How SpringServe Helped Bring Programmatic Buying To CTV

The latest from our Thought Leaders Circle series features Springserve Founder and CEO Joseph Hirsch talking about the problems he was trying to solve when he started the company, which is now a part of Magnite.

JOSEPH HIRSCH: When SpringServe launched. the competitive landscape for video advertisers was a little different, and programmatic in video was a more new and nascent form.

The lead in the space at the time was kind of divided three ways between Live Rail, now owned by Meta, Google's product, Google Ad Manager, and the Freewheel product owned by Comcast.

All of these products were very enterprise driven and weren’t really built for a smaller, digital first broadcaster or publisher, and they thought about TV in the way that people thought about TV ten years ago.

They thought about MVPDs as the primary mechanism—a bundled package of channels that you paid for.

And at this point in time, if you look at the landscape, the products that were around— things like Sling and Hulu, who were kind of the first movers to consolidate channels onto a single subscription service. So their needs were different, before things like Free Ad Supported TV, or FASTs came to the market.

We wanted to build a product that those people—the upcoming generation of connected TV publishers—could use without such a high barrier to entry.

Ultimately, these publishers decided that they were a programmatic-first set of people. They didn't spend the resources on developing a direct sales team. They wanted a turnkey monetization solution and programmatic was more of an afterthought inside of that first group of CTV ad serving partners.

So our position was we wanted to build a programmatic-first CTV ad serving platform for the next generation of publishers.