest video ad networks such as BrightRoll, TremorVideo, and TubeMogul. They are participating in our RTB (=real time bidding) ad exchange.
LR: What devices will your ads run on? How does the technology work?
FM: We either support or will soon support all the major platforms in these categories: 1) Set top boxes such as Roku, Boxee, WDTV, etc. 2) TV sets and Blu Ray players such as Samsung, LG, Yahoo connected TVs and Google TV and 3) game consoles such as XBox 360 and PS3. From a technology perspective, we provide ad SDKs across all these platforms with interactivity support, transcode the ad videos to the right format for each platform, and provide real time analytics and reports.