So, you measured incrementality. Great. Now, what? You know what [music] worked? What didn't? Maybe even what was cannibalizing your organic. But turning that insight into actual decisions, that's where most marketers get stuck. Incremental doesn't just measure incrementality. It helps you operationalize it. Shift budgets, [music] pause wasteful campaigns, double down where it actually matters. No tracking, no experiments, just always on automated truth. So if [music] you're done measuring for the sake of measuring and ready to act, visit incremental. That's incr.com. Because knowing is only half the battle. The problem is that the distinction needs to be drawn between the competence of the economists and the correctness of their analysis.
Hello and welcome to the mobile dev memo podcast. I'm your host Eric Seufort and I'm joined today by Jonathan Moffy. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.
Hey, Eric. Nice to be here.
Nice to have you here. Thank you for joining me on January 2nd, starting the new year off vigorously with the podcast appearance. I appreciate that.
Yeah, I doubled my normal dose of creatine to get ready for this one after the long break. And knowing this podcast gets pretty wonky, I really had to make sure my brain was as sharp as it can be.
Well, good on you. I'm probably running at about 50% capacity today after the holiday, but that's fine. So, we're going to talk all about CTV today, which I think is kind of an evergreen topic, but certainly captures a lot of attention at the moment. CTV is a really fascinating space, and I think it's probably one of the areas that performance marketers are most focused on just given the kind of fluid dynamics of that category. But before we start talking about CTV, can you please introduce yourself?
I just wanted to touch really quickly on that. It's great that we're even saying that in 2026. I can remember just like five years ago when I launched maybe five to seven years ago now I launched at the first fast channel ever before it even had a name and we wouldn't have
said performance marketers were eyeing CTV as a top priority going into the new year. It was all oh TV just does brand awareness. So it's really awesome that this is now a major conversation in the e-commerce and performance space. So yeah intro and background. So I was kind of in CTV and adtech for over 12 years at big companies like Yahoo etc. And then about five years ago I jumped into the startup space. I was head of product at Whirl. We were acquired by Apploven and I actually oversaw the biggest synergy between the two companies which is taking Apploven's mobile performance demand and extending it to CTV. Whirl was basically turned into the CTV SSP for those campaigns. And then I was actually ousted along with the rest of the leadership post acquisition. And that kind of made me lose my mind. I had equity at like $23 a share. It's now, I don't know, 690 to 750, something
insane. I could have retired, but here we are. Instead, I went crazy, started my own company, uh, streamer.ai, and then in two years, we sold that to Magnite. And now I'm leading Agentic product at Magnite. I don't want to maybe bring up a touchy subject, but you had equity in Apploving it at $23 a share.
Correct. I love No, it's the first stock ticker on my Yahoo Finance app. I look at it every day for motivation. It's amazing.
And again, like, let me know if this is just a little raw, but And that that was unvested. And when you
Unvested. Yeah. Yeah. One month. One month before. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good story.
Well, sorry to hear that.
Hey, I sold streamer.ai to Magnite and here we are. And it was honestly much more fun building a company from scratch in the genai space. I actually enjoyed the apploven folks. Had nothing to do with app loving. There was, you know, I was part of whirl and the whole leadership team left at one point. So it's just part of business and you just have to either take it on the chin and
cry about it or you take it on the chin and you get after it. And I have millions of chips on my shoulders quite literally.
Well, there you go. It motivated you to start a new business and to exit it. So congratulations. You harnessed that energy into something very positive. Uh if it makes you feel better, Apple's down 7% right now.
Oh yeah.
Today 7%
probably 6 something
680. Okay. Well, that was a detour, but yeah. So it's great to have you on the podcast and I think there's like a couple of really interesting threads with CTV at the moment. The first is adoption by performance marketers. We'll get to that, but that is like a very real phenomenon. And I think the second though is kind of consistent with the general trend in marketing at the moment which is the application of Gen AI. Talk to me I want to maybe we'll start there on the Gen AI angle. So how is Gen AI currently being used for ad production for CTV channels and how does that compare to social?
Yeah, so it's used in you know different ways by different core personas. So I
would say you know creative agencies and brands are incorporating it in their flow when they're using like V3 to prompt image to video and then pull that into like Adobe Premiere Pro. So more efficiencies making it much more cost effective. Uh and then you have tools like ours but also Meta and social really pioneered this and this is what inspired streamer.ai is building the Genai tools into the adte stack. So you can do what I really believe you need to do, which is drive return on ad spend for advertisers. So like Gen AI alone isn't enough. So we always believed you had to combine Genai creative plus AI powered media buying to drive that return on ad spend.
So like kind of consider that to within the you know within the context of the the format, right? So, social, I don't know if you remember the the kind of scandal, mini scandal from, I don't know, a couple weeks ago, a true classic
t-shirt ad on Facebook and they, you know, Facebook had created the variant with the elderly woman wearing like a cardigan and, you know, True Classic is a men's t-shirt brand. So, I mean, I think, you know, that that did erupt in kind of like a minor scandal, but I think at the end of the day, people don't really care about that as much. I think it's first of all, we don't know how well that did. I mean, I imagine that ad maybe outperformed and that's why Meta made it and that's why Meta, you know, gave a delivery, but I imagine like the the risk there with CTV is like a little bit greater because it's a different format. It's generally seen as like higher fidelity. You know, obviously there's there's we've been talking about the the incursion of performance dollars to CTV, but still a lot of it's probably more brand anchor. What are the sensitivities there? I mean, is it is it, you know, just kind of throw everything at the wall and see what sticks or, you know, and obviously that the feedback loop's probably a little bit longer with CTV or it's a little bit muddier. Just how do you think about that from the actual like fidelity and faithfulness to the sort of like brand guidelines standpoint?
Yeah, of course we want to keep quality
as a north star, but the problem with TV is historically only 500 advertisers dominated TV ad spend and you have millions, I think 10 million plus meta alone in search and social. So TV has this frequency problem and the repetition of seeing the same ad over and over again. You know that's happened to you during the break. If you're watching Disney Plus and you see the same ad every single time, that's not going to give you brand affinity. It's going to piss you off about that brand. So seeing a diversity of new advertisers getting SMBs into the space, performance advertisers into the space is just a really good thing for the ecosystem in general. And of course, we want to keep the quality bar high, but one of our most successful products was taking a social ad. You just take your Instagram reels. We have an Instagram API integration and turn that quickly into a CTV commercial. Because for e-commerce advertisers, Instagram is their storefront. So, they want to take an ad
that's already performed and sold merchandise on Instagram, turn that into a CTV commercial, and run that along with a few other variants. I think more is definitely better.
That's interesting. So, I imagine the Gen AI component of that is not necessarily creating this entirely new creative concept. It's really just adapting it, right? I mean, it's just maybe some background fill because you have to adjust the sizing and the resolution and stuff like that. But, but that's nonetheless, I mean, you classify that as Gen AI, right? Is that is that what you think of as a Genai product? Yeah, that one's a gen product because basically we'll allow you to automatically pull in one of your performing Instagram reels and then on the right side of the ad, I'm visualizing the ad right now. We have integration with your Shopify product skew and it'll carousel through your products and you can adapt those and make changes and that's where you could even generate one of those images with like a nano banana integration, etc.
I see. Well, that's that's interesting. But talk to me about the the kind of quality bar. Is there a higher quality bar? I mean, because Instagram's a little different because I do think just
given the visual nature of the medium and that a lot of it now is video anyway. I mean, I think people probably view the quality necessity as being near TV, right, in terms of, you know, the just the perceived fidelity of it and a lot of times it's like 3D live footage. But is there a higher bar on CTV or or is that just a historical artifact that is not going to apply going forward that people actually would expect CTV to adapt to what they're used to in social like? So actually they kind of converge around what the sort of social ads look like just given how prevalent social is but also the fact that video is kind of the dominant medium anyway on social is it or or is it really like this has to hue to like historical TV standards so it is all expected to be like live real 3D footage.
Yeah it really depends who you ask again. So our main goal with streamer was to get millions of new SMVS into the space, first-time TV buyers. And for them, they were just so happy to save on the high cost of creative and reduce the
complexity. So their bar was, "Wow, I just have a TV commercial now." And so they're happy to run that. And then obviously old co creative agencies and brands have a higher bar for their brand and rightfully so. And they're not using the more automated tools to generate the ad. They're using maybe a mix of VO3. They're using Chat GBT for script writing, 11 Labs for voice over, but then pulling it into Adobe Premiere Pro and doing a bunch of After Effects work on it. And they're just making a more cost-effective, faster, really great still cinematic TV commercial. So, it just depends kind of what persona is using the AI. Well, from a performance perspective, do you see certain approaches working better for certain categories like DTOC? They tend to work better on CTV if they're using more like social style ads or or is is it pretty universal? Just doesn't matter or just random. So, this is the really cool thing and it's really intuitive once you say it out loud. So, one of our agency
customers is Search Kings. They're a performance agency that historically worked only on search and they're Google's premier search agency in Canada. And we actually worked with them to launch a completely new business unit, Search Kings TV, because they were taking search advertisers like HVAC and law firms and bringing them to CTV for the first time. And for those advertisers, it has to perform. They're not going to just do CTV just to do it. They are search advertisers. So the reason it performs is three things. It's 90% cheaper to generate the ad. You can create multiple variants and target them. We had like I don't know 150 HVAC commercials in August alone and like Arizona and we were targeting different locations with personalized ads. And basically by making it 90% cheaper by really personalizing and being able to target specific audiences you can make it perform. So it just being more cost
effective made the AI more performant because you could put that 90% budget saving towards the media spend.
Yeah, that's I mean you know I wrote this podcast a while back called commerce at the limit and I was kind of exploring this idea that you know the reality of the generative AI tools for advertising. I mean you could focus on the creative piece and that's important brings cost down but I think and then there's the other piece which is the optimization of campaigns right which just makes things more efficient but I my sense is like the real unlock here is giving people capabilities they just wouldn't otherwise have right and that part of that is on the creative piece but like if you think about an HVAC company or a plumbing company like a local advertiser I mean their audience is local right so TV was always out of reach Not just from an efficiency standpoint, a because of the cost of producing the creative, which is expensive. You're talking about like actual live footage, but but b because it's so unargeted. I mean, in order for
TV to work, a lot of times you have to be going very broad, high repetition, and you know, nationwide in a lot of cases. So, there's just the very biggest brands. Like, to your point, 500 companies dominated TV because they had to be kind of nationwide brands. You couldn't go very local. You couldn't do any sort of behavioral targeting. But now, you can. And so that is the a lot of the value of these Genai products from both the efficiency and but also the the output standpoint is it's onboarding people who are spending their first ever dollar on digital ads, right? And whether that's digital CTV or social, it's the same. And so on boarding these new advertisers, you're bringing that economy closer to the the frontier than it otherwise would be with these companies that are underetized because they're not bidding for a lot of this inventory that is just very local, right? And and only, you know, needs those local services to a greater extent or maybe to the same extent that they need DDC stuff, right? And so that's where the real value is like all this dormant inventory is all of a sudden targetable. And I think, you know, with
CTV, it's, you know, you bring this the JAI component into it, it's like, well, you're enabling people to advertise in that space. It just never, it was utterly off the table. I mean, just out utterly out of reach from a creative perspective, a but also just from there's no ability to target and I have no idea, you know, if I'm just targeting, you know, even if I localize it to Phoenix, to your point about like HVAC, it's you're going to be wasting so many impressions because you need some sense of who are the right people to be targeting with an HVAC ad.
Yeah. And the beauty is, so we had this advertiser, Trident Coffee, and this happened all the time. The beauty is a local business really wants to see themselves on TV on the biggest screen in the living room. It's like the coolest thing ever. They want to see their brand on TV. So, the founder, Eric, this is last March Madness, was like, "I want to run our commercial during March Madness." And I'm like, "Cool. you're going to get like six impressions and it's going to spend your whole like $750 budget that you want to spend. So those two things don't make
sense. But he absolutely wanted to do it. So we ran it. Obviously wasn't effective except for he was able to have bragging rights with his friends and family and local community in San Diego. However, to get him to renew and to keep going, they started using the IP conversion pixel. They put it on their website. They had a neutropic like mushroom coffee packets that they wanted to sell on the website versus the cold brew and the retail locations and you could see here's how many people saw my ad on Roku or on Samsung and then took an action actually made a purchase on their website and that's what got them to renew. So you can get hundreds of thousands, millions of first-time TV buyers into TV because it's really cool, but you're not going to renew them unless you drive results. And that's really where we're focusing with Magnite and bringing kind of performance into the ecosystem even with the mobile side that we could talk more about.
Happy to shift focus there. I mean I certainly the kind of mobile advertisers
that I have any visibility into are all exploring CTV. I mean there's there's not to to the one I mean they're all excited about the prospects of this just different reach. But I I think you know what's under discussed with CTV is the second screen aspect which is just really powerful. That's a harder orchestration problem because being able to reach someone on two devices within some amount of time is a task. But if you can do that well it's very very effective. Maybe talk to me about like success you've had with mobile advertising how they view this and how they think about measurement because there is a measurement challenge. I mean this is incremental capabilities that you have to introduce to your apparatus to be able to do this properly but once you do I mean it does open up a whole universe of inventory. So talk to me about the approaches that you're seeing with appbased advertisers with CTV.
I promise I won't pump the bags too much but this is right in the wheelhouse. One of the coolest partnerships we did right when we joined Magnite was with a company called Vault. So Vault is a Door
Dash subsidiary. They like I think four billion in revenue a year. Don't quote me, I just quoted myself, but they're a retail media network that work with the biggest brands you could imagine. And they wanted to take kind of their mobile aggregated performance advertiser ecosystem and extend it to CTV for the first time. So we had to do an integration with their MMP, mobile measurement partner apps flyer. I did a lot of this work when I was briefly part of app 111. We had to do integrations with the MMPs and like the OEMs like LG, Samsung, etc. So, apps flyier, adjust, branch.io. Obviously, your audience is super familiar with this, but it's new to CTV. So, we were integrating with Apps Flyier and we wanted to show Volt not only for these kind of large I almost said the name, but we still have to get the case study approved. We had a massive fast food chain. I'll say that we ran a multinational campaign in Finland, Germany, Israel. We generated
commercials in all those different languages for this massive fast food chain. We generated an ad that was about 50% off their flagship product and we targeted that to deal seekers and used live ramp audience segments to hit those dealseker audiences. And then we had they had a vegan burger. Okay, I didn't give it away. It's a burger company. a vegan mozzarella burger and they wanted to target vegans and vegetarians with that specific commercial. And so we were able to do that. So by Genai being able to generate an ad in multiple languages, target different audience segments with CTV, you can even work with really big brands with Genai. And then where AppFire comes in is we can show you here's how many people saw that fast food burger ad on Roku, Samsung, etc. and either drove app installs of vault or even deep link purchases of the
burger within the app. And that's the holy grail if we can actually drive purchases of the app. People expect a flawless experience from the moment they click a promo link in a text, tap a paid ad for a new pair of sneakers, [music] or scan a QR code on a fast food cup. Marketers, meanwhile, want a clear view of customer behavior [music] and how campaigns are performing across every channel without spending hours digging through data. That's where Branch comes in. Branch is your AI powered MMP connecting every paid, owned, and organic touch point so growth [music] teams can see exactly where to put their dollars to bring users in the door and keep them coming back. Find out what over a 100,000 brands know. [music] Head to branch.io to get started. That's branch.io. IO.
What are those integrations like though? Is that I mean that's I guess fairly straightforward if you're working directly with an MMP, right?
Exactly. Yeah. The biggest thing is you need the blessing of Bolt in this
instance to say, "Hey, Appsfly, work with Magnite on this." So, we're really happy to partner with them and be a part of Appsfly's partner ecosystem.
What's the lift? If it was just an app developer, is that just a button you click in MMP or is there more to it? Yeah, it's just the button in the MMP.
Okay. All right. Well, then maybe there's less of a measurement upgrade than I thought. I mean, I guess the issue is, you know, you'd want to think about the kind of halo effect, maybe the interaction effects, too. I mean, the way that like I've seen companies approach this is like they're running the CTV ad and then they're working to maybe do remarketing or retargeting, but the reality is I think they just want the click on the phone is always going to carry less friction. And so what they want to do is like reach the person on the phone after the TV ad is shown. And then that tends to work pretty well because it's just easier to get the install and shift into the onboarding. So if you if you think about measurement from that perspective, it's like I don't necessarily need the direct install from the TV ad. I need that to improve the performance of the subsequent ads that I
show wherever else. And that still can be very effective, but measuring that is a little bit more of a challenge.
Yeah, 100%. The omni channel campaign is definitely the most effective in that case. Talk to me about integration with the creative production tools. How well integrated with the specific CTV platforms do you expect the Genai creative production tools to become? Will these be channel specific production tools or do you see the sort of operating dynamic being more of we're going to borrow the creative that we've made elsewhere or we're going to take bits and pieces of it and you know the channel maybe just combines it or or rescales it or fills in the background or whatever else. Again, you could totally repurpose ads that performed well on social and just kind of generate a CTV version, but the biggest thing and Meta is obviously leading here with Advantage Plus in social and it's the whole thesis of streamer is you have to tightly integrate the Genai creative tools and the media buying to actually drive the return on ad spend. So that's
where you can generate multiple versions of the ad and then you can target specific audiences and actually optimize when you see all right one line item is actually driving more site visits or app installs than the other one let's create more variance or shift the budget over to that best performing line item. You don't have that data if you're just a creative production tool. So you absolutely have to combine it all. And I think CTV was a bit slower than social, but that's kind of our whole main mission is to really tightly integrate our tech that broadcasters can use, retail media networks like Bolt, agency partners, we have OEMs, and it's a really exciting time to really tightly integrate these ecosystems.
So then that's just a function of again just having that integration with the whatever the measurement tool is to optimize against the downstream outcome, right? So if it's purchase or whatever it is a registration that's just what
you're receiving from them is that the kind of primary input I guess.
Yeah for us having it at the ad server level magnites kind of has the CTV ad server spring serve which is the best CTV ad server and having that tight integration where you could see all of the kind of end KPIs and optimize against them is really the way to drive performance. Mobile game developers no longer need to pay up to 30% in [music] major app store fees. With Exolo Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics. Start [music] today at exola.com. That's xsol.com. Or use the link in the episode show notes. Are there specific aspects of CTV that lend itself to Genai Creative? Something about like you you mentioned the carousel product ads, but like dynamic product placements in the content
itself, not just pure play ads. That might be kind of like a future prospect. I don't know that we're talking about that right now, but where do you see that going? Because I feel like, you know, there's no possibility of doing that in social, like integrating into the content. That just wouldn't make sense. But like CTV, it's it's possible that the person in the show is drinking Coke instead of Pepsi or, you know, they're wearing a we already use the True Classic brand, so they're wearing a True Classic T-shirt instead of some other generic t-shirt. What do you see for the prospects of that? Because it feels like you've got kind of a more open-ended canvas there than you do in in a sort of feed environment.
Yeah, 100%. You know, branded placement within content is totally a holy grail play. The big thing is you would need the brand or the hold code that represents the brand or the agency to like sign off on hey let's make realtime decisions in Stranger Things to put a Pepsi in the hand of the hero in this instance and I'm willing to bid up and pay for that moment because it's going to be great for my brand. So there's
some plumbing on both the creative and the media side to do that live. There's some like VOD work being done. But to go back to pumping our bags a bit, the most surprising thing when joining Magnite is that we launched smart home screen ads, Genai powered and pause ads, which are both really good omni channel like CTV omni channel ad formats that actually lend themselves more towards performance because it's on the screen longer. It's on the home screen when it comes to the home screen tile ads. They're huge. They look more like your traditional display units, but they're really nice large screen ads that are on the main screen in the household for quite a bit. And then you have pause ads where you can actually pause it. You have time to scan a QR code and actually take an action. So, we think those are really great opportunities for Gen AI going into 2026. uh while these kind of like more
nent use cases of genai product placement come about. Another really interesting place is live. So live is like the holy grail of why TV is still so important. This is going to be a crazy year for live with Olympics and the Super Bowl obviously is always a big event and you can do things like you can do a squeezeback and it'll go picture and picture with the live event and then you could generate a contextually relevant ad based on what just happened in the live event which is a great moment for a brand.
World Cup this year too should be a big moment.
Yeah, it's a huge huge year. Let me go back to the product placement thing because I think that kind of connects to live, but maybe there's just even more hurdles to clear. So, going back to like this product placement notion in real time, generating some kind of creative or asset that gets overlaid to the the content that the person's watching to promote a product, right? Like, is that realistic? Is that premise realistic? Or do you think there's just way there's
just way too many issues to get through that you're probably not going to end up there? Technically, especially with like the large home screen ad formats or like an overlay, it's technically very possible from a Gen AI perspective pass like a context ID which exists today in the ecosystem and we'll generate a contextually relevant creative to return in that moment. The big thing again is about media buying and it's not even that's also technically possible to execute that buy in real time and there's cool things like adcp going on where we're having agents do autonomous buying. It's more about did the brand or did the hold co or agency actually like is there an always on budget to take advantage of those moments when hey this would be a really great opportunity. I always go back, I don't know why, to this example. You're watching Game of Thrones and the red wedding just happens. You could totally pass a contextual ID. We could generate a
contextually relevant ad for the knot and be like, "Hey, if you don't want this to happen at your wedding, book with the knot, but the knot would need to approve like, you know, that budget to run in that exact moment to take advantage." And that I think is still a bit away. It's really about getting the buy side and demand comfortable with taking advantage of those real-time moments,
right? But you can imagine it's like the not it's this is an established company. I don't know how much they spend on advertising. I don't know how big of a company it is, but like let's say that it's a big company and they have kind of like well- definfined brand guidelines and uh this is probably not something that we're ever going to pursue. But there's a divorce lawyer in, you know, Worcester, Massachusetts, who has no such qualms, and he's certainly willing to throw 500 bucks a month to the red wedding scene. It's like avoid getting murdered, have a prenup in place or some, you know, whatever. And, you know, just talking about the true SMB who is just way less sensitive to brand guidelines and who's probably willing
for there to be some messiness or, you know, kind of some sharp edges in his ad placement. Is is that like because again you the bigger the brand like the Cokes, the Pepsis, we're never going to give you real-time control over rendering assets and placing them into any possible, you know, context that we can't possibly prevet. But the divorce attorney who's got a parallegal and a, you know, works out of a wei work, he doesn't care and he's willing to leave a $500,000 a month always on budget. Is that the kind of entry point to this or what do you think? Or or is this does this need to be so controlled?
No, 100%. And those are the most fun brands to get into the ecosystem because of the crazy interesting things they're willing to take risks on in CTV. And then same with e-commerce. So you know this with mobile and performance. These brands are also willing to take pretty daring creative risks when it comes to promoting their brands. We've seen a lot of the companies like Kelshi like really lean into AI and have some over-the-top
crazy ads. So I think yeah 100% those are the brands that are going to take the most risks and right now with AI taking the most risks I think is a really good thing and you're going to see a lot of results.
Yeah. I I don't know if I'd want to see call she's uh Facebook ads library it might be kind of depressing.
Yeah. [laughter]
Okay. What do you see as the most substantive barriers to entry for CTV for advertisers? So we talked about geni and that kind of reduces the hurdle to just getting the creative assets made. But what prevents advertisers from running CTV campaigns beyond just producing the creative?
Yeah. Well, going back the first-time TV buyers, it was totally just about the high cost of, you know, 10,000 plus. Like that's the cheapest for the creative. So, that's the biggest unlock for firsttime new SMB TV buyers. And then beyond that, for both them to renew and then obviously for agencies and brands, you have to show results. They're not going to renew those campaigns and budgets in CTV if they
don't drive results. Social and search have trained them that you can get real return on ad spend. Maybe it caps off at a moment and that's why you're trying CTV, but you have to show the results and that's where all the effort and all of the plumbing is being laid in CTV in 2026 and obviously beyond is really showing measurable return on ad spend or not going to get the millions of brands from search and social into the space.
Well, but so when you say showing is it how much can you do? I mean a lot of that is kind of the responsibility or the onus of that is mostly on the advertiser themselves, right? I mean there's only so much I mean I guess you know doing things like a conversions API that obviously enables that but like what other sort of tools do you have in that tool belt to help advertisers recognize their performance versus you know just communicating that to them? Well, definitely the different formats. So, trying home screen, trying pause beyond the just midroll formats. An overall omni channel campaign as you
said, I think omni channel has to be the default. Running a CTV combined with display and mobile inapp as well. And then really there still needs to be some interesting innovation in the measurement space where we can show whether it's you know 30-day attribution windows that this is adding incremental value. And I think incremental is actually a really good partner in the space that's working with ecom brands to try CTV. It's really just showing the value of the biggest screen in the house.
You have to create the formats that are the most conducive to conversion. So that's the responsibility of the platform is create formats that lead to conversions that lend themselves to conversions. You have to facilitate measurement by doing things like you know what else I mean are there misconceptions? Are there preconceived notions that need to be dispelled? How much of this is just the narrative that hey actually CTV can work for you and it can benefit your other channels with this sort of halo effect. What else is involved in kind of onboarding that
first time CTV advertiser?
Yeah. And then it's just showing them that you actually can reach pretty granular audiences with the targeting. And then the coolest thing that we do in CTV is personalize a commercial per target audience. So the whole idea of creating one TV commercial for 10 plus target audiences is insane. You want to personalize commercial for each target audience. So you can hit if you have Spanish speakers that you want to hit, you should translate the ad in Spanish and hit that zip code where that Spanish population that's in HVAC looking to buy HVAC services. That's the really main goal is to get as granular as possible hitting the right audience. Got it. So like when you I don't know, let's say you're talking to a prospective customer and they've got reservations about CTV, like what are the most pervasive misconceptions that people have about it? the things that you have to dispel, things that are just they're incorrect beliefs that are, you know, provably false, but this advertiser has because they had a bad experience five years ago or they've never tried it and they've got reservations because they're so, you
know, sort of anchored to social. What are the things that you have to disabuse advertisers of?
Well, AI did the biggest thing, which was the high cost of creative that just kept people not even considering it. And now you can get a CTV commercial for free in some cases or for very cheap you can get a cinematic commercial leveraging V3. If you've seen VO3.1 it's amazing. So that's the number one barrier. And then the lack of granular targeting. They think that it's just kind of like big brand awareness. But you can get super granular down to the zip code down to a specific audience segment. So that's another thing is you can granularly target audiences and then that there is real tools to show you return on ad spend metrics. You can add a IP conversion pixel to your website. You can partner with apps flyier or what have you to have the SDK in your app and show app installs deep link purchases. So a lot of the measurement pieces are there that are there in search and
social.
Jonathan this was fantastic. How can people learn more about what you're doing at Magnite? How can they follow up with you?
Yeah, just go to streamer.ai. We're launching a new version of our platform at CES that's better than ever, leveraging the greatest in Gen AI. So excited to unveil that next week and hit 2026 with the ground running.
I appreciate you joining me on the 2nd of January. This was a fantastic conversation and I wish you a healthy and productive 2026. Likewise. [music]
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