Cracking the Online Video Monetization Nut: Adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi (Part 6)

Next Amir describes the environment and concepts behind the founding of Adapt.tv. Having the seed money himself from his previous exit, he was able to move forward aggressively to seize a piece of an emerging market. This is a key element for entrepreneurs who are able to repeatedly experience success and is right in line with the more popular trends these days of bootstrapped startups financed by repeat entrepreneurs.

SM: That brings us to the story of your new startup. Did you start right away? AA: I pretty much started right away. I have the start-up bug, so I pretty much started immediately.

SM: This one is entirely based in California? AA: Yes, it is all here.

SM: How did you frame the problem, and what are you looking at in terms of trends? What is the broad market landscape which led to your current positioning. AA: It is obvious today we are moving to a world of unlimited selection of content which is moving from the TV as the main platform of video content to a mix of platforms: Internet, mobile, IPTV, etc. These platforms come with the usual amount of content. They are also interactive one-on-one messaging instead of broadcasting tools. It is obvious that manually mapping to video content is not scalable. We at Adapt.tv focus on building fully automatic methods for placing the right ad at the right time on video content. We think this is a core problem for advertising today and will remain a core challenge for advertising in the future.

SM: Can you explain some of the details of how you accomplish that? AA: We analyze the video using different technologies such as facial recognition and text recognition.

SM: What is it that you are looking for? AA: We look for every piece of information we can put our hands on about the video.

SM: Can you give me an example? AA: The speech that is being spoken in the video.

SM: If the video is talking about cars, are you going to show me advertisements about cars? AA: We are going to understand that it is about cars, and if cars is the most effective ad for the video, we will show that ad.

[to be continued]

[Part 5]
[Part 4]
[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 6 in the series : Cracking the Online Video Monetization Nut: Adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi
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