adRise brings interactive ads to your connected TV

By Ryan Lawler Sep. 21, 2011, 8:15am PT

For decades, TV advertising has suffered from a lack of interactivity and a lack of true measurability. New connected devices like TVs, Blu-ray players and streaming set-top boxes are changing all that by providing the same type of granular reporting and targetability available for web-based video ads directly on the TV. San Francisco-based startup adRise wants to be the platform to enable those ads to be delivered across multiple devices.

adRise offers up a real-time bidding exchange for video advertising on connected devices, enabling advertisers to serve into a number of different connected devices without having to do the hard work of integrating with various device platforms themselves. The startup has already integrated with Roku, Google TV, Boxee, Samsung, Yahoo Connected TV and other device platforms, with more on the way. adRise does all the device detection, transcoding, insertion of video assets on its end, so advertisers need only feed their existing Flash creative into its system once to have those assets reach a number of different devices.

On the publisher front, adRise provides a software development kit that publishers can use so that videos delivered to the TV through a Roku, Samsung TV or other device can serve up the same advertising. The startup has already teamed up with ad networks Tremor Video and Brightroll, and plans to announce partnerships with other major publishing and ad partners later this fall. According to CEO Farhad Massoudi, adRise has seen its ad inventory double every month over the last three months, and he expects that trend to continue at least through the end of the year.

The startup solves a problem not just on the delivery side of things, but on the reporting side as well. While Nielsen ratings are nice, there’s no substitute for the type of granular, deep-dive analytics that advertisers can get from IP-based delivery. adRise measures a number of unique characteristics, allowing advertisers to drill down into viewership by device, as well as to see how long ads were watched, if viewers clicked through to learn more about a product.

As more viewership happens on connected devices, advertisers will need a way to reach those viewers and publishers will need a way to monetize those views. Platforms like adRise seem well positioned to offer a solution to both.

http://gigaom.com/video/adrise/