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In the podcast studio this week, GCA Advisors managing director Josh Wepman talks about the changes afoot in television. Wepman has sold companies to Google, Snap, Yahoo, Pitney Bowes and Telstra, among others, and TV is his key strategic focus right now.
“When you think about the dynamics of the TV ads market, unlike the hegemony of digital where you have Facebook and Google sucking up most of the oxygen in the room, it’s a more fragmented landscape,” Wepman says. “And it’s a big landscape.”
Advertisers will spend approximately $70 billion on television in the United States this year, according to eMarketer. The rise of connected TV and addressable TV will bring attributes of digital to the heretofore stodgy medium, which will in turn herald new opportunities around identity and data.
“In digital you have a good sense of who is in front of your screen,” he says. “In TV you’ve got the large TV in the living room. You don’t necessarily know who is watching. The companies that will be successful are those that are able to bridge identity across devices.”
He says legacy TV and telco companies like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Sky, Charter and Verizon are well positioned to solve for this challenge, but there is room for outsiders.
“There are businesses that are springing up that are natively TV focused, and there are some mature businesses that have invested a lot of time, capital and resources into moving into the TV business,” Wepman said.
