A note on the brackets

Where a number belongs but Telly's verified version isn't public, this kit uses [bracketed placeholders] rather than an invented figure. That is deliberate. A kit that ships with made-up proof gets a seller caught in a room, and the whole point of Pillar 4 is that we stop putting numbers in market that we can't stand behind. Every bracket is a work item, and together they are the shopping list for the first quarter of research.

The rule for every asset here: a seller may fill a bracket only with a number that has a source, a date, and a methodology behind it.

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ASSET 1 — The One-Pager

Use: post-meeting leave-behind, and ammunition for a champion selling internally. One page, front and back.

Open the designed one-pager →

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FRONT

Television sells time inside the show. Telly sells space beside it.

Always on. Never in the way.

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Telly is a free television with a second screen.

Households get a 55-inch 4K TV at no cost. In exchange, they answer 120+ questions about themselves and accept a second, always-on screen beneath the main one. That second screen is advertising space — permanent, addressable, and clickable.

It is not a commercial break. It never interrupts the show, so it is never skipped, never scrolled past, and never the reason someone reaches for the remote.

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Three things you can't buy anywhere else

1. Space, not seconds Every other television buy rents you time inside somebody's programming. This is a permanent placement on a screen that is lit whenever the set is on. Out-of-home economics, in the living room.

2. A household that told you who it is 120+ declared attributes, volunteered by the household in exchange for the television. Not inferred from what the TV displayed. Not modeled. Asked and answered.

3. A response that doesn't require a phone On-screen click, browser, and tune-in — plus QR when a mobile handoff is what the campaign needs. The viewer never has to change devices to act.

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The proof

[Share of Room benchmark — average % of TV-on time a brand is present] [Source, date, methodology]

[Response rate: on-screen click vs. category benchmark] [Source, date, methodology]

[One named advertiser result, with the metric that mattered to them]

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BACK

How it's bought

Which budget it comes from

Telly is usually funded from one of six places. Sellers should ask which one is open before proposing a structure.

CTV — incremental in-home inventory that doesn't compete for attention inside content DOOH / place-based — everything place-based always wanted: permanent screen space, plus the household and on-screen response Display — display in a lit room on a 55-inch screen, with no fraud surface and no banner blindness Social / performance — social's response mechanics, in an environment that isn't hostile Retail media — declared household attributes plus on-screen commerce Innovation / test — a different approver, a different threshold, the fastest first dollar

What a first campaign looks like

A [length] test, [minimum spend], with [measurement approach] built in from day one and results shared openly — including anything that doesn't work.

[Seller name] · [direct email] · [direct phone] telly.com/advertise

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ASSET 2 — The First-Call Deck

Nine slides. Opens on the category, not the company. Under twenty minutes, leaving room for the buyer to talk.

Open the nine-slide deck →

The rule: slide 1 is not a company overview. Nobody has ever bought anything because of a company overview.

What is deliberately not in this deck: a company timeline, an investor logo slide, a leadership team slide, and any reach figure.

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ASSET 3 — Vertical Narrative: Automotive

The template every vertical follows. Auto goes first because the product fit is genuine and there is an existing data point to build from.

The category's problem with television today

Automotive is one of the largest television spenders in the market and one of the worst-served by it. The buying cycle runs months; a thirty-second spot runs once. Tier 1 brand advertising builds awareness that Tier 2 and Tier 3 then have to convert with no shared surface between them. And the moment a viewer is actually interested — wanting a price, a trim comparison, a dealer — television has nothing to offer but a URL they won't remember.

Auto buyers have compensated by moving budget to search and social, where the response mechanism exists. That works, but it means abandoning the screen where the emotional case for a vehicle is actually made.

Why persistent space solves it

A car is a considered purchase, and consideration rewards presence over frequency. A permanent placement means a brand is in the room across the weeks a household is actually deciding — not appearing three times inside one show and then disappearing.

And the response mechanism finally lives on the same screen as the emotional pitch. Build-and-price, inventory search, and dealer locator are one click from the ad, without asking anyone to pick up a phone.

The declared attributes that matter here

Household income · household composition and size · current vehicle ownership and type · homeownership · commute and geography · life stage [Confirm the exact auto-relevant attribute list against the current survey instrument]

The distinction that matters to an auto buyer: this is what the household said, not what was inferred from what its television displayed. In-market auto audiences are among the most heavily modeled — and most heavily doubted — segments in the industry.

Format recommendation

The benchmark

[Share of Room, auto category] [On-screen response rate, auto creative] [Dwell benchmark vs. category]

Proposed test design

Question: does persistent presence across a consideration window outperform equivalent spend on interruptive placement? Structure: matched household groups — persistent Smart Tile presence versus equivalent-spend CTV video Duration: [8–12 weeks, matched to the category's consideration window] Success criteria: agreed with the advertiser before launch, not after Measurement: [brand study partner] for consideration lift, [partner] for dealer/site action Publication: results shared with the advertiser in full, including null results, and published jointly if they agree

Objections this category raises

"We buy TV on reach and frequency. This isn't a reach buy." Correct — it's a presence buy, and it should be judged on share of room and consideration lift rather than GRPs. Propose it against the innovation or digital line, not against the national TV buy.

"Our agency handles TV, and our digital sits somewhere else." This is a real organizational problem, not an objection to the product. Identify which team owns "new formats" before proposing, or the test dies in a handoff.

"Auto creative is built for :30 and :15." Existing display and social assets work in Smart Tiles today. We'll build the first flight's creative if that's what unblocks the test.

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ASSET 4 — Competitive Battle Card

Telly gets compared to four things. Three of them are formats and one of them is inertia.

Open the designed battle card →

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1. vs. Smart TV home-screen ads

Samsung Ads · LG Ad Solutions · Roku · Amazon Fire TV

Their pitch: massive installed base, home-screen real estate, ACR-based audiences, and increasingly full-funnel "performance TV" positioning.

Where they genuinely win: scale, established buying relationships, measurement maturity, and self-serve tooling. Say this plainly. A seller who pretends otherwise loses credibility for the rest of the meeting.

Where we win:

The line: "A home-screen ad reaches someone who is looking for something else. Ours is there for the whole evening."

Do not say: anything comparing footprints.

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2. vs. CTV video — pre-roll, mid-roll, pause ads

Every streaming platform

Their pitch: premium content adjacency, full-screen attention, growing performance and outcome measurement.

Where they genuinely win: scale, content context, and the fact that video is what brand teams already know how to make.

Where we win:

• Pod position doesn't apply. There is no first-in-pod premium because there is no pod.
• Frequency waste doesn't happen inside our surface. CTV has no universal creative ID, so the same spot hits a household repeatedly across platforms that can't see each other. We control the whole surface. (Be careful here — see objection 10; this is true within Telly, not across the ecosystem.)
• "Non-disruptive" is a claim they make and a fact we have. Pause ads and home-screen units are marketed as non-intrusive while overall ad loads rise. AdExchanger's own 2026 NewFronts recap concluded there's no such thing as a non-disruptive ad. Ours isn't non-disruptive by design intent. It's non-disruptive because it is physically not in the content.

The line: "They're trying to make the interruption feel better. We're not interrupting."

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3. vs. DOOH and place-based

Vistar · Broadsign · Hivestack · Place Exchange

Their pitch: permanent screens, high dwell, growing programmatic sophistication. Programmatic DOOH investment is forecast up ~49% over 18 months, with campaign adoption going 34% → 52%.

Where they genuinely win: true public-space scale, mature venue taxonomy, and an established buying practice.

Where we win — and this is the sharpest contrast in the kit:

DOOH gives you a screen and no idea who's standing in front of it. We give you the screen and the household.

Plus: in-home dwell is measured in hours rather than seconds, and there is an on-screen click. Addressability and response are the two things place-based buyers have chased for a decade and cannot buy.

The line: "You've been buying screens in places. This is a screen in a household — and we know whose."

Note for the seller: this is the most productive conversation available, because it's the one where the buyer's existing mental model works in our favor. Ask early which buyer owns place-based.

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4. vs. doing nothing

The real competitor

What it sounds like: "Interesting, let's revisit next planning cycle."

Why it happens: no line item, no internal precedent, no career upside in going first, and a genuinely full plate.

How to beat it:

• Make the first commitment small, defined, and time-boxed. A test with a start date beats a proposal with an open one.
• Give the champion something to forward. The one-pager exists for this exact moment.
• Attach it to something already on their calendar — a launch, a model year, a seasonal push — so it doesn't need its own justification.
• Name the first-mover argument honestly: the people who define how a category gets bought are the people who bought it first.

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ASSET 5 — Objection Handling

Quick reference — for live calls

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Detailed — for prep and training

1. "How many households do you have?"

Why they say it: it's the first question in every media conversation, and it's how buyers triage. It is not usually hostile — it's a filing instinct.

Response approach: answer plainly and reframe fast. Do not bluff, do not deflect, do not answer a different question. The seller who dodges this loses the room permanently; the one who answers it in a sentence and moves to what's being bought usually keeps it.

"Fewer than the platforms you're comparing us to. That's exactly why we don't sell this as a reach buy — you'd lose that comparison and so would we. What you're buying is a permanent placement in a household that told us who it is, on a screen with no competing inventory. Nobody opens a place-based conversation by asking how many billboards someone owns. Can I show you what a first test looks like instead?"

Proof: [Share of Room benchmark] · [yield per home] · [dwell]

Follow-up: "What would you need to see to justify a test rather than a campaign?"

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2. "Isn't this just a banner ad on a television?"

Why they say it: they've seen a 300x250 in the spec sheet and pattern-matched. It's the single most dangerous framing for Telly and it usually arrives as a throwaway line.

Response approach: name it before they do — this is slide 6 of the first-call deck. Three concrete differences, then reframe to out-of-home.

"It's the fair first reaction, and it's why we don't sell it as display. Three differences. A banner is served and gone — this is on the whole time the TV is on. A banner is cookie-inferred — this household answered 120 questions to get the television. And a banner competes with fifty other things in a feed and lives in an ecosystem where 9% of non-optimized traffic is invalid — this is a lit 55-inch screen in a room with one advertiser on it and nothing to spoof. The closer comparison isn't display. It's a billboard that knows who's driving past."

Proof: IAS 2026 — 9.1% IVT on non-optimized CTV vs 0.1% optimized · [Share of Room] · [dwell]

Follow-up: "What would make this not feel like display to you?"

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3. "I don't have a budget line for this."

Why they say it: usually true, and usually the polite end of a conversation. It's a process problem, not a product objection.

Response approach: treat it as a routing question.

"You probably don't, and that's normal for a new format. Six different budgets have funded this — CTV, place-based, display, social, retail media, and innovation. The argument's a bit different for each. Which of those has room right now?"

Follow-up: "Who owns new formats on your team? That's usually the fastest first conversation."

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4. "Your performance numbers aren't third-party validated."

Why they say it: they've been burned. And in 2026 they're right to press — Nielsen and VideoAmp both withdrew from MRC accreditation in July, and the industry standard advice is to pair two methodologies.

Response approach: this is the objection where honesty wins the deal. Never bluff a validation that doesn't exist. A seller who concedes cleanly here is more trusted for the rest of the relationship.

"Some of it isn't, and I'd rather tell you which than have you find out. Here's what's validated and by whom [list]. Here's what's ours and unaudited [list]. Here's the study in field right now and who's validating it [partner]. I'd rather give you a smaller number you can defend to your client than a bigger one you can't."

Proof: whatever is genuinely validated, and nothing else.

Follow-up: "What validation would your measurement team actually accept? I'd rather build toward that than guess."

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5. "Nobody's asking me for this."

Why they say it: career risk. Buying something nobody has heard of has asymmetric downside for an individual.

Response approach: convert risk into upside, with a precedent they lived through.

"Nobody was asking for retail media in 2018 either, and it's the third-biggest channel in digital now. The people who decided how it gets bought were the ones who bought it first. In eighteen months somebody will own the digital in-home conversation inside your agency. I'd rather it were you, and I'd rather your first test were small enough that being early costs you nothing."

Follow-up: "When did retail media first show up on your plans, and who brought it in?"

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6. "Privacy. There's a camera and a sensor in people's living rooms."

Why they say it: legitimate, and increasingly a legal review question rather than a marketing one. The Texas AG sued five TV makers in December 2025 over ACR data practices.

Response approach: be precise and never dismissive. Precision is the proof.

"The camera has a physical shutter and is for video calls — it isn't used for ad targeting. The presence sensor is millimeter-wave, so it detects that someone is there, not who or what they look like; no images are captured or transmitted. And the important part for your legal team: our targeting is declared rather than inferred. Households answered questions and got a television for it. The practice under scrutiny across the category right now is automatic content recognition — inferring households from what the screen displayed. That's the model we don't use."

Proof: [privacy documentation] · [data provenance whitepaper] · Telly is not a defendant in the Texas action — state this precisely and never imply competitors' legal exposure is a settled matter.

Follow-up: "Can I send your privacy team our documentation directly?"

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7. "How do I know you'll still be here in a year?"

Why they say it: a real risk for a hardware-dependent startup, and a buyer who commits budget to a platform that disappears mid-flight owns that mistake internally.

Response approach: do not get defensive, and do not oversell. Structure is a better answer than reassurance.

"Fair, and I'd ask it too. What I can tell you: the revenue per household is unusually strong for this category [figure], the business is backed by [investors], and our CRO built and sold SpotX. What I'd actually propose is structuring the first flight so the question doesn't matter much — short, defined, [payment terms], with everything you'd need to walk away cleanly."

Follow-up: "What would de-risk this enough to be worth trying?"

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8. "My client's brand safety team will never approve an unknown platform."

Why they say it: verification workflow, not skepticism.

Response approach: this is one where Telly is genuinely easier than most CTV, and sellers under-use it.

"We're actually a simpler approval than most CTV. One environment, owned and operated end to end. No long tail of apps, no user-generated content, no arbitraged supply, nothing to spoof. Your team is approving one property, not auditing an inventory list."

Proof: [verification partner integrations] · [supply path documentation]

Follow-up: "What does your verification vendor need from us to sign off?"

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9. "Creative would be a lift we can't justify for a test."

Why they say it: production budgets are committed early and there's no room for a one-off.

Response approach: remove the cost entirely for the first flight.

"There shouldn't be a lift. The tiles are IAB standard sizes, so your existing display creative runs today. If you want something built for the format, we'll produce the first flight — I'd rather spend that than have you build a business case for creative on a test."

Follow-up: "Can you send me what's running now? I'll show you how it looks on the screen."

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10. "Can I frequency cap and dedupe this against the rest of my CTV?"

Why they say it: a genuine, unsolved, industry-wide problem — CTV has no universal creative ID standard, IAB Tech Lab is only now building a framework, and Omnicom had to construct a clean-room tool to measure cross-platform frequency at all.

Response approach: honesty is the differentiator, because competitors overclaim here.

"Within Telly, completely — we own the entire surface, so there's no unintended repetition. Across platforms, nobody has solved it, including the people telling you they have. There's no universal creative ID; the IAB is building the framework now. What I can promise is that we won't pretend otherwise, and we'll support whatever cross-platform measurement you're using."

Follow-up: "How are you handling cross-platform frequency today? Genuinely asking — the answers vary a lot."

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11. "What's the CPM?"

Why they say it: triage. They want to know which shelf to file us on.

Response approach: answer the question, then fix the comparison set — because the comparison determines whether the price sounds reasonable.

"[range] depending on format and flight length. The more useful question is what you're benchmarking against. If it's CTV video, we'll look expensive per impression and cheap per hour of presence. If it's high-impact display or place-based, the comparison works very differently. What are you holding it against?"

Follow-up: "Would it help to model this on time-in-view rather than impressions?"

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12. "Prove it's incremental."

Why they say it: the hardest and most legitimate question in the kit, and increasingly the only one that matters. 27.4% of marketers now name conversions and sales impact as their top CTV KPI.

Response approach: honest current state, plus a genuine invitation.

"Not fully, not yet — and anyone in this category telling you they can prove incrementality at the standard you'd want is overstating it. Here's what we can show today [current evidence]. Here's the incrementality partner we're working with [partner]. What I'd rather do is design the test with you, agree the success criteria before it runs, and publish whatever comes back — including if it doesn't work. That's a better offer than a case study I wrote myself."

Follow-up: "Would you co-design it? Your methodology, our inventory."

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Discovery questions — before any of the above

Ordered by how much they change the pitch.

1. "Which budget would this most likely come out of — video, display, place-based, social, or an innovation pot?" Determines the entire framing.
2. "Who owns new formats and first tests on your team?" Finds the actual buyer.
3. "What's your current read on shoppable and interactive TV? Have you tested QR?" Opens Pillar 3 and reveals scar tissue.
4. "How are you handling frequency across your CTV platforms today?" Surfaces a live pain we speak to credibly.
5. "What does a first test have to clear internally to be worth running?" Tells you the real threshold and the real approver.
6. "Which measurement partners does your team actually trust right now?" Shapes Pillar 4 and the validation roadmap.
7. "What's on the calendar in the next two quarters that this could attach to?" Beats "doing nothing," which is the real competitor.

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How this kit stays alive

Enablement rots when nobody owns it. Three rules:

1. Monthly seller feedback, with a template. What objections came up, what landed, what died. Fifteen minutes, standing, obligatory. The job description asks for exactly this — turn customer feedback and sales opportunities into stronger messaging — and it only happens if it's a ritual rather than an intention.
2. Every bracket becomes a work item. The bracket list is the research roadmap; a quarter where no brackets close is a quarter where marketing didn't ship.
3. Reps co-write the next version. If sellers rewrite these before sending them, the wrong thing was written. Draft with the two best sellers in the room, not for them.