Samba TV recently announced the expansion of its Australian operation following a year of significant growth that saw them more than double revenue year on year.
The smart TV ad data analytics company, launched in 2020, focuses on omniscreen advertising and analytics through their software in several smart TV brands that enable consumers to opt into their services for better viewing experiences and content recommendations.
Through their first-party relationship with consumers who have opted into their services, Samba TV can gain a granular view of household TV viewing, analyse what’s on-screen in real-time, and help advertisers, brands, agencies, broadcasters and measurement firms find new audiences.
Yasmin Sanders, managing director of Samba TV in Australia, spoke to Mediaweek about the company’s key to growth, its expanding team, and goals for the new financial year.
In addition to working across free-to-air channels, Samba TV works with advertisers, agencies, broadcasters and publishers to enrich their omniscreen advertising and analytics.
“We help advertisers and brands manage reach and frequency across linear TV, digital devices and streaming platforms. We help them find new audiences, incremental reach and optimise their frequency. The nice and unique thing about our data set is that it can be integrated into marketing technology stacks,” Sanders said.
“They can take the data in-house and build and craft omniscreen advertising and measurement solutions for their clients to make sure that their advertising dollars are working as efficiently as possible for them – whether it’s activation, planning or measurement,” she added.
As managing director, Sanders oversees the day-to-day running of the business, building the brand, and its presence in the market.
The managing director also played a part in brokering partnerships with the likes of Trade Desk, MiQ, EMX Digital, Yahoo! and ComScore, discussing smart TV automatic content recognition (ACR).
“I was out in the market talking to all types of organisations in the ecosystem to showcase how our data could complement the existing data sets that they also have in-house to help enrich the insights they have for their advertisers and clients,” she said.
The key to Samba TV’s recent revenue growth in the Australian market
Last month, Samba TV announced that it had more than doubled its revenue year-on-year in the Australian market.
At the time, Samba TV CEO and co-founder Ashwin Navin said in a press statement: “We’re very pleased with the strong momentum and growth across our business globally.
“With 92% of linear ad impressions in Australia repeatedly served to the same 55% of households, the opportunity for the industry to innovate and deliver better omniscreen TV planning, activation, and measurement has never been greater,” he added.
Sanders told Mediaweek that while Samba TV had been in the Australian market for less than two years at that point, the key to its growth has been its ability to offer cross-screen solutions as audiences continued to shift between different platforms.
“Advertisers and brands are finding it harder to cost-effectively meet their audience targets and plan for their investment and measure those outcomes effectively.
“Because we have a wide and granular view of what audiences or TV viewership behaviours are happening on the largest screen in the living room, we’re able to apply that and extend that to devices in the household to offer these advertising solutions,” she added.
“The market understands the value of deduplicated cross-screen measurement and activation. Being able to understand and manage reach and frequency through data insights can help inform how to best use their marketing ad dollars,” she added.
Recent appointments to the Samba TV team and its continuing growth in the local market
This year, Samba TV has welcomed new appointments to the team to help support their growth and to lead divisions of the company’s offering.
Tom Parsons was appointed head of client partnerships and data. Sanders said: “He leads all new business discussions with organisations who want to take the data in-house and integrate it into their marketing technology stack to create omniscreen advertising and measurement solutions.”
Simeon Swain also joined the team as commercial lead – programmatic and audience. The managing director explained that he oversees the programmatic media side of the business to help advertisers find elusive TV audiences across devices via Pubmatic and Xandr’s digital inventory. “He works predominantly with agencies and brands to be able to activate against our audiences in a self-serve programmatic fashion,” she added.
Sanders also noted the addition of Damien Tang as the director of data solutions. “He works with our audience team to create and build bespoke audiences for our clients and acts as a technical solutions consultant for clients wanting to take our data in-house,” she said.
Damien Tang, Simeon Swain, Tom Parsons and Yasmin Sanders
The managing director said that with their local clients, whom she described as strategic partners, other local companies in the media and broadcast ecosystem want to learn more about Samba TV and its offering.
“For us to best service these clients and continue to grow on the trajectory that we’re on, we need to make sure that we have these boots on the ground. Although we are headquartered in the US, the business has a strong local lens.
“The business has quite smartly invested in local boots on the ground to make sure that our clients, our partners, and the folks that are going to come on board, have the local knowledge and the local skills to be able to help service them.
“I think the biggest thing is, how do we have local Samba folks to ensure that they are helping our clients and partners extract as much value from our dataset as possible? You can’t do that just with one person, so we’re just going to continue to grow and grow, which is exciting,” she added.
Samba TV’s goals for the financial year ahead
Looking into the financial year ahead, Sanders said their goal is to continue “evangelising” the Samba TV product.
“If we look at the advertising ecosystem, you have platforms, measurement firms, broadcasters, agencies, brands and big digital publishers, all of these types of players in the ecosystem we would love to be working with.
“Our intention is, we would love our data to be hitting all of these types of organisations to help contribute, complement and supplement the insights that they already have,” Sanders added.
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Top image: Yasmin Sanders