August 29, 2025 • 23 mins
The SVP of the Ventura TV operating system for The Trade Desk lays out the digital ad giant’s vision for the forthcoming OS, the challenges facing the business and how TTD hopes to rewrite the rules for CTV.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to Strictly Business, Variety's weekly podcast featuring conversations with
industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. I'm
Tyler Aquallina with Luminated Intelligence formerly known as Variety Intelligence Platform.
TV buyers will soon have yet another option when weighing
what's smart TV to purchase. Digital advertising giant The Trade
Desk has been developing a new operating system known as Ventura,
set to launch in the near future. It's an intriguing proposition,
(00:29):
but ever since Ventura was officially announced back in November,
a lot of questions have risen about the new OS.
Why is the Trade Desk entering an already crowded and
hyper competitive business, What are the implications of an advertising
company entering the smart TV space? And how might this
disrupt the already turbulent connected TV ad market. Here to
answer all those questions and more is The Trade Desk's
SVP of Ventura, Matthew Hennick. He came to the Trade
(00:51):
Desk from a media and tech background and is now
heading up its efforts to reshape the CTV business. Let's
just get right into it, because there's a lot to
discuss with Ventura. It's an interesting time to be getting
into the smart TV business.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
It's a very kind of complicated time for the space.
It's undergoing a lot of growing pains, maturation, that kind
of thing. Why is now the right moment for the
trade desk to be getting into the space.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
We think it's an incredibly important moment right now because
we're huge fans and believers in the power of the
open Internet and the power of the media industry the
open Internet. Because the open Internet, because there's a huge
portion of Internet that's not controlled within the walled gardens
of Google and Amazon and Facebook, and luckily, most of
(01:39):
the best media that humans have ever made in all
of recorded music, movies, television, news, sports, podcasts, sits outside
of those wild gardens in the open Internet. And those
companies that have been making this media have been going
through massive transformation the past ten years of days as
they've moved to be direct to consumer. This usually means
(02:01):
that they're releasing their own streaming apps of one kind
or another. And one of the reasons why they had
to do this was because many of the big tech
companies were disrupting their core business. They were getting in
between them and their customers and The scary thing right
now is that they've made these massive transformational investments to
become direct consumer, but all these apps still sit on
(02:22):
operating systems owned by these big tech companies, and so
a lot of the same problems that they're trying to
avoid haven't fully gone away yet. So we think we
have a pretty unique way to enter this space objectively,
to bring objectivity as a core principle, and to improve
how the money flows between all of these participants.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, so tell us more about that, like what will
distinguish Ventor from the other OS's on the market, both
in terms of objectivity and what it offers to users.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Sure, we think you know, objectivity has been an important
part of the trade desk since our founding, so we
intend to bring that to the CTV space and we
think that has benefits for every participant along the waying
massive challenges for the manufacturing and retailing of television that
we think can be solved with objectivity. We're seeing large
(03:09):
scale issues for publishers because they're competing with content apps
owned by the operating systems themselves, and then for advertisers,
they're not able to get accurate signal and most effectively,
enter this space when they really want to. And this
all comes down to a user experience that also is
incredibly confusing and frankly untrustworthy for users where they can't
(03:29):
necessarily trust the recommendations and the pixels on their screen
that are coming their way because it is meant to
serve somebody else's use case and not necessarily theirs.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Okay, and so what will Ventur bring to the table
that kind of you know, helps solve some of those problems?
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Sure, so let's start with OEMs and retailers. The manufacturing
televisions is incredibly margin challenged right now, and this was
before tariffs came into play. When when you're making a
television and you're selling it television, you're making a couple
dollars or in some cases negative margin once every five
(04:07):
to six years. When you sell that television, and when
you sell that television with perhaps Amazon's OS on it,
then you're handing over the customer relationship to the world's
largest retailer who may not necessarily drive them back into
your store to buy the next television. So by having
an independent and objective OS there, you're able to build
a recurring revenue stream that lasts beyond that point of
(04:29):
sale for retailers. For publishers, that means you're not going
to be competing directly with the OS, and being the
OS brings a lot of power. We've seen this in
the mobile phone space. We've seen this in the desktop space,
where you control everything that's happening on that screen. So
if you're a publisher and you're competing with the owner
of the operating system, you're pretty much going to lose
(04:50):
every jump ball possible. So if you're a publisher, you
want to be on an objective platform so you have
a level playing field to get your media scene just
as eas as anybody else's. And then for users, you're
able again to trust the recommendations. You're able to know
that this thing has my personalization at heart, and it's
(05:10):
sending me two things that I want to see, not
necessarily that my corporate overlord wants to see right right.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
And then, you know, you're talking a lot about the
benefits for publishers, what about advertisers? You know, how will
Venture kind of address the problems in the supply chain
that we hear so much about in that the trade
desk talks a lot about.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Sure, Yeah, I mean advertising is our core business and
the reason why we think we even have the right
to compete against some of the most successful companies in
the history of capitalism in Amazon and Google in particular.
Advertisers are increasingly telling us and showing us that they
want to invest more in CTV. It is an amazing
advertising product. Again, the quality of the media is as
(05:53):
high as it can be. It's incredibly immersive because you're
usually watching it in a large screen and most of
the time the users are logged in in one way
or another, so it's authenticated so you can track it well.
So averatis want to spend more, but they're increasingly hitting
these walls of fragmentation of how inventory is being divided up.
(06:14):
So when you're an OS traditionally you're exerting this leverage
to tell every publisher, Hey, if you want to be
on OS, you have to pay us a tax and
every new subscription that's being originated on our platform. And
then number two, you need to give us a certain
percentage of your advertising inventory for us to sell ourselves,
which means that the OS is again are taking advertising
(06:35):
inventory and selling it in market next to the owners
of that inventory. So you are competing again in the
advertising space with the OS. What we're going to be
able to do number one is clarify that supply chain,
So we're going to allow the inventory to stay with
the publisher, and the publisher in the OEM can figure
out how to divide that up, and then we'll bring
our core products to help it be transacted on as
(06:57):
transparently as possible. At every dollar that an advertiser wants
to spend will get directly to the publisher and not
be taxed by multiple parties in between that perhaps aren't
contributing as much value as they should be.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
And what do you think the effects and possibly the
benefits of that will be for you know, kind of
the ad market as a whole.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Transparency is probably number one, because again, when an advertiser's
buying something, they want to have as much confidence that
they know what it is, where it'll run, and that
they're advertising to a particular person and they'll pay up
for that. So the benefits will be from a publisher's standpoint,
you know, they really are looking at what percentage of
(07:40):
their inventory or is actually getting sold and at what price.
I think there's a lot of room to improve your
cell through rate all these publishers, we want to help
sell one hundred percent of their ad inventory, and we
want to sell it at competitive prices. If we do
both of those things, advertisers will be getting more for
their money and publishers will be capturing more of those
ad dollars.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
So you also mentioned the strategy of letting manufacturers control
more of the ad inventory. Can you tell us a
little bit more about that and how that is going
to work?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Sure, So, manufacturers of television's OEMs as we call them,
and retailers are looking for ways to turn the selling
of television into a recurring revenue stream, and so that
traditionally has brought them to advertising and content broadly. And
so when you have that challenge in front of you, you
really have two choices. You can choose to build all
(08:31):
of this in house, so you have to build your
own operating system, your own content team, your own ads team.
We're seeing folks like Samsung and LG do this with
some success. Or you can choose to outsource all of
that to a big tech company at Google and Amazon
exchange for a check. And we think there's a better way,
which is the OEMs don't necessarily want to be selling
(08:52):
the ad inventory themselves. They want the revenue that comes
through it. I would argue that the best people to
be selling that inventory are the public themselves. And so
what Ventura allows us to do is to connect those
OEMs and the publishers directly, so that Disney can still
sell all of their inventory and not feel like they
have to obfuscate it and charge a fair price for
(09:12):
it and share a certain percentage of that back to
the OEMs. So the oms can build an advertising revenue
stream without necessarily having to do all the investment required
to build the tech stack themselves, to build the advertising
sales team and everything that comes along with it.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, and so what I'm hearing is that, like the
OEMs are going to get to kind of read more
of the benefits from you know, AD revenues and things
like that, which is kind of more than they would
typically get to participate in with with other OS's.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Absolutely, when you're an OEM that hasn't built their own OS.
So you're going to Google, You're going to Amazon, you're
not participating at all. In most cases, if you're lucky,
you maybe are getting a per device bounty where Google
Amazon is giving you a small check per every device,
but that's a flat fee, so you get paid once
and Google and Amazon are doing that because they know
(10:03):
that they'll make way more than that over the lifetime
of that television. So we're making sure that all of
that revenue is able to go back to the OEM
and not captured by a third party.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
And yeah, I kind of do have to ask, what
is the benefit for you guys of kind of giving
up this this revenue stream in this way. You know
why I kind of approach it in this with the strategy, we.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Have the benefit of having a core business as an
ad tech firm that perfectly aligns with growing this pie.
And so you know, we're not doing this as a
loss leader, as a philanthropic exercise. We're doing it because
we believe that more transparency in the CTV ecosystem, a
fair auction where everybody knows what they're bidding on it
who they're bidding against, will benefit our core business. And
(10:44):
if it benefits our core business, that allows us to
make advertisers more effective in their campaigns and frankly, bring
more dollars back to the media. Companies that are investing
in this amazing content can.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
You tell us anything about you know, how potential manufacturing
partners have been responding to the strategy do so far.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
They're incredibly excited because they've been looking for this solution
right again pre tariffs, post tariffs, you know, as they
really try and figure out what this business looks like.
They need something sustainable and recurring to build a business
model against, and so they're definitely leaning in on the
commercial side. The other thing that they're really excited about
(11:21):
is the flexibility and customization that our platform brings. So again,
if you are a retailer or if you're an OEM,
you would prefer to still extend your brand and maintain
that customer connection with people in their living rooms. You're
going through all the trouble to make these amazing pieces
of electronics, and you're going through the trouble of placing
them in people's homes, and so we think they deserve
to be able to customize what the os looks like
(11:43):
as well to extend their brands. It's not as important
for us that the Ventura logo is huge everywhere. We'd
rather have the OEMs and the logos in there because
they're bringing the value to installing those televisions, So they're
excited about the commercial side, but they're also excited about
the brand flexibility side as well.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Well, Yeah, I want to talk a little bit more
about that customization that you mentioned, because I was just
reading about that that's the OS is kind of designed
to be sort of modular. How is that going to
work exactly?
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah, So it starts with our ad supply chain stack,
meaning we want the auctions that are happening for all
the ads that run on Ventura to be as transparent
and as fair as possible. That allows us to compete
as the core business and trade desk, but that allows
everybody else in the ad tech community to compete as well.
And anytime we brought more transparency to any part of
(12:34):
the ad tech space, all boats have risen who are
adding value there. So that's the core module that we
bring on top of that. Then, obviously we have the
core services around our catalog, our search engine, and recommendation
engine that make it function as an OS and function
as something that's really valuable to users. And then you
have the user interface on top, which has to have
(12:56):
certain common elements around the continue watching feature that we
have where we're pulling in all of your progress, that
cost all of your apps into one place, our app
store that allows all the apps that you would want
to watch content on to be there. But there's certain
elements of that user interface that you know, have font
choices and colors and logo placements, and that's where we're
(13:18):
able to offer a lot more flexibility to OEMs versus
what they're offered from other partners where it's really take
it or leave it. So we're really excited at being
able to offer them that because they haven't been able
to take advantage of that for a long time.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
So really, the interface could look different, you know, from
manufacturer to manufacturer, depending on you know what the features
that they want to prioritize completely.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Yeah, it's not just the look and feel. There are
certain features. If you're a retailer has a loyalty program
or a tech support offering, will integrate that into the
OS as well, so that again, if you're a user
who subscribes to that program or bought that warranty, everything
should be in one place. It shouldn't feel as fragmented
as it is now.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, that's that's really interesting. I do want to talk
a little bit more about you know, the user experience.
I feel like that's something that often kind of gets
left out of the conversation when it comes to talking
about CTV, but it feels so vital to me. I mean,
you know, as a user of these you know technologies myself,
I often find the experience frustrating. How are you guys
(14:19):
kind of approaching that side of things now?
Speaker 3 (14:21):
I appreciate you pointing that out, because you know, all
the data that we have shows that users are not
very particular about what OS they choose, and in most
cases it's downstream from screen size and price of their
television and the OS. This sort of comes along for
the ride, and I think to your point, that shows
that we're not doing enough to build amazing user interfaces
(14:44):
for folks. So one of our core principles first is
that we're going to be content first, meaning we're partnering
with all the publishers, and because we're an objective partner,
they're willing to give us access to their catalogs that
they don't necessarily give to other OS's where we can
pull out individual shows, individual movies and present those two
on the core home screen versus having you have to
(15:06):
click into every app to try and find something. So
that shows up in something like I mentioned before is
our continue Watching feature, where we're able to pull from
every app that you have see it in one place,
and we've seen that be at least sixty percent of
the time that you turn on your television, you're going
right there because you're either picking up the next episode
or you're halfway through a movie or anything like that.
(15:28):
Beyond that, it also means that we can be objective
in what we recommend to you at any given time.
So obviously a big problem that everyone's been trying to
solve is live sports. Right there is incredible urgency to
turn on your television and find the game that you want.
It's increasingly becoming harder to find it as sports rights
have been divvied up in eighteen thousand different places. But
(15:48):
by building a content first user interface, we'll be able
to give that to you directly in the largest possible square,
right when you turn on your television, and then in
those minority of situations where you don't know what you
want to watch, we'll be able to give you the
best recommendations possible by both learning about you ourselves, but
also by pulling out the recommendations from each one of
(16:08):
your apps. Obviously, partners like Netflix have invested a tremendous
amount in trying to give you the best recommendations possible.
They've built very advanced algorithms, so it's Disney, HBO max
all them down the line. There's no reason that you
shouldn't be able to benefit those on the home screen
as well. So it's really a mix of being able
to do our own recommendations but also marry them with
(16:30):
all the amazing work that the apps do individually.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
That's interesting. You know, you mentioned that you know, os
often kind of doesn't make a difference for consumers. It
sounds like something that that Sorry, it sounds like that's
something that you guys want to change. You know, how
do you think we can kind of get to a
place where consumers are thinking more about that?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah, I mean the first the first step is to
expose it to them, right, So the first step still
is solving the commercial and customization wants and desires of
these own OEMs and retailers so that we get a
shot at showing them what a differentiated user experience can
look like. But a real sign of success down the line,
and this will take multiple years. Is that users start
(17:13):
to have a preference, and then if there's televisions who
have equal specs of size and costs and one of
them is powered by a ventur that they're choosing that
over the other option. So we'll look at that down
the line. We won't get there right away, because again
we have to build this audience. We have to show
them both what we think an OS can be today
and what it should be in the future.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
I'm curious, are there any particular features that you know
that consumers are looking for in smart TVs that they're
maybe not getting right now.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
We've definitely seen a lot of interest and in our
research surveys direct interest in our continue watching feature, something
that truly can bring in every single app. Certainly. Another
one is the live sports feature, where again we're able
to go across all the apps that you have subscriptions
or access to and pull out the exact match that
(18:01):
you want at that particular time. Search is another one
for sure, where if you're searching for something that maybe
a show that may sit the new episodes in one
place the old episodes in another, that we can help
you sort that through. And then something like a unified
watch list is really interesting to folks too, where you
know you're obviously favoriting things or putting things on a
(18:23):
list in each individual app, but you're not necessarily able
to pull them all together. And that's something we're also
able to do.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
I don't want to name any names, but I am
often kind of appalled by how bad the search function
often still is on some of these interfaces.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Yeah, I mean it's hard technically, and again it takes
an integration in a close partnership with the publishers because
they need to give you access to what their catalogs
are and a lot of the metadata that comes along
with it, and the entitlements you subscribe to this tier
and not that tier to really build a corpus that
you can build a great search experience on. And I
(18:58):
empathize with the publishers because again they need to existentially
be onto these platforms, but they also don't want to
help their direct competitors by giving them access to the
catalog or access to engagement information about which shows are working,
because that same os as another division that is bidding
against them for that next big show or that next
big sports right, so that puts us in a position
(19:20):
again where we can build trust publishers or able to
give us access to that information that they probably wouldn't
for other partners to build a better user experience.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't want to leave the
retail side of things out of this conversation. You know,
you have mentioned tariffs a couple of times. You know,
I'm curious what the kind of the economic climate right
now how that's been impacting some of your conversations with
manufacturers and retailers.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, I mean it's it's tough. I sympathize with them
because there's so much uncertainty and each component that goes
into a television you're looking at down to the penny,
the system on a CHIPI conductor that you're putting in there,
the memory, the motherboard. Getting it all packaged up, getting
it chipped over is an incredibly complicated challenge that both
(20:10):
manufacturers and to your point, retailers have to deal with.
And so especially post Walmart and Visio, every retailer, whether
they're national or regional, is looking at their television strategy again.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, just to clarify, Walmart acquired smart TV manufacturer Visio
late last year.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Correct, Walmart's a longtime partner of ours, and it's been
really interesting to work with them to help stand that up.
And every other retailer is also thinking about their strategy there.
What's amazing about what we offer that we didn't necessarily
have in market even when that acquisition went down, was
we can give retailers pretty much one hundred percent of
(20:48):
the value that Walmart's getting from Visio without having to
acquire their own OS because of the customization we bring,
because of the tie ins to whatever ad business they
already have, and put them in a place where, again
they could overnight flip a switch and basically have their
own in house OS and all the benefits that it brings.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Interesting. So, you know, I'm curious, you know, your thoughts
on Ventro's prospects for adoption. You know, I know that
some observers have said that you guys kind of face
an uphill battle just because of how crowded the market is,
things like that. What's kind of your response to that.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Yeah, I mean, they're right, it is a crowded market,
and they're right that these upgrade cycles take a while. Right.
Number one, people usually buy a new television once every
five to seven years at this point, and a lot
of the OEMs and retailers have relationships with the existing
OSS that come up once a year, every three years,
(21:42):
every five years, or whatnot. So fitting into all of
those is a challenge, but one that we're handling really well.
I think what's really interesting that people are not necessarily
appreciating is how uncertain the OS space feels. For the
first time in a while, we're seeing some of the
larger players like Google, just to call one out, who
(22:04):
is actively reducing the size of the team working on
Google TV and Android TV. I think most of the
major OSS are very publicly reevaluating their investment in it.
And that's often because if you're part of a big
tech company and you're a project like this, you're the
one hundred and twenty seventh most important product at that
company at any given time, and if somebody who is
(22:25):
more important sits down in your product meeting, you're doing
what they're doing to build your fast service or to
build your AD product or your AI product or whatever
it is. And so I think there's going to be
a lot more space than people appreciate in the future
that I think we're well positioned to capture. But even
in the meantime, we're fitting into the normal cycles and
offering something that's commercially more advantageous and from a brand
(22:48):
perspective more advantageous. So we're in a really nice spot.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Yeah. Interesting, it'll be. I think it'll be fascinating to follow.
I hope to continue following it and covering it. Has
it been doing?
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Best to luck to you guys, appreciate it, Thanks so much,
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
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in next week for another episode of Strictly Business.
Welcome to Strictly Business, Variety's weekly podcast featuring conversations with
industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. I'm
Tyler Aquallina with Luminated Intelligence formerly known as Variety Intelligence Platform.
TV buyers will soon have yet another option when weighing
what's smart TV to purchase. Digital advertising giant The Trade
Desk has been developing a new operating system known as Ventura,
set to launch in the near future. It's an intriguing proposition,
(00:29):
but ever since Ventura was officially announced back in November,
a lot of questions have risen about the new OS.
Why is the Trade Desk entering an already crowded and
hyper competitive business, What are the implications of an advertising
company entering the smart TV space? And how might this
disrupt the already turbulent connected TV ad market. Here to
answer all those questions and more is The Trade Desk's
SVP of Ventura, Matthew Hennick. He came to the Trade
(00:51):
Desk from a media and tech background and is now
heading up its efforts to reshape the CTV business. Let's
just get right into it, because there's a lot to
discuss with Ventura. It's an interesting time to be getting
into the smart TV business.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
It's a very kind of complicated time for the space.
It's undergoing a lot of growing pains, maturation, that kind
of thing. Why is now the right moment for the
trade desk to be getting into the space.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
We think it's an incredibly important moment right now because
we're huge fans and believers in the power of the
open Internet and the power of the media industry the
open Internet. Because the open Internet, because there's a huge
portion of Internet that's not controlled within the walled gardens
of Google and Amazon and Facebook, and luckily, most of
(01:39):
the best media that humans have ever made in all
of recorded music, movies, television, news, sports, podcasts, sits outside
of those wild gardens in the open Internet. And those
companies that have been making this media have been going
through massive transformation the past ten years of days as
they've moved to be direct to consumer. This usually means
(02:01):
that they're releasing their own streaming apps of one kind
or another. And one of the reasons why they had
to do this was because many of the big tech
companies were disrupting their core business. They were getting in
between them and their customers and The scary thing right
now is that they've made these massive transformational investments to
become direct consumer, but all these apps still sit on
(02:22):
operating systems owned by these big tech companies, and so
a lot of the same problems that they're trying to
avoid haven't fully gone away yet. So we think we
have a pretty unique way to enter this space objectively,
to bring objectivity as a core principle, and to improve
how the money flows between all of these participants.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, so tell us more about that, like what will
distinguish Ventor from the other OS's on the market, both
in terms of objectivity and what it offers to users.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Sure, we think you know, objectivity has been an important
part of the trade desk since our founding, so we
intend to bring that to the CTV space and we
think that has benefits for every participant along the waying
massive challenges for the manufacturing and retailing of television that
we think can be solved with objectivity. We're seeing large
(03:09):
scale issues for publishers because they're competing with content apps
owned by the operating systems themselves, and then for advertisers,
they're not able to get accurate signal and most effectively,
enter this space when they really want to. And this
all comes down to a user experience that also is
incredibly confusing and frankly untrustworthy for users where they can't
(03:29):
necessarily trust the recommendations and the pixels on their screen
that are coming their way because it is meant to
serve somebody else's use case and not necessarily theirs.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Okay, and so what will Ventur bring to the table
that kind of you know, helps solve some of those problems?
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Sure, so let's start with OEMs and retailers. The manufacturing
televisions is incredibly margin challenged right now, and this was
before tariffs came into play. When when you're making a
television and you're selling it television, you're making a couple
dollars or in some cases negative margin once every five
(04:07):
to six years. When you sell that television, and when
you sell that television with perhaps Amazon's OS on it,
then you're handing over the customer relationship to the world's
largest retailer who may not necessarily drive them back into
your store to buy the next television. So by having
an independent and objective OS there, you're able to build
a recurring revenue stream that lasts beyond that point of
(04:29):
sale for retailers. For publishers, that means you're not going
to be competing directly with the OS, and being the
OS brings a lot of power. We've seen this in
the mobile phone space. We've seen this in the desktop space,
where you control everything that's happening on that screen. So
if you're a publisher and you're competing with the owner
of the operating system, you're pretty much going to lose
(04:50):
every jump ball possible. So if you're a publisher, you
want to be on an objective platform so you have
a level playing field to get your media scene just
as eas as anybody else's. And then for users, you're
able again to trust the recommendations. You're able to know
that this thing has my personalization at heart, and it's
(05:10):
sending me two things that I want to see, not
necessarily that my corporate overlord wants to see right right.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
And then, you know, you're talking a lot about the
benefits for publishers, what about advertisers? You know, how will
Venture kind of address the problems in the supply chain
that we hear so much about in that the trade
desk talks a lot about.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Sure, Yeah, I mean advertising is our core business and
the reason why we think we even have the right
to compete against some of the most successful companies in
the history of capitalism in Amazon and Google in particular.
Advertisers are increasingly telling us and showing us that they
want to invest more in CTV. It is an amazing
advertising product. Again, the quality of the media is as
(05:53):
high as it can be. It's incredibly immersive because you're
usually watching it in a large screen and most of
the time the users are logged in in one way
or another, so it's authenticated so you can track it well.
So averatis want to spend more, but they're increasingly hitting
these walls of fragmentation of how inventory is being divided up.
(06:14):
So when you're an OS traditionally you're exerting this leverage
to tell every publisher, Hey, if you want to be
on OS, you have to pay us a tax and
every new subscription that's being originated on our platform. And
then number two, you need to give us a certain
percentage of your advertising inventory for us to sell ourselves,
which means that the OS is again are taking advertising
(06:35):
inventory and selling it in market next to the owners
of that inventory. So you are competing again in the
advertising space with the OS. What we're going to be
able to do number one is clarify that supply chain,
So we're going to allow the inventory to stay with
the publisher, and the publisher in the OEM can figure
out how to divide that up, and then we'll bring
our core products to help it be transacted on as
(06:57):
transparently as possible. At every dollar that an advertiser wants
to spend will get directly to the publisher and not
be taxed by multiple parties in between that perhaps aren't
contributing as much value as they should be.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
And what do you think the effects and possibly the
benefits of that will be for you know, kind of
the ad market as a whole.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Transparency is probably number one, because again, when an advertiser's
buying something, they want to have as much confidence that
they know what it is, where it'll run, and that
they're advertising to a particular person and they'll pay up
for that. So the benefits will be from a publisher's standpoint,
you know, they really are looking at what percentage of
(07:40):
their inventory or is actually getting sold and at what price.
I think there's a lot of room to improve your
cell through rate all these publishers, we want to help
sell one hundred percent of their ad inventory, and we
want to sell it at competitive prices. If we do
both of those things, advertisers will be getting more for
their money and publishers will be capturing more of those
ad dollars.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
So you also mentioned the strategy of letting manufacturers control
more of the ad inventory. Can you tell us a
little bit more about that and how that is going
to work?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Sure, So, manufacturers of television's OEMs as we call them,
and retailers are looking for ways to turn the selling
of television into a recurring revenue stream, and so that
traditionally has brought them to advertising and content broadly. And
so when you have that challenge in front of you, you
really have two choices. You can choose to build all
(08:31):
of this in house, so you have to build your
own operating system, your own content team, your own ads team.
We're seeing folks like Samsung and LG do this with
some success. Or you can choose to outsource all of
that to a big tech company at Google and Amazon
exchange for a check. And we think there's a better way,
which is the OEMs don't necessarily want to be selling
(08:52):
the ad inventory themselves. They want the revenue that comes
through it. I would argue that the best people to
be selling that inventory are the public themselves. And so
what Ventura allows us to do is to connect those
OEMs and the publishers directly, so that Disney can still
sell all of their inventory and not feel like they
have to obfuscate it and charge a fair price for
(09:12):
it and share a certain percentage of that back to
the OEMs. So the oms can build an advertising revenue
stream without necessarily having to do all the investment required
to build the tech stack themselves, to build the advertising
sales team and everything that comes along with it.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, and so what I'm hearing is that, like the
OEMs are going to get to kind of read more
of the benefits from you know, AD revenues and things
like that, which is kind of more than they would
typically get to participate in with with other OS's.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Absolutely, when you're an OEM that hasn't built their own OS.
So you're going to Google, You're going to Amazon, you're
not participating at all. In most cases, if you're lucky,
you maybe are getting a per device bounty where Google
Amazon is giving you a small check per every device,
but that's a flat fee, so you get paid once
and Google and Amazon are doing that because they know
(10:03):
that they'll make way more than that over the lifetime
of that television. So we're making sure that all of
that revenue is able to go back to the OEM
and not captured by a third party.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
And yeah, I kind of do have to ask, what
is the benefit for you guys of kind of giving
up this this revenue stream in this way. You know
why I kind of approach it in this with the strategy, we.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Have the benefit of having a core business as an
ad tech firm that perfectly aligns with growing this pie.
And so you know, we're not doing this as a
loss leader, as a philanthropic exercise. We're doing it because
we believe that more transparency in the CTV ecosystem, a
fair auction where everybody knows what they're bidding on it
who they're bidding against, will benefit our core business. And
(10:44):
if it benefits our core business, that allows us to
make advertisers more effective in their campaigns and frankly, bring
more dollars back to the media. Companies that are investing
in this amazing content can.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
You tell us anything about you know, how potential manufacturing
partners have been responding to the strategy do so far.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
They're incredibly excited because they've been looking for this solution
right again pre tariffs, post tariffs, you know, as they
really try and figure out what this business looks like.
They need something sustainable and recurring to build a business
model against, and so they're definitely leaning in on the
commercial side. The other thing that they're really excited about
(11:21):
is the flexibility and customization that our platform brings. So again,
if you are a retailer or if you're an OEM,
you would prefer to still extend your brand and maintain
that customer connection with people in their living rooms. You're
going through all the trouble to make these amazing pieces
of electronics, and you're going through the trouble of placing
them in people's homes, and so we think they deserve
to be able to customize what the os looks like
(11:43):
as well to extend their brands. It's not as important
for us that the Ventura logo is huge everywhere. We'd
rather have the OEMs and the logos in there because
they're bringing the value to installing those televisions, So they're
excited about the commercial side, but they're also excited about
the brand flexibility side as well.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Well, Yeah, I want to talk a little bit more
about that customization that you mentioned, because I was just
reading about that that's the OS is kind of designed
to be sort of modular. How is that going to
work exactly?
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah, So it starts with our ad supply chain stack,
meaning we want the auctions that are happening for all
the ads that run on Ventura to be as transparent
and as fair as possible. That allows us to compete
as the core business and trade desk, but that allows
everybody else in the ad tech community to compete as well.
And anytime we brought more transparency to any part of
(12:34):
the ad tech space, all boats have risen who are
adding value there. So that's the core module that we
bring on top of that. Then, obviously we have the
core services around our catalog, our search engine, and recommendation
engine that make it function as an OS and function
as something that's really valuable to users. And then you
have the user interface on top, which has to have
(12:56):
certain common elements around the continue watching feature that we
have where we're pulling in all of your progress, that
cost all of your apps into one place, our app
store that allows all the apps that you would want
to watch content on to be there. But there's certain
elements of that user interface that you know, have font
choices and colors and logo placements, and that's where we're
(13:18):
able to offer a lot more flexibility to OEMs versus
what they're offered from other partners where it's really take
it or leave it. So we're really excited at being
able to offer them that because they haven't been able
to take advantage of that for a long time.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
So really, the interface could look different, you know, from
manufacturer to manufacturer, depending on you know what the features
that they want to prioritize completely.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Yeah, it's not just the look and feel. There are
certain features. If you're a retailer has a loyalty program
or a tech support offering, will integrate that into the
OS as well, so that again, if you're a user
who subscribes to that program or bought that warranty, everything
should be in one place. It shouldn't feel as fragmented
as it is now.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, that's that's really interesting. I do want to talk
a little bit more about you know, the user experience.
I feel like that's something that often kind of gets
left out of the conversation when it comes to talking
about CTV, but it feels so vital to me. I mean,
you know, as a user of these you know technologies myself,
I often find the experience frustrating. How are you guys
(14:19):
kind of approaching that side of things now?
Speaker 3 (14:21):
I appreciate you pointing that out, because you know, all
the data that we have shows that users are not
very particular about what OS they choose, and in most
cases it's downstream from screen size and price of their
television and the OS. This sort of comes along for
the ride, and I think to your point, that shows
that we're not doing enough to build amazing user interfaces
(14:44):
for folks. So one of our core principles first is
that we're going to be content first, meaning we're partnering
with all the publishers, and because we're an objective partner,
they're willing to give us access to their catalogs that
they don't necessarily give to other OS's where we can
pull out individual shows, individual movies and present those two
on the core home screen versus having you have to
(15:06):
click into every app to try and find something. So
that shows up in something like I mentioned before is
our continue Watching feature, where we're able to pull from
every app that you have see it in one place,
and we've seen that be at least sixty percent of
the time that you turn on your television, you're going
right there because you're either picking up the next episode
or you're halfway through a movie or anything like that.
(15:28):
Beyond that, it also means that we can be objective
in what we recommend to you at any given time.
So obviously a big problem that everyone's been trying to
solve is live sports. Right there is incredible urgency to
turn on your television and find the game that you want.
It's increasingly becoming harder to find it as sports rights
have been divvied up in eighteen thousand different places. But
(15:48):
by building a content first user interface, we'll be able
to give that to you directly in the largest possible square,
right when you turn on your television, and then in
those minority of situations where you don't know what you
want to watch, we'll be able to give you the
best recommendations possible by both learning about you ourselves, but
also by pulling out the recommendations from each one of
(16:08):
your apps. Obviously, partners like Netflix have invested a tremendous
amount in trying to give you the best recommendations possible.
They've built very advanced algorithms, so it's Disney, HBO max
all them down the line. There's no reason that you
shouldn't be able to benefit those on the home screen
as well. So it's really a mix of being able
to do our own recommendations but also marry them with
(16:30):
all the amazing work that the apps do individually.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
That's interesting. You know, you mentioned that you know, os
often kind of doesn't make a difference for consumers. It
sounds like something that that Sorry, it sounds like that's
something that you guys want to change. You know, how
do you think we can kind of get to a
place where consumers are thinking more about that?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yeah, I mean the first the first step is to
expose it to them, right, So the first step still
is solving the commercial and customization wants and desires of
these own OEMs and retailers so that we get a
shot at showing them what a differentiated user experience can
look like. But a real sign of success down the line,
and this will take multiple years. Is that users start
(17:13):
to have a preference, and then if there's televisions who
have equal specs of size and costs and one of
them is powered by a ventur that they're choosing that
over the other option. So we'll look at that down
the line. We won't get there right away, because again
we have to build this audience. We have to show
them both what we think an OS can be today
and what it should be in the future.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
I'm curious, are there any particular features that you know
that consumers are looking for in smart TVs that they're
maybe not getting right now.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
We've definitely seen a lot of interest and in our
research surveys direct interest in our continue watching feature, something
that truly can bring in every single app. Certainly. Another
one is the live sports feature, where again we're able
to go across all the apps that you have subscriptions
or access to and pull out the exact match that
(18:01):
you want at that particular time. Search is another one
for sure, where if you're searching for something that maybe
a show that may sit the new episodes in one
place the old episodes in another, that we can help
you sort that through. And then something like a unified
watch list is really interesting to folks too, where you
know you're obviously favoriting things or putting things on a
(18:23):
list in each individual app, but you're not necessarily able
to pull them all together. And that's something we're also
able to do.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
I don't want to name any names, but I am
often kind of appalled by how bad the search function
often still is on some of these interfaces.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Yeah, I mean it's hard technically, and again it takes
an integration in a close partnership with the publishers because
they need to give you access to what their catalogs
are and a lot of the metadata that comes along
with it, and the entitlements you subscribe to this tier
and not that tier to really build a corpus that
you can build a great search experience on. And I
(18:58):
empathize with the publishers because again they need to existentially
be onto these platforms, but they also don't want to
help their direct competitors by giving them access to the
catalog or access to engagement information about which shows are working,
because that same os as another division that is bidding
against them for that next big show or that next
big sports right, so that puts us in a position
(19:20):
again where we can build trust publishers or able to
give us access to that information that they probably wouldn't
for other partners to build a better user experience.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't want to leave the
retail side of things out of this conversation. You know,
you have mentioned tariffs a couple of times. You know,
I'm curious what the kind of the economic climate right
now how that's been impacting some of your conversations with
manufacturers and retailers.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah, I mean it's it's tough. I sympathize with them
because there's so much uncertainty and each component that goes
into a television you're looking at down to the penny,
the system on a CHIPI conductor that you're putting in there,
the memory, the motherboard. Getting it all packaged up, getting
it chipped over is an incredibly complicated challenge that both
(20:10):
manufacturers and to your point, retailers have to deal with.
And so especially post Walmart and Visio, every retailer, whether
they're national or regional, is looking at their television strategy again.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, just to clarify, Walmart acquired smart TV manufacturer Visio
late last year.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Correct, Walmart's a longtime partner of ours, and it's been
really interesting to work with them to help stand that up.
And every other retailer is also thinking about their strategy there.
What's amazing about what we offer that we didn't necessarily
have in market even when that acquisition went down, was
we can give retailers pretty much one hundred percent of
(20:48):
the value that Walmart's getting from Visio without having to
acquire their own OS because of the customization we bring,
because of the tie ins to whatever ad business they
already have, and put them in a place where, again
they could overnight flip a switch and basically have their
own in house OS and all the benefits that it brings.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Interesting. So, you know, I'm curious, you know, your thoughts
on Ventro's prospects for adoption. You know, I know that
some observers have said that you guys kind of face
an uphill battle just because of how crowded the market is,
things like that. What's kind of your response to that.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Yeah, I mean, they're right, it is a crowded market,
and they're right that these upgrade cycles take a while. Right.
Number one, people usually buy a new television once every
five to seven years at this point, and a lot
of the OEMs and retailers have relationships with the existing
OSS that come up once a year, every three years,
(21:42):
every five years, or whatnot. So fitting into all of
those is a challenge, but one that we're handling really well.
I think what's really interesting that people are not necessarily
appreciating is how uncertain the OS space feels. For the
first time in a while, we're seeing some of the
larger players like Google, just to call one out, who
(22:04):
is actively reducing the size of the team working on
Google TV and Android TV. I think most of the
major OSS are very publicly reevaluating their investment in it.
And that's often because if you're part of a big
tech company and you're a project like this, you're the
one hundred and twenty seventh most important product at that
company at any given time, and if somebody who is
(22:25):
more important sits down in your product meeting, you're doing
what they're doing to build your fast service or to
build your AD product or your AI product or whatever
it is. And so I think there's going to be
a lot more space than people appreciate in the future
that I think we're well positioned to capture. But even
in the meantime, we're fitting into the normal cycles and
offering something that's commercially more advantageous and from a brand
(22:48):
perspective more advantageous. So we're in a really nice spot.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Yeah. Interesting, it'll be. I think it'll be fascinating to follow.
I hope to continue following it and covering it. Has
it been doing?
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Best to luck to you guys, appreciate it, Thanks so much,
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Be sure to leave us a review at Apple Podcasts
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