LONDON — In the last couple of years, the UK’s leading pay-TV and telco provider, Sky, has become an active investor in ad-tech startups, as it looks to improve its multi-platform offering to advertisers.
Investments have included $5m in to native ad tech company Sharethrough in 2014, and, recently, a $10 million round in to DataXu. Now the company is seeing some of the first synergies from its Sharethrough commitment.
“Sharethrough will have been integrated, by the end of this month (May), across all of our app estates, so we’ve got really sympathetic and empathetic ad experiences across our Sky News app, Sky Sports all, all of those sorts of things,” Jamie West, the deputy MD of Sky’s Sky Media ad sales division, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
Sharethrough’s technology helps advertisers present messages in mobile apps that resemble the content users are already browsing.
That leaves DataXu, the Boston-headquartered, data-driven marketing analytics company. How will Sky harness the outfit run by CEO Mike Baker?
“DatXu is really about being a key enabler for our product Sky AdVance (which) takes our unique understanding of TV consumption and applies that in to the digital estate, allowing us to serve sequential and frequency-capped campaigns across multiple platforms,” West adds. “DataXu’s part in that is to act as our demand-side platform to enable us to buy inventory off Sky’s platform.”
West says Sky realized a few years ago it couldn’t build everything itself, so set up a San Francisco outpost to spot opportunities to work with startups. Now West says the company is looking globally for best-in-class vendors in which to take strategic stakes, to go on giving it an ad advantage.
This video was produced in London as part of our Addressable & Advanced TV Summit hosted by Sky Media and presented by FreeWheel and Invidi. Please visit this page for additional segments from the event.