This startup watches TV to make ads smarter

Photo credit: Pixabay

Here’s how television ads have worked until now: there’s a big football game on television, so the assumption is that a bunch of young men are probably watching. That means advertisements about beer and cool cars. If an early morning talk show is on, definitely push those diaper commercials. Late night cartoons? Show off cheap deals at fast food restaurants for those with the munchies.

That type of ad targeting misses the mark for a lot of people, which then wastes money and results in more switched channels than anything else. And even if people are responding positively to ads, it’s hard to track how many of them saw a commercial for Taco Bell and showed up at a restaurant because of it.

Here’s how they might work in the future, though: you’re watching a cricket match and right when things get a little dull, you get a notification on your phone to buy your favorite team’s jersey. If you cross it out, you’ll never see that sort of pop-up again, but if you click on it, it’ll be marked down as a yes and the next time you’re watching a cricket match, you might get a push to buy a hat with a team logo.

Advertising can be an immersive experience, with access to things you want right when you want them – and with a smartphone in every person’s hand, it’s easier than ever to figure out what those things are. That’s what Sandipan Mondal, Deepak Baid, and Sajo Mathews, are betting on with Zapr.

Zapr partners with app companies to collect data from different signals that float around in the air when televisions are playing in the vicinity. Then, it analyzes these signals by observing what viewers are watching, when they change channels, and how often advertisements get skipped. It then uses this data to create unique “media profiles” for each person.

Media profiles are presented to different businesses in the form of solutions, like tweaking brand campaigns so they show up at better times, or pushing app notifications during certain prime time television slots.

This is not a small market – Sandipan pegs the global advertising industry anywhere between US$200-300 billion. Within that, accurate statistics on television are hard to come by, but there are a recorded 1.81 TVs per household and India has the fourth highest number of television broadcast stations in the world.

I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a market primed for big data.

“We have our technology distributed across millions of devices, and check intermittently whether media is playing in the vicinity,” says Sandipan. ”Every time we get a few signals, we figure out what type of content it is, and over time we build out a profile for an individual and get them an identity.”

Zapr grows as it’s fed more information, and Sandipan explains that their product is just getting better – to the point where they can analyze the tiniest millisecond of a television viewer’s life.

Many hats

Photo credit: PTWO.

The use cases for a startup like Zapr are endless.

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