Telly Touts Programmatic Home Screen Ads

Telly, the startup that gives away free smart TVs in exchange for data and ad exposure, is making its home screen ads available to buy programmatically and pushing for industry standards to attract more spend. Its TVs carry a second screen below the main one that runs a steady stream of news and ads, delivered through Magnite's SpringServe ad server with demand from The Trade Desk, Teads and others. CRO Mike Shehan, the former SpotX CEO Magnite acquired in 2021, said the signup questionnaire goes "very deep on demographics, lifestyle and brand loyalty," covering household income, insurance providers, the cars a household drives and whether they are leased or owned, and that this first-party data, paired with automatic content recognition, gives Telly an edge in targeting. Telly is not first, Nexxen and Magnite have run programmatic home screen and pause ads before, but Shehan said Telly is working with the IAB Tech Lab to standardise home screen ad specs in the bidstream, with signal updates finalised in July.

The crux

A hardware maker is turning the television's home screen into a programmatic, data-rich surface, betting that first-party household data and a second screen that can run ads without interrupting the main content will unlock spend that linear and CTV formats leave on the table.

Sell-side read

Every Telly-style second screen is new, addressable inventory that does not cannibalise a publisher's main-screen yield but competes for the same household budget, so publishers with CTV supply need their own data and standardisation story or they watch a hardware OEM eat the addressable premium. The IAB Tech Lab spec push matters because standardised specs are what convert curiosity into scaled programmatic budgets.

Watch

Whether the IAB Tech Lab's home screen ad specs gain real bidstream adoption, and whether Telly's scale, still small against Nexxen and the TV majors, grows enough to matter to buy-side budgets.