After two decades of getting people to tap “install” on a six-inch screen, mobile ad tech has its eye on the 65-inch one in the living room.
“Every dollar an advertiser spends should drive some kind of outcome, including on connected TV,” said Sameer Sondhi, North American CEO and chief strategic investments officer at Affle, a holding company of mostly mobile ad tech providers that’s based in Singapore and publicly listed in India with designs on the US market.
Affle has built its business largely through acquisitions, not unlike Zeta Global, Infillion and also Verve Group, where Sondhi previously served as CRO and CEO of ad tech before joining Affle earlier this year.
On Monday, Affle launched MediasmartTV, a self-serve CTV platform housed within Mediasmart, the omnichannel DSP it bought in 2020.
Buyers can use the platform to plan, run and manage their CTV campaigns, and supply comes from SSP partners, including Magnite, PubMatic, Index Exchange and FreeWheel, as well as TV manufacturers like LG and Samsung.
All together, Affle says that adds up to more than 1 trillion monthly ad opportunities in the US alone.
Big numbers, but none of that is unique, and Sondhi doesn’t pretend otherwise. Plenty of CTV players pitch performance, and getting advertisers to integrate yet another measurement pixel is a pretty hard sell.
The difference, Sondhi said, is Affle’s cost-per-converted-user (CPCU) model.
Show and sell
“CPCU” is a whole lot of acronym for a simple idea.
Rather than buying impressions and hoping for the best, advertisers are only charged when someone who was exposed to an ad on their TV goes on to take an action, like installing an app or making a purchase.
The trick is connecting the two.
“We don’t have a cookie and we don’t have device IDs from the TV side,” Sondhi said. And so Mediasmart ties ads to households using signals like IP addresses, devices on the same Wi-Fi network and “everything consented that we’re allowed to,” he said.
If someone buys something or installs an app on another device within an agreed window, the advertiser’s ecommerce or measurement platform sends Mediasmart a postback. That postback is what Affle bills on. Purchases are tracked through ecommerce integrations with the likes of WooCommerce and Adobe Commerce.
Affle built its targeting and optimization models on mobile, where device IDs are (relatively) plentiful. The “TV-first” version of its algorithm, as Sondhi describes it, has been retooled to work without them. It learns from Mediasmart’s mobile campaigns, advertiser first-party data and whatever signals it can pull from the TVs themselves.
What Mediasmart doesn’t have yet is direct publisher integrations, which means that contextual signals are limited, but Affle is evaluating ACR and ID graph partners to fill in the gap.
Affle has a pithy little slogan for all this – “TV to cart” – and it’s hoping the phrase catches on. Sondhi said Affle is even trying to trademark it, along with “TV to travel,” “TV to education” and “TV to finance.”
“We want to keep it simple,” he said. “No more acronyms, no technical jargon.”
(Guess CPCU gets a pass.)
Proof of purchase
Paying only for results may sound logical, but it requires a mindset shift. Most CTV is still bought on impressions, Sondhi said, and judged afterward by cost per install and/or return on ad spend.
“There needs to be a lot more education around this,” he said.
So Affle is starting off with the advertisers who need the least convincing, as in the app marketers, mainly gaming-focused, it already works with on user acquisition and reengagement campaigns. “You’d be surprised how much gaming user acquisition we’re already doing through CTV,” Sondhi said.
But there’s also interest beyond gaming, including from rideshare, finance and reward apps, some of which are spending millions on TV, he said.
Next up, Affle wants to court independent agencies using joint “lunch and learn” sessions together with its mobile measurement partners to explain the model, followed by outreach to the large holding companies – and that one will be a challenge.
The big holdcos tend to have a “very upper funnel” mentality, of which Sondhi is not a fan.
“I really do hate the upper-funnel, mid-funnel, lower-funnel pyramid,” he said. “Let’s be honest, it’s not like advertisers spend money without expecting to get something back.”
Going stateside
Winning over new buyers is also part of a bigger push into the US.
North America accounts for roughly a third of Affle’s business, but the company has been underrepresented stateside, Sondhi said, and “that’s where the big dollars are.”
Affle was founded in 2005 when “Nokia was king and the BlackBerry was considered very cool,” he joked. Today, it trades on India’s stock exchange with a market cap above $2 billion.
Mediasmart is one of eight specialized point solutions Affle has assembled since 2012, primarily through acquisitions. The others include omnichannel marketing platform Vizury, app discovery platform Appnext, user acquisition specialist Jampp and gaming-focused programmatic app marketing platform YouAppi.
In June, Affle bought AdColony’s brand and SDKs from DT, formerly Digital Turbine; just the tech, though, not the team.
Sondhi said he spends more than half his time on M&A and to expect more deals soon. He declined to name targets, but did say that anything Affle buys will tie back to CPCU, with CTV as an obvious area of interest.
Further out, Affle is hunting for its next screen.
With LLMs upending the web and mobile, Sondhi said, the company is eyeing “autonomous integrated connected devices,” or “AICDs,” everything from the watch on your wrist to screens in a retail store, because “these industries are evolving so fast, we don’t want to just bet on one thing.”
So much for “no more acronyms,” though.
