We met with Mark Myers who explained how iSpot measures TV ads and helps brands succeed with advertising on TV and streaming.

What does Mark do?

Mark Myers is the Chief Commercial Officer at iSpot.tv, an ad measurement company centered around measuring and selling TV ad analytics. They help their clients by giving them information that they can then use to cultivate a better campaign. It can help companies figure out how to advertise on TV and streaming. It can also give their customers an advantage over their competitors by allowing them to see their analytics and use that information to grow their business to be superior to the competition.

What is interesting about what Mark does?

In my opinion, the most intriguing aspect of the company is the “competitive intelligence” in which iSpot’s clients can access their competitor's data and analytics, in order to gain an almost tactical advantage over the other companies. I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I find it fascinating that iSpot can even measure so much advertising data. This was an almost impossible task to do at any point in history up until the invention of things like the internet, so the fact that we are now living in a time period where we can tell who watches what when, and where is pretty crazy to me.
Secondly, we as a soecitiy can use that information like iSpot provides in order to grow businesses, sell products, and generate profit. This is the first time in history where we are able to do this and it really does open up a whole new world of advertising, especially considering that we can use it to compare to and gain leverage over competitors and just know what people are interested in and advertise towards that.

What do I like about Mark’s message?

Mark's message was to not pay attention to the “buzzwords” and to instead focus more on driving your business to help it reach its full potential. I like how much this message reminds us to really focus on a main goal, instead of getting caught up in the nitty-gritty details and only focusing on one small thing instead of prioritizing company growth. 

TRANSCRIPT:

RIO: So hi. So to start, what is your name? And what do you do?

MARK: Sure. I'm Mark Myers, the Chief Commercial Officer at iSpot.TV, and I run our brand direct partnerships at iSpot. Anytime a brand signs up with iSpot for our services, wants to expand the relationship with us get impact and value from our services and renew their contracts. That's what I'm responsible for.

RIO: All right, and what does your company do? What does iSpot do?

MARK: So iSpot is a TV streaming video measurement and analytics platform. So we partner with brands, agencies, and media companies, to help them understand the performance of TV and streaming video campaigns, driving two main KPIs. One is how those campaigns build the brand’s business, brand effectiveness, and brand equity. And the second is how the campaigns build business outcomes. So a company like Expedia advertises on TV to build the Expedia brand, but also to drive people to Expedia's website to shop and book for, you know, book, travel packages. So we help Expedia, our client, understand both those things, how their brand equity is being built, and how TV and videos drive people to their website to book vacations.

RIO: Correct me if I'm wrong, but is it a way of sort of measuring data and then giving it back to other brands?

MARK: Yeah, so it's performance around that brand's campaign. But a big part of what we do is competitive intelligence. So Expedia can look at what Trivago and verbo and Airbnb are doing on TV, they can look at their creatives, and they can look at the effectiveness of those creatives and driving breakthrough likeability and purchase intent. So what we call kind of qualitative metrics around the campaigns. And then they can even see some performance around attention scores and some benchmarks around conversion rates. So how does Expedia is website conversion rate to the benchmark for online travel agents, for instance, they can see if they're above or below that benchmark, so competitive intelligence and benchmarking are a big part of what we do.

RIO: What's your position again?

MARK: Chief Commercial Officer. So working with our brand customers on sales and customer success and impact and value, but also part of it is devising pricing strategy. So how much should we charge for our services? How should we sell our services? Like, what's our go-to market motion? How should we work with the marketing team to generate demand? How does PR and marketing drive demand for more customers to become customers of ours, right, more brands to sign up? And really just how we sort of formulate the, what we call pricing and packaging of the services, what price? And then how do we package our products, we've got over a dozen products now. It's not just one product to sell to everybody. So what package of products makes the most sense for any particular brand? And then how do we go to market with those products?

RIO: Alright, that's really cool. And just as sort of starting to exit, what's like a couple word summary of what your job is just like two or three words? 

MARK: Oh, total brand domination. Very easy. Every brand on TV, or streaming video needs iSpot 60% of the market has realized that and they license our services. So we have the majority of brands advertising on TV, but we want them to buy more from us. They don't buy all of our products, all of them. And we of course have 40% of the market to go. So every brand on TV needs iSpot. And my job is to help them realize that.  

RIO: All right, yeah. That's very cool. And just as a final question, do you have any messages to marketers out there? 

MARK: Yeah. So marketers, you know, there's a lot of buzzwords "AI" is kind of buzzing around Cannes and it was at CES a couple of months ago. I feel like well, I'll take a page from my interview with VP of consumer marketing from Google that I did on Monday. And she said, Listen, you can't use both words buzzwords until you actually have done the job, like do the job and understand what's driving your business forward. And then there's gonna be a buzzword that goes along with that, but do the job first drive your business. So for a head of marketing, right, a chief marketing officer or someone on their team, do the foundational things that drive your business, and let the buzzwords take care of themselves. Don’t drive with buzzwords because that's fluff and doesn't really get you anywhere that's my words of advice from somebody who sells measurement analytics.