• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 13, 2017

Walt Horstman, a pioneer of programmatic TV advertising, has joined TiVo Corp. as SVP/GM of analytics and advertising, a role that will put him in charge of both the data and the advertising markets that TiVo helps make and influence.

Horstman -- who is best known as president of AudienceXpress, a unit of Visible World he helped found that is now part of Comcast Corp.’s humongous ad technology stack -- plans to bring the same “SSP,” or supply-side platform logic that he created there to TiVo. 

SSP will develop data, technology and advertising application that enable suppliers of TV audience inventory to derive more market value than they would without it.

To do that, Horstman built a platform at AudienceXpress that served the needs of both the demand-side as well as the supply-side, by enabling advertisers to more precisely target the mixes of audiences they wanted to reach on television.

Unlike AudienceXpress, which worked exclusively with local cable TV advertising inventory, Horstman will utilize TiVo’s platform to do the same thing for national programming networks and the advertisers they sell to.

“It’s an exciting opportunity to be moving to the national media providers, and of course, to be expanding into those agencies and marketers, as well,” he said in a briefing prior to this morning’s announcement.

Horstman calls TiVo’s stack an “audience management platform” in the sense that it has to be neutral in terms of how it works for both buyers and sellers to identify the audiences they are trying to reach, but he acknowledges that its purpose is to function more like an SSP in terms of increasing the yield for suppliers by enhancing the value of their audiences to buyers.

While most big national TV suppliers have created their own audience data-based targeting systems, they generally are optimizing and pushing their own audiences. A big advantage of TiVo’s system is that it optimizes audience reach across all suppliers -- cable and broadcast -- based on the behaviors of consumers in its set-top universe of millions of installed TiVo device households.

Horstman’s goal is to develop better and more sophisticated ways for both buyers and sellers to leverage those data and insights to facilitate more TV audience buys that perform for both sides.

He will be competing not only with the internal audience-targeting systems of major TV providers, but with a cadre of new and emerging TV audience targeting platforms, including so-called “connected TV” aggregators like Samba TV, as well as audience and inventory aggregators, such as Simulmedia, that are also using technology, data and unique insights about the value of television audiences to create more market value.

Unlike some of those market makers, TiVo does not take a position or principal ownership of any inventory, and licenses its data and applications to buyers and sellers based on a software-as-a-service model.

While it is supply-focused in terms of yield, Horstman says his goal is to develop ways for the demand side to extract more value through proprietary insights that enable their brands to reach audiences that perform better for them.

In his new role, Horstman has responsibility for three key assets at TiVo: the advanced viewership data from its highly regarded audience analytics platform, the audience management platform enabling buyers and sellers to trade off of it, and TiVo’s own advertising inventory on the electronic programming guides used by its millions of users.

He says his goal is to leverage all three to develop better ways of unlocking insights about how TV advertising can perform better by reaching the right audiences.

“At AudienceXpress I spent a great deal of time building a best-in-class data analytics, optimization and inventory management system. What excites me most about TiVo is the predictive ability of the advanced data assets we have. That’s a real differentiator for us.”