Captify, a specialist in consumer search data, named Brendan Condon, a former senior executive for the ad-sales unit of Comcast’s cable division, as its global chief revenue officer, a sign that the company sees opportunity as the media industry starts to focus more heavily on how consumers utilize video delivered by broadband.
Condon is charged with driving new growth opportunities for Captify, which delivers real-time consumer insights based on data from consumer searches around the globe.
“We provide a much cleaner, viewer-friendly approach to how search data can enter the TV realm, and with that, I think, can greatly expand the brands that Captify works with,” says Tom Rogers, chairman of Captify, in an interview.
Captify vies with Google, which is one of the largest holders of data about how consumers use search. Captify captures data from a range of publisher and ecommerce sites, and uses it to help marketers establish consumer target parameters they can use in developing programmatic ad buys, among other schedules of commercial inventory. The company counts Apple, Disney, Adidas, American Express and Microsoft among its clients.
Condon has held top sales and executive roles at companies including AOL and Media Property Holdings, and was most recently chief revenue officer at Comcast’s Effectv, where he managed a team of more than 1500 sales executives. “There is a need for better insight and better targeting,” says Condon, in an interview. “Multiple categories of advertisers, from entertainment to health to e-commerce, retail and even automotive, want to capture search interests before they make important decisions.”
He joins the company as Madison Avenue will likely focus even more closely on how consumers interact with streaming video. Nielsen, one of the industry’s largest measurement concerns has unveiled plans to start tracking viewership of so-called “addressable” advertisements placed into linear feeds via use of connected TVs. It’s a move top media executives have been demanding for years.