Zack Rosenberg leads CatapultX, a company seeking to bring the same level of contextual targeting long available to search and direct advertising search to video streams. He also writes a weekly newsletter titled “AI in Advertising.”
CatapultX’s AI engine — called the “Moments Targeting Engine” — parses video streams and programmatically arranges for non-interruptive ad units to appear in relevant channels. In so doing, it unlocks value in video streams whose potential was hitherto unrealizable.
I caught up with Zack to explore issues relating to the state of video advertising. I wanted to hear his company’s interesting origin story, learn about what CatapultX’s technology does, the results that using it has made for publishers, and also talk about the degree to which video advertising, particularly CatapultX is relatively immune to the plague of bots and fake views that afflict other advertising modalities.
I also probed Zack on a recurrent choice that brands must often make with respect to creating video ads: should a single ad be made to serve multiple target audiences or a single one? As Zack notes, this decision is often dictated more by the channel than by the audience itself. And we chatted about the future of AI in advertising, in particular the degree to which a potential recessionary economy may
CatapultX seems to be on its way. It recently raised a Pre-Seed round led by Quake Capital. Its angel investors are distinguished (Mark Pedowitz (CEO of CW Network), Sanjay Macwan (CIO of Vonage & former CTO of NBCUniversal), Will Margiloff (CSO/President of Zeta Global) & Claude Ruibal (Fmr. Global Head of Sports Partnerships at YouTube)) and its tech solves a real problem for publishers seeking a better way to monetize video assets.
As Zack notes, news publishers who can better monetize video assets have a much better chance of surviving than those who cannot — if CatapultX can help with this process, it’s good news for the news industry and, by extension, us all.
