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iSpot CEO on the Future of TV Ad Outcomes & AI
00:29:14
iSpot CEO Sean Muller joins Next in Media to break down how the post-2026 upfronts are shifting the TV advertising landscape toward trusted, outcomes-based measurement, the reality of AI-driven optimization, and what brands actually care about moving forward.
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- [00:00]
A
So in audience measurement, the creative has no bearing on anything. When it comes to outcome measurement. You gotta measure the create. We have this equation, right? It's a math equation. Creative plus audience equals outcome. And if you can't measure the components, then you really can measure the outcome of that. Which is. Which is outcome.
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B
This week on Next in Media, I'm kicking off Nexting tv, a special multi part series with my partners at Vizio. We're focused on the future of TV, where to think stand, coming out of the 2026 upfronts and previewing what the industry will be talking about at Cannes this year. Starting this off is my conversation with I SPOT CEO and founder Sean Mueller who talks about why the topic of outcomes in TV is hugely important and hugely misunderstood. Sean, I also talked about the role that AI may or may not play in the TV advertising ecosystem. Whether the big TV networks are fully on board. Lots to discuss. Let's get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to Next to Media. I'm Mike Shields. My guest this week is Sean Mueller. He is the founder and CEO of EyeSpot. Hey Sean, thanks being here.
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A
Hey Mike, thanks for having me.
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B
Excited to talk to you because it's, we're coming at, it's a really good time to catch you. I think we're coming out, you know, we're coming right out of the upfronts. Outcomes are this very buzzy thing everybody's kind of talking about full funnel. And you're, you guys are right in the middle of these conversations, big picture wise. Before we get into like some specifics maybe, how do you, how would you say, the, how well equipped is the TV business, the ad business, at least in dealing with attribution analytics. Like in this time of great flux,
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A
as we know, there's a lot of noise and buzz right around outcomes. Everybody is talking about outcomes, but very few are actually talking about what that actually means and how outcomes are actually measured. And even less people or companies are even qualified to do so. So, so but your fundamental question is, is the industry ready for all this? Right? That, that is the, the fundamental question at hand. And the way I would probably answer that is I would say the buy side or the advertisers have, have actually been doing outcome measurement for a long, long time. Like in fact we at I Spot have been doing outcome measurement with hundreds and hundreds of advertisers for now nearly 10 years. So what I would tell you is from an advertiser perspective, many advertisers have invested in outcome. They understand outcome, they understand their own KPIs short term, long term, they're measuring everything. They're decisioning, they're decisioning off of it. So from that perspective, I would say the industry is ready.
- [02:46]
B
Right. It's not as though no one has thought about, hey, we should check track ROI for television advertising spending. Right. It's, it's, I guess it's what we're defining as outcomes. And are we talking about audience delivery outcomes, action oriented outcomes, just, just to have something else and that, and that's, and that's, and the pressure is on from all the other sectors of the industry that, to make those as, you know, powerful and fine as possible. I guess, right?
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A
No, but, but I guess back to the question, is the industry ready? What I would tell you is the publishers and networks are leaning in right now. You saw it in the upfront. They all understand the advertisers are making allocation decisioning based on outcome today. They understand their job is to deliver outcomes at the end of the day. So it is wonderful to see like the publishers and the networks really leaning in and bringing outcomes in front and center. But, but is the, is the industry fully ready to transact or optimize on outcomes? There's, there's a lot of work there to do but the first step is to get both sides of the industry
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B
to the same motivation.
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A
With the same motivation. The, the advertisers have already had this motivation and I think what's, what's great is to see the, all the publishers and the networks and we work with all of them, but really lean in and really understand the value of delivering outcomes. And again. Well, I'm sure we'll get into it more but outcomes is a very broad topic and we need to dive deeper into it.
- [04:13]
B
I want to ask about. Well, yeah, because everyone's going to define these things a little bit differently. I want to ask because what, what you where your focus but what, what is your, like how would you define. Because I think I spot for a lot of people came on the scene is like oh, you got, you guys have ACR data. You're in this like alternative to Nielsen conversation, a new currency, maybe now more of a TV intelligence platform. What is the role today of the company? Because it seems like it's, it's, it's fast evolving if I'm looking at it right.
- [04:43]
A
Yeah, it's fast evolving but it's actually never, it's never changed. The, the, the focus of Ispot has always been to measure TV and video advertising and the effectiveness and the performance of the ads. Which one simple way to think about it is Nielsen measures the programs. I spot measures the ads. That's really as simple as that.
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B
Yeah. And it's, and it's just like stuff that wasn't counted in the same way with the same precision as, as it, as it can be today. That makes sense to me.
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A
Well, it goes a lot broader. When you think about traditional measurement, you think about audience measurement. When you're thinking about ads, you gotta measure more than audience. And so we measure creative, creative effectiveness. We measure the audience and then we measure the outcome. And so that gives you basically everything you need to know about a much
- [05:30]
B
fuller picture than just one piece of it.
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A
Correct. Yeah.
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B
What? And then you guys recently hosted an event and that's kind of very focused in this area. Give us like a little bit of a fly on the wall kind of feel of what was going on there. What was your focus? What are you talking about?
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A
Yeah, so the, the event you're talking about is our annual TV Disrupt event. It was actually in its 11th year. It's really a customer and industry event and it's really all about our customers, which are the advertisers and the publishers. And it's really all about getting the advertisers up on stage talking about what matters most to them and what's new and what they're thinking about. So we had the likes of General Motors and Miller Kors and Diageo and Carmax and many other brands that were on stage and talking about the latest and greatest. And really the, the core topics of TV Disrupt this year were outcomes and AI. Those, those, those are things that are front and center for everybody. And of course that sits on top of long standing issues like fragmentation and how do you, how do you capture audiences across all these fragmented platforms?
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B
Do the brands, are they bringing up currency wars anymore? Currency alternatives? I'm not saying it's, it's gone, but it seems like it was definitely not a big topic at the upfront presentations this year. Where, where is that sit these days?
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A
So the truth of the matter, the brands never brought up alternative currency ever.
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B
Yeah, just to be clear, right.
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A
That wasn't a thing.
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B
They don't. Yeah, they're not thinking about their iOS as much as the whole alternative currency conversation.
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A
They're thinking about outcomes and performance. And so the alternative currency was really the publishers and the networks primarily trying to gain maybe some leverage over the industry. So that was probably, I almost think about it as much ado about nothing. Like the currency is changing. The currency of yesterday is all about measuring programs and that's built for a linear world Currency in this new world doesn't even work as we know of it. So really what the attention is shifting to is outcomes and performance and measuring the ads across all platforms. That's, that's what has value today.
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B
Right. You could tell your CMO that you work. Oh, you know, we, we have gotten a better way of counting and billing and that's great. But what, what to do for my business is going to be the conversation.
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A
Exactly.
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B
Over time. Okay. So big picture wise, if we, you know, television is unique and it's changing, it's obviously far more digital than it once was. There is a lot more potential for interactivity, but it is, it has a unique nature versus display, advertising versus search versus social. Is there a danger that we could go too far in getting into pushing it towards outcomes, Tracking outcomes in a way that maybe it's not suited for or that that favors the tech giants that can track that stuff.
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A
Again, I think we have to define outcomes. Right. Because again, people sort of think that outcomes just means like a transaction that occurred immediately after.
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B
Yeah, like I saw the thing and bought it.
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A
That's how I saw the thing and I bought it immediately. That's what people think an outcome and outcome is. But, but when you talk to advertisers, outcomes actually runs a fairly big range. It really depends on the industry and it really depends on the goals. So there is performance or what we call short term outcomes. Short term. Short term outcomes is all about sales and store visits and website visits, which is massively important.
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B
Right.
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A
And again, every industry has a slightly different KPI there even. And then there's longer term outcomes, which is more, what more traditionally what we know of as brand longer term purchase intent. And both of those notions are important to most advertisers. Some will lean more towards performance, some will lean more towards brand. But the point is an increase in brand recall or an increase in purchase intent is also an outcome. Right.
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B
That's a positive thing for most marketers, right?
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A
Correct. So at the end of the day, and by the way, I'll give you an example of an industry that cares about both equally, I would say, and that's the auto industry. I mean, we all know the auto industry makes two types of ads, what they call tier one, which is their branding ads. And those are kind of to build awareness and to build longer term purchase intent and favorability, all those things. And then they have their tier 2 ads, which is promotional driven, like go
- [10:18]
B
to our website, APR pricing Right now, this weekend, you know, yeah, go to
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A
our website, go to our, your local dealer, go buy this. And so there, the outcome that they're looking for is in fact sales. And in auto, the biggest KPI for sales is the thing something like a website visit or you know, the chosen ten that immediately follows a dealer visit and a car sale. So it's really. And again, this is why I kind of chuckle at just people throwing out outcomes. And half the time they don't even know what they're talking about.
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B
It definitely seems like. And do you feel this maybe that a lot more brands than the narrative is? Well, the CMOs never been under more pressure. The short term think, you know, ISM is taking over and then the CFO has become this like bad guy. That makes sense to me, Sean. I want to track brand awareness, but the CFO is on me to prove all this stuff. Are you, and how do you blend all those metrics in a way that, that I can make sense to him? Are you getting those kind of pushes?
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A
Honestly, that's the key that, that's the, what we've learned in 10 years of doing outcome measurement is unless you measure all the components, you can't make sense of it all. You got to measure the short term and the long term. So then you go to the CFO and say, look, this investment is driving X in short term sales and it's driving Y in longer term. Brand, brand value, brand equity, purchase. And, and, and it's increasing purchase intent which will translate to sales. And the other thing that I would tell you that people, you, you almost never hear people talk about this when it comes to outcome. But outcome changes the paradigm. It's so different than audience measurement. And the number one reason for that is because the creative actually makes a massive difference on the outcome. Whereas when you're measuring audience, you can play an ad that's like a 30 second black screen, it's still going to have pretty much the same audience, right? It's not.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
So in audience measurement, the creative has no bearing on anything when it comes to outcome measurement. You got to measure the. We have this equation, right? It's a math equation. Creative plus audience equals outcome. And if you can measure the components, then you really can measure the outcome of that. Which is, which is outcome.
- [12:38]
B
Yeah, and we've seen that like, we've seen that play out in the broader digital, digital world, especially in the display space where the creative was almost like ignored for a little while because the audience, the industry was so obsessed with audience. Correct and now there's like a renewed. So you don't want that to happen to television, but it seems like you're trying to make sure that that gets emphasized especially as brands talk about, you know, let's have all these different variations of creative and more correct.
- [13:04]
A
And so you need to understand the creative contribution, the audience contribution. And then you almost think about this as a four square grid. Across the top is short term sale and we generally refer to short term as within 30 days. Right. And then you have your long term outcomes which is more purchase, intent, favorability, recall. And then across the left side you have audience and you have creative. And, and unless you can fill in all those squares, you don't actually understand outcomes.
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B
Yeah. So are you have your tools evolved like the to. To incorporate all those different pieces versus a couple of years ago. Is that always kind of the way that you thought about things originally?
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A
Well, yes, I spot one of the things that advertisers love about I spot always since day one is that we've brought creative and media together in a
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B
single platform and now there's a lot of talk about what we shouldn't have broken that stuff up. Let's bring it back.
- [13:59]
A
Yeah, so, so we're actually a lot of the work we do with advertisers is bringing all those things together because they need to work together. So yes, the short answer is that I spot you can measure both at the creative, you can measure the audience and you can measure the outcome and you can do that across the entire industry. So in other words, do it in a syndicated manner. So you understand benchmarks. So when we measure a creative, we benchmark it against not only your own creatives, but against competitor creative. When we measure, we look at your audience delivery across all the different platforms you're buying. We're also benchmarking that against competitors and looking at share of voice and then same with outcomes. And when we measure conversions and lift. And by the way we should talk about the metrics how you actually. What, what is the unit of measurement of outcome?
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B
Right.
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A
That, that. I think that's, that's also something people don't.
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B
Well, well, let, yeah, let's talk kind of glossing over what is. There is there's not going to be. I'm, I'm imagining there's not going to be one answer to that question. But, but maybe you, you're seeing, you know, it's actually a coalescent.
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A
It's actually fairly consistent across. Okay. What's different is the outcome KPI between different advertisers and industry, but generally speaking, most advertisers and like I said, we work with over 450 mostly large advertiser. Pretty good cross section, pretty good cross section across industry. Most everybody has adopted a multi touch attribution crediting system that looks at conversion. Conversion rate is one unit of measurement and then the other one is lift or incrementality. And you kind of have to use those together. Obviously you want a higher conversion rate but, but conversion rate doesn't speak to causality. Right. And so you can think about lift as almost the quality of the conversion. So you may have a very high conversion rate on one platform, but with very low lift that means you're just hitting a lot of people that would have bought anyway or.
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B
Right, right.
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A
And by the way, that's not necessarily a bad thing. You just need to know, you just
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B
need, you just need to credit. Credit a proper correct and account for a property.
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A
Yeah, correct. So it's really about conversions, a conversion rate and crediting all the different touch points because generally in TV and video you need to see an ad 2, 3, 4 times before you take any action, no matter what. Like even if it's.
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B
Yeah, they start about three plus three plus reach was a key metric for a lot of brands back in the day because you needed, you needed to that reinforcement. So that's interesting because I wonder if are your partners, if you want to measure incremental reach, for example, are your partners or the media companies are all kind of walled gardening up in a lot of ways where they have their own identity and their own, you know, spines and graphs. Are they making it harder to do those things or can you look across everybody and get to the calculations you need to.
- [16:56]
A
No, they're not making it harder. We, we have a partnership with every single TV network, publisher, dsp and what the, what the advertisers want is not those publishers to do the measurement for them, but they want a neutral party like I spot to do it exactly in the same methodology. So they can do an apples to apples comparison between an Amazon prime and an NBC or a Disney or Netflix where they can look at the conversion rate and the lift and the exact same methodology, all deduplicated, all brought into a single system, single ID spine. Where the value becomes really big is for the publishers that are really leaning in and then are surfacing those metrics. But really where this is all heading is having the publishers actually take action and actually optimize based on outcomes. That's where the paradigm shift is really, really going to happen. It's actually not about the measurement of outcomes. It's about the decisioning based of outcome,
- [18:04]
B
making the campaign more effective over time by, by just not letting it go, but acting. So I want to get into that. You have a partnership with Roku that you recently. I want to ask about that. Is that an example of what maybe you're talking about?
- [18:17]
A
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. That is an example of a publisher that has really leaned into outcomes, has been. Leaned into outcomes for a while and understands where this is all going, which is if they not only report the outcomes, but if they actually optimize on outcomes. We had Roku, I think with CarMax at TV disrupt actually speak about just that, how they're optimizing campaigns for them based on outcomes and the positive results that they're seeing. So that's where this is all headed. And so the publishers are really lean in and start really leveraging those signals as decisioning from neutral parties that are already trusted by the advertisers. Those are the ones that are going to win more of the wallet of advertising.
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B
Right. Okay, got to talk about, Got about. Got to have the AI conversation. Of course you mentioned at your event that was, that was topic number 1A.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Besides outcomes, I want to ask you about what your kind of position is. I'm sure you're pro, I'm sure what your position is and how the industry should use it. But then I wonder, I think about how what's gotten a lot of people excited slash scared in, in the digital ad world is that these automated AI driven optimization vehicles that the metas and Googles have, TV doesn't really have that yet. But I wonder if you think we're going there or if we, if we never can get there.
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A
Oh yeah, we're absolutely going there. But there's a, there's a particular path to get there. And I think sometimes people put the cart before the horse before. And, and, and the notion is actually pretty simple. Before you, you can have an AI agent take an autonomous action for you. And by the way, that's not hard to do like writing an agent that takes an autonomous action. That's the easiest thing. But the missing ingredient is trust. And, and, and that was at the center of the conversation that we had at TV Disrupt and, and talking about our AI platform called Sage. What is missing in AI right now? And we saw that from TV Disrupted as well as our annual customer survey is the trust. A lot of marketers are like, well, I'm not Trusting the response that I'm getting from the AI. And so trust is number one. And how do you get trust? You gotta train the AI on data that's already trusted by the industries. So what we've done is We've taken our 16 years of intelligence and measurement around creative audience outcome attention and we've trained Sage on that data. The likes of General Motors were on stage and Balance of Nature talking about why when they use Sage, they trust it a lot more than when they go and use.
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B
Because they know it's in it. They, they know what it's trying to do.
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A
Right. Because they, they know it's based on actual verified data and they can actually click on that data and like go into our traditional dashboards. So what, what the step that's required before, before anyone will agree to autonomous action at scale is they got to trust the data and they got to trust the measurement. That's what we're going through with the industry right now and with advertisers is to use Sage to get to the insights faster, to get, get much deeper on the insights, really bring creative audience and outcome together. And also look at optimization, look at use cases that were a little more difficult before. If it's creative actually making new ads that are rooted in what it knows work. If it's campaign data, are the campaigns that are running hitting the audience that's actually resonating with this creator. That's part of what Sage does, for example. And then optimizing the media not just within a publisher but across publishers.
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B
That seems to be where that could get tricky is that are the publishers going to. Because you got to have, you could have all the insight and intelligence you want but if the publishers don't let you have somebody have access to that inventory to optimize quickly across the industry, you can't really. It's not going to be as a potential reach your potential.
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A
Correct.
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B
And they're, I could see where they're going to be a little bit.
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A
I don't know.
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B
Is it going to make me look bad? Is it going to lose control?
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A
Actually that's not the case. We've had all publishers, we are now measuring everybody, including by the way, YouTube. And we had YouTube at TV disruption.
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B
Right. You might think there would be a holdout.
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A
No, YouTube is. And Google, they're actually very lean into this because it's actually benefit to the publishers that are good at performance optimization, actually want to be in the system because they're actually going to get more of the dollar.
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B
They're going to they think they're going to win. Why wouldn't they? Yeah, right.
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A
Yeah. And. And actually publishers like YouTube as amazing data, amazing ability to optimize, and in fact, the advertisers are telling them that. The advertisers are saying, hey, we want to be an I spot unified measurement. We want to be in I spot outcomes. And so the industry, what the industry actually needs is a neutral platform that can track the audiences and the outcomes across all TV and video in a very consistent manner. And I spot is that platform for advertisers today where are the most holistic platform that measures both the audience and the outcome and the creative across all of these mediums.
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B
I got a couple more for you. I want to ask about that because that sounds like that's the vision of the, of the, you know, a much better tomorrow for TV advertising, which sounds fascinating. And then here's him. You got a couple interesting things going on. You, you guys had a recent public dispute with Edo, do you. I don't, I don't know what you can and cannot say about that case, but is there, is there anything you want to share here?
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A
Yeah, I mean, look, most of this is public right now. I mean, the dispute was only public because it was tried in federal court. What people don't know is that dispute has been ongoing for four and a half years and we've actually not publicized it whatsoever. And it's really Edo that decided that this is going to be going to court because they were delusional about their wrongdoing. And I mean, this is. And again, all this is public. This is pretty blatant theft of data and ip. I mean, it's so blatant and it's so wrong. It's. It's like everything you were taught not to do in life. And, and so, so you didn't.
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B
You welcome this public try. You welcome this going to court because you felt like this, it was, it was pretty.
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A
We knew we were going to win. Like, it was so egregious. Like, if, if you actually go and read the public records and look at the evidence, it is like talk about deception and theft of. Like, this should be like a show. Like, it's like, like it's.
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B
I would watch.
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A
It's actually unreal and quite frankly, it's a despicable way to, to start and run a company. Now, again, this, this wasn't us going publicly, like when this went to federal court because they, they had an opportunity to settle this and they didn't think that they were in the wrong. And they wanted to take this to court and so we said fine. And, and so anyway, look, I, I, I hate litigation. We've never, this is the only litigation that we ever had. And in fact they had a lot of wrongdoing over six years. A lot of theft and a lot of wrong and we just had no choice but to stop them. But, but, but, yeah, that, I mean, look what I'll say, and I don't mind saying publicly now, that company was built on stolen data and IP and everyone could see that.
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B
Do you, do you think, I mean, besides the, the ruling, do you think this is going to have consequences in the industry or is it too soon to tell?
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A
No, it has no consequences in the industry. It has nothing to do with our industry. It has, it has everything to do with stealing.
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B
Right, but you don't think that all the brands are going to stop working with them all tomorrow?
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A
I don't know because I don't.
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B
Right.
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A
Look, yeah, everyone can decide who they, they, they work with. We happen to think that measurement is all about trust and you know, people could choose who they want to trust. That's not up to me to tell.
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B
On a totally different note, you, you, you have, you, you see what's going on. You have a very good vantage point with all the different creative and where ad spending is headed. There's some debate. Like everyone, there's a lot of excitement because of both the digitization of television and AI. We're going to get a lot more advertisers on television than we've ever had. And like some of Amazon's talking about, they've seen more and everybody's seen growth. But then there's some analysts saying, you know, it's really going slow, it's not happening. Are you seeing that yet? Can you tell?
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A
I mean, look, with television going to streaming and with the rise of programmatic, it naturally yields itself to lowering barriers to getting an ad on tv.
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B
Accessibility.
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A
Accessibility. And that is definitely happening. It's definitely happening. I'll caveat that though. I'll caveat that TV is largely driven by sports and really a handful of industries where most of the spend really sits. And so when you think about that, the bulk of investments in sports and certainly in linear really sits, I'll tell you, like the five biggest spenders and industries right now, year to date, you've got insurance, you've got auto, quick serve, restaurants, wireless and pharma. Like that makes up like 30% of, 35%, maybe more of, of, of all, of all advertising. Now I'll tell you the one, the one platform that's probably done the best job in bringing more advertisers to TB and that's YouTube. YouTube has probably the biggest proportion of SMBs and 50 of all YouTube is on a television.
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B
Right. And that makes sense. That's where they, that was their heritage. Right. And they're gonna. So they can, they're. It's in their. A platform to begin with. That makes sense that they would move quicker.
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A
Yeah, but, but I'm a big believer that for sure, like the SMBs, they're coming to TV, it's, it's just not maybe moving as fast. It's not a wave like maybe nothing, everything's exaggerated.
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B
Right.
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A
Nothing actually happens overnight, like.
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B
Right, right. Well, there's some million different things we could talk about. This is fantastic. Sean, thank you so much for your time and hopefully we'll see you at Canon out at Babel. Let's check in soon.
- [28:59]
A
Yes, Ian can. Thank you, Mike.
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B
Thanks again to my guest this week, Jason Wy Lee of Jubilee Media and my partners at Katie View Planner. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more on what's next in media. Thanks for listening.