Cracking the Code: How AI and 70% Discounts Are Democratizing TV for Nonprofits

“So AdGood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We work with large-scale publishers and platforms to donate their unused inventory to us. We then have our own ad stack put together from partnerships and little tech that we’ve built, where we manage all of that inventory. We only enable nonprofits to access this as an inventory.”

Denver: Yep. Narrowcasting. By the way, I watched a football game or two on streaming this weekend. It’s better than cable, I’m telling you. It is so crystal clear. It was unbelievable.

In the simplest terms, what does AdGood do? Who is it for? And walk us through the process.

Kris: Yeah. So AdGood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We work with large-scale publishers and platforms to donate their unused inventory to us. We then have our own ad stack put together from partnerships and little tech that we’ve built, where we manage all of that inventory. We only enable nonprofits to access this as an inventory. These are the only companies that are able to access what our inventory is.

Our core mission here at AdGood is to bring affordable Connected TV advertising to all nonprofits. And so by saying that, we obviously, we want to be able to connect on multiple fronts. And so to make it as accommodating as possible, we’re trying to make our inventory available to all different sizes of nonprofits, no matter where and how they buy. So we’ve built partnerships to be able to do that.

Larger scale nonprofits can access our inventory quite easily through any sort of Deal ID, through any trading desk that they’re already buying through, like Viant or like StackAdapt, or any of these other scenarios or basis. Like we’re able to connect to any of those.

 And they can essentially access our inventory and all the great data that comes with it within that request, and be able to run their media through that and get all the great reporting that they’re able to get within their same styles that they currently run their media through.

We also do manage service for that to be able to connect to what this works at, where we essentially do everything for the nonprofits. It’s white glove. You come to us and let us know what you’re looking for; we put a little media plan together for you. You understand what the aspects are and the budget and all these other scenarios, and you’re able to run in that piece.

And we give all that great weekly reporting to you guys. And our weekly reporting has been… we’re constantly growing what we can offer the nonprofits because this is …a lot of them, this is the first time they’re getting this level of data, and so we’re giving them really great things around the campaign run. So it’s like impressions.

Completion rate we give as well, and that’s the amount a viewer has viewed the ad. And on average, we’re seeing our completion rate around 98%. So 90% of the ad is actually seen. I think all CTV is roughly around 95%, so we’re seeing a higher uptick a little bit on average. And I think it’s mostly because it’s tied to the content of the ads because it is more awareness-driven or donation-driven or nonprofit- driven.

So it’s a small bump, but I think it is interesting to see. In addition to that, we give impressions by platform, and then we also give impressions by time of day, as well as any sort of geotargeting that they’re going after as well. It’s all impressions broken down by those geos.

One other scenario that we actually roll out that’s pretty interesting is the smaller nonprofits. As I think a lot of smaller nonprofits know, it’s hard to create an ad. It takes time… it takes budget. They don’t even know where to get started. How do they even get access to media like this?

 It’s usually only… donated media is very hard to get unless you know somebody or you can get in somewhere, and that’s only that one offering. With AdGood, we have a much bigger piece, which I can talk about a little bit later. But we also offer our Self Serve GenAI Ad Manager.

Really interesting actually, because the tool itself is quite amazing. Any nonprofit can come in. Since you type in the URL to the website, the AI scans their website, pulls images from the website, builds a 30-second video script for that, and then generates a 30-second video ad.

All of it is completely editable via chat prompt through that same UI that exists there, and they can upload videos and images, update the copy, select multiple voiceover text or voiceover styles that exist. You can select different music as well as up to 30 different languages and dialects.

And it has great aspects of being able to add in a QR code that’s trackable, helps you with your targeting. You can change the context of anything that you’re doing right there. And then one other great thing that we’ve actually just rolled out because we actually licensed this tool from streamr.ai, which has been a great partner for us.

And they just rolled out the Google VEO 3. And so now, you’re able to actually upload images and get aspects of the different credits that are available there, and purchase additional credits to be able to upload images and actually have those images come to life so that you can have some of these static images where you don’t have video, and get really kind of simplified animations that are really powerful to create a much more compelling ad to speak more to your story.

And then essentially, the whole thing takes about three and a half minutes, depending on what you’re doing. You swipe a credit card and your ad could go live within 24 hours as long as we… obviously we have to approve the ad so it’s TV quality, and then you’re essentially live.

And we set that spend at a $250 minimum spend, so even the smallest nonprofits in the smallest towns could still run their campaigns in those smaller geos.

Denver: Pretty sophisticated nonprofit I just started… just listening to you right now. Okay, let’s take a pretty good-sized nonprofit, $5 million, $10 million or above. What kind of budget should I set aside to really have this create some impact, and how will I know if I’ve been successful?

Kris: Yeah. So I think a couple things. Really kind of based on that size, you typically want to take a percentage of what your marketing spend is.

This is essentially like a net new channel for you, so you’re going to have  your typical campaigns across Meta; you’re going to have campaigns across Google; maybe you’re running them in other scenarios to try to get fundraising. You’re sending out mailers.

All these things kind of tie together what your overall budget is. And so this is kind of a net new channel for you, but it’s a really good, powerful performance channel as well. So for a scenario like this, recommendations kind of vary. I think you need to figure out there’s pieces of understanding which creatives are going to convert the best. So you need to kind of understand that piece.

Denver: Yeah.

Kris: Going after and also understanding how do you build creative, that does two things. One, awareness, as well as driving donations, right? How can you kind of do those to maximize your budgets a lot as much as possible across these?

And so for something around that size, we typically see from us ranges from campaigns coming in, depending on budget size obviously, from around $5,000 a month, all the way up to a hundred, depending on what the different sizes are.

And a lot of it ties to what the overall thing is. What are you doing? Is this tied to an event? Is this tied to donations? So that piece is where that really comes together. The other part that you mentioned as far as like, how do you see if this was effective? Well, there’s all kinds of different ways to be able to test that, to understand that.

One, looking at your site traffic and growth and being able to benchmark that for the smaller nonprofits that are running campaigns and seeing what the impact is. And then there’s other aspects too, where you can track the donations during that period of time and understand what those pieces are. But that’s, again, not that quantitative look that you really want to have.

And so at AdGood, we’ve actually just begun partnering with a couple attribution platforms, as well as bringing on a lift study partner. So all these capabilities are there. We’re currently in beta testing right now with these partners, and also too with understanding what we’re going to be doing with the lift study piece.

And so all these are kind of coming together so we can track. When we talk about attribution, what that means is essentially for every managed service campaign we run, as long as you’re over that 5 million threshold of impressions, depending on what your budget is, like you need to at least meet that impression load for what you’re running, we’re able to actually run a universal pixel for you that we would place on the nonprofit’s website.

Every viewer that sees an ad, we’re able to track who goes to the website from that ad, what they do on the website, and then tracking them all the way down to the donation front, depending on how the donations are set up there and how they’re taking donations, and be able to provide an actual return on ad spend to see what that overall picture looks like for them.

And all these, they’ll have their own kind of dashboard for this stuff, and it’ll all be set up because of the partner that we’re working with. So there’s a lot of great things we’re doing on the attribution front there. In addition to that too, we’re working to get lift study pieces, so that’s more kind of survey based, more or less. So people that have seen the ad or people that were supposed to see the ad, were they affected by it?

And getting like a brand lift or awareness lift study, that’s really depending on that specific campaign and what it can do for that specific nonprofit. So they can see kind of the actual, qualitative impact of what’s happening. So there’s…

Denver: So then you’re in a very… yeah, go ahead.

Kris: No, that’s it.

Denver: I know you’re in the very early innings of this, but have you worked with any nonprofits and have at least some stories you could tell in terms of their successes?

Kris: Yes. I don’t know if I can mention any specifics, but we do work with like BreastCancer.org, and we’ve run a lot of campaigns with them. And then a couple kind of more in the public publishing space for streaming. I can’t say names, but I’m sure you guys could figure that piece out.

But I think they do a lot of awareness in a lot of other great things. And we also work with nonprofits across many verticals, aspects of animal welfare. We work across like different kind of health-oriented aspects, relief and recovery. We do a lot with hunger, you name it.

We’ve  been in across most verticals, heavier in some, less heavy in others. And it really just boils down to outreach because I mean, we just launched in January.

Denver: Yeah, I know.

Kris: We’ve been running full bore. We all kind of came from adtech and start-ups and so we move pretty quick, and we’re highly programmatic too, so a lot of aspects of the business, we get really well, and we know a lot of people in the space. So that side of it is definitely a lot easier on our front.

And our board is actually quite helpful, too. Everybody comes from the publishing, the media, and the streaming space, and as well as the adtech space. In addition to that too, they’ve all done a lot of great things as far as philanthropy and as far as helping other nonprofits and understanding those pieces. So we have a lot of great guidance along the way.

Denver: Yeah. What sparked this idea initially, in the ad tech space. Has this been something always in front and center for you, or was there a moment that you said, Aha, there’s an opportunity here to do something really meaningful?

Kris: Yeah. So I think overall, I always kind of wanted to do something in the space, going to be more purpose driven. I was always kind of looking, even when I was in grad school, like I just want to do something that’s for good, like in some way, shape, or form.

I’ve always liked helping people, and it’s just a scenario that I think is important to kind of apply to what you’re doing, and if you can use that skillset to do so. Now, being an adtech, it’s kind of hard to apply those skills sometimes just to figure out how can we… you know… it’s not like I’m out building houses to help restructure people’s lives.

And I don’t know how to do a lot of things in medicine to help people or build better filtered water. Like it’s just not my background. And so for me, it just took a minute to figure out what the scenario could be. And for me, it’s like I donate blood all the time, so I was donating blood for a Red Cross blood drive, and I’m sitting, and there’s nobody in there.

 And I know there’s all this unused inventory happening in streaming, and so I started looking into it. And the more that I did, I realized that there’s some allocations of donated inventory happening, but it’s not happening at scale and it’s not being accessible in a way that’s meaningful for nonprofits.

So that if they’re running a campaign, and they have a certain allotment of inventory and they’re out, that campaign’s crushing for them; they can’t go get more. Like it’s done, and so they miss out because it’s seasonal, it’s impactful. Certain campaigns are going to do better at certain times. They need to be able to move and be agile just like all current marketers do in the private sector.

And so I wanted to create this scenario. After I looked into it, I’m like, Okay, well nobody’s doing this, so I kind of have to do it because I think I can put this together quite quickly, and I knew the right people to help bring in on the team. And I brought Craig Heiting in, and he came over from Wurl as well, and so it’s been a really great thing. And also our CTO, Andy Hardwick came over, and so he’s been really helpful.

And so we’re slowly starting to kind of build up the team here and doing great things. And that’s kind of the gist of it, is like we kind of came in and put it together. I’ve had to learn a lot about nonprofit stuff along the way.

Denver: Yeah.

Kris: But thankfully I’ve had Syeda, who’s our general counsel. She came in and she was a great help for me. She really has done so much nonprofit work. She guided me through the whole process. We got our 501(c)(3), helped organize all the book stuff, and we’ve pretty much set our nonprofit up to be massive. Like we’re able to handle scale, all of our policies, everything.

So it was a really exciting time, but it was also a lot of learning.

Denver: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s a very adtech of you to build on something to the size you want it to be, not the size it is right now, so you can grow into it. Sort of like getting a shoe for your kid who’s wearing a size four… you buy them a six because they’re growing like weeds, and they’ll grow into it.

Two questions about this process. Number one, the inventory. How did you get your hands on this inventory? I mean, it’s there, you’re a guy, you know what I mean? You have access to a lot of this inventory. What was that like in terms of being able to access it?

And the other thing, which I know a lot of nonprofits are probably thinking: What kind of discount is going to be available to them if they should avail themselves of this opportunity?

Kris: Yeah. So along the way, we’ve had some great partners from the publishing side. One of our biggest and best partners is A+E Global Media. Mark Garner’s on our board. He heads up streaming over there, but he was a great source. And then Tyler DeNicola over there helped get us all set up with what we’re doing.

And overarchingly, I think, having that support from them initially to really get things moving was really essential to what we did here at AdGood. And then along the way, we’ve added a lot of partners. We work with LG, we work with Scripts, we work with some other new partners that are coming on that I can’t mention. But we work with Syniverse…..

 So we only have like the most premium inventory. And the partners are fantastic that we work with. And I think one of the other key things to mention too is we work with Plex; we work with Stingray. So we have really good inventory, but the key thing to mention is we have 1.5 billion available impressions a month.

Denver: Hoo. Yeah.

Kris: And that’s across over a thousand channels. It’s over 25 platforms. We’re talking about 50 million households, over 7,000 different movies and shows. So this is all really great content, and this is over 200 million Connected TVs, smart TVs out there.

“But our bigger piece too is: we still need to scale. The bigger we get, the more good we can do because that’s our whole mission. Like our whole thing is to make it as simple and as easy as possible for people to access.”

Denver: You’re speaking to a lot of nonprofit organizations right now. What’s your message to them? Because I’ll tell you the truth, this is something which I think they get a little intrigued by, but it’s also something that they’ll say: Well, we’ll get around to it at some other time. We got some urgent things in front of us right now.

How can you, if I were a CEO of a nonprofit, what would you say to me to maybe get me to rethink that a little bit and prioritize this a bit?

Kris: Well, I think a lot of nonprofits are already spending. So if you’re already out there spending, like you shouldn’t be paying full price for your inventory. You should be working with us so that we can help you get access to that inventory at 70% off.

Denver: That was 70% off?

Kris: 70% off, but with market rate, that’s typically what we charge. There’s different fluctuations sometimes because our costs go up in different scenarios too. So we do adjust that pricing, but we try to keep it as flat as possible. And that’s just based on like the service fees that we have. Obviously, we have bills and tech and people and all these other key pieces, so that we can maintain.

But our bigger piece too is: we still need to scale. The bigger we get, the more good we can do because that’s our whole mission. Like our whole thing is to make it as simple and as easy as possible for people to access. But I think the big mention is like you should be working with us to help either increase your impressions for what you’re trying to achieve and access this, however you need to.  But in addition to that, you’re going to get 4x more impressions by working with us.

Denver: Wow.

Kris: And that’s a big impact, especially depending on what you’re trying to chase and go after. It enables nonprofits for the first time in a long time to actually test things because they’re not spending $30 CPMs or $25 CPMs on the inventory. They’re paying far less. So now they can experiment with different creative and different scenarios and do what marketers are doing now in the digital age.

Denver: Kris, what is AdGood’s business model? I mean, you talked about service fees, but I mean, is there philanthropy involved? I mean, what do your revenue streams look like?

Kris: So we have a couple; we have one major scenario, and that’s where obviously we go out and we get the inventory, and then we sell that inventory to the nonprofits. And we sell to them at a highly reduced rate.

Denver: Yep.

Kris: And that’s the bulk of how we generate. We’re totally bootstrapped. I think we’ve gotten two donations, one from a former colleague, and then my wife. So aside from those two, like we don’t really… donations aren’t a big thing for us because we’ve bootstrapped this ourselves, and we’re kind of putting everything together.

We do have the AdGood Nonprofit Media Fund, which we’re actually just going to roll out probably in about a week and a half. It’s live now, but we haven’t started marketing it or going after that. And what we’re going to be doing with that is actually going out and working with some of our partners and some of the other larger kind of companies that we’re tied to, to be able to get donations into that fund.

We’ll be able to then take funds from that and then allocate to nonprofits that don’t have budget or can’t spend, or maybe they’re in a lull at that time. They don’t have the money that quarter to run, but they need to be running. We can actually give them free impressions and let them run, by utilizing that fund to pay for their media and still be able to get all the great services that we give.

“And I would see that at some point, I would like to be able to offer every nonprofit a certain level of inventory just completely free. Like I’m hoping that we get to a scale that we can not only operate and do great things and build new tech that does further good in the space, but also to enable us to help more of the nonprofits.”

Denver: Oh, that would be great addition. It really would be.

Finally, Kris, let’s look out five years, if Ad Good scales the way you hope, how does that change the nonprofit advertising game? What does it look like five years from now?

Kris: I think five years from now, there might be scenarios where there’s maybe less donated inventory just because they’re filling it better.

Denver: I think so.

Kris: And so it might be scenarios where we know we kind of have to adjust some aspects of things. But additionally to that too, I think there’s a model that shows that you don’t have to just buy media during certain periods of the year and do your big spends around certain pushes. You have more evergreen campaigns and you’re getting donations, and you’re growing awareness, and you’re growing brand throughout the entire year.

Because now, we’re able to prove and show you guys through case studies that we’ve done over time and all these other scenarios, that prove out really like the benefit of doing proper marketing and having access to channels like this, to be able to actually turn marketing from a cost center to a profit center. That’s the bigger stuff that we see.

Additionally to that too, I just see them operating as just amazing digital advertisers and accessing us. And our scale at that time, I mean, it’s been eight months, we’re 2 billion avails like I imagine we’re going to have access to a lot more by then, and we’ll be much larger by then and able to help a lot more people.

And I would see that at some point, I would like to be able to offer every nonprofit a certain level of inventory just completely free. Like I’m hoping that we get to a scale that we can not only operate and do great things and build new tech that does further good in the space, but also to enable us to help more of the nonprofits.

Denver: That would be great. So for nonprofits out there who are listening and want to learn a little bit more, tell us about your website, the kind of information they’ll find there, and how they can get in touch.

Kris: Yeah. Just visit adgood.org, and if you’re interested in just kind of jumping in and trying to set up your own ad yourself, you can go to am.adgood.org and you can jump right in and use our Ad Manager.

You only get charged to use the Ad Manager if you’re done with your campaign, and you go to swipe your credit card, but other than that, you can save everything. You can share your videos with your team, all kinds of good stuff.

Denver: Well, thanks for being here today, Kris. This is really exciting stuff, and it was a great pleasure to have you on the show.

Kris: Thanks, Denver. I appreciate it.