One equity analyst recently told us that "Roku's strategic position is weakening, actually dramatically," as "the three largest tech companies in the world, alongside the biggest TV manufacturers in the world, mostly compete against Roku and take more share every quarter."

Roku's stock price stands a merely a fraction of its peak valuation 26 months ago. And the only time Roku seems to please The Street these days is when it cuts cost, like this earlier this week, when Roku only momentarily raised its share price by announcing that it was cutting employees and shows. 

Still, according to Beachfront Marketplace, a sell-side ad platform (SSP) enabling programmatic buying and selling of premium TV, nearly 40% of the connected TV ad impressions the company arbitrated in the first six months of 2023 were on the Roku TVOS. 

That was nearly as much as the combined impressions delivered by Amazon Fire TV, Samsung and pay TV set-top boxes. 

Spectrum Reach, Charter Communications’s ad-sales unit, said it will use Beachfront Media as its sell-side ad server. 

Working with Beachfront will enable Spectrum Reach to sell ads to programmatic buyers across traditional set-top box TV, connected TV and online video platforms.

“Our collaboration with Beachfront is moving the industry forward by unlocking the massive scale of linear TV and providing programmatic TV buyers with new inventory sources,” Rob Klippel, senior VP, advertising products & strategy at Spectrum Reach, said. “For Spectrum Reach, the innovation achieved through this partnership will empower advertisers to more efficiently and effectively reach their audiences across all TV platforms, in a privacy-focused way.” 

At launch, advertisers and programmatic traders can buy a convergent TV supply from Spectrum Reach and Beachfront through approved demand-side platform partners.

“As CTV and traditional cable TV have converged, media owners and distributors have sought more consolidated, efficient ways to manage and monetize their premium ad inventory,” Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro said. “Our partnership with Spectrum Reach is another exciting example of how Beachfront’s award-winning technology is helping modern TV media sellers unlock the full value of their multi-screen inventory and streamline ad operations.”

Spectrum Reach’s patent-pending technology, which incorporates Beachfront’s sell-side ad server, enables the insertion and delivery of linear advertising in a QAM set-top box environment. The new arrangement with Beachfront wallows Spectrum Reach to sell linear and streaming TV inventory in a more automated, fluid and interoperable manner, enabling advertisers to buy premium, multiscreen media on an impression basis through a unified marketplace.

Beachfront and Canoe Ventures said a group of TV networks have adopted Beachfront’s unified ad serving technology and Canoe’s Service Assurance, which inserts commercials across connected TV and traditional set-top-box TV.

The programmers employing the technology include Afro TV, It’s Real Good TV, Kabillion, ToonAVision and TV One, with Epix using it for in-house promos.  

“Unified ad serving across CTV and set-top box VOD supply is critical functionality that programmers are demanding as the lines between platforms continue to blur,” Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro said. “Enabling interoperability of TV ad inventory for our clients and their ad operations teams is a feat that many platforms have been unable to accomplish. We’re thrilled to bolster our existing partnership with Canoe in a way that unlocks new revenue streams and more cost-efficient monetization options for programmers, and affords brands easier access to premium, cross-screen TV inventory.”

In addition to servicing direct-sold ads, programmers can use the technology from Beachfront and Canoe to create programmatic private marketplace deals.

“As the television landscape continues to fragment across traditional and streaming environments, programmers and media buyers alike are seeking more uniform ways to execute, service, and optimize their advertising campaigns,” Canoe senior VP and general manager Mark Shepard said. “Being able to offer campaign management through our existing Service Assurance offering and Beachfront’s ad server solves a major headache for our partners, streamlining the process of monetizing CTV and traditional TV ad inventory for programmers.”

Beachfront and Canoe said their technology gives programmers more efficiency, increased revenue and a clean ad experience for viewers. Advertisers and agencies can buy CTV and set-top box TV ad inventory through a single marketplace, reaching both traditional TV viewers and cord-cutters.

“Being able to scale our ad business across our traditional cable VOD and IPTV platforms are crucial to TV One’s growth,” TV One senior VP, network operations John Fant said. “And having great software and service like this optimizes our ad revenue possibilities.”

“Canoe has been at the forefront of advertising on TV, and now with the addition of Beachfront and the ability to combine CTV and [set-top box] VOD, we see the future growth to be exponential,” Kabillion president of programming and operations Stevan Levy said. ■

Dish Media said it is enabling advertisers to access national linear TV inventory using real-time programmatic technology it developed with Beachfront and Seachange International.

The technology is more flexible for buyers and allows the to plan linear alongside their digital and over-the-top buys for a more holistic view. It will also bring a bigger range of buyers to linear TV, the companies said. 

“Pioneering this new capability is another step in our effort to build more open and interoperable solutions for our advertisers,” said Kevin Arrix, senior VP, Dish Media. “The television marketplace is evolving, and providing our valuable linear TV inventory via programmatic technology is another positive step in this direction.”

Also Read: Beachfront, SeaChange Enable Programmatic for Cable Operators

Viant is the first demand-side platform to use the new technology, Dish said. 

“This exciting new offering is a great option for digital-first buyers who want to expand their reach and take advantage of Dish’s linear footprint,” said Jonathan Ahuna, senior VP of operations, Viant. “It delivers a one-two combination of being able to buy ads seconds before the ads’ airing, then, through the power of Viant’s Adelphic DSP, quickly report out on the buy, vastly reducing the traditional delay of linear reporting.”

Dish’s National Linear Programmatic capabilities covers 7 million households with Beachfront providing its sell-side ad serving built for convergent TV, and Seachange providing video delivery and ad insertion.

“Enabling new and incremental advertising capabilities for DISH TV with our Advanced Advertising Platform is a true milestone in our quest to optimize ad yield for operators globally. Adopting the principles of addressability and automation from the digital landscape to enable real-time auctions for linear TV through industry-standard digital advertising marketplaces is a gamechanger and a growth milestone for the industry,” said Chris Klimmer, president, SeaChange. “Together with Beachfront, we will continue our mission to optimize ad yield for operators by attracting additional advertisers, enabling real-time bidding and automating ad sales.” 

Also Read: Beachfront Brings Systems Together to Make Linear Ads Programmatic

“Having Dish-TV deploy an automated solution is truly going to accelerate the growth of programmatic capabilities in the industry, particularly for TV media buyers, programmers, and distributors,” added Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro. “Advertisers are constantly looking for the fastest, most efficient use of time and money. Having access to DISH TV’s national linear TV inventory with the tools required to get a campaign live in a day will provide a lot of new flexibility.” ■

Looking at the growth of connected TV, ad tech company Beachfront said it hired Marni Rommel as VP business development as it looks to get media companies to adopt its ad serving and decisioning systems.

Rommel, previously senior director of global partnerships at Verizon Media, joins Beachfront in the midst of an expansion. The company said it increased headcount by 20% in 2021 and expects to grow by another 40% in 2022.

Also: Beachfront, Vizio Run Addressable Campaign Meeting OAR Specifications

“I’m thrilled to bring Marni on to the team at Beachfront. Her expertise in leading customers through strategic plans and effortlessly managing complex media partnerships will be vital to our continued momentum and growth,” said Chris Maccaro, CEO of Beachfront. “We’re all very excited to drive towards -- and exceed -- our goals at Beachfront of redefining and transforming the television advertising market. Marni will play a pivotal role in this progress, and I am excited to see what the future holds.”

Rommel told Broadcasting+Cable she sees opportunity in Beachfront’s ability to help media companies monetize content across both traditional distribution platforms and the fast-growing connected TV space.

“Traditional linear isn’t going anywhere. I still have my cable. It’s declining, but I think it’s stabilizing, so I definitely think converged TV is here to stay," Rommel said. 

It’s also clear that ad-supported streaming will be growing, with Disney Plus and Netflix throwing their hats into the ring. “The rest of the year will be exciting. Everyone’s coming out with an AVOD,” she said. 

But while more advertisers are turning to CTV to reach streaming viewers, there are challenges, and Beachfront is trying to clear those hurdles.

“There’s no standardization. Everything is fragmented. We need to make it easier for both the media buyers and the seller to buy and sell their inventory. I think it’s on us, the technology partners, to solve for that,” Rommel said. “Beachfront has this fabulous technology. We have the partnership we have, and I really think that sets us apart.”

Beachfront works with Canoe, the ad tech company owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox, and with Frontier Communications to get ads into cable homes. Its decisioning  system is also used by Vizio’s direct response clients. It competes with Comcast’s FreeWheel tech unit and other ad-serving companies.

Rommel likes the fact that Beachfront is a smaller company at this point. “We’re nimble. We can move on the fly. We can build things very fast, much faster than some other companies."

Beachfront technology provides bid level data and log level data in its user interface. Its system does ad pod construction, addressing competitive separation and creative duplication. It also offers publisher-friendly pricing, she said.

Rommel was with Verizon’s media unit when it was sold to Apollo Global Management and left in January. She likes how Beachfront has reinvented itself over the past four years, building its technology and creating partnerships. 

After working for a big company, she was ready to join a “people may not know about all the cool things that Beachfront’s doing,” she said. Her job now is to change that. ■

Although there is still much work to be done in improving the underlying ad infrastructure, programmatic is no longer a novelty in Connected TV (CTV). In fact, it has become one of the fastest-growing and most-debated areas of ad tech, with eMarketer projecting that nearly 75% of CTV video ad spend will be delivered programmatically in 2022. 

As with any expansion of technology, growing pains abound. For programmatic CTV, there is a lack of standardization across auction practices and protocols. There are several players involved in CTV, each vying to have the standards they built their tech on adopted by the masses. This has led to technical fragmentation and slowed the industry’s march to getting all ad operations stakeholders on the same page.

The Multi-Impression Opportunity 

One of the areas where supply-side platforms (SSPs) and publishers are missing the boat in CTV is with multi-impression opportunities. If you aren’t familiar, multi-impression opportunities allow publishers to send one request to buyers for all slots in an ad pod, and receive multiple impressions back in one response.

If you are an SSP or publisher, you can participate in a programmatic auction either for the entire ad pod or on a per-slot basis. When opportunities are sold by the ad pod, it opens the door for SSPs to leverage these multi-impression auctions. 

Basically, an ad request can be auctioned off in many different ways, and each SSP accepts requests differently. Some SSPs might say, “send us one request with multiple impression opportunities - we’ll fill the ad pod with as many bids as we can, and send all creatives back in a single response.” While some may simply say, “we can only bid on a slot by slot basis.”

So, implementing a standardized option for structuring ad requests and opportunities can be difficult when each SSP is bidding differently due to unique auction requirements. As an industry, we need to move towards a more unified way of executing these tasks. Granted, we’ve started to take steps in the right direction, there is still work to be done in getting all SSPs and publishers on the same page.

Eliminate Wasted Opportunities

Right now, many publishers are trying to figure out what auction mechanics to use and how to use them. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a scramble. We frequently see SSPs respond with the same creative back-to-back because their respective technology interprets each request as a different opportunity, resulting in lower use rates and wasted opportunities. 

Our recommendation is to always auction one request with multiple impression opportunities, that allow your demand partners to apply their own deduplication and creative blocking, while keeping queries per second (QPS) low. 

In a realistic sense, separate requests per slot all feed into the same opportunity anyway because it's all one ad pod. When publishers set up buyers for their ad pods, there’s value in prioritizing SSPs that can send through multiple impressions in one response instead of bidding on a slot-by-slot basis. This also benefits buyers, who want to make sure that the same creatives aren’t being played back-to-back, as it will lead to a poor viewer experience.  

As we continue moving toward a new industry standard, the logic used to build ad pods (such as revenue per second) will help to drive maximum revenue. Evaluating creatives by CPM and duration will also help ensure combinations that yield the most revenue are placed first. Combining this type of logic with the adoption of multi-impression requests and responses will propel us towards even better outcomes and greater efficiency.

We need to work through CTV’s growing pains collectively. Taking advantage of multiple impression opportunities is one easy step that moves us closer to a cleaner, more efficient ecosystem.

Beachfront is the convergent TV advertising platform that enables unified ad decisioning and monetization across Connected TV (CTV), set-top box video-on-demand (VOD), linear, and national addressable television. Leading media owners, programmers, and distributors leverage Beachfront’s TV-first tech stack to maximize revenue and improve operational efficiency, while delivering best-in-class ad experiences to their audiences. ■

Addressable TV ads, the kind that are aimed at individual households by cable and satellite providers and streaming TV services, continue to grow as a category, offering brands the promise of targeting the right audience and digital-style reporting of business results. Advertisers today can reach a majority of households by running addressable ads across the available platforms, aiming at targets using more precise characteristics than Nielsen age and gender demographics.

A panel of experts, though, point out that there are still lags in stitching together different delivery platforms and in judging how successful a campaign is while it is still going on. B+C business editor Jon Lafayette led the panel at the Advanced Advertising event during Virtual Fall TV 2021. 

“Where we sit now is how to bring it all together so that from an advertiser’s perspective, an addressable ad can run across multiple platforms,” Adam Gaynor, veteran of the category who is now VP of network partnerships and head of addressable at TV-set maker Vizio. “I think we‘re there. We have enough homes, we have enough screens, I think there’s enough tech that’s out there. It’s just piecing it all together.”

Brian Lin, senior VP of product management and advanced advertising sales at Univision Communications, agreed that “bridging it all together is the hard part.” Tim Myers, head of strategy and product at Dish Media, said it‘s important to speed up the feedback on a campaign‘s results, or provide early indicators of success or advice on what to tweak. “That is one of the complaints that we hear from agencies, it just takes a lot of time to get results back.”

Daniel Church, head of advanced TV product at ad-tech provider Beachfront Media, joked that he was “very happy that I enjoy integrating systems and it’s one of the joys of my life, because it’s a lot of integrations across the board.” He did offer praise for industry partnerships working to make those integrations easier, especially Project OAR (which Beachfront and Vizio have worked with) and the Go Addressable initiative. Interoperability and standardization will continue to be priorities for addressable TV backers in 2022, Church and Gaynor said.

“The technology’s there, and the value prop is there, too,” Lin said.

Virtual Fall TV 2021 (free to attend) continues this week with the Next TV Summit and the 17th annual Hispanic Television Summit, and event-session replays are available to attendees. ■

Ad tech company Beachfront said it ran a national addressable ad execution on Vizio smart TV sets that met the specifications of the Open Addressable Ready consortium.

Open Addressable Ready (OAR) was formed in 2019, led by Vizio, to create standards that would make it easier to buy and execute addressable advertising campaigns.

“Widespread and continued support for the OAR spec has been important, and this marks further momentum as we’ve fully executed an addressable campaign at the glass level,” said Adam Gaynor, VP of Network Partnerships for Vizio and steering lead for Project OAR. 

Also Read: Beachfront Brings Systems Together to Make Linear Ads Programmatic

Beachfront said the campaign ran in locally and nationally syndicated broadcast programming that was distributed to stations in 125 markets and seen in more than 3 million homes with Vizio TV equipped with the OAR specifications. The content contained ads that were watermarked by the programmer, indicating that those ads could be replaced, if appropriate, as part of an addressable campaign.

“As advertisers continue to allocate media dollars across multi-platform viewing environments, it remains paramount that we deliver solutions and opportunities that are more accessible and effective for our marketing partners,” said Dan Callahan, senior VP of data strategy and sales innovation for Fox. “Across the Fox portfolio, we have premium content that reaches massive audiences and we combine that with forward-leaning ad opportunities that deliver precision and drives impact across our entire portfolio.” 

Beachfront’s Unified Decisioning product chose which homes would see the addressable campaign. When appropriate the ads are inserted inside Vizio Smart TV.

“Over 60 million U.S. TV households are enabled for addressable advertising, yet addressable TV still represents a small portion of TV ad spend overall,” said Beachfront president and founder Frank Sinton. “Our work with Vizio helps programmers to unlock pent up addressable TV dollars from media buyers, which is particularly important at a time when media owners are looking to monetize traditional and streaming TV in a unified fashion through new technology.” 

The campaign made it possible for different viewers of the same show to see different creative executions from same--a technique known as SASO, or single advertisers slot optimization. The campaign was bought direct, but Unified Decisioning is designed to work for campaigns executed programmatically.

Beachfront and Vizio will next work on enabling multiple advertisers’ commercials to appear during a given  time slot--with different viewers seeing different spots based on each advertisers’ targeting. That’s known as multiple advertiser slot optimization or MASO for those of you scoring at home.

“Our tests proved Beachfront’s platform can scale to support full programmatic optimization for single and multiple advertisers,” said Gaynor. “This means Vizio’s addressable capabilities can support the broad and increasing demand of advertisers aiming to come direct-to-device.”

Addressable advertising is coming to linear TV slowly because it’s hard to do, especially within the cable environment.

Putting relevant commercials in front of the right viewers requires getting legacy insertion equipment and set-top boxes to communicate with newfangled ad-management platforms. And if you want to do it programmatically — the way an increasing amount of ad dollars are coming into the market — a lot has to happen fast. That’s not easy to do, either.

That’s where Beachfront Media is staking its claim. The industry is clamoring for more inventory to be addressable and for that inventory to be available however buyers and clients want to transact.

While lots of companies jump into connected TV because it is growing fast and the digital architecture lends itself to addressability, Beachfront sees opportunity in the still-large number of cable subscribers and the fact that linear continues to draw the majority of ad spending.

Even if cord-cutting continues, “there’s going to be 20 to 30 million set-top boxes in homes for the foreseeable future,” Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro said. “Building that interactivity is going to be important for at least the next decade.”

Spotted Need for Enablement

Beachfront started out in the supply-side platform business but has been pivoting from competing against larger ad networks into providing enablement technology. 

“We’re a technology company, not a sales company,” Maccaro said, noting that Beachfront employs engineers rather than salespeople. 

“Getting those systems to speak the same language is hard, and getting those systems to transact in anything close to real time is super-difficult, because it’s not how those systems were made to transact,” he said.

Beachfront works with multichannel video programming distributors in the U.S., including Frontier Communications, and abroad.

For its enablement work, Beachfront gets paid every time its system delivers an ad. To get to scale quickly, Beachfront also found opportunities to work with outfits with technology used by large portions of the industry, Canoe Ventures and SeaChange International.

SeaChange servers are used by cable operators around the world to insert addressable ads down to the ZIP code level. When Beachfront figured out how to get those SeaChange servers to respond to requests from programmatic buyers, MVPDs saw increased demand and revenue for their local ads.

Similarly, Beachfront developed a programmatic module to connect buyers to Canoe’s video-on-demand inventory from networks using Google Ad Manager or Canoe’s own ad management platform.

“We like them because they are real and they actually do real work,” Canoe Ventures senior VP of global sales and marketing Chris Pizzurro said of working with Beachfront. “And their stuff works.”

What makes Beachfront unique is its familiarity with cable plants. Canoe saw what Beachfront had done for Frontier and felt reasonably sure that something similar would work for Canoe. “They had already built something for this purpose,” Pizzurro said. “It was really about how they make their peanut butter talk to our jelly.”

Canoe is working with Beachfront to integrate systems as it moves into international markets including Latin America and India, Pizzurro said.

Pizzurro said the communication that goes on to collect programmatic bids and insert the right ad into the right program must happen in milliseconds. If it’s just a bit slow, the program will run without the ad and revenue is lost. 

But when it works, “the national guys are happy and the local guys are happy because everyone has more ad impressions to sell,” Pizzuro said.

Amobee, which starts its cross-platform campaigns for clients with linear, likes working with Beachfront. 

“What was appealing to us is they are in the linear space through video-on-demand and addressable set-top box inventory,” Amobee chief commercial officer Jack Bamberger said. “This was a perfect marriage between what they do and what we do as a technology provider, meeting our clients’ unmet needs.” 

Competition Is Gearing Up

Beachfront certainly has competitors. First of all, there’s Comcast owned FreeWheel, which so far has largely focused on inserting ads based on direct sales, as opposed to programmatically. 

Roku last month agreed to buy dynamic ad-insertion technology and the patents it is based on from Nielsen, which had been in testing mode.

And the large media companies — NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co, WarnerMedia — might all at some point decide to either build technology or bring it in-house as they build their advanced advertising and direct-to-consumer functions.

Despite the challenges, Maccaro said he thinks the Beachfront strategy is sound because building this technology is hard. “If you try to do it in a siloed approach, you miss the scale opportunity,” he said.

Maccaro said Beachfront is working on ways to address measurement and attribution. One key to its approach will be speed. 

Traditionally, the turnaround on letting buyers know when ads ran and what impact they had was measured in months. Beachfront already has it down to a week and is aiming to do it within an hour. 

“What we’re trying to do on linear is get our ducks in a row to make sure we give the demand side everything that they get today in a time that’s exponentially faster than they get it through a manual process,” Maccaro said. “The goal is to get them the data in real time so they can make optimization decisions in real time.”

Cable operators will be able to dive into the linear TV programmatic ad pool thanks to technology created jointly by Beachfront Media and SeaChange International.

The technology, already being used in the U.S. by a global operator and a regional cable company — both unidentified — will enable multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to tap into hundreds of millions of dollars being spent over automated platforms.

“Linear TV inventory has long been excluded from programmatic marketplaces due to technical limitations and infrastructural challenges,” SeaChange president and CEO Yossi Aloni said. “In partnership with Beachfront, we’ve completed the difficult work of connecting modern, digital-oriented ad buyers to linear TV inventory. This is a major milestone for the media and advertising industry, which we expect will serve as a major catalyst for improving the CPMs for our cable operator and media owner partners.” 

ALSO READ: AMC Networks Moves Ad Tech to FreeWheel

The companies say their combined technology can also help direct-to-consumer and over-the-top video services sell their advertising without going through a middleman.

Beachfront has been building advertising technology that works with the set-top boxes employed by cable operators. Last year, Beachfront enabled the programmatic buying of commercials in set-top-box video-on-demand programming. The new technology extends that to linear TV.

Beachfront’s technology will interface with buyers and demand side platforms. Advertisers can activate this linear TV ad inventory — along with VOD, connected TV, mobile and desktop inventory — much faster than traditional direct buys through the use of real-time bidding.  Beachfront will connect with VOD vendor SeaChange’s equipment, which provide information about available advertising, handles insertions and sends invoices. SeaChange also has the data about viewers needed to create targeted campaigns.

Despite the changes in TV viewing, linear TV is not going away. In fact, Aloni points out ad-supported on-demand streaming services are creating linear channels so people can continue to be couch potatoes.

The problem is that a lot of linear inventory remains unsold. On top of that, for many MVPDs, their sales units are old and expensive.

“These guys are actually using phones, and they’re calling customers and they have a cutoff date for commercials that’s three days ahead of when they go on-air,” Aloni said. “We are moving them into the 21st century. Not only are we enabling them to monetize their inventory, we are also enabling them to reduce their costs.”

The companies said the technology has already been tested with public service announcements, and some real clients have put real money through the system to prove the concept works.

ALSO READ: NBCU Opens Digital Ad Inventory to Local Business

“It will start generating very meaningful revenues in the next few months,” Aloni said, first internationally, then increasingly in the United States.

Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro said what’s holding back programmatic buying for traditional TV is “a bunch of legacy executives who want to protect the way things have been done for a long time. I think you’re starting to see a transformation and consolidation on the agency side where teams are collaborating holistically on where budgets are going.”

Maccaro said Beachfront and SeaChange are giving buyers a lot of new flexibility. Instead of needing days to mount a campaign, “you can get a campaign live and buy it today.”

“What will accelerate the growth of this programmatic capability is how quick the inventory can be used in addressable campaigns,” Maccaro said.

“The quicker we get to addressability for this supply — whether it’s linear or VOD or even [connected] TV, which generally is addressable — and the more it looks familiar to how [demand side platforms] buy it, then demand starts flying into these channels,”
he said. 

Advertising technology company Beachfront, working with Canoe Ventures, is enabling automated, real-time audience-based buying of video-on-demand inventory delivered by Canoe’s owners, Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Media.

Like streaming, traditional cable VOD usage has grown during the pandemic. Cable VOD also offers advertisers familiar brand-safe premium programming. 

Related: Canoe, AMC Go Addressable Across Comcast, Charter Homes

“Sophisticated, digital-oriented ad buyers understand impressions are way up across the convergent TV ecosystem in 2020, but they’ve historically lacked easy pathways to accessing TV Network’s ad inventory on MVPD’s VOD platforms,” said Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro. “We’ve spent the last several years tackling the technological hurdles to make it easy for any ad buyer to access these premium video impressions, while also laying the groundwork for future addressable-enabled solutions.”

Opening the door to programmatic buyers will help cable networks’ VOD inventory compete for ad dollars against streaming video and connected TV, whose technology was developed to provide targeted and addressable ad campaigns.

“We’re constantly seeking innovative ways to help complement our TV networks’ customers’ ad sales teams with new solutions to monetize the long-tail of their premium VOD inventory,” said Canoe CRO Ed Knudson. “Unlocking VOD inventory to a new class of ad buyers helps ensure networks get the most value out of their programming, which is particularly helpful at a time when on-demand viewing is on the rise.” 

Agencies, brands and demand-side platforms that utilize Beachfront can purchase VOD inventory from networks that can reach as many as 38 million VOD households. 

“Traditional TV inventory is still a big piece of the pie that many modern digital-oriented ad buyers don’t have access to,” said Adam Helfgott, CEO at MadHive, an enterprise software platform building tools to help buyers purchase digital TV inventory. “We’re excited to leverage our relationship with Beachfront to offer this unique set-top box VOD inventory to our ad buying partners.” 

AdLedger, the consortium using blockchain and cryptography to address the problems of fraud, transparency and privacy in digital advertising, said its CryptoRTB technology has been used in market to buy and sell over-the-top ads.

In CryptonRTB’s first real-world scaled deployment, MadHive, which architected the protocol, acted as the DSP. MadHive’s sister company MadNetwork was the blockchain. Beachfront was the SSP.

“With so much television spend moving to digitally delivered formats like OTT,  it’s becoming even more critical to solve the underlying problems with the digital ecosystem,” said Christiana Cacciapuoti, executive director at AdLedger. “CryptoRTB can remedy these problems across all platforms and screens, including OTT, which is an increasingly important part of the marketing mix.” 

In the pilot deployment, CryptoRTB’s digital signatures identified and eliminated domain spoofing, which cost the industry $23 billion in fraud last year. CryptorTB also sealed consumer data, ensuring compliance with GDPR and CCPA regulations.

“The e-commerce industry has been utilizing cryptography to ensure trust, transparency and security for decades, and now we’re leveraging the technology with blockchain to remedy the problems in digital advertising,” said Adam Helfgott, CEO at MadHive and Project Lead at Mad Network. “In addition to providing the verification methods needed for a more efficient supply chain, CryptoRTB is built with privacy as a core tenet to ensure a mutually beneficial future for advertisers, publishers, and consumers.”

CryptoRTB injects cryptographic tools into the ad serving environment, identifies illegitimate ad supply and creates a verified chain of custody.

“The behind-the-scenes work of actually understanding and integrating technologies like cryptography to create efficiencies and drive data fidelity in digital advertising is now a reality,” said Frank Sinton, founder and president at Beachfront. “This proof-of-concept demonstrates to the collective industry that blockchain solutions can enable meaningful industry change. Now is the time to rally around this type of innovative solution, work to drive adoption with AdLedger members, and set the stage for the future of the industry. One that stands for the transparent, secure, and privacy-conscious flow of dollars and data across the supply chain.” 

The AdLedger consortium includes agencies Omnicom, IPG, Publicis, WPP and Dentsu, publishers Hearst and Meredith and chocolate marketer Hershey.

Beachfront Media, a programmatic video ad-tech company, said Growth Catalyst Partners (GCP) and PSP Capital have acquired a majority stake.

Financial terms were not announced, but Beachfront Media says it handles billions of video ad requests a day worldwide across mobile, connected TV and desktop platforms.

Beachfront said GCP and PSP will provide the company will resources to expand its capabilities for its multi-platform advertising business.

In tandem with the deal, Beachfront also announced Bill Jennings as CEO and Rich O’Connor as CFO. They previously served in the same roles at PageScience, an ad targeting company acquired by Accent Health in 2016.

Beachfront Media co-founder Frank Sinton will remain president, and he and co-founder, Lisa Connell, will also retain stakes in the company.

“The future of content consumption is increasingly mobile, social and arrayed across a diverse set of screens of all shapes and sizes,” Penny Pritzker, PSP’s founder and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, said in a statement. “Beachfront’s platform-agnostic business model and world class management team will play a pivotal role in the dynamic and fast-changing media industry landscape for years to come.”

Dickinson Wright LLP served as legal counsel to Growth Catalyst Partners. Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP represented PSP Capital, and Greenberg Traurig LLP acted as legal counsel to Beachfront Media.