Tim Rowe:
Welcome back to another episode of OOH Insider. In case you missed last week, look back with Ravi Patel, founder of SWYM.AI. They are a supply path optimization company. You're going to learn a lot about how Swim and specifically the practice of SPO is being implemented on the DSP and the SSP side. So go back and check that out. Looking ahead to next week, we have Jeremy Sunny from Twitter, from LinkedIn fame. He is a favorite character. If you're a follower of Jeremy on those platforms, he's also the founder of Daypark. which is a DSP and we'll talk about how they have moved through the DSP evolution to AI media buying and now some really interesting work in the B2B ABM space. So make sure to be subscribed so you don't miss that conversation. There are only six weeks left. to the Placer AI Discover event on December 10th at Chelsea Pier in New York City. Got a special way for you to save 70% on registration. Go to theOOHinsider.com. There's gonna be a big banner across the top. You cannot miss it. Tickets are only $3.99, which is wildly reasonable, but if you go to theOOHinsider.com, there's a promo code there, OOHinsider70, which will save you 70% at registration, bring the price down to like 120 bucks. So I will see you there. Go to the website, theohinsider.com, take advantage of the 70% off Discover event there in New York City. Now for today's conversation with Jonathan Moffey, founder of Streamr AI, an AI platform that is unlocking the ever precious long tail demand for CTV publishers. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Hey Tim, great to be here. It's going to be a good conversation. I've been really impressed with the platform. You're working with a network that's near and dear to my heart, ReachTV. But what's unique about Streamr I think is that it's really kind of more of a show than tell. Are you cool with like, just, could we do it like a live demo episode? Would that be, that'd be okay with you?

Jonathan Moffie: We do it live. That's what we do. Every sales pitch, everyone knows we're doing it live. So let's, uh, let's get into it.

Tim Rowe: Let's do it. Let's do it. I love it. I love when we can do a live demo because the product works.

Jonathan Moffie: Yeah, exactly. So we launched in beta back in March and basically we wanted to build the easiest way to advertise on streaming TV, leveraging Gen AI for the creatives and AI powered campaign setup. So let's just get into it. A fan favorite. We have Nobu Malibu out here. You just search for your business or enter the URL. You hit generate ad with AI and in a few seconds.

Tim Rowe: So for the listening audience, we're actually on Streamr. We're watching an AI generated commercial.

Jonathan Moffie: Yep. And then you can come in, you can edit it.

Tim Rowe: So I was just going to point out, like all you had to do was search the name of the business and the address, like, like a Google map search. You just looked up the business.

Jonathan Moffie: Yep. Yeah. It's Google maps, powered search or enter your website URL, and then you have your commercial. You could come in. If you didn't like a certain frame, you can swap it out. We have an image service that pulls in more. frames. That's a really nice shot of the sushi. You can change the script in real time, make it shorter, make it longer.

Tim Rowe: AI is actually writing a script for the spot.

Jonathan Moffie: Correct. Yep. We also support over 32 different languages and hundreds of more dialects. And then Once you are ready, you just hit launch on TV, choose your budget. We'll forecast your reach based on your budget. And a cool thing, because we know the context of the business, we automatically append contextually relevant audience segments to target on your campaign. Find dining lovers, gourmet cuisine, luxury travelers, and then you just enter your credit card. You hit launch on TV and you're good to go.

Tim Rowe: Where's my ad actually playing? Do I know?

Jonathan Moffie: All right. So let's, let's get into that. So obviously we've reduced the friction of launching and generating your commercial and then launching down to the bone for our initial beta launch. We actually integrated where you can launch on Netflix, Hulu, et cetera. We've launched campaigns with law firms. This fitness influencer is kind of the pinnacle case study. He reached out all excited. He was able to generate his commercial in 30 seconds from his smartphone and launch it all within 30 seconds while training a customer at the gym. So that was the initial product. But what we're really focused on now, so you mentioned reach TV earlier, when we were launching in beta back in March, we had a DSP reach out and they said, Hey, this is really cool. However, I don't want to push our advertisers to your platform, but five to six times per week, we do have advertisers who want to try streaming, but don't have a video ad. So do you guys have an API we can use? And of course I said, yes, even though at the time we did not. But our engineering team is awesome. So we built an API very quickly and we were off to the races with what we now call Gen AI solutions, which is basically white labeling our Gen AI tech for broadcasters, ad tech platforms, and agencies to kind of accelerate democratizing CTV ad buying. So you mentioned Reach TV. And I'll get out of demo mode soon. I could demo all day. This is ReachTV's ads manager that we built with them and launched in September. So this connects directly to the ReachTV airport TV screens nationwide. And they now have, which blows my mind, the easiest and most cost-effective way to buy NFL games every Sunday. ReachTV literally has live NFL games. You can go in here and if you're Shake Shack, in LaGuardia that you can advertise extremely easily on the NFL by just coming here and generating a commercial and launching. Awesome.

Tim Rowe: Love it. Thank you for the demo. Let's talk about it. It almost seems too simple. It almost seems too simple. Like I don't believe it's working. Like I see the creative. It just created something out of nothing. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense?

Jonathan Moffie: No, no, no. I should have stayed up because one of my favorite case studies, one of our first campaigns was, it was called virtual X kitchen, this ghost kitchen in Maryland. They actually are at the university of Maryland. And their quote, let me try to remember it exactly. It was like, this was dangerously easy. Like what? I almost accidentally launched a CTV campaign. So that was the goal. We really wanted to reduce the friction down to the bone.

Tim Rowe: It's like when Amazon got in trouble for that buy with one click button, like Streamr might Am I getting in trouble for, that was legitimately one of the, I use AI all day. That is easier than anything that I do from a productivity standpoint and just created a commercial and launched a CTV campaign. So that's crazy. Where did you start with this idea? Cause I know you're, you're funded through a lot of really creative, like there's AI mechanisms that you've tapped into and you've built Streamr in a really smart way. I would love to understand what was the problem you started with and how did we get from there to here?

Jonathan Moffie: Yeah. Yeah. So the problem was so in a previous role, we built an ads manager and the goal was to make it extremely simple. And this was building an ads manager for Loop TV while I was at Orca. And basically we started meeting with all of their businesses and they all had the same two problems. You'd get them ready to launch their campaign, these small businesses. And they'd say, I would say to them, all right, ready? Upload your video ad. And they'd say, well, I don't have a video ad. We'd say, no worries. We will, we have the cheapest creative services, you know, 250 bucks. And they'd say, well, I only wanted to spend like 500 bucks. And you say, all right, well, we'll just give you a credit. We'll come back in a week, create the ad for you, and then we'll upload it and launch. So then we go create the ad. We come back, we have another meeting. They upload the ad and then they get into the campaign manager and we made it 10 steps to advertise. All the competitors, all name names, Vibe, TV Scientific, Mountain, even Meta are like 20 plus steps. They're all like 20 plus steps. So we made it 10 steps. We're like, this is the easiest thing on earth. And then the business owner would get in and they'd go, what the hell is a DMA? And I'd go, you're right. What the hell is a DMA to a real pizza shop owner? They have no idea.

Tim Rowe: That is a real question there. Joe's pizza. Doesn't matter anyway. That's what a DMA is.

Jonathan Moffie: Exactly. It made us realize what if we used Gen AI to solve the creative problem? This was the time when like mid journey was really taking off and build creatives and then use AI also to do all the campaign setup, the zip code targeting near your retail location, automatically target the relevant audience segments, because we know the context of your business and just all you have to do is generate the ad. put your credit card info in, choose your budget, and launch on TV. So that's what we did. And like I said, we launched in beta in March. And then since then, we've realized we're better suited to license our tech to larger platforms who already have a big sales team, a big marketing budget, direct relationships, so we can kind of accelerate. The whole goal of all of this was to get millions of SMBs from search and social into CTV to start buying CTV. There's more performance here and we need more advertisers.

Tim Rowe: Love it. And we're enabling that by giving tools and technology to the backbone of the long tail, local sales, account executives are out there pounding pavement, pulling doors and actually selling this. And now clients are going to be able to activate in a, in a really simple way. What are the challenges from a publisher standpoint?

Jonathan Moffie: Yeah, so challenges. I mean, really selling Gen AI and getting the advertiser comfortable with Gen AI is a hurdle that we've discovered. It's scary. Like you said, we've almost made it scary how easy it is. They're like, it can't be real. It can't actually be going on TV. It's too easy. So getting past that hurdle and showing them the results. And that's why we have really awesome ROAS, return on ad spend powered reporting that the customer gets. And we show them, so we'll automatically add a branded QR code to every creative. We'll show them QR code scans in the reporting. We have a IP address tracking pixel that they can add to their website and we'll show them site visitors that have been driven as a result. We show them the zip code level performance, the channel level performance, and we make sure they're really comfortable with the metrics. It's extremely important. At the end of the day, you want to drive more ROAS. for your business than you spent on the campaign if you're a small business owner. So that's kind of the, obviously the goal.

Tim Rowe: Mission critical. So really it sounds like full funnel measurement, zip level lift. We can look at kind of top of funnel. We look at website visits as kind of a middle funnel metric and QR scans is really that bottom funnel. We know not everyone's going to scan it, but it's representative of. the greater population of an action taking place. So that sounds pretty powerful for any advertiser. You know, we see some premium publishers on here, Netflix, Hulu. How are those sorts of pubs being incorporated into this whole ecosystem?

Jonathan Moffie: Our initial product Streamr.ai, we still do run campaigns. We have some law firms and a couple of coffee shops and car dealerships. that really have seen great results. So they have always on budgets, but it's not our priority. Our priority is licensing our gen AI tech like reach TV. Just a few months ago, we launched stir the fast service, their own gen AI powered ads manager. And we have a few really interesting launches coming up in November. Uh, we, again, we still run campaigns there and that's connected via Xander, but it's not our main focus.

Tim Rowe: Who was the company that you just mentioned is launching?

Jonathan Moffie: So we launched Stir this week, the fast service that was owned by Sinclair. I think Sinclair is still a minority owner. Stirr is a fast service. I think they launched a few years ago by Sinclair. It was a Sinclair product. So they had a lot of local, all the Sinclair local TV stations and a catalog of VOD content. They've since sold off the business to this great group of entrepreneurs who are kind of re-imagining Stirr. And they're going to actually relaunch the product in 2025 with a lot of AI powered UI UX features. So they saw. an AI powered ads manager as a great extension to their business.

Tim Rowe: It would seem like with what you've built and having obviously API plugs into all of these publishers and all of these customers that there could be visions of a, of a future stitching all this together. Do you have greater plans to bring together a Streamr ecosystem or is the, is the vision to stay, Hey, we're going to license the tech and enable the growth of everybody else. Do you have. Any visions of a future like that?

Jonathan Moffie: We mainly integrate at the ad server level. We have five integrations already. Definitely see a world where we can basically stitch a kind of marketplace together where if any of the publishers that have their own Gen AI powered ads manager need like a campaign extension, they can't fulfill all the impressions for a campaign. They might have a preferential extension with another publisher on the platform. So definitely in the works, but right now we're so laser focused on launching these new customers. And we just rolled out two weeks ago, Gen AI 2.0. So our creatives, the one that you saw, we just demoed actually already got a lot better. And you can actually demo that for yourself. We like to make things free and frictionless at Streamr.ai slash pro. And yeah, the creative is already significantly better.

Tim Rowe: So that's 2.0. 2.0 is out. We, we showed everyone 1.0 in the beginning. We're going to make sure that everyone has a link to 2.0 so you can play with it. And if for no other reason than like to be playing with AI, to, to see what it's capable of. And if you haven't yet started to, this is a great place to start. It's something that I did was I was, I was doing. I was using Streamr to build creatives for car dealerships that I used to manage as a, as an account manager at an agency. I used to have to do TV shoots for them. So it was really cool to see how quickly AI was able to generate a creative that was Mostly good enough. Like, is it a $5,000 TV shoot? No, but also we didn't need to spend $5,000 on a TV shoot and we could just put that towards working media. How about that? How about that idea? So I think that what you're working on is a really important problem to solve. Thank you for. Working on it. Thank you for, for helping us to connect some of the play space, DOOH, that CTV convergence that we've talked a lot about here. Jonathan, if folks do want to learn more, I know we've talked about it. Streamer.ai it's S T R E A M R.ai. There's no extra E after the M. So it's just really, uh, it's that simple. We will link to those things. Where do folks get in touch with you if they want to connect with you directly? Give them the Latin long. How do they get in touch?

Jonathan Moffie: Yeah. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I do a weekly newsletter trying to, you know, sometimes it's definitely just pumping our own bag. but also I like to kind of opine on industry trends, et cetera. And then on X, I've tried to revamp my X presence. I was kind of dormant for many years while I was stuck in big tech, but I'm trying to revamp X. LinkedIn, I've done a little bit more work for a lot longer. So yeah, either one of those places.

Tim Rowe: All right. This is going to be like a… A couple of weeks of X guests, so we will, uh, we'll make sure to link to all the socials, all the handles, all of the links and things that we've talked about here today will be in the show notes, nicely, neatly organized. Jonathan, thinking into the future, you're working directly with AI every single day. What do you think changes over the next 12 to 18 months? What's the most significant impact that AI has on advertising in the next year and a half, do you think?

Jonathan Moffie: All right, so I'm going to do a little bag pumping, but I will tell you it's going to be pump. We're going to tease it before the end of the year. We're going to tease it and then it's going to be live in Q1. So I just said we rolled out Gen AI 2.0. We've already been working on Gen AI 3.0. And what that means is, so everyone has seen Runway ML, Luma AI. They've probably heard of OpenAI, Sora, these Gen AI video generators. Very cool. Very fun to work with. The reality is they're kind of like too surreal. Like you just want a commercial for your car dealership. As you said, you don't need the car to be flying out of space with like dogs and cats raining from the sky. So we've actually been working with them. these different partners with early API access to make real business commercials with Gen AI video models. And our next iteration of our creative is going to include that. And as you said earlier, it's not a $1,000 commercial. This next version will be, it's going to be worth just as much as doing a shoot. It's really going to be generative.

Tim Rowe: That's pretty incredible. Something that might be a little bit in the weeds for some of the listeners, but indulge us here. Cause I'm curious, how are you solving for the challenge of the uncanny valley? And for folks that don't know what that is, that's the whole emotion that you had watching the polar express where it didn't quite feel human, but also there was something off about it. That's that's that feeling. That's that kind of primal instinct. How are you solving for that in gen three?

Jonathan Moffie: The main thing we've been doing working with these models is actually paring back what they're doing, simplifying things. Like if it's a coffee shop, you just want the coffee to steam and you want to show a motion of people coming in and out. But we avoid like. We're still avoiding fingers and little things that do trip up AI. So we're purposely avoiding things that we know are kind of AI gotchas. And we're just making subtle changes to make it a real kind of live video, not insane, you know, rockets in outer space coffee shop, just a regular coffee shop. You could see yourself going into a busy Manhattan.

Tim Rowe: good enough versus some sort of theatrical production that is built in outer space. Love it. Love it. It makes a ton of sense. Just like a real commercial. Real, just a real commercial. I think that that's cool. I am, I'm excited to play with 2.0. It'll be linked in the show notes so that you can too. And we will be subscribed for 3.0. Looking forward to that. Jonathan, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with a little bit of news. If you're listening to this and thinking, I need that, I need what Streamr AI has. I want to unlock the long tail. I want to create my own self-serve ad buying experience to give access to local, small, medium sized businesses, tier two and tier three agencies. If you want to unlock the long tail demand for your DOOH network, Visit sellmoredo.com, sellmoredooh.com. There you'll be able to book time with myself and my team. You'll answer a couple of questions about your network and we will get you started on your journey to working with Streamr AI, Jonathan and his team. Visit sellmoredo.com.

Tim Rowe: If you're ready to unlock the long tail for your scaled DOOH network, that's the place to go. That's the first step to take. Sellmoredooh.com and we will get you started today. Now back to the show.

Tim Rowe: And we're back. We're talking with Jonathan Moffitt. He's the founder of Streamr AI. They are unlocking long tail demand for CTV publishers. So we thought we'd talk a little bit of CTV news. The IAB is rolling out what they're calling Ad Format Idol. And it's what it sounds like an American Idol style roadshow to establish CTV measurement standards. What do you think of that? Good, bad, hard seems challenging. What's your take?

Jonathan Moffie: It's certainly hard, but we are very excited about the ad format innovations going on in the space. So obviously we are fully focused on Gen AI proper mid-roll full screen commercials. However, we've already had a lot of great conversations with folks like Reach TV. They have like an always on L-bar where mainly it's editorial content. like a ticker scores, tickers, et cetera. Guess what also can satisfy a lot of LBAR demand? Gen AI demand. So we are talking to them about, you know, bringing on more SMBs into the new LBAR formats, squeezebacks, et cetera. So look for more ad formats coming from Streamr in 2025 as well.

Tim Rowe: Love that part of the focus of the ad format idle roadshow is to do exactly that. Set standards. How do we describe the new types of CTV ad formats within the bid stream? Love it. Looking forward to more on that. And the second piece is out of ad exchanger. It's incredibly relevant to the entirety of today's conversation. That is 25% of CTV is only available with linear TV. Two impacts on CTV buying. Blurs the lines between linear and CTV. Is it really CTV yet? I don't know. Potentially the limits, uh, some of that transition and really slows programmatic adoption to it, which are two of the things that the Zoom are solving for specifically. How do you, how do you feel hearing that 25% of CTV only available with linear TV considering your mission?

Jonathan Moffie: So the linear opportunity is huge and all the linear guys that are in our sales pipeline, you know who you are. Let's close these deals. These guys are not moving fast enough. I think linear is an amazing opportunity because they have these great regional sales teams. that we're looking to arm with Gen AI with self-serve. And then they can actually take an SMB commercial and run it on their linear channels and their fast service or their fast channels that they have. So we're having active talks with everyone you could imagine in the linear space. And we want to add this as an incremental revenue line for them. We're close. You guys know who you are. Let's close those deals. What do we need to do? Steak dinners? What do we need?

Tim Rowe: Close those deals. Come on. The creative is solved. The self-service is so easy. It's scary. I don't know what else you need to hear, but you've listened to the end. So thank you. Thanks for tuning in, Jonathan. Thank you for being here. It's been an insightful conversation. We're really excited about the rapid advances of AI, how it's influencing media, and we're excited to stay subscribed to your story. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And if you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit. As always, make sure to smash that subscribe button. See you next time.