tvScientific and the Future of Advertising in Streaming TV
By Jeff Crowe & Paul Kigawa
Today, we’re excited to announce that Norwest is leading tvScientific’s Series A raise of $20M, with participation from NBCU and Hearst Ventures. We are thrilled to join forces with tvScientific co-founders Jason Fairchild and David Koye as they spearhead the frontier of CTV advertising. Here’s why.
Ask any DTC brand executive what keeps them up at night, and you’ll hear a common refrain: customer acquisition costs (CAC) keep rising and rising. According to a study by the martech firm Iterable, 65% of marketers have pointed to increased customer acquisition costs as one of their top priorities. Privacy-focused regulation (e.g., CCPA, GDPR) has curtailed marketers’ ability to leverage consumer data in identifying and targeting potential new customers. Add that to Apple’s privacy updates in iOS 14.5, and marketers — accustomed to the old acquisition stalwarts of display advertising, Facebook, and Instagram — are left with skyrocketing cost per acquisition.
With the days of plug-and-play Facebook advertising (seemingly) behind them, a new medium for marketers has emerged: streaming TV. The massive shift in viewership from linear to streaming TV has brought 128M US viewers (and counting) to the world of connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) streaming content. With the privacy changes driving up CAC, streaming TV provides a newly accessible medium for ad spend. Whereas linear TV has been prohibitively expensive for smaller advertisers, streaming offers a more affordable and efficient entry point for performance marketers. The result is a deluge of ad spend in streaming. According to eMarketer, the US market for CTV ad spending reached $14B in 2021, up 60 percent from the $9B spent in 2020 and charging towards the $30B expected in 2024.
No strangers to the world of adtech, Jason Fairchild (co-founder and former CRO of OpenX) and David Koye (former Chief Digital Officer of SummitMedia) launched tvScientific in 2021 to capture this influx of ad dollars. With tvScientific, they have built a self-serve (or managed) performance platform for advertisers to acquire customers via CTV.
While a number of managed offerings exist for CTV advertisers, tvScientific has charted a new course through the space with its self-serve platform — allowing performance marketers to buy, measure, and optimize CTV ad spend with a “hands-on-the-keyboard” experience just like the ones they’ve used for digital advertising. Through the platform, users can specify target profiles, optimize against certain metrics (e.g., return on advertising spend), gauge incrementality against control groups, and output reports or raw data for internal analysis — leveraging proprietary access to publisher inventory.
Given the surge in demand for this kind of service, Jason, David, and the tvScientific team have opened access to CTV advertising for 70+ performance marketing partners, including AppLovin, Wildlife Studios, Nurx, eSalon, Avocado, Lottery Now, Omaze, and Hawthorne. Moreover, in the short time since launching, the tvScientific team has cleared eight figures of annualized ad spend, at a quarter-over-quarter growth rate north of 100 percent.
As we canvassed the startup ecosystem within CTV, we spent a lot of time with Jason, David, and the tvScientific team. We believe they are uniquely equipped to tackle this market head-on, and we’re excited to lead tvScientific’s Series A raise of $20M, with participation from NBCU and Hearst Ventures. We are thrilled to be joining forces with Jason and David as they realize the future of advertising through streaming TV.
