COLOGNE — SpotX has come a long way since its launch more than a decade ago.
Just ask Mike Shehan. He co-founded the company as a self-serve off-shoot of another company he was at.
Acquired by European broadcast group RTL in full last year, now Shehan is speaking from a vantage point at which he has seen tremendous growth. But the SpotX CEO feels like the whole industry is about to experience a whole lot more.
“If you looked at Spot X two years ago, we had no [ad] inventory in OTT, it was very nascent,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But we started two or three years ago entering that space. Today, now 40% of our spend globally is through OTT, and actually a majority of that is via the big TV.
“No-one knows how big this market could be, but if we’d know that the linear market is $80 billion, I think it’s anyone’s guess that CTV or OTT could be say $10 billion in the next couple of years, $20 billion, it could be even more depending on that continued adoption of OTT by the consumer.”
That seems to stand in good stead any company offering technology for buying digital video and over-the-top TV ads, as SpotX does – though the market continues to swirl with competition and consolidation.
One of SpotX’s key strategies has been diversifying out of its native US market, starting with investment by RTL and, later, outright acquisition. North America now pulls in 60% of its revenue, but Europe represents 35% of the remainder.
The company sees market traction especially in Italy, Nordics, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.
But that doesn’t mean Shehan isn’t seeing growth at home, too.
“Last year, we started seeing in the fall, we started seeing all these big spikes in [ad] calls and we’re like, ‘Why are we seeing this?’,” he explains.
“It was football, it was American football. It was college football, it was NFL football. We were seeing calls of 250-300,000 concurrent users where we’re just getting slammed because people were actually watching those games now on their mobile devices or the other Roku device. That’s just so cool to be part of.”
This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo. Please find more videos from the series here.