Streamlining Contextual Targeting: Richie Hyden Explains How IRIS TV's CTV Deal Library Is Changing The Game

“There are plenty of ways for buyers to transact off age and gender data, as well as ways to transact off of audience data,” explains Richie Hyden, Co-Founder, President and COO of IRIS TV. “What we wanted to do is give them the same seamless way to transact off of contextual data.” Hyden recently sat down with TVREV’s Alan Wolk to discuss IRIS TV’s new contextual CTV deal library.

ALAN WOLK (AW):  What was the impetus for this new product and why are you guys so hot on it?

RICHIE HYDEN (RH): IRIS TV launched recently in what we call a contextual CTV deal library. Basically it is a curation of programmatic deal IDs that are based on the topic of the content that a consumer or an audience is watching. One of the core aspects of our content data platform is the ability to analyze and scan the actual content that we get from publishers. So our content data platform functions as all three legs of the stool. 

First, we work with publishers, so content owners that provide their content files to us through integrations that we manage with content management systems. The second are data companies, the contextual brand safety and brand suitability partners that are then able to access those video URLs, and those HLS streams, through our system and actually watch the content. And what they're able to do using video recognition technology is classify that content into different categories or contextual segments. So based on watching the content, what types of contextual categories did they locate in that content? It could be a brand safety or a brand suitability score. 

We're also working with partners that can identify the emotional resonance of that piece of content. Is it joyful, is it happy? Is it sad? So we work with a variety of data companies. 

Finally, we work with ad platforms, and for this product, they are predominantly SSPs, who enable us to onboard all of that data through our content ID, which is called the IRIS ID, which is able to tie all of this data together in the auction. 

We've been working on the implementation of this product offering for the past year or two. What we want is to give buyers the ability to easily utilize this data through a curation model. So how can we make that data available across all of the publishers and inventory that we work with, through pre-built deal IDs. And what we did is we set up and hosted those deal IDs, through all of the SSP partners that we work with, so that they have the ability to reach the right person at the right moment in time. And in the right mindset too, which we've seen drives superior results for campaigns

AW: When you say a deal library what exactly does that refer to?

RH: A library deal is basically just a collection of deal IDs based on the definition of that content. So again, we could have a PMP [private marketplace] deal in the library that is for people watching sports programs. It could be a big broad content definition. It could be something where we're taking an emotional score, and we're helping the advertiser access joyful content. So again, across all that CTV inventory, let's find all the happy moments in time. So it really depends on what the tactic is, but think about it as a pre-set list of options that are pre-curated, that a buyer can tap into.

AW: So you would give them this list of all the possibilities you have. And they go through and say okay, people watching sports make sense. Joyful moments make sense. Let's do both of those.

RH:  Exactly. They can access the full list of options and then they can request a deal right through our portal and they can have it instantaneously pushed directly to their DSP. 

AW: Are you finding that people are just buying off the contextual data or are they also layers demo data on top of it?

RH: It varies. If you are running a broad awareness campaign—say you're a CPG brand where literally the whole country is kind of addressable for toothpaste—they might just opt for contextual targeting only. Or they might use a variety of different line items where they're targeting consumers watching travel content, or, sports or food and beverage related content. So contextual certainly can be applicable for just broad awareness and nothing else. It's also very common that they would overlay first and third party data. Sometimes we'll set that up for them on the SSP side. Other times, they'll layer that in through the DSP. And then some of them even go as far as to say they're retargeting a very specific audience. They know that when that audience is watching that exact type of brand suitable sports content that they get a high conversion. In many ways, all of these situations are quite similar to what contextual is used for in display or in search or in YouTube. Only now it’s on streaming TV.

At the end of the day, TV is predominantly a reach mechanism. It's not a bottom funnel conversion, or it hasn't typically been a bottom funnel conversion tactic. CTV can have the same impact, except we have great data. So there's a lot of granular data running through CTV based on its digital backbone. But it's the biggest screen in the house, it has massive reach. So obviously, we're seeing big CPG brands utilize it for similar tactics that they would linear TV. But it also drives the bottom funnel conversion metrics too and there's a lot of very interesting things happening in the ecosystem. We're seeing some of that too as we do work with a lot of performance buyers who are trying to optimize for very specific outcomes, whether that be app downloads, foot traffic or whatnot. So at the end of the day, it's applicable to all sorts of brand advertisers.

AW: How does this play out in terms of brand safety and suitability? 

RH: One of the things that we help with is figuring out how to unblock news content. A lot of news content typically gets blocked due to the channel name or the app name. And given we have all the content from a lot of news group, we know that a lot of the content that's on these news channels is not hard news. So for something like a CNN, you might miss all the Anthony Bourdain shows that run there and have content that is very appropriate for your brand. So I think it's important that we give advertisers the ability to unblock news safely and securely. Because ads that run on news shows perform exceptionally well. 

It’s really all about risks, how we mitigate risks and use the data. And then how do you curate that inventory so that buyers can access that? 

That's really what the new product offering is all about: how do we take this rich, robust data that's available across a good portion of CTV inventory and make it really easy for buyers to access it and put their ad dollars to work?