Apple, at least, is betting on people spending time watching things on big screens in their living rooms. This year, Apple TV 4 is its most ambitious update yet. Why hasn't the adtech sector made the same bet?
Mobile adtech has undergone a kind of Cambrian explosion. The venture dollars are trying to keep up with an equivalent explosion in mobile users. But the bulk of the ad-buy dollars are still in TV. Why hasn't the technology followed the money?
An ad-dollar shift to mobile is expected as marketers follow user activity and the cutting edge of adtech. Former Compete CMO Stephen DiMarco thinks the cutting edge of technology will also start to move in another direction.
DiMarco, now president of digital at the market research firm Millward-Brown, is betting the living-room-screen ad market is primed for adtech innovation. "One of the big missing gaps has been understanding the TV component," he said.
Watching a video on your personal mobile device, you might see a personalized ad. Watching it on the living room screen, that's less likely. "Mobile has shot past that because it is easier to do, whether it’s mobile display or mobile video," DiMarco said.
Cable industry fragmentation is part of the picture. That's changing with consolidation, DiMarco said. He predicts new startups and new technology focused on serving smarter ads in the TV market. One of the companies he's been watching is a startup out of MIT called TVision Insights.
TVision has a Nielsen-like system that uses machine vision to track not only what's on the screen, but who's in the room and whether they're paying attention. They're out raising a seed round of $1 million to $2 million, with $380,000 already in through a BOSS Syndicate. (We told you about that in the Beat last month.) Here's their video, explaining how it works:
Dan Schiffman joined co-founders Yan Liu and Raymond Fu from Amazon, where he'd worked on the company's A9 adtech subsidiary.
"A lot of what I did there ended up being very transferrable to the work we do in TVision," he said. At A9, they were obsessed with inserting e-commerce into the physical world–specifically, "being able to see something and have your phone recognize it and buy it on the spot," Schiffman said. "They're always trying to decrease the number of steps in the conversion funnel."
Schiffman and Fu met in Ramesh Raskar's lab at MIT, working on computer vision and photography projects. What they learned there helped them understand the limitations of the technology they'd be working with at TVision, he said.
It turns out, those limitations aren't huge. TVision says it can recognize faces and it knows when your spouse looks away from the TV and starts playing with his phone. Sounds creepy, but Schiffman said TVision has signed up survey participants using the kind of compensation model Nielsen uses.
DiMarco doesn't think it's creepy. He asked TVision to let him dive into his own household's data on TV watching activity.
"You think about what’s going on with Apple Watches and FitBit," he said. "It’s the same exact thing as it relates to consumption of content."
So, "quantified self" extends to media consumption?
"I think it’s where entertainment consumption fits into your broader life," he said. "How much time are you spending with these devices? How does that relate to the other people in your life? We spend a lot of time with these devices. Are we spending it in a good way, or in a bad way?"
For advertisers, the benefits are obvious. "From our perspective, the suppliers on our side, the advertisers, the network, the agencies working on our behalf just don't have that data that fills the gap," Schiffman said. "They know what the price is, but they don't know whether people are in the room watching."
