What this document is — and what it isn't. This is the machine: how the marketing function operates, permanently. Channels and their cadence, the research franchise and its governance, the named-account program, the handoff to Ad Sales, and the metrics. It has no expiry date.
What runs through it — the platform line, the headline system, the activations, this year's calendar — is The Campaign. That starts and ends.
The short version: the engine is how the function runs. The campaign is what it broadcasts.
1. The organizing idea
Most B2B ads marketing plans are a channel checklist: a blog, a newsletter, some LinkedIn, a PR retainer, a booth. Each channel is fed separately, each one starves, and none of them compounds.
This engine is built the other way around. One proprietary research franchise sits at the center and feeds every channel. Content is the franchise published. PR is the franchise pitched. Social is the franchise argued. Email is the franchise delivered. Enablement is the franchise turned into a sales conversation. Industry moments are the franchise staged.
That structure is how the best advertiser-facing marketing in the industry actually works — LinkedIn's B2B Institute, Spotify's Culture Next, Pinterest Predicts, TikTok's What's Next. None of them are content programs. They are proprietary data assets with distribution wrapped around them.
Why this is the right architecture for Telly specifically: a challenger cannot buy awareness and does not need volume. It needs a small number of high-value accounts to accept that a new category exists and to buy it first. Proprietary insight is the one asset that does not require scale to produce — it requires a vantage point nobody else has. Telly has one.
The three jobs, in order:
| # | Job | Without it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Make the category real | There is nothing to buy |
| 2 | Make Telly the author of it | They buy the category from someone else later |
| 3 | Make it easy to buy | The category gets admired and never funded |
Every program below is tagged to one of these three.
2. The engine's core: a research franchise only Telly can publish
The franchise
Time & Space — Telly's research program on what happens to advertising when it stops competing for time inside content and starts occupying space beside it.
The name is the positioning. Every time someone says it, they restate the category argument. It carries a quarterly report cadence plus a fortnightly newsletter, all under one masthead rather than three separate content brands.
The metric we coin
Share of Room — the percentage of a household's total television-on time during which a brand was present on screen.
Coining a metric is one of the most durable category-creation moves available. Share of voice, share of search, attention units, the 95-5 rule — each one gave an industry a way to measure something, and the coiner became the authority by default. Share of Room does three things at once: it is the metric Telly wins on, it is unbuyable anywhere else, and it teaches the market to evaluate digital in-home the way out-of-home is evaluated rather than the way CTV is.
The publication is the franchise. The metric is the standard. Same structure the B2B Institute used: a body of work, and a rule everyone repeats.
Research governance — the rules that make this safe to run
A research franchise is only an asset if it can survive an inconvenient result. These rules exist so that a study producing the wrong answer is a decision, not a crisis.
- No study is announced before it is read. Every study is commissioned as internal research with a publication option. Nothing is pre-announced, teased, or promised to a reporter before the data is in hand.
- Pre-register the methodology internally before fielding — sample, method, success criteria, and explicitly what result would falsify the hypothesis. This prevents post-hoc rationalization, and it means that when we do publish, the methodology was locked before anyone saw the numbers. That is the difference between research and marketing, and reporters can tell.
- Define kill criteria in advance. Write down, before fielding, the result that means do not publish. A named person owns the publish decision at a defined checkpoint.
- Name the third-party validator before fielding, not after. Validation sought only once results look good is not validation.
- Never run a study whose only publishable outcome is the flattering one. If just one result is publishable, it is marketing wearing a lab coat, and the trade press will smell it.
- We publish results that surprise us. The first time Telly publishes something inconvenient to itself, every subsequent Telly number becomes more believable. That is cheap credibility and almost nobody buys it.
- Aggregate, never name. Findings about third-party data quality are published against categories of provider — "third-party inferred segments" — never against a named vendor. Naming vendors invites legal response and destroys partnerships, and it adds nothing to the finding.
- Legal, privacy, and contract review before fielding anything using household data. Data partner agreements frequently prohibit using partner data for competitive benchmarking. This has to be checked before a study is designed, not after it is run.
- Disclose sample and significance even when unflattering. A small sample honestly labeled is credible. A small sample hidden is a story about us.
The three founding studies
Each serves one proof pillar, none requires scale, and all three are things only Telly is positioned to run.
Sequencing: field Study 3 first. It is a benchmark rather than a hypothesis test, so it cannot fail — it simply produces numbers — and it underpins the standards work in §6. Run Study 1 in parallel as an internal read. Publish whichever is strongest at CES.
Study 1 — The Inference Gap (serves Pillar 2: Declared)
Telly is the only company in advertising that knows both what a household said about itself and what the industry's data providers claim about that same household. Running that comparison — declared attributes against inferred segments, on the same homes — produces a single number quantifying how wrong audience inference actually is.
This is the flagship. It is cheap to run, structurally impossible for a competitor to replicate, needs no reach to be valid, and lands in the middle of a live industry argument about ACR data and audience quality. It will make data vendors uncomfortable, which is precisely why it gets covered.
Headline we are working toward: "X% of what the ad industry thinks it knows about your household is wrong. We asked."
Risks and how they are handled:
| Risk | Handling |
|---|---|
| Inference turns out to be accurate, undercutting the Declared pillar | Unlikely as a binary — the industry already accepts inference is noisy; the open question is magnitude, and any material gap is publishable. If the gap is genuinely small, we do not publish, and we have still learned something that changes how we sell |
| The study reveals our own declared data has decayed — households answered a year or two ago and circumstances changed | The most probable inconvenient outcome and the least discussed. Not publishable, highly valuable internally: the fix is a re-survey cadence nobody has built yet. Design the study to measure this deliberately rather than discover it by accident |
| Data-partner contracts prohibit competitive benchmarking against their segments | Contract review in week one of design, before methodology is set |
| Named vendors respond legally or partnerships break | Publish against provider categories, never named vendors. Rule 7 |
Study 2 — The Response Test (serves Pillar 3: Responsive)
A controlled head-to-head: identical creative and offer, response via on-screen click versus response via QR code. Run with an agency partner so the byline is shared and the result is not ours alone.
The industry already suspects QR-only shoppable does not work — publisher-reported CTR sits around 0.03% — but nobody has published a clean comparison. Being the one who finally quantifies it earns more credibility than any claim about our own performance, because we are the source of a fact rather than the subject of one.
Risks and how they are handled:
| Risk | Handling |
|---|---|
| QR outperforms in-set click | The positioning already survives this. Pillar 3 does not claim "no phone" — it claims the phone is an exit rather than a toll. A split result (in-set wins on rate, QR wins on completion depth for app installs and cart handoffs) is the positioning, and a nuanced finding is more credible and more useful to a planner than a clean win |
| The agency partner walks when results are unflattering to their recommendation | Agree publication terms in writing before fielding, including a joint-approval clause and an agreed neutral framing. Choose a partner whose interest is in the answer, not in a particular answer |
| Creative differs inherently between the two formats, confounding the comparison | Hold offer, brand, and message constant; disclose the creative variance that cannot be eliminated rather than pretending it away |
| Result is directionally right but not statistically meaningful | Kill criteria set in advance; a thin result gets held and re-fielded, not published with hedging |
Study 3 — The Share of Room Benchmark (serves Pillar 1: Permanent)
The category's first measurement standard: dwell, time-in-view, and share of room benchmarks by vertical and creative type, published openly as a reference other people can use. Validated by an outside attention vendor.
A benchmark that other companies cite is worth more than a claim about ourselves that nobody can check. This is also the asset that makes the standards work in §6 credible — you cannot propose a spec without data behind it.
Risks and how they are handled:
| Risk | Handling |
|---|---|
| Absolute numbers come back lower than hoped | A benchmark is inherently relative — it establishes the scale others get measured on. This is why it leads the sequence: it produces reference data rather than testing a claim, so there is no failure state |
| Read as a Telly claim rather than a category standard | External attention-vendor validation is a precondition of publishing, not an enhancement. Unvalidated, it is worth very little |
| Competitors dispute the methodology | Good. A competitor arguing about how to measure digital in-home has conceded that digital in-home is a thing being measured |
The publishing rules
- Every study carries methodology, sample, dates, and a named validator. No exceptions, ever. This is Pillar 4 made operational.
- Ungated. Gating a category-definition asset defeats its purpose — we want it in decks written by people who do not work here. Capture demand through the newsletter and the tools instead.
- Published as a web property first, PDF second. Citable, linkable, and readable by the AI systems buyers now use for research.
- Every study is designed backwards from a headline a trade reporter would actually write.
3. Content — build a category home, not a blog
Telly currently has one advertiser-facing landing page. No research hub, no insights library, no case study collection, no practical guidance. That is not a gap to be filled with blog posts; it is a missing property.
The property: an advertiser-facing hub with the research franchise as its front door, structured the way Roku's and Disney's insight properties are structured — research separated visibly from sales collateral, so the research is credible.
The content stack, in priority order
| Priority | Asset | Job | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The category definition page | 1 | The canonical answer to "what is digital in-home." The page every other page and article links to. This is the single most important URL Telly will own |
| 2 | Time & Space research hub | 1, 2 | The franchise home |
| 3 | "How to buy digital in-home" | 3 | The practical guide: how it's planned, what it's bought against, how it's measured, what a test looks like, what to put in an RFP. Boring, unglamorous, and the highest-converting asset we will make — because it is the thing a planner actually needs at the moment they are trying to say yes |
| 4 | Case study library, one fixed format | 3 | Objective, approach, creative, result with a hard number, methodology note. The recurring failure in weak media marketing is every case study having a different shape. One template, no exceptions |
| 5 | Vertical narratives (§5) | 2, 3 | Three to start |
| 6 | The spec and creative center | 3 | Formats, dimensions, file specs, deal IDs, creative templates and examples. Removes friction that kills deals quietly |
Cadence
Deliberately modest, because credibility comes from consistency rather than volume, and because a small team publishing weekly produces filler.
- Quarterly: one Time & Space report
- Fortnightly: the newsletter
- Monthly: one substantial POV piece, bylined by an executive, not the brand
- Per deal: one case study, on the fixed template
The rule that governs all of it: if a piece would be equally publishable by a smart-TV home-screen business, we do not publish it. Category-defining content is content nobody else is positioned to write.
4. Social, email, and CRM
Social — LinkedIn, executive-led, and essentially nothing else
Media buyers are on LinkedIn. That is the channel. A challenger brand page posting daily is worth less than a credible executive posting weekly, because the industry follows people, not logos.
The assets we already have: a CEO who co-founded Pluto TV and sold it for $340M, a CRO who founded and ran SpotX, and a Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Communications with holding-company and ad-tech comms experience who is already on the industry speaking circuit. Mike Shehan in particular carries real standing with exactly the buyers we need, and a CRO arguing a category position in public is far more compelling than a brand account announcing one.
| Track | Owner | Cadence | Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category argument | CRO | Weekly | The positioning, argued in public. Not product news — the case for why time-based advertising has a structural ceiling |
| Founder POV | CEO | Fortnightly | The origin story and the long view. Why the second screen exists at all |
| Industry voice | CSO / Head of Comms | Fortnightly | The category in context — where in-home sits relative to CTV and out-of-home, and what the standards work means. The most natural byline for the category-definition argument |
| Research drops | Both + company | Per study | Findings, not announcements. The chart is the post |
| Seller amplification | Ad Sales team | Ongoing | Sellers reposting with their own commentary, supported by a light internal content kit. A seller's post outperforms the brand page in their own network every time |
| Presence in other people's comments | All | Daily-ish | On AdExchanger, Digiday, Beet.TV and analyst posts. Cheapest reach available in B2B advertising, and it puts us inside conversations already happening |
What we do not do: paid social to a broad audience. At Telly's stage that is spending money to be seen by people who will never buy. Paid social is used only as ABM support — narrow, named-account targeting behind the research (§5).
Email — the newsletter is the demand engine
The highest-leverage owned asset for a challenger, because it earns standing permission with people who will not take a meeting for another year.
Time & Space — fortnightly. Three items: something we learned from our own data, something happening in the category worth a POV, and one practical thing a planner can use.
The discipline: it is about the category, not about Telly. Roughly one item in six is ours. A newsletter that reads as a sales channel gets unsubscribed; a newsletter a buyer forwards to a colleague builds a category. Success is measured in forwards and replies before it is measured in clicks.
Sequences that sit behind it:
| Trigger | Sequence |
|---|---|
| Research download / hub visit | Category education → the buying guide → an invitation to a briefing |
| Newsletter engagement over threshold | Routed to the seller who owns that account, with the engagement history attached |
| Post-briefing | Recap, relevant vertical narrative, proposed test design |
| Test in flight | Progress notes to the buyer — the retention asset nobody builds and everybody appreciates |
| Dormant account | Re-engagement anchored to the newest research, never to a product update |
CRM — where marketing becomes pipeline
This is the part of the job description that most candidates will skip: connect marketing activity to product adoption, pipeline, and revenue. It is unglamorous and it is the difference between a marketing function and a content function.
What has to exist:
- The account list is the database. Marketing is measured against the ~40 named accounts in §5, not against total leads. A thousand unknown signups is a worse quarter than four target accounts moving a stage.
- Account-level engagement scoring, not lead scoring. In agency buying, six people at one holding company each reading one thing matters more than one person reading six. Score the account.
- A defined handoff. An engagement threshold that triggers a seller alert with the full history attached — what they read, when, and what to open with. Agreed jointly with Ad Sales, in writing, before launch.
- Closed-loop reporting. Every opportunity carries first-touch and every-touch marketing attribution. Not to prove marketing's worth in a slide, but to know which of these programs to kill.
- A feedback path from sellers back into messaging. Structured, monthly, obligatory: what objections came up, what landed, what died. The job description asks for this explicitly — turn customer feedback and sales opportunities into stronger messaging. It only happens if there is a standing ritual with a template.
The stack: whatever the sales org already uses, instrumented properly, plus an ABM layer for account identification and a data-warehouse view joining marketing engagement to pipeline. The tooling matters far less than the discipline of measuring accounts rather than leads.
5. Vertical and account-based programs
The account list — forty accounts, not forty thousand leads
Named, tiered, jointly owned with Ad Sales. Reviewed monthly.
| Tier | Who | Count | Treatment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Holding company investment and innovation teams: GroupM/WPP Media, Omnicom Media Group, Publicis Media, IPG Mediabrands, Horizon, Dentsu, Havas | ~8 | Fully bespoke. Custom research cuts, co-authored studies, executive-to-executive programs, a named marketing owner per account |
| Tier 2 | Independents and performance shops with real innovation budgets: Tinuiti, PMG (already a Telly relationship), Wpromote, Goodway, Mediahub and peers | ~12 | Modular programs. Templated but personalized; vertical narrative plus a standing test offer |
| Tier 3 | Brand-direct advertisers in the three lead verticals | ~20 | Programmatic ABM: paid social and display against named accounts behind research assets, plus sequenced outbound |
The calendar rule that matters most: ABM cadence follows the industry's budget calendar, not an arbitrary drip. Account dossiers land 60–90 days ahead of planning and negotiation windows. Marketing to a media agency in the wrong month is marketing into a void.
A structural note worth acting on: holding companies are consolidating into unified platform structures — Omnicom centralizing creative globally is the clearest example. The practical consequence is fewer decision-makers with broader mandates. Assign one marketing owner per holding company rather than one per agency brand underneath it, and lead with consistency across their stack rather than point solutions.
Three verticals to lead with
Chosen because the product genuinely fits, not because the budgets are big.
1. Auto — Long consideration cycles reward persistent presence over a single interruption. Declared household attributes cover income, household size, and vehicle ownership. Telly already has a Kia data point to build from. Tune-in and dealer-locator response work natively on screen.
2. Entertainment and streaming tune-in — The one vertical where Telly's format is not an adaptation but the obvious answer. Tune-in is a native Telly unit: a persistent reminder on the screen the viewer is already using, one click from the thing being promoted. Every streamer and studio has a tune-in budget and no good place to spend it.
3. QSR and food delivery — In-home, at mealtimes, on the screen that is on. Immediate response with a short path from impulse to order. Frequency and dayparting matter more than reach, which suits us.
Held for later: telco and insurance (household-level decisions, strong declared-attribute fit, longer sales cycles), retail and e-commerce (waits on the retail-media data partnership), and travel.
What a vertical narrative contains — same structure every time: the category's specific problem with television today · why persistent space solves it · declared attributes that matter in this vertical · the format recommendation · a benchmark from our own data · a proposed test design with success criteria · the objections this category raises and the answers.
6. PR, thought leadership, and industry engagement
The posture
Telly's press coverage to date has been product news and consumer curiosity. That coverage does not reach media buyers, and the trade stories about the business have not been the ones we would choose.
The shift: stop pitching what Telly built, start pitching what Telly knows. A challenger cannot out-announce incumbents, but it can out-inform them. Research travels where press releases do not, and a reporter who has cited your data once will call you for comment forever after.
The internal partnership this depends on
Dallas Lawrence is Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Communications, and this pillar is his function, not a vacancy. That is a distinction worth getting right from week one. An Ads Marketing lead who arrives and starts running PR has created a turf problem on day one; one who arrives with a supply of research, POV, and category argument for comms to place has created an ally. The framing is: marketing manufactures the story, comms places it.
He is also an unusually well-matched partner for this specific plan:
- Holding-company and ad-tech comms background, including WPP on his record and time as Chief Communications Officer at Rubicon Project, plus comms and brand leadership at Samba TV and Roku experience before that. He has sat on the agency side, the SSP side, and the smart-TV data side — which is the exact triangle this category story has to land in.
- An existing speaking platform. He has spoken at Advertising Week New York and Streaming Media multiple years running. That is a distribution channel already built; the job is to give it better material, not to construct a new one.
- Agency-side intelligence for the ABM program. How holding companies actually decide, who signs off, what a test has to clear internally, which budgets are real versus theoretical. This is the difference between an ABM plan and an ABM guess.
- Warm entry to WPP Media/GroupM, which is Tier 1 account number one.
- A pressure-test partner in days 1–30. He is the most useful internal person to challenge the "digital in-home" name from a genuine agency-insider view, before a dollar is spent on it.
A caution worth stating. He also owns the current narrative — the consumer-facing tagline, the existing performance claims, the press posture to date. The measurement conversation in the positioning framework runs directly through his function. It should be opened as a shared problem ("how do we make these numbers travel in an RFP?") rather than as a critique of work already done.
Target map
| Tier | Outlets | What we bring them |
|---|---|---|
| Category-defining | AdExchanger, Digiday, Adweek, Ad Age | Research exclusives, category POV, the standards story |
| Trade depth | MediaPost, Beet.TV, StreamTV Insider, The Current, VideoWeek | Executive interviews, format and measurement detail |
| Analyst and independent | Lowpass, eMarketer, Forrester, independent newsletters | Briefings, data access, honest access — this tier rewards candor and punishes spin, and it is where the most credible voices sit |
| Podcast circuit | The trade podcasts buyers actually listen to | The CRO arguing the category, at length |
The standards play — the highest-signal move available
Categories become buyable when they become classifiable. Out-of-home proved this: it formalized itself through the OpenOOH venue taxonomy, an open specification that standardizes venue types so a buyer in a DSP asking for "gyms" and every supply platform selling them mean the same thing. Version 1.1 is current, 1.2 is in working group, and it is maintained by working groups drawn from Hivestack, Vistar Media, Broadsign, PlaceExchange and VIOOH, with production adoption at Broadsign Ads, PlaceExchange, Hivestack and Adomni. It is the plumbing that made programmatic DOOH scale.
There is no in-home class in it.
A blunt read on the obvious move: getting a literal in-home class inside OpenOOH is a long shot, because the "OOH" is in the name and a living room is definitionally not out-of-home. A purist on that working group will say so in the first reply. So we do not spend the year chasing it. We run two other routes, together.
Route A — Publish our own open specification
What it is. An open, versioned specification for classifying in-home digital advertising placements, structurally modeled on OpenOOH so it is instantly legible to the same buyers and supply platforms. Published on GitHub under an open license, in the same formats (spec plus JSON), so a platform can adopt it mechanically rather than interpretively.
What it would classify. Screen role (primary, secondary, companion) · persistence (persistent versus transient) · position and share of display · interaction capability (on-screen click, browser, tune-in, device handoff) · room context · household addressability tier · and the measurement definition for Share of Room.
The counterintuitive move that makes it work: invite competitors in. A specification containing only Telly is a product spec with delusions. One that classifies Samsung, LG, Roku and Fire TV home-screen placements alongside Telly's second screen is a category. The goal is not to fence off our inventory — it is to build the shelf and be the one who built it.
Sequence and timing:
| When | Step |
|---|---|
| Month 4 | Draft v0.1 internally, alongside the Share of Room benchmark data |
| Month 5 | Private circulation to two or three measurement partners and one or two integrated supply partners (Magnite, Index Exchange, PubMatic and OpenX are already in Telly's stack) for comment |
| Month 6 | Publish v1.0 with at least two non-Telly names attached. This is a hard gate — a spec published with only our name on it reads as vanity and is worse than not publishing |
| Months 7–9 | Convene a working group; open public issues process; recruit one agency and one competitor |
| Ongoing | Version it publicly. A spec that gets to 1.1 is a spec people are using |
What it is worth even if nobody ratifies anything. It is a citable artifact, a press story, and something a seller can point to. It forces competitors to take a position — and a competitor arguing against our taxonomy has conceded the category exists.
Route B — Work the standards bodies properly
Who matters. IAB Tech Lab owns the technical specifications the industry actually runs on — OpenRTB, VAST, ads.txt, ad format guidelines, and the Creative Ad ID Framework now being developed in response to the CTV frequency problem. Working groups are member-driven. Separately, the DPAA is the place-based advertising body — smaller, more accessible, and populated by exactly the buyers and sellers who already think in terms of screens in places.
The sequencing discipline that most companies get wrong: join, then participate, then propose. Standards bodies punish newcomers who arrive with a demand. Two quarters of useful contribution to an existing working group buys more than any amount of lobbying.
| When | Step |
|---|---|
| Months 2–3 | Join IAB Tech Lab and DPAA. These are real budget lines and should be in the first-year plan explicitly |
| Months 3–9 | Participate in the existing CTV/digital video and measurement working groups. Contribute, do not campaign |
| Months 9–12 | Propose in-home as a placement type within existing ad format guidance, with the Share of Room measurement definition attached and the Route A spec as the supporting artifact |
| Beyond | Ratification is an 18–36 month horizon, if ever |
How the two routes work together
Route A creates the artifact and the news. Route B creates the legitimacy and the long game. Publishing our own spec first is what gives us something to bring into a working group; walking in empty-handed is how you get politely ignored.
What we promise and what we do not. We do not promise ratification in year one — that would be a claim we cannot control. We do promise the proposal, and "Telly published the first proposed measurement standard for in-home advertising" is a headline available in month six that gets covered whether or not a standards body ever adopts it.
How this gets measured: the number of organizations other than Telly that publicly engage with the specification — comment on it, adopt it, or argue with it. Not downloads.
A category Telly convenes is worth more than a category Telly occupies alone. This is the mechanism that makes that true.
Industry moments
The research is explicit on what works here. The ad-tech Cannes yacht arms race — roughly $165K a week — reached diminishing returns years ago, and Digiday's own summary was that when everyone has a yacht, nobody's yacht is interesting. What actually works for a challenger is exploiting the geographic and temporal concentration of the industry crowd, paired with one distinctive cheap gesture engineered for trade pickup.
Proven tactics from companies that did this well: OOH concentrated in commuter hubs during event week (Samsung Ads, Nielsen, The Trade Desk, TransUnion all do this); LED trucks circulating the venue at a fraction of billboard cost, as Vibe.co ran with parody creative and QR codes; and the format-as-the-message stunt — Spotify's Spreadbeats put a music video inside the Excel file of an RFP response and won a D&AD for it.
| Moment | Dates | Play |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising Week NY | Oct 5–8, 2026 | If this falls in the first weeks: a listening tour, not an activation. Fifty conversations, no booth. The account list gets built here |
| CES | Jan 6–9, 2027 | Publish The Inference Gap. Telly has CES history and the show rewards a real finding over a booth |
| IAB ALM | Feb 1–3, 2027 | The standards conversation, in person, with the people who write specs |
| NewFronts | Expected March 2027 | The category showcase. Telly debuted here in 2024 — this is the return, with a category instead of a format list |
| POSSIBLE | Apr 5–7, 2027 | Buyer-dense and mid-sized. Better ROI than Cannes for a challenger |
| Upfronts | Expected May 2027 | Counter-programming. Everyone else is selling time; that is the week to be loud about space |
| Cannes Lions | Jun 21–25, 2027 | No yacht. A distinctive gesture, the second Time & Space edition, and awards entries for the work itself |
The out-of-home note, which is almost too on-the-nose to pass up: a company selling digital in-home should be buying digital out-of-home around industry venues. The medium is the argument.
7. Measurement — connecting activity to pipeline and revenue
Category creation takes longer than a quarter, so the metrics have to show progress before revenue arrives without letting anyone hide behind vanity numbers. Four layers, each with a leading and a lagging indicator.
| Layer | Leading | Lagging | Honest time to signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Unprompted uses of "digital in-home" by people outside Telly; research citations; inbound press | Category appearing in agency planning templates and RFP language | 6–12 months |
| Account | Named-account engagement depth; number of Tier 1 and 2 accounts with three or more engaged people | Accounts moving from unengaged to briefed to testing | 3–6 months |
| Pipeline | Briefings booked; test designs proposed; RFP inclusion rate | Qualified opportunities created and influenced; average deal size | 2–4 months |
| Revenue | Tests converting to campaigns; repeat rate | Marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced revenue; renewal rate | 6–12 months |
The one metric to lead with internally: RFP inclusion rate — how often Telly appears in an agency's consideration set for a brief, whether or not we win it. It is the truest measure of whether a category is being built, it moves earlier than revenue, and it is unfakeable. Losing a bid you were invited to is a sales problem. Not being invited is a marketing problem.
The number that will be asked for and should be resisted: volume metrics on content and social. A newsletter with 2,000 of the right subscribers is worth more than 50,000 of the wrong ones, and the engine is designed accordingly. Agree that in advance, in writing.
8. The first 90 days
Days 1–30 — Diagnose, and earn the right to decide
The instinct in a build-from-scratch role is to start producing on day one. The better move is thirty days of establishing what is actually true, because everything after it compounds off those answers.
- The measurement audit. Answer the five questions in the positioning framework. What proof exists, what is published, what is validated, what an RFP response contains today. This determines whether the first quarter is a packaging job or a commissioning job.
- Fifteen buyer conversations. Actual calls with actual media buyers and agency leads, some customers and some not. Test the category language live before committing a dollar to it.
- Pressure-test the category name with three or four people who have no stake: an agency investment lead, an IAB contact, a trade journalist off the record — plus the CSO internally, whose agency-side background makes him the sharpest available challenger. If "digital in-home" does not survive contact, better to know in week three than after the microsite is built.
- Audit the existing assets against the three-way definitional test — anything equally true of a smart-TV home-screen ad, a pause ad, or a pre-roll gets rewritten.
- Build the account list with Ad Sales. Jointly, named, tiered. This is the artifact that aligns the two functions for the year.
- Set the baseline. Current category mentions, share of voice, pipeline, RFP inclusion. Without a day-one baseline, none of §7 is provable later.
Days 31–60 — Build the foundation
- Positioning locked, rolled out internally, and adopted by Ad Sales — with sellers in the room while it is finalized, not after
- The sales narrative and first-call deck. Under ten slides, opening on the category rather than a company overview
- Enablement kit v1 in sellers' hands: one-pagers, the first vertical narrative, a battle card, objection handling
- The category definition page and Time & Space hub live
- Study 3, the Share of Room Benchmark, fielded first, with the external attention validator named before it goes into field. Study 1, The Inference Gap, run in parallel as an internal read, with contract and privacy review completed before methodology is set. Whichever is stronger publishes at CES
- IAB Tech Lab and DPAA memberships secured — the standards clock in §6 starts here
- The newsletter launches. Fortnightly from the first issue; cadence credibility is earned early
- Executive LinkedIn cadence begins
- CRM instrumented: account scoring, handoff thresholds, closed-loop reporting agreed with Sales in writing
Days 61–90 — Put it in market
- The strongest of the first two studies published, with a coordinated exclusive and full trade push — and a live willingness to hold either one if the publish gate is not cleared
- Share of Room proposed publicly as a category metric, with validated benchmark data behind it
- Route A specification drafted and circulating privately for co-signers; standards-body working group participation underway
- Tier 1 ABM programs live — bespoke research cuts into the eight holding-company accounts
- First co-authored agency study signed, ideally the Response Test, giving us a partner's byline
- Three vertical narratives complete
- First quarterly business review with Ad Sales against the metrics in §7, with the monthly feedback ritual already running
What is deliberately not in the first 90 days
Paid brand advertising. A rebrand of the ad products. A booth. A big-budget industry activation. Every one of those is a way to spend money before knowing whether the category language works — and all of them are more effective in month six, once there is proof to put behind them.
9. The twelve-month arc
| Phase | Window | Objective | The proof it worked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation | Months 1–3 | The category exists on paper; sellers are armed; the first study is in market | Sellers using the narrative unprompted; first trade coverage of the category |
| Authority | Months 4–6 | Telly is the cited source on digital in-home; the standard is in motion | Third-party citations; a working group convened; RFP inclusion rising |
| Demand | Months 7–9 | The category converts. ABM produces briefings, briefings produce tests | Tier 1 and 2 accounts in test; pipeline attributable to the franchise |
| Compounding | Months 10–12 | Tests become campaigns; other people market the category for us | Renewal and expansion; "digital in-home" appearing in documents we did not write |
The twelve-month success test, in one sentence: an agency planner who has never spoken to Telly writes digital in-home into a media plan, and cites a Share of Room benchmark to justify it.
Market data cited throughout is sourced in the playbook appendix. Dates for 2027 industry events are as announced or, where noted, expected based on 2026 scheduling.