Welcome to the Martech Matrix, where we delve into the dynamic world of Connected TV (CTV) advertising. Hosted by Sean Simon, alongside industry experts Dan Larkman, CEO of Keen’s Digital, and Rick Egan, owner of Riviera Marketing, we explore the challenges and opportunities in the rapidly evolving CTV landscape. From fragmented platforms to innovative solutions, our discussions aim to provide clarity and actionable insights for brands navigating this exciting channel. Join us as we cut through the noise and uncover the strategies that drive real results in CTV advertising.

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Takeaways

1. CTV is experiencing rapid growth, but it comes with challenges.
2. Brands are increasingly investing in CTV as part of their marketing budget.
3. Data alone is not enough; understanding infrastructure is key.
4. Incrementality is essential for measuring the effectiveness of CTV campaigns.
5. Brands often struggle to identify their return on investment in CTV.
6. The CTV landscape is fragmented, leading to confusion for buyers.
7. Expertise in CTV can help brands avoid pitfalls and optimize performance.
8. Amazon’s role as a DSP raises concerns about data privacy and targeting.
9. The future of CTV will see a focus on measurement and trust-building.
10. Mid-market brands have significant opportunities in the CTV space.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to CTV and Its Challenges

03:08 The Current State of the CTV Ecosystem

05:45 Understanding Data and Infrastructure in CTV

08:45 Brand Frustrations and Challenges in CTV

12:00 Identifying Reliable CTV Providers

14:34 Incrementality and Proving Value in CTV

17:42 Investment Strategies and Budget Allocation in CTV

20:42 Unique Advantages of Keen’s in the CTV Space

25:11 Navigating Audience Targeting in CTV

31:35 The Role of Amazon in Digital Advertising

37:18 Identifying Winners and Losers in CTV

42:39 Unlocking Opportunities for Mid-Market Brands

Speed Is the New Personalization: Why E-commerce Growth Starts at the Edge

Let’s be honest: if your site takes longer than three seconds to load, you’re leaving money on the table. We’ve all heard that before, but most teams still attack the problem backwards—stacking on more tools and “personalization” widgets while quietly taxing the very performance that drives conversion. In a world with 20,000+ MarTech solutions, speed has become the clearest, least controversial growth lever. No one has ever said, “That site was too fast.”

That’s the core argument behind Nostra: treat performance as a first-class product feature, not a back-office chore. Nostra’s approach flips the typical CRO playbook by optimizing the foundation first—how the browser and server connect—so every other investment (recommendations, testing, analytics, paid media) performs better.

Fix the pipe, then the pages

Most commerce sites are a blend of static and dynamic content. Images, styles, and layout frameworks are largely the same for everyone; carts, pricing, and logged-in experiences are not. Nostra’s Edge Delivery Engine sits as a Cloudflare reverse proxy between user and origin, caching the HTML “scaffold” and pushing as much logic as possible out to the edge—close to the buyer. Pixel by pixel, it decides what must come from origin and what can be served instantly from a prebuilt cache.

The result? A baseline lift in real-world speed—often 20–30%—whether you’re crawling from five seconds down to three or sharpening two seconds to one-and-a-half. That lift doesn’t just feel snappier; it compounds into better SEO (Google and ad platforms punish slow sites), higher conversion, and more efficient paid spend. Time kills deals; speed creates them.

The uncomfortable truth about “personalization”

Personalization works—when you actually recognize the shopper. On mobile Safari alone (frequently 40% of traffic), anonymous users are often “forgotten” within seven days because cookies aren’t treated as mission-critical. Nostra’s identity extension fixes that with first-party, server-set cookies at the edge. Think of Netflix: you never get logged out. With the right setup on your own domain, cookies can persist for months, even years.

Why it matters:

• Better onsite relevance: Recommendations and content improve when you can stitch behavior across visits, not just sessions.
• Cleaner measurement: A/B tests hold buckets; lifecycle tools (Klaviyo, Attentive) see the real journey; paid platforms attribute accurately beyond a week.
• Less vendor sprawl: Instead of asking every tool to hack identity, fix it once at the edge and let everything downstream benefit.

Implementation is refreshingly simple: add a DNS record or worker. If you’re on Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware), or similar platforms, there’s no heavy engineering.

Don’t forget the new crawlers

Search is changing. Beyond Google, large language models (LLMs) are already crawling and summarizing commerce sites. Many of those bots don’t render JavaScript, which means your reviews widget, FAQs, and dynamic content may be invisible to the very systems shaping buyer research. Nostra’s crawler optimization serves a fully cached, bot-ready experience—fast and readable—so both traditional search engines and LLMs see the substance, not a blank shell.

What great brands get right

The best-performing commerce teams don’t start with a target conversion rate and bolt on shiny objects. They start with a single North Star: “How do we make the experience feel instant and effortless?” Speed is customer experience. The difference between a page that paints immediately and one that stalls behind a white screen is the difference between curiosity and bounce. Nostra has measured the impact at scale—hundreds of human years reclaimed from loading spinners.

And when speed lands, the economics change. In controlled A/Bs, brands run half their traffic through the edge layer and watch revenue deltas in their own analytics. Some see double-digit conversion lifts; others simply see their RUM dashboards shift down by a second overnight. Either way, both marketing and engineering win: lower acquisition costs and fewer performance fire drills.

Where this is going

More logic is moving to the edge—performance, identity, security, even analytics signal routing. The upside isn’t just “faster pages”; it’s a more resilient, privacy-aware stack where first-party data and user experience aren’t at odds. That’s why many teams come to Nostra not to rip-and-replace, but to amplify the tools they already bought.

If you’re investing in content, media, and personalization, make sure the foundation isn’t sabotaging you. Fix speed first. Everything else gets better.

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👉 Want to dive deeper? Listen to the full conversation with Dan Larkman and Rick Egan on The MarTech Matrix Podcast.

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Sean Simon (00:01.561)
Welcome to the Martek Matrix, a blurbs production. CTV is exploding, ad spend is shifting fast, but with all that growth comes chaos, fragmented platforms, repetitive ads, wasted dollars, and buyers who don’t know what or who to trust. Today we’re cutting through the noise. I’m joined by Dan Larkman, CEO of Keen’s Digital, a tech-enabled CTV company. Dan’s team lives and breathes CTV, and they’ve built their model to fix the problems most brands run into.

Rick Egan (00:23.933)
you

Sean Simon (00:28.781)
Alongside me is my co-host Rick Egan, owner of Riviera Marketing. Rick has spent more than 20 years driving performance marketing for brands like Beyond, Overstock, and CarParts.com. And he brings deep hands-on experience in connected TV. He knows the challenges brands face because he’s lived them. Together we’ll unpack the biggest obstacles in CTV, the traps to avoid, and how companies like Keens are helping brands get real results from the channel. So let’s get into it. Dan, Rick, welcome into the Matrix.

How are you guys today?

Rick Egan (01:00.221)
I’m great, Sean. Thanks for having us.

Sean Simon (01:02.519)
Excellent. Glad to have you. All right, to kick things off, Rick, in 30 seconds or less, give us your background as it relates to CTV.

Dan Larkman (01:02.873)
Yeah, thank you for having us. I’m great. Looking forward to this conversation.

Rick Egan (01:14.269)
So my background was CTV. So I’ve been doing it for, you know, off and on for probably 10 years. You know, certainly, initially more dabbling as a small percentage of kind of my investment in that side with then last year or the last year at beyond really moving 100 % or near 100 % into CTV really because I wanted to build the

expertise with the team and really keep the focus and thought there would be a better, it was a good point to make that full on switch and move away from linear.

Sean Simon (01:48.941)
Excellent. Dan, tell us what led you to start Keen’s. What does Keen’s do and what are the benefits or where does it fit into the CTV landscape?

Dan Larkman (01:58.966)
Yeah, let’s start with who Keenz is. So we’re a CTV partner. We focus with medium enterprise growth brands. So our sweet spot is typically the medium and growth size enterprises.

that effectively where we fit is we are hands on keyboards. are tech enabled service. We’re working hand in hand with brands and then, and effectively helping them drive outcomes. So it’s always looking at some type of performance, whether that’s CPA, ROAS, visits, incremental lift, that type of stuff. And I found a Keynes in 2018, like kind of a random story, but in 2011, when I moved to the US.

I worked for a company that was all CTV, but it was in hardware. It was how to get SDKs in Samsung TVs and LGs so that you can then start using those to run streaming ads. Fast forward 2018, I kind of had seen that the CTV market was stuck. More conversations were happening. We really just had Hulu that was ads, a few other players, Netflix, everyone, most people had Prime, that type of stuff. And it was this is the direction I saw the market going in.

So decided to break off and start Keens and have a look back. It’s been a wild ride.

Sean Simon (03:19.493)
All right, well, let’s get into it and see what we can learn. Dan, CTV has become probably the hottest channel in the last five years, but there’s also lot of buyer frustration. How would you describe the current state of the ecosystem?

Dan Larkman (03:37.341)
Thriving and confusing. I think it’s probably the best way of describing it. So I think there’s a huge tailwind behind CTV. And I think, you know, we’re seeing that. you know, for brands that are on CTV, what we’re finding is their investment in CTV is increasing year on year. Right? The percent of total marketing budget is increasing year on year, which is really exciting. The reason I say it’s confusing is

We see this all the time in our industry. When one new medium appears and it starts getting traction, everyone then starts doing it. There’s, I’m not going to name them, but a direct mail company that now has CTV as an offering. You’ve got anyone who has a seat on any type of DSP offers CTV.

I joke about it, but in 2015, when all the budget was social, YouTube was a social channel. In 2025, DV360 New Fronts, it’s a CTV channel. it’s like, well, because yeah, the budgets are shifting. So I think it gets confusing for people of what is CTV? What do I need to spend on CTV? You you’ll see an ad saying you could run a TV ad for 50 bucks or $500. And you’re like, you can, but…

Are you going to get any type of data behind that to know if it’s working or not? The answer is no. Right. And so I think that’s where the confusion kind of comes in. And then we’ve got identity that’s, that’s definitely fragmented. MMMs should be used, MMMs or ghost bidding. It’s exciting. It’s kind of like, the foundations have been built. We are, we’ve built half of the first floor, but the house isn’t finished yet. That’s kind how it feels.

Sean Simon (05:25.571)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Rick, you’re right.

Rick Egan (05:27.961)
So, yeah, so I was gonna say, I think Dan, I can feel your pain as on being on the other side, on the buyer side, because I know I continue to see a higher and higher number of providers doing, like you said, direct mail, programmatic, whatever it may be coming out and saying, by the way, I can also do CT, I have a new CTV offering for you. Just put your money into that and we’ll all make it work. And I know I…

Dan Larkman (05:45.838)
Mm-hmm.

Rick Egan (05:56.987)
I think I tried a couple because I think like there were some in the affiliate space where, you know, was like, okay, well, what the heck, you know, we we can kind of try something like that. But but then I really get reached the point where that really wasn’t the way to go. I wanted to have the expertise in house and doing it and not not outsourcing it in that way. So working either directly with an agency or we’ve been eventually, you know, started working through dv 360 with some of our own media buyers directly.

Dan Larkman (05:57.838)
you

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rick Egan (06:25.724)
because I just didn’t really trust what was going to happen with the other side.

Sean Simon (06:31.637)
There’s sort of a trap right Dan so you have as a a marketing technology company or vendor you have all this data from whatever business you’re running and Then it’s hard to resist the idea of doing more with that data, right? Okay, we have all this consumer data from all these brands How else can we use it to make money? Right and I think that’s why you see companies that do one thing really well like direct mail moving into other channels like CTV but

Dan Larkman (06:40.01)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Simon (06:59.993)
I mean, talk to us about how it’s more than data, right? You need more than data to make CTV work. You need to understand the infrastructure. You need to understand how to deliver, how to measure, how to optimize the meat of the channels. Can you elaborate on that?

Dan Larkman (07:06.702)
Yeah, of course. What we do is programmatic. So I should have set the stage there. When you’re thinking about data by itself, it’s extremely valuable to be able to find the right audience to able to target.

Right? Like that’s that’s a no brainer. That’s, you know, Amazon’s biggest sales pitch is, we know the audience so we can target them. Right. the next question is if you want a single device, like identity is such a big question mark when it comes to CTV. If I’m on a single device, Meta’s data on my cell phone is great. But if I take the data of a direct mail company and I use just a basic, seem like an IP address.

The accuracy there drops off massively. know, let’s say at best it’s 50 % accurate. My rich data is now half as rich as it was when I’m targeting. just having the ability of running on a TV screen or running within TV content, it’s hugely valuable. But just the data alone without all the pipes set up, it’s not going to drive outcomes for brands. And then the next thing is

Are you actually going to get enough signals back to be able to look at the total effectiveness of it? Are we looking at it like a linear channel where it’s GRP frequencies? Or are we looking at it from a CPA role as point of view? Right. Those are two very different metrics. And do we have the ability of being able to talk through why you’ve been used to social and search, which are click environments, and we’re now moving to a multi-device non-clickable environment.

Do you have the infrastructure to be able to show the total impact, the total lift? Or it’s, we have data, I can target that data and run it that way. And I think those variables make a massive difference to really the outcome and can break through the confusion for brands.

Sean Simon (09:14.371)
Yeah, Rick, I wanted to ask you, where do you see from the brand side or agency side, where do you see brands getting burned the most or feeling uncertain about, know, CTD as they are entering that market?

Rick Egan (09:26.396)
I mean, I think the challenges on the brand side are still kind of, how do you really identify what your return is? I think the big ones are, you’re really starting with what is my return and how can I rely on the ROAS or CPA that I’m going to get from linear TV versus what I’m going to get through Meta or Google. Meta and Google, I think,

right or wrong, we’ve come to really trust what we’re gonna get from there. And I think CTV, the results that are coming through, we have a harder time tying it back in some ways. We can do incremental studies and we can do a bunch of things like that to try to triangulate it more. that’s, think the first one of, cause that really defines how much you’re going to invest into it. And then the second really,

I think, you know, then comes to once you decide, once you’re in there is what percentage of that budget should it be, you know, because if you’re, if you’re a pure performance marketer, just, just doing digital today, you’re probably 90, 95 Google meta. Um, but really to have an effective full funnel, you know, marketing approach, you need to be, you know, you, you probably need to be, you know, a lot less than that. Um, but.

that trackability and comfort level keeps people there. But I think those are the big challenges.

Sean Simon (11:00.057)
Yeah, Dan, I wanted to go back to something you said about just having the pipes isn’t enough. Obviously, if you’re a direct mail company or your core business is something other than CTV, anybody can go buy a seat at a DSP and start serving ads through it and accessing whatever that DSP offers and sort of white labeling it, right? And so how does a brand identify or understand this

Dan Larkman (11:00.622)
you

Sean Simon (11:28.175)
provider over here is just basically plugging in their DSP and weight labeling it, right? And really it’s somebody else that’s serving it. Versus what you do, which is a lot more robust in the CTV space, can you just sort of compare and contrast those approaches?

Dan Larkman (11:44.303)
Yeah, I so I think there’s, there’s another question that keeps coming up, which is what is CTV? Right. And I alluded to it little earlier, but like, do we count YouTube as CTV? Right. Most people, a lot of people do, you know, at Keen’s that’s not, we don’t really count YouTube as you as CTV, but for a slightly different reason than most people would think. But like, think, don’t, and that’s actually, but when you’re thinking about what is CTV, you know, is it just the device? Is it streaming in general? it?

TV, is it paused ads? Where does that begin and end? And I think it’s exciting because there’s so much attention in the CTV ecosystem, but there’s also now even more fragmentation than always, which let’s be real, anyone who’s been in this industry for more than five years knows that that’s the typical wave. I would say that when I think about the CTV ecosystem,

And if someone just getting a seat on a DSP, the hurdle you have is DSPs are set up to run the ads. But do you have, do you know when your ads are going to run? Are you buying remnant inventory, which the SSP is called performance inventory? It’s a lower CPM. We found that you actually get lower performance from it. Your overall CPA is slightly worse. What we found running head to head. So we do those tests. Is that what you’re going to be buying?

If you run across a DSP, are you going to be running across Twitch that’s on the TV screen? Where does that end and how much control do you have, even down to first ad pod versus last ad pod? You have a higher retention rate in the first ad pod, in the first ad within the first ad pod than the last ad within the ad pod. Well, what does that look like on second, third, fourth, fifth? We have studies to show the performance and how it declines. There’s value there.

But if you’ve got a high intent customer that you know this is your perfect audience you want to target, you want them in the first or second ad pod, right? You want the first or second ad placement in that ad pod, right? So they can’t miss you. That’s not as valuable as someone who’s similar to your audience, pretty good, but not perfect, right? There’s just a different value. And when you’re running programmatically, that’s crucial. So when I’m thinking about running a campaign, you can set up a seat, but there’s many things you need to add. So we describe…

Dan Larkman (14:05.814)
any like the DSPs we work with, we describe them, them as the freeway and we built the on-ramps. So the data providers is a data provider, great data provider that can work on not a cooky list environments as an example, cross-device companies all the way through to reporting analytics and optimizations. So all of those variables play a role. You know, the freeways there and everyone can drive on it, but not everyone has those same on-ramps. And I think that makes a huge difference.

Sean Simon (14:34.629)
Interesting. So Dan, when brands come to or agencies come to you, what do you sense is their biggest frustration in the market today or challenge that they’re facing?

Dan Larkman (14:50.262)
It’s incrementality for sure. When brands come to us, their biggest concern is everyone is telling me I need to do CTV or they’ve done CTV before and I couldn’t see the impact or I didn’t feel it. And then it’s how can we prove the value of this channel in a non-clickable environment? It’s back to that age old view conversions and click conversions back in the day with display ads.

We’re in the same position now, but there isn’t a click. So it’s all of view and it’s how does that impact? that’s, know, geo lift with things like, you know, um, Meta’s open source, geo lift that you can run through a recast or something like that, running MMMs through recast and LiftLab Measured Haus people like that to really show and prove the total impact to the brand and all paid media. So our value is just as Rick was talking about 95 % is probably going to be social and search.

Ours is what should that ratio be that really drives the best effectiveness for brands? Right? If I serve a CTV ad and they come through paid search and the conversion rate is three times higher than if they just came through paid search, that could be really valuable. Again, cost effectiveness, but it should be really valuable. Can we drive that and deliver those results? That’s how we think about it. And that’s really what makes a difference for brands. you know, it’s incrementality. It’s understanding that.

Sean Simon (16:13.791)
Is that the first thing you think about?

Rick Egan (16:17.943)
Yeah, I incrementality, he’s right. That’s the biggest piece because then you have to justify your investments. And I think what I found it beyond was our sweet spot was it should be about 12 % of our budget should be into CTV. But I still have to convince the FPNA folks and the CFO that that

Dan Larkman (16:42.19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And Rick, was going to say.

Rick Egan (16:44.399)
that that money should be going there because they’re just going to see the clickable conversions that they can measure and say, why aren’t you just putting more into PLA? Because if you put more into PLA, won’t we keep getting that return? And I tell them, no, you won’t. It will just get worse and worse the more money you put into it.

Dan Larkman (17:09.908)
hilarious. We didn’t plan this, but we tell people it’s between 10 and 15 % for outcome-based campaigns. It’s higher if you want a midfinal branding type campaign. It’s more of an investment, probably closer to 25 to 35%. But you say 12, we go between 10 and 15 % is about the sweet spot. And I think that’s one of the reasons the industry is growing so much because brands that test it, they test it with 1%, 2%.

They start seeing the outcomes and the performance and that starts increasing. And so now we’re seeing that point where we’re still not at 12%. Right. We’re still, you know, if you look at the average, we’re not north of 10%. However, it’s going in that direction. Some brands are, but overall, that’s one of the reasons that this industry is growing so much is people are realizing it’s an evergreen channel and investment should be there.

Sean Simon (17:59.005)
I’d love both your takes on why it takes so long for a brand, for a marketer to really get to that maximum capacity, right? To go from 1 % to 12 to 15 % of their budget, right? Is it because they’re used to looking and optimizing on data that’s more directly correlated to the sale and they’re having a hard time making correlations between the data? Or is there a fear that the channel isn’t working and they can’t measure it?

What do you think is driving them? And if they start off with a small percentage, is that enough to really give them enough information to invest more?

Rick Egan (18:39.514)
So I think I’ll go first if that’s okay, Dan. I think the first part, I really liked Dan’s analogy on the on-ramp piece of it. Because I think that’s a very, that’s a critical part of how you expand. When you’re, I think everybody is gonna start small. mean, that’s a nice thing about CTV is that you can, you don’t have to necessarily

Sean Simon (18:43.012)
Yeah.

Rick Egan (19:08.474)
negotiate with a network who’s going to say your minimum buy has to be a million dollars. You you can start a bit more like you can with any programmatic channel. can start with a small percentage of your budget. And then as you test and you see performance, you can keep expanding. I think the on ramps are the component that allow you to go beyond the three to 5%. I think it’s easy for anybody to spend.

three to 5 % and have the marketing folks say, yes, this is working. Because there’s always 5 or 10 % out there that nobody’s going to sweat you if you can’t tie that dollar directly back to a sale. But once it becomes 10 % of your budget, now you really have to be able to say, how can I justify this the same way I can justify my beta or Google spend?

And that’s where the sophistication starts to come in of what do your audiences look like? What’s your creative look like? How well do you know where you’re placing your media? I think knowing if I’m in the first spot or the second spot as opposed to run of network, all those things start to come into play because that’s where now you’re gonna start to see your lift in that.

you know, you’re seeing your your ROAS perform or get better in Google, and that’s your your downstream number. So now your view ROAS, you can start to feel a lot more confident in, you know, that what the number you’re seeing there, you can go, okay, well, I can trust as long as I’m staying in my view ROAS, you know, six, seven or eight, a better, I feel really confident in that. And I’m to put some more money into it, because I’m also seeing I’m not seeing degradation in my in the total

total sales that I’m driving in as well as I’m not seeing the degradation in robots on other channels.

Sean Simon (21:09.581)
Anything to add Dan?

Dan Larkman (21:10.382)
I agree. I I think that we think about it as if you’re a marketing manager, VP of marketing, even CMO, you’re going to be reporting into the CFO of why you need the budget and you need to have to justify why that budget’s coming through. If I’m looking at a social and search and I can tell you my click, rather as my click CPA, you get people justifying it. It’s very easy. Also, you know, no one gets fired for running a social campaign.

Yeah. When we run a, a CTV campaign, it’s like, do we have enough, is there enough data there? You get CPA fatigue or, or, you know, outcome fatigue to be able to prove that and use those lift studies to be able to use that as defensible to take throughout the company and be like, here is the total impact. We, we ran everything the same. added CTV in these regions and we saw a lift of X. That’s a number that any.

data person can look at and say, I know that that then means why to my overall business. Right. And I think that’s something that’s, that’s crucial. And, and I would say, I don’t think brands, I think brands have started to, but they don’t invest enough right at the beginning. And yes, I think that we’re reaching that point where it being paid more attention to. But I think that one of the hurdles that I think the industry has is a lot of tools I talked about earlier will run campaigns at $50.

$500, which is great to get your ad on the TV screen. For us, we say it’s about 300,000 impressions until we start to get to StatSig to be able to start looking at optimization. You can do the math, that’s way more than 500 bucks. And so it’s like, what can we do to really get brands to understand this is the type of investment level to then start being able to do that? And then the next thing is, what size is your brand?

If you’re giving half a percent of your marketing budget and you’re saying, well, I’m not feeling it. Well, you’re not going to see the numbers, right? You’re not, there’s no investment to see that type of growth. Um, it’s, think all of those things is why, you know, no matter who, who, who someone works with in the CTV space, you kind of want to work with either a consultant or a company that, that, that does this. So you can start looking at where are those pitfalls and what am I going to need to know when I’m investing this money in the best way to see outcomes.

Dan Larkman (23:34.686)
I think that’s, those are the kind of the pitfalls that I kind of see people in.

Sean Simon (23:39.942)
Yeah, I definitely agree. Having an expert in your core is definitely going to help you avoid some of the pain that maybe others have faced without having the expert. So in regarding those honor ramps, Dan, can you talk about what about those honor ramps makes you unique or remarkable in this space, right? Like we talked about what vendors remarkable at blurbs. What is it about those honor ramps that makes Keens oftentimes a better option for

Dan Larkman (23:49.166)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Larkman (24:05.166)
Yes, so number one, there’s tech that we’ve built for optimization to make the optimizations and push those through the DSPs. So DSP has great technology. Ours is to work collaborative with it. So we’ve got that as one of the key on ramps.

Sean Simon (24:09.905)
brand than say just going direct to a DSP or another CTV vendor.

Dan Larkman (24:34.99)
But there’s other ones. When you think about building audiences out, you can go onto the trade desk right now, the Amazon DSP, and you can select audiences that they have, right? Kind of off the rack audiences. And they’ll perform, but how much do they cost you? What went into that audience? How accurate to your own first party data is that? There’s so many variables that go into it to understand who your audience is or who you want your audience to be, right?

and how to then get an optimization engine to work towards that. Just that by itself, building those custom audiences that are really specific, the testing audiences and building those relationships directly with the audience providers, it saves money for brands because you effectively, you’re going to get a lower rate because we’re pre-negotiated rates. Then you will across the DSP like trade desk, I think if I’m correct, it’s, I would say 25 % of media up to $2.50 for the audience.

There’s nowhere close to what we’ve negotiated for audiences. Then you’ve got through to cross-survive companies, partnering with cross-survive companies that aren’t just using IP addresses to sell signal. Especially in the US, can use these. It’s a little tougher in places like Europe with GDPR. But in the US, we can use some very accurate cross-survive companies that will be counting 95 % confidence.

to be able to say, want to find you, I built this audience of you on your cell phone. I now want to target you on your TV screen, that Samsung TV screen or on your PC or your tablet. Being able to use those really means that not only we’re building a really custom audience, and that’s one of the on-ramps, it’s been working with those technologies to make sure they’re identifying the other people that we can find or the other devices associated with you to be able to find you.

And then you’ve obviously got the relationships and the relationships with the networks. All right. Let’s say like a Disney, like a Hulu or something like that. To be able to work with them on what ad placement, obviously negotiating rates, that table stakes, but what ad placement, where can we get those ad placements? Make sure we’re bidding on them. How many queries per second are we actually seeing from these networks? How do we expand that? Same thing with the SSPs, et cetera. So, and then even down to, I mean,

Dan Larkman (26:55.064)
It sounds strange, but like if you work with any of the DSPs, when you get log level data back, it doesn’t tell you this was Hulu. It gives you a string of numbers that the app is. Even just passing that through a regex and be able to show people where were you running and be able to optimize towards it makes a big difference. So the DSPs are powerful and they grow more powerful constantly, which is great for us in an industry. The hurdle is it’s so fragmented that it’s…

It works for certain things. doesn’t work for other things. And it’s not the best approach across the board. If you’re looking just at one, if you’re an omnichannel, great. you’re looking, yeah, but if you’re looking at CTV as part of that, there’s a lot more, a lot of moving, moving pieces that really need to be taken into account.

Sean Simon (27:43.439)
Thoughts on that, Rick, from a buying perspective?

Rick Egan (27:45.146)
No, I think that’s all accurate. think that I would say I think it’s fair and accurate that, you know, I think, you know, the other piece to with the DSP is if you want to go directly to that, you know, do the other piece probably is, you know, would be, I would say is what level of expertise do you actually have in that person that’s doing it? You know, are you because probably most people are going to end up

Sean Simon (27:51.151)
there.

Dan Larkman (28:08.72)
Mm-hmm.

Rick Egan (28:13.993)
you know, going, okay, who’s my search person or my social person and go, okay, you know, here, I just negotiated a good deal, go learn this. And, you know, I like I said, that’s probably fine. And that, you know, that one to one to 5 % of your budget that you’re not going to be challenged on. But to get true performance, you need a lot of the other things that, you know, Keynes is that Dan and Keynes are offering.

Dan Larkman (28:29.02)
Mm-hmm. Hmm.

Sean Simon (28:41.433)
Yeah, yeah, again, I may have mentioned this to you before, but I was always curious when I’m watching a sporting event and I’ll get this ad for a particular dishwasher detergent.

in Spanish and nobody in my household speaks Spanish. And I get it, it happened once, but it pretty much happens every time I’m watching a game where I’m getting an ad in Spanish. Is that because that brand is probably just leveraging a DSP and not using the right data to find their customers? Like, how do they not know? I mean, how does this DSP not know that I don’t watch Spanish programming?

Dan Larkman (28:56.11)
Mm-hmm. Action.

Dan Larkman (29:20.686)
So I guess it really depends on how they bought the ad. I think it’s one of the big variables. You can buy direct. And a lot of brands, and this is kind of how we think about it two ways. You’ve got the brands that have always run linear, that are moving to CTV. And a lot of the time that’s a linear play. It’s signals, it’s a little bit more similar. Not always, especially for performance agencies, but for…

A lot of brands, especially CPG, that’s typically how they look at it. And then we look at it as digital art. So people that have done this, that are typically doing social and search and they’re, they’re diving into this as a new channel. so it’s kind of two sides of it. So you don’t, they didn’t necessarily bought it. They didn’t necessarily buy through a DSP. And if it was, it’s pretty poor targeting. I get the same thing. usually when I’m watching soccer, and I assume it’s somewhat profiling that soccer in the U S, but.

I think what really happens is when you’re doing a linear buy and you’re running it on CTV, they’re trying to make sure they can reach enough users. And if we’ve reached that point or if that company, whoever it was, let’s go, it’s NBCU, has reached that point, they’re starting to serve ads, hit that frequency, hit that reach. And that you may be part of that. And that’s what we’re kind of seeing happen. That with, what’s really interesting is…

We’ve seen year on year about a 900 % increase in live sports availability with CTV ads. But we’ve seen the fill be about 171 % increase, which effectively means we have over 700 % surplus. So it’s a weird position, you know, if anyone’s econ class, you know, the demand isn’t in line with the supply. And we’re seeing that happen, which is a great opportunity for brands, but it does mean that there are going to be points when, you know,

an ad might be served to you because an ad needs to be filled and we can fill it here. And the TV network is probably going to do that. I really hope no DSP was targeting you with a Spanish ad. That is a pretty easy target.

Sean Simon (31:22.821)
Have you had that experience Dan as a buyer finding out that your ads have been running in to the wrong audience but in a really obvious way?

Dan Larkman (31:34.134)
No, no, I’d be pretty annoyed. I think our team would have done a pretty bad job. mean, language-toting is a pretty easy one.

Sean Simon (31:42.511)
Yeah, you would think.

Dan Larkman (31:44.814)
I’ve been a consumer on the end of that, though. That’s where I’ve been.

Sean Simon (31:46.861)
Yeah. Rick, has that ever happened to you?

Rick Egan (31:51.13)
I’ve gotten the Spanish language ads too. I always kind of, I look at it, I’m always like interested, but you know, me as the marketer, I’m always like, interesting creative, you know, even though it’s in Spanish. I, so I look at it differently.

Sean Simon (31:53.295)
Ha.

Sean Simon (31:57.337)
You

Sean Simon (32:06.085)
I want to go back to DSP that Dan mentioned, and I think it’s the elephant in the room, Amazon. Amazon’s got a, they sit uniquely in the industry, In the sense that they’ve got the most data on the most amount of people, but not every brand sells on Amazon. So I think it’s probably a different approach if you’re an Amazon seller or not. But when you think about Amazon as a DSP,

I’m going to start this with Rick. From a buying perspective, you think about Amazon differently if you’re working with a brand that sells on Amazon versus a brand that doesn’t. And do you have any concerns about giving Amazon more data?

Rick Egan (32:53.144)
I don’t have the concern about giving Amazon more data. I’ve sat through their pitch before. I think the interesting part, at least, maybe the interesting and probably uphill part, I think, for them is the customer that they’re typically advertising to predominantly shops on Amazon. So if you’re looking for, you know,

direct consumer, even if you have an Amazon store, think, even if you have an Amazon store, your primary goal, you know, through your media is you want to get those people to your site. And, you know, in Amazon’s pitch is really, even though most people stay here, those that leave are more valuable than you’re going to get other places, which I personally, I was intrigued by it, but

At the end of day, I’d rather go somewhere where I know I’m really hitting my customer than hitting Amazon’s customer.

Sean Simon (33:57.146)
That’s fair. Dan, I’m sure you have some energy around Amazon.

Dan Larkman (34:00.271)
Yeah, I mean, we have a seat on Amazon DSP. I think there’s value in it. I have probably a little bit more fear than Rick on the data side of things. For me, it’s like, I agree with finding the customer. think that’s such a crucial thing. And there is a different type of customer. I think the other thing is, when we work with Amazon, they’re not looking for…

the products they sell on Amazon, they’re like, can find them. can advertise to them. We don’t need your help for that. We want the ones that don’t run on Amazon. And the whole thing you have is the targeting’s great, but I don’t know a brand and maybe Ricky had a different experience here. I don’t know a brand that I’d say take, you don’t run on Amazon, but take this Amazon pixel, place it on your site so that this date, the Amazon, Amazon’s now going to be able to store that data. And then.

But your competitors sell on Amazon. Amazon has a vested interest in their marketplace and getting 30 % of the margin there, as well as the ad dollars and the advertising succeeding and creating that cycle. For me, it creates a risk. I think that if it was that by itself, it would be too much of a risk for brands. I think the fact that Amazon has Prime, which is one of the largest subscriptions in the US.

That is a huge variable for them that having that O &O gives them the ability of, I run there? But again, I go back to the same thing, which is, we want to give more data to Amazon? I’d be skeptical there. Are the audience people that are to be shopping on or off Amazon? think Rick, you’re right. They’re going to be shopping on Amazon primarily. And so is that benefiting the off Amazon transactions or is benefiting the on Amazon transactions? And I think it’s the latter.

Rick Egan (35:56.086)
Yeah, I think for me, like where I kind of up landing with Bed Bath and Beyond and Overstock was, we were effectively a marketplace already, just for home specifically. so, whatever we were going to get, versus what we were going to give back to Amazon, just wasn’t, the trade off wasn’t going to be there. I think with like D2C brands that I’ve worked with, you know, in the past that

Dan Larkman (36:07.106)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Larkman (36:20.512)
and

Rick Egan (36:25.28)
you know, we sell direct to consumer, you know, through our website, but we also, you know, have a store on Amazon and, you know, and maybe some offline makes a lot more sense to be there because then you’re, you don’t care as much about the data that you’re giving because you’re ultimately just trying to sell your product wherever the customer is at that time. So

Dan Larkman (36:32.161)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Simon (36:46.661)
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. So I think about it bigger picture and I’m not immersed into the space like you guys are. I think, you you see Amazon creating their own product line, their own white label, if you will. And just to sort of play on Dan’s perspective, if I sell a product.

Dan Larkman (36:52.558)
Thank you.

Sean Simon (37:02.659)
that I don’t sell on Amazon, then Amazon’s able to understand my audience. And then they’re able to, you know, drive sales of that product category on Amazon. And then they see an uptick, then they justify investing in that category to develop product on their own. I mean, it almost feels like there’s an antitrust violation just waiting to happen. Like there’s something brewing there.

that people need to watch. And I think we’re slower to pick that up as a country just because it’s just not understood by government as well. And it takes some time. It’ll take 20 years for it to develop and then the government will try and shut it down like they do with Google. But I’m just hypothesizing. But along those lines, if you guys could open your crystal ball and look ahead 12 to 24 months, from each of your perspectives, what do you think drives winners and losers?

Dan Larkman (37:26.062)
Okay. Okay.

Sean Simon (37:49.978)
What do you think is gonna separate winners from in the CTV space? And again, you guys sit in very different spots in the ecosystem. I’ll start with Rick. Where do you see from a buying perspective, winners and losers falling?

Dan Larkman (37:54.926)
you

Rick Egan (38:07.384)
I mean, I think that the winners are the ones who are going to really look to understand the channel and make the investment into, they’ll make the right, they’ll make the investments into, you know, kind of a test and learn approach and they’ll be more aggressive to spending into the channel. Those are going to be the winners, you know, in my mind for sure. The people that look to follow and, you know, are going to be the losers.

you know, they’ll just they’ll end up losing market share and then that will hurt their budgets and their ability to spend. So so they’ll just keep falling behind.

Sean Simon (38:45.579)
Dan, do you see it from the vendor side? What do you think is going to separate the winners from losers with all the players that exist today in the CTE space?

Dan Larkman (38:50.222)
I think it’s going to be incrementality. It’s going to be measurement. It’s going to be showing the actual true value. If I look at the CTV landscape right now, it’s kind of the nicest way. It seems like a race to the bottom race to the smallest brands. And there’s a number of them. Or it’s either that or it’s enterprise. There’s both sides.

And there’s this gap in the middle, which is really the gap that Keen Services. I think that what we’re finding is that with lower minimums, actually creates, I think it’s going to create a lot of testing and a lot of churn in the smaller market. The reason being, like I said, you don’t have enough ads for, for StatSig to be able to actually find out whether it worked or not. and then I think, I think you’ve got that, that’s the wave. So I think we’ve got a wave of brands there. We’ve got a wave of advice being given.

to smaller brands. I mean, I heard one today from a company, not going to name them, but it was on LinkedIn and it was test creatives, test creatives. And I was like, that’s true. But, oh, you should only run one creative, false. You should run multiple creatives. I was like, it’s true. However, if your budget permits it, if your budget doesn’t permit it, then you’re just spreading it thinner. That 300,000 now is across five creatives. Well, now it needs to do, you know, 1.5 million.

ads just to get statsig. And so it’s that thing of like what’s being passed through. I think there’s a lot of noise. I think over the next 12 months, that’s going to continue while budgets are shifting towards CTV. And I think you’re always going to have that. I imagine there’s going to be a big M &A push throughout 26 with a lot of mergers from companies in the CTV space with the growth. I imagine in 24 months, we’re seeing that ease up a little bit and you’ll probably see that the winners.

thriving and you’ll see either merging or companies disappearing.

Sean Simon (40:53.945)
Yeah, I agree. think blurbs we see things as a factor of trust, like what vendors are doing the right things to build trust with the buyers so that they tell their peers and then they’re the ones that are building more relationships than the ones that are burning bridges because they’re trying to get the quick buck.

Dan Larkman (41:02.158)
and

Dan Larkman (41:10.958)
I mean, it’s the thing that we see in our industry. you’ve got the sellers who are selling for quick wins and you’ve got the long-term trust relationships. you know, if you can build those relationships, especially in a channel that is non-clickable, that you’re bringing true cross-revice, type of stuff into the play, you bring that, you build those long-term relationships for trust because you’re bringing them the truth of what you’re seeing. And I think, you know, I love the fact that Rick, you were talking about that 12 % has made me smile because

Like we’re saying 10 to 15 and you know, it’s the same same hurdle we face is people saying, well, you know, are we sure? It’s like these, the data is telling us this people like we’re all seeing it. And I think brands are starting to see that, but they’re seeing it and have to build that trust to get there.

Rick Egan (41:41.428)
I’m

Sean Simon (41:56.591)
Yeah.

Rick Egan (41:56.982)
Yeah, I wonder, or like my head, you know, has thought into the future on this one a bit and thought that 12 % is going to end up significantly higher. You know, the just, you know, if I think back to, you know, just more of the history that how much how much was put into linear TV and how much people would spend on that. And then the trackability so as we got to trackability and incrementality and everything, then

Dan Larkman (42:07.788)
I agree.

Rick Egan (42:25.207)
you know, people put their dollars in certain social because it provided that clickable performance. So as the trust factor happens back, the video medium is just so much more. You can tell the brand story and communicate to the customer that much better. My crystal ball says the percentage is going to be much higher than the 10 to 15.

Dan Larkman (42:28.186)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Larkman (42:50.017)
Nice. What I’m hearing, Rick, is that’s the precursor to the next one of these we do in a year’s time and see if we’re at 40%.

Sean Simon (42:55.461)
So Dan, at Keen specifically, where do you see the biggest opportunity for that target audience that we’ll call it the mid-market to unlock better performance? What do you think those brands need to lean into? Where’s the opportunity for them?

Rick Egan (42:55.511)
There you go.

Dan Larkman (43:13.422)
I think it’s evergreen. know, it’s, CTV is an evergreen channel is, you know, part of the, the, marketing mix. It’s a must. think we’ve seen that pick up for medium sized brands where a lot of them now see it as an evergreen channel. And, we’re still seeing that wave comes through of people who are testing out CTV for the first time, which the other, your point, Rick, I think they’re a little late to the game. As you kind of like to the game, doesn’t mean it’s too late. There’s still opportunity there. As you know, we talked about with the supply and demand, but

Yeah, for me, I think that that’s the biggest opportunity that most brands are starting to see it as a must run evergreen channel in the medium and gross space. After they’ve done their testing, seeing that I think that is the growth opportunity for all of them. And then it’s really just what percent of spend should it be that’s going to drive the best outcomes and running it that way.

Sean Simon (44:08.931)
Rick, any last thoughts around when you’re working with a client, the first thing that you talk to them about, or the most crucial data point that you talk to them about when they’re thinking about CTV or expanding more into CTV?

Dan Larkman (44:23.374)
you

Rick Egan (44:24.407)
It would really be setting up the measurement side, making sure that you have a good measurement approach. Ideally, you have a measure to house one of those guys on board, but if you don’t, then how can you set up some things within your GA4 dashboards or design some testing so that you can really…

Dan Larkman (44:45.502)
and Okay.

Rick Egan (44:51.029)
Measure that because that’s going to be your next best step to determining what your real investment should be.

Sean Simon (44:56.249)
Yeah, that’s the beautiful thing about blurbs. You can come there, you can find your CTV partner, you find your measurement partner all in one spot. Okay, thank you gentlemen. That is a wrap for today’s episode of the MarkTech Matrix. Huge thanks to Dan Larkman from Keynes Digital for sharing his perspective on CTV and to Ian for grounding us with the buyer perspective. Thank you both for coming into the Matrix.

Rick Egan (45:02.487)
There you go.

Sean Simon (45:17.934)
If there’s one takeaway is that CTV is a powerful channel, but without the right strategy and partners, it can quickly become fragmented and wasteful. Companies like Keens are stepping up to give brands clarity, transparency, and real results. If you want to learn more, head over to TrustBlurbs.com where you can explore Keens and other CTV vendors, compare solutions side by side, and connect on your terms. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.