streamr.ai: Democratizing Streaming TV Advertising with GenAI

I had the pleasure of interviewing the CEO and Co-Founder of streamr.ai, Jonathan Moffie. Moffie started building Free, Ad-Supported Streaming TV (FAST) channels before the industry had a name for them. As the Head of Product at People, Yahoo, and Wurl, he launched Streaming TV products that entertained millions of viewers and introduced new, innovative ad formats to the CTV space.

Now with streamr.ai, the streamr team is democratizing CTV advertising by helping millions of small and medium-sized businesses advertise on TV who never could before.

What motivated you to launch your startup?

In 2023, I helped build an ads manager for one of the largest Digital Out of Home (DOOH) providers, Loop TV. Our goal was to make the world’s simplest ads manager for small businesses to advertise on Connected TV (CTV). We built the easiest-to-use ads manager at the time but still ran into two major customer complaints. The small business owner almost never had a video creative, and despite making the campaign setup process easier than every other ads manager, it was still too confusing. This is when the idea for streamr.ai was born. What if we auto-generated video creative for the business and took the guesswork out of the campaign setup with AI? This would take all of the friction out of advertising on Streaming TV. streamr has realized this vision. We’ve built an AI-powered platform that generates video ads and launches them on Streaming TV apps like Netflix in less than 2 minutes.

What is it that excites you about what you’re building?

We knew we built the easiest way to advertise on Streaming TV when we had a fitness influencer launch their commercial from their smartphone in 30 seconds while training a customer at the gym! That’s definitely the first CTV campaign launched in under a minute on a smartphone.

Only 500 advertisers dominate TV spend, whereas 9 million advertise on search and social spending $300B+ per year. Millions of advertisers are just waiting for a viable way to buy TV. It’s critical we make ad buying simple to unlock this SMB spend on Streaming TV.

What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?

In the last three months, we moved from marketing to SMBs to use streamr.ai to advertise on CTV to licensing our GenAI tech to Broadcasters, AdTech Platforms, and Agencies that already have a lot of demand. Changing the sales process, marketing tactics, and products to close these types of enterprise deals is an ongoing challenge.

But we’ve made a lot of progress focusing on selling GenAI solutions. We just closed two deals for our biggest product, a white-label GenAI Ads Manager. We have to continue to push new product innovation while understanding that the enterprise sales cycle will be longer than selling directly to SMBs.

What are your future plans for your startup?

streamr’s core mission is to democratize streaming ad buying by removing the friction of the high costs of creative and the complexities of launching advertising campaigns. After hundreds of conversations with folks in AdTech working at DSPs, SSPs, Broadcasters, and Agencies, we realized that our best shot at accelerating getting millions of SMB advertisers into CTV is offering our GenAI solutions to platforms that already have a lot of advertiser demand. Together we will bring historically search and social advertisers into the streaming ecosystem by making it cheaper, easier, and more effective to advertise on TV than ever before.

We are also going to push the boundaries of advertising with GenAI. We just launched a feature in beta we call streamr GenAI♾️. With streamr GenAI♾️, we automatically create and test an infinite number of ad variations to identify the best-performing creative for your campaign. Once the best creative wins, your budget is automatically shifted to it, ensuring you maximize the return on your hard-earned ad spend. Infinite images, call-to-actions, voices, and music tracks…

Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_atORzIvFtI

These features are what really set GenAI apart from the traditional way of doing advertising. A/B testing creatives used to take tons of creative manpower to produce multiple variations of an ad and then manually set up the campaign with different targeting criteria for each version. streamr GenAI♾️ automates all of this end-to-end by using your business’s context to automatically create variations targeted at contextually relevant audiences. We will continue to train GenAI creatives on business metadata and connect it with streaming audience segments to unlock the ability to personalize commercials on a per-user basis so the message resonates with each viewer’s specific interests.

If you had to share “words of wisdom” with a founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?

Momentum is everything. Your #1 job as the CEO is to ensure your startup relentlessly pushes product updates, makes noise about your product with marketing, and has an active sales pipeline. Anything that the team is not doing to keep the momentum going is your job as the CEO. Get to it!

How can our readers follow you on social media?

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanmoffie/
• X (Twitter): https://x.com/JonathanMoffie

This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!