Vibe.co is focused on allowing any marketer, any brand, of any size, to advertise on TV in under 5 minutes. Founded in August 2021, Vibe.co launched its platform in September 2022. Within one year, they reached 1,000 clients, and in February 2024, they raised $22.5M in Series A funding.
Vibe.co aims to make television advertising as simple as possible and remove barriers-to-entry into the world of streaming TV advertising.
We held an exclusive interview with Vibe.co and discussed TV advertising platforms, their primary challenges, and the latest trends.
Can you elaborate on how Vibe.co positions itself within the competitive landscape of TV advertising platforms and what the primary objectives are that you aim to achieve for your clients?
Vibe.co is uniquely focused on the Streaming TV advertising market, from both the demand and supply side. That, in itself, differentiates us from 99% of CTV advertising platform competitors who tacked CTV onto their suite of services, but don’t devote nearly as much of their financial and intellectual resources to the channel as Vibe does.
Our market positioning is unique in that we are not aiming to push a few thousand advertisers to their spending limit; instead, we want to empower millions of advertisers to launch Streaming TV campaigns. 90% of our marketing efforts are inbound and growth versus sales because of the size of the market we are going after.
That means appealing to a much broader spectrum of businesses and developing a platform that fits a different set of needs like intuitive UX for a self-serve platform, instant campaign launch, ML-enabled real-time campaign optimization, first party data lookalike audience creation and testing, direct publisher relationships, etc.
We consistently approach the CTV market from an outsider’s perspective, pushing to legitimize the channel at large and redefine the CTV media buying landscape by developing a marketplace rather than a platform and bridging the gap between publishers who are still learning how to monetize their audiences and advertisers hungry for performance.
What are the challenges businesses typically face when entering the realm of TV advertising, and how does Vibe address these challenges to make the process more accessible and efficient?
Across advertiser types and experience levels with Streaming TV, challenges remain the same: industry fragmentation, metrics opacity, and the switch to a performance mindset (vs branding). For smaller advertisers, cost is also a massive barrier to entry.
Vibe’s answer is to radically shift traditional media buying paradigms and transform the publisher-advertiser relationship into a holistic marketplace bringing hundreds of premium publishers together with thousands of advertisers and working with both sides to share data as transparently as possible.
Vibe.co allows advertisers to deliver their content across hundreds of channels, while receiving real-time, unified data in one coherent dashboard as opposed to having to develop separate campaigns with different publishers.
Meanwhile, we have direct relationships with publishers who trust us because of the diversity of advertisers we bring to market for them, so it is in their interest to grant us quality inventory placements and transparent data access (audience, context, VTR, cost per view, etc.).
As for prohibitive pricing, Vibe.co bets on the success of our clients’ campaigns to hit our revenue goals, not on gouging them from the get go. That’s why campaigns can launch on our platform starting at $50/day.
How does Vibe.co determine the optimal combination of digital and TV advertising strategies for clients? Can you provide insights into the balance between the two and how it varies based on business goals and target audiences?
Vibe.co is 100% focused on CTV advertising to ensure we have the time and resources necessary to develop state of the art features like Live Sports advertising, lookalike CTV audience creation, retargeting, frequency capping, direct publisher relationships, etc. so we don’t allocate budgets across strategies.
One thing we always encourage our clients to monitor, however, is CTV’s “halo effect” across channels: we have noticed that search and social results often grow at a pace with CTV investments.
We work with a lot of clients who are either new to television advertising altogether or are transitioning their TV budget from linear to streaming and need help reframing their perspective in terms of measurement, ROAS, and CPA calculation – that’s where Vibe.co really shines.
In fact, a lot of our clients work with digital vendors who offer CTV as part of their services suite, but choose to work with us for that one line item because of our industry knowledge, flexible pricing, responsiveness, and deep bench of metrics.
How does Vibe leverage advanced AI and data analytics technologies to provide actionable insights and optimize TV advertising campaigns for maximum impact?
Vibe.co has always used machine learning to enhance our bidding process and validate advertiser creative in real time, but this year is really pushing our commitment to AI into hypergrowth.
Some of the most exciting initiatives due to launch in the next few months include new user acquisition algorithms based on key search words associated with advertisers’ urls, automatic lookalike audience creation, incrementality testing, and rapid creative customization based on geos or audience interests, to name a few.
What are the unique advantages and potential hurdles for SMEs versus larger enterprises when utilizing TV advertising, and how does Vibe tailor its services to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes?
We’ve talked a bit about the ways in which Vibe.co is more than just a DSP connecting advertisers to long-form content streams, and a lot of that comes from our desire to serve a much larger swath of brands than are currently advertising on television. Over 60% of our client base are SMBs because we understand what that market needs:
- An intuitive self-serve platform
- Product-based onboarding
- Responsive customer success team
- Instant campaign creative validation
- Low average CPMs
- $50/day minimum
- Google Analytics integration
Meanwhile, we’re building a powerful engine to power performance-focused campaigns with massive reach, incrementality testing, direct publisher relationships, CRM targeting, MMP integrations, customizable reporting dashboards, advanced campaign testing modules, and more.
Image Credit: Vibe.co
What emerging trends or shifts in the TV advertising ecosystem do you anticipate, and how is Vibe prepared to innovate and adapt to these changes to better serve your clients?
We have long preached that audiences are more open to different types of creative on television than one might think – the first being that ads, in general, are not as hated as many streaming services thought, but also that formats like UGC or repurposed social assets can be just as compelling as high production commercials.
As more and more publishers switch to ad-supported models we are of course working hard on developing meaningful relationships with them and bringing their content to our clients, but we also love working with those publishers on the types of creative they will allow on their platforms.
Our intuitive platform empowers advertisers to test early and often which we think should extend to video formats, especially as shoppable formats come on the scene.
As the industry continues to focus on performance objectives and data transparency, Vibe.co is diversifying its targeting and reporting modules to meet demand. This way, advertisers can make the most of the data they do have to optimize their targeting, retargeting, measurement, and look alike segment creation.
Can you share a notable case study where Vibe’s platform significantly transformed a client’s TV advertising strategy or campaign performance? What were the key tactics employed, and what measurable outcomes were achieved?
Our work with Natural Cycles, a fertility app recently launched in the US market, was especially revealing. It yielded not only a 3X ROAS, but CPAs and Costs Per Page View at half their target price. Read all about the Vibe solutions they used here.
