Of all the innovative companies in the TV advertising space, one of the most distinctive businesses is Telly, the US startup that offers users a free dual-screen TV with ads delivered on the second screen. Today the company makes its debut at the IAB NewFronts in New York to announce a new suite of ad products, including T-commerce capabilities and synchronised ad formats.
One of the challenges of bringing shoppable ads to TV has been getting viewers to shop for products when they’re trying to watch TV. Tech firms have looked to smooth that user journey by bringing the shopping functionality onto a second screen, which has generally been a mobile device. The difference with Telly is building that second screen into the TV itself, allowing consumers to interact with ads using their remote control without disrupting the content they’re watching.
The new T-Commerce ad format brings one-click purchasing onto the Telly interface, according to the company. For example, if a Pizza Hut ad airs during an NBA game on the main screen, viewers can click the remote and bring a shoppable ad onto the lower screen, which they can click to order a pizza. Telly users have also registered their home address and card details so no further input is necessary, and the second screen then converts to a countdown towards their delivery.
The company highlights that built-in user data as a key differentiator for Telly. In order to get their free TV, users are asked 120 questions about the household, including household income and number of residents. From an advertising perspective, this enables one-to-one targeting of consumers, rather than the panel-based modelling usually used in TV. And the company says this first-party data is bringing budgets from social media into CTV.
“We are tapping into search and social budgets, budgets that would have traditionally gone to Facebook or Instagram, because we have the same type of data, insights and actionability that would drive the ads on those digital platforms – we can now drive them on TV,” says Dallas Lawrence, Chief Strategy Officer at Telly. “So if you want to reach millennial moms in the market for a car today, who want to buy an electric vehicle, who want to have a car payment of less than $400 a month, who have two kids, I don’t have to model that, I’ll give you that exact household, and you can have a one-to-one advertising relationship with that household.”
The free model
This unique business model raises questions over scale, given the niche portion of the market using the free TVs. But Dallas Lawrence argues that when the TV is free, scale should take care of itself. “Nothing scales faster than free,” he says. “I think the best example is that TikTok reached 100 million users in nine months. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two weeks. Free is universal at scale. So our free model is what’s going to enable us to capture rapid market penetration.”
The firm analysed the data it collected from the first 400,000 users and found they modelled the US Census on geographic distribution, gender and ethnicity, suggesting the user base mirrors the wider population. But they also skew younger (two-thirds of Telly users are under-45) and with higher incomes than the US average. And average Telly usage is more than double that of traditional TV, according to the company, with over 6.5 hours of TV usage per household per day. This includes Telly’s “beyond TV” features that can be added to the bottom screen, including news, sports and weather widgets, Zoom camera, motion-tracking fitness and voice assistants.
The business does not break out the number of TVs now in use, following last year’s initial announcement of 500,000 units, built by an unspecified major TV manufacturer. But Lawrence notes that high usage rates prompted Telly to launch its advertising business ahead of schedule, and now has integrations with all the major programmatic players. Today the company will also announce new programmatic integrations with Index Exchange and Madhive, alongside expanded partnerships with media agencies, and the addition of Vevo’s ad-supported music video app.
“There’s a reason why digital advertising has been growing for decades straight: it works,” comments Lawrence. “And there’s a reason why TV has been down for that same period. And so when you take the best of the digital world and marry it with the creative platform of a 55-inch screen on the wall, with an enormous amount of personalised data that the consumers share with us, you can have a far richer advertising experience.”
Double trouble
Telly is also agnostic in terms of streaming operating system, allowing users to plug in their own device, such as Amazon Fire Stick or Apple TV. The company’s ACR technology can then read the dongle and see what users are watching, and measure viewing across streaming, linear and gaming. The business licenses this data, citing the value it holds for advertisers. This includes co-viewing data, using a built-in 3mm wave sensor that detects how many people are within 25 feet of the TV.
That ability to identify ads on the main screen enables Telly to synchronise ads on the second-screen. One of the new ad products is Telly’s dual-screen takeover format, which makes use of this technology. For example, when insurance firm State Farm runs a national ad on NBC, Telly deploys a regionalised, addressable ad on the bottom screen that prompts users to click their remote to book an appointment with their local State Farm agent. The format also facilitates synchronised conquest ads, allowing a brand to advertise on the second screen against their competitor’s ad on the main screen.
“One leading automotive advertiser has told us anytime they see their competitor’s car commercial, they want to launch a conquesting ad in the bottom-right hand corner that says, ‘This is the number one new car in America, not this one!'” explains Lawrence. “The marrying of those two screens, and the technology and the data behind it to have a different advertising experience is why we’re seeing new, different dollars come back into television.”
