Ad-Supported Streamer Crackle Joins IRIS.TV Contextual Video Marketplace

Amidst a growing market around contextual CTV advertising, premium ad-supported video streamer Crackle will be adding its video inventory to a contextual video marketplace run by IRIS.TV, a video platform focused on data and research.

The deal will offer transparency for marketers to buy Crackle inventory, contextually targeting Crackle’s connected TV audiences. Contextual video advertising enables marketers to reach audiences while viewers are watching relevant programming.

IRIS.TV has some 7,000 publishing clients extending across CTV and premium digital video platforms, totaling some 20 billion addressable video impressions.

Richie Hyden, co-founder and chief operating officer of IRIS.TV, says the company started off as a big search and recommendation engine for digital video for publishers. It then moved to contextual video data when it realized “context and brand-safety data had never migrated from page-level analysis -- which dominated display [advertising] -- to video-level analysis.”

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Hyden says: “The simple missing piece is that the URL for video is not passed from seller to buyer. And therefore the buyers are blind.” This lack of transparency has caused measurement, planning, and fraud issues.

Video data from publishers now goes to IRIS.TV data partners who contextually segment the data into categories and definitions.

Those partners include Oracle Data Cloud, Comscore, GumGum, Zefr and Spectrum Media Services. “We integrate our data back into the publisher's ad server so that every time a consumer clicks play on a video, it pings our system.”

Earlier this year, IRIS built an onboarding ramp for contextual and brand-safety data for partners to connect with publishers' videos. “We [then] service our data partners definitions to the advertising ecosystem,” Hyden says.

For example, he says, Nike may want to target sports content verified by its data partner. Hyden says: “In the same way LiveRamp is the vehicle for audience data, we are the vehicle of contextual and brand-safety data in video.”

One estimate from Verified Market Research says the global contextual advertising market is projected to reach $453.52 billion by 2026, growing at a compounded annual rate of 18%

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, Inc.owns a majority stake in Crackle Plus, which runs ad-supported, video-on-demand networks Crackle and Popcornflix formed with Sony Pictures Television.

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