Beeswax funding news underscores a rise in bringing services in-house, faith in CTV advertising

DSP Beeswax announced Tuesday that it has secured an additional $15 million in Series B funding and reported a jump in revenue of 150 percent over last year, underscoring a marked rise in marketers taking programmatic advertising services in house.

The “bidder-as-a-service (BaaS)” platform, which enables marketers to build their own programmatic ad services, recently bulked up its connected TV (CTV) ad inventory through new partnerships with Tru Optik, Telaria, Tubi and SpotX.

Why you should care

Calls for increased transparency in programmatic advertising have rippled through the industry for the past few years, as marketers seek guarantees that their ads will be viewable and will not run next to objectional content.

More than a third (35 percent) of the respondents to a 2017 Association of National Advertisers (ANA) study (free, registration required) reported that they had already expanded their in-house programmatic media buying capabilities — an increase of 24 percent over 2016. More than three-quarters (78 percent) said they were concerned about programmatic brand safety issues.

By bringing services like ad buying in-house, marketers gain more control over their inventory — control that can be lost in the folds of an agency-brand relationship.

The investment also shows faith in CTV advertising, which has suffered from its own transparency issues as it scales. A Sept. Innovid report said that CTV ad impressions have grown by 106 percent since 2016, with a 30 percent increase in the number of advertisers from 2016 to 2017.

Finally, the vote of confidence by investors highlights a key trend identified this week by MarTech conference chair Scott Brinker, who predicts that the martech landscape will see more companies blending software and services in the coming years.

More about the news

• Investors include RRE, Foundry, Amasia and You & Mr Jones, for a total of $28 million to date.
• Beeswax customers include Twitch, FourSquare, Cognitiv, Social Point, Dailymotion, Tresensa and Iotec.

About The Author

Robin Kurzer

Robin Kurzer started her career as a daily newspaper reporter in Milford, Connecticut. She then made her mark on the advertising and marketing world in Chicago at agencies such as Tribal DDB and Razorfish, creating award-winning work for many major brands. For the past seven years, she’s worked as a freelance writer and communications professional across a variety of business sectors.