Welcome, Zvika! We’re excited to have you with us. To start, can you share a bit about your professional journey and what inspired you to co-found Innovid?
I co-founded Innovid with the belief that video could be more engaging, measurable, and dynamic. When we started the company in 2007, it was clear that the world was heading toward a more digital experience, and we saw an opportunity to reinvent how advertising could show up in that environment. That belief still drives me today – to power more relevant, efficient, and impactful ad experiences that people love.
What do you see as the biggest reason why ad budgets haven’t caught up to where CTV viewership is today?
CTV has massive reach, but the path to accessing and measuring that reach is still fragmented. Unlike linear, CTV isn’t one destination, it’s a web of platforms, devices, and data signals. That complexity creates friction, which leads to higher costs, measurement challenges, difficulty in proving incrementality, you name it. There’s also the aspect of buyers defaulting to what’s familiar to them or siloed teams that haven’t aligned digital and TV budgets. But it’s important to note that this is changing. As infrastructure improves and partners like Innovid help unify the view across platforms, the value of CTV is becoming impossible to ignore.
With the launch of Harmony, how do you see Innovid helping reshape the CTV advertising infrastructure before it becomes too tangled to fix?
CTV is at a critical inflection point. It’s growing fast, but unless we act now, we risk repeating the mistakes of early digital advertising – fragmentation, lack of transparency, excessive “tech taxes,” and a handful of dominant players controlling everything. That’s why we launched Harmony. It’s a long-term initiative and suite of products to reimagine the infrastructure of CTV advertising while there’s still time to do it right.
The focus is to keep CTV open for everyone and controlled by no one by building a more efficient, transparent, and sustainable foundation.
Take Harmony Direct, for example. It eliminates wasteful “hops” between buyers and sellers in guaranteed media, increasing working media by 8% on average for agencies and boosting yield for publishers by up to 15%. That’s more than $1B in potential value if applied across the U.S. CTV market.
But Harmony is more than products. It’s our blueprint for what CTV should be – a collaborative, data-driven, outcome-oriented ecosystem. And Innovid has the scale, neutrality, and tech to help build it. Not just for our own benefit, but for the industry’s future.
Can you walk us through how holistic frequency management works and why it’s such a game-changer for advertisers compared to past approaches?
Historically, marketers were flying blind. Frequency caps existed, but only in silos – one DSP, one publisher, one platform at a time. That meant consumers were often bombarded with the same ad over and over again, while other households weren’t reached at all, resulting in wasted impressions, frustrated audiences, and inefficient spend.
Harmony Frequency changes that by flipping frequency management from a reactive to a proactive strategy. Powered by our ad server, which sees every impression across platforms, publishers, and households, we provide DSPs with real-time exposure data before they place a bid. That means they can suppress already-exposed households and shift spend toward net-new ones to increase reach and reduce ad fatigue.
This is the first truly holistic frequency solution for CTV and digital.
How are publishers positioned to benefit from better frequency control on the sell-side, and how does this give them an edge in the increasingly competitive CTV space?
Publishers want to effectively monetize inventory while also delivering a great viewing experience. Harmony helps them do both. With real-time insights, they can avoid bombarding viewers with the same ad and instead enable smarter pacing and optimization. That drives better results for marketers, improves campaign performance, and enhances the viewing experience, which all help to justify premium pricing.
As the upfronts continue to evolve, how do you think CTV is reshaping what advertisers expect when they come to the table?
Marketers are no longer satisfied with broad estimates or legacy guarantees. They want proof. At this year’s Upfronts, we saw buyers come to the table asking tougher questions: What’s my actual reach? Where’s the overlap? How much of my spend is being wasted?
CTV offers digital-like precision, but without the right infrastructure (shared data, cross-platform visibility, frequency management, etc.) it risks falling into the same inefficiencies as linear. That’s why things like interoperability, transparency, and optimization are absolutely critical.
Zvika, when you think about your own personal strategy as a leader, how do you prioritize where to focus your energy in a fast-moving, high-growth space like CTV?
The CTV space moves fast, so I try to spend my time where I can add the most value – staying close to clients, listening to the market, and making sure we’re solving real problems with real urgency. I also believe in building great teams and then empowering them. No one can do it alone. My job is to keep our mission clear and make sure we’re moving toward it together.
What advice would you give to brands or publishers who are still hesitant about shifting more of their budgets toward CTV?
The audience is already there, and waiting comes with the cost of missed engagements, inefficiencies, and falling behind more agile competitors. My advice is to start now, but start smart. Work with partners who prioritize transparency, independence, and interoperability, and look for tools that can connect the dots, not just add more silos.
Looking ahead, what are you personally most excited about when it comes to the innovations and opportunities on the horizon for Innovid and the broader CTV landscape?
We’re at a point where AI, automation, and data can power relevant, outcomes-driven advertising at scale. Innovid sits at the center of that, helping marketers deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time, and measure and optimize it all in real time. We’ve spent close to two decades building the foundation for this moment, and now the industry is ready to accelerate.
Any final thoughts you’d like to leave with our readers on why now is such a critical moment for the CTV ecosystem and how they can best position themselves for success?
This is the window. CTV is no longer the future, it’s the now. But how we build the infrastructure today will determine the industry’s trajectory for the next decade. We all have a choice: keep operating in silos and risk inefficiency or work together to unlock the full potential of CTV. At Innovid, we believe the latter is not only possible, it’s already happening, and we’re here to help lead that transformation.
For more expert articles and industry updates, follow Martech News
