Ads Pay for Great Content
James Grant has worked in streaming TV for over twenty years, starting as a TV buyer at Mediacom in 2002 when he watched World Cup clips buffering on a BBC website and predicted that the internet would eventually deliver everything. As SVP and Head of Advanced TV at Equativ, he now builds the monetisation technology that makes it work.
“We can read an audience profile in 300 milliseconds. Household-level personalisation across connected TV.”
James Grant is SVP and Head of Advanced TV at Equativ, the ad tech monetisation platform. Equativ builds technology spanning ad serving for publishers, a supply-side platform, demand-side campaign management, and a server-side ad insertion tool for dynamic ad delivery in streaming environments. James leads Equativ’s advanced television strategy and commercial development.
James began his career as a TV buyer at Zenith Optimedia in 2001, then moved to Mediacom, where a conversation in 2002 about watching World Cup clips on the internet set the direction of his entire career. He has since worked across both the buy and sell sides of the streaming advertising ecosystem, holding roles at Microsoft Advertising, VINDICO Group, FreeWheel for six years, Finecast, Wurl, and Equativ. Across that progression he has been a buyer, seller, startup operator, and strategic advisor, always gravitating toward the companies building the technology layer between content and commerce.
At Equativ, he oversees the advanced television business, which sits at the intersection of streaming monetisation, household-level identity, addressability, and outcomes measurement. Equativ’s Green P&P sustainability initiative, which James references as one of the most exciting developments in the company, makes the carbon footprint of the platform’s programmatic operations transparent to buyers and publishers. He believes the TV advertising industry is entering an outcomes-based era and that the companies which solve the unified measurement problem will define the next decade of the market.
“We read an audience profile in 300 milliseconds and change the ads in that stream.”
“More and more of the ecosystem of TV streaming advertising will focus on outcomes. What was the target?”
TV advertising has historically lived in the brand and reach half of the funnel, where success was measured in GRPs and share of voice. The data infrastructure of streaming is making it possible to tie TV ad exposure to what happened next: site visits, app downloads, purchases. James sees the outcomes-based model accelerating significantly within three years, reshaping how media plans are built, how budgets are justified at board level, and how the value of streaming TV is articulated compared to search and social. The comparison he draws is precise: search performance is a metric marketers love because it is accountable. Streaming TV is on the same journey.
“We don’t have a unified audience universe across all the different providers. That fragmentation is a real problem.”
The fragmentation of streaming audiences is both the opportunity and the crisis of advanced TV. The opportunity is hyper-targeted, highly personalised, cost-effective reach at scale. The crisis is that no single data model reconciles the audience across all the providers, all the devices, and all the viewing environments into a comparable metric. Buyers want to know what percentage of their target audience they can reach. Without a unified model, they are assembling that picture from incompatible sources. James’s view is that solving this requires tech platforms, buyers, and publishers to move together rather than waiting for regulators to force the issue.
“Don’t always think that television is just for the largest, biggest companies, biggest brands.”
The mental model that TV advertising requires national-scale budgets is a legacy of linear TV economics. In streaming, the same technology that allows a major FMCG brand to run personalised household-level ads also allows a regional car dealership to run the same creative only in the postcodes where it operates. Sky AdSmart has demonstrated this at scale in the UK. The next wave is SMBs that have never considered TV as part of their media plan discovering that the targeting, the format, and the pricing have moved far enough from the old model to make it viable. James’s advice to marketers is to go and check rather than assume.
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