Insights

Finecast turns four – looking back and to the future

  • 5 minutes read
  • Global
  • 30/09/2021
Finecast Turns Four

Harry Harcus, UK MD

Finecast is celebrating its fourth birthday this week, but our story starts before September 2017.

We first realised the potential for total TV transformation two years earlier in 2015 as it became clear that consumers were changing the way they consumed content and the big screen experience was going to evolve at pace.

In those two years we obsessed over crafting a truly visionary, industry-leading product and a brand that would shake up the TV advertising industry. From this, Finecast was born. A company that was – and still is – committed to a purpose, making the TV advertising experience better for brands and viewers.

Initially, we were meeting a demand for targeted TV advertising and a need for traditional TV and OTT providers to scale their addressable inventory to meet that demand. Four years on, we are spearheading an ecosystem that spans every corner of the world, incorporates a global community of clients, major media partners, broadcasters and data partners, and provides addressable solutions for everything from linear TV to streaming and on-demand.

Finecast will always continue to evolve to meet the demands of our clients and partners and help them bring addressable TV to the world – providing an entry point for TV brands that are new to TV, connecting brands and advertisers to new audiences, and helping brands better understand campaign results and true business impact.

Going global

Finecast is relentless in its global ambition to bring a gold-standard product to the market. We do this by working with the most relevant broadcast partners in the market to access the right level of inventory that is representative of that market’s population. Working hand in glove with our media partners across the globe gives us unrivaled access to this inventory, adding value to our offering.

This philosophy has helped us make significant breakthroughs in different regions across the world with market-specific solutions such as Finecast ID in Australia and Live Linear in the UK.

We’re currently entering the next stage of our global growth, rolling out and scaling the Finecast product across multiple markets. We expect to be live in 11 markets by the end of 2021, with more to come in 2022 and beyond. But it doesn’t end there. Finecast teams worldwide are also working hard every day to evolve and improve our product proposition.

This includes, among other things, developing global relationships and deeper integrations with our media and technology partners, forming new audience data partnerships to improve audience segmentation and targeting capabilities, and building safe, privacy-centric identity solutions. It also means testing and rolling out new product extensions, and investing heavily in our proprietary planning, forecasting, pricing and activation platform – Finecast Audience Planner – which makes it easy for our clients to deliver campaigns through a single access point across the whole addressable TV marketplace.

Helping established and new clients

As we work with more and more clients worldwide, enabling them to undertake their total addressable TV transformation, we can deliver a consistency in approach to all clients, at all levels of their maturity.

In the UK alone, we have worked with more than 330 advertisers on over 6400 campaigns to reach millions of viewers. This ranges from new to TV brands like Sweaty Betty and NIO Cocktails, to improving reach and awareness for the likes of Montblanc and eBay.

One team

None of this would be possible without our global network of employees who are an integral part of the Finecast journey. We pride ourselves on a culture of mobility and flexibility that not only allows our people to learn from one another, but to transform emerging markets. Learnings in Europe can be implemented in our Asian markets, and Asian findings can prove invaluable in North America, and so on. This global network means we’re capable of servicing our clients with global campaigns.

This ‘one team’ mentality means that, wherever you are and whatever goal you have, you can always find someone in the Finecast family that will be able to help. As we have grown, we have created specialist teams across the business spanning from product development, targeting and TV planning and investment, to emerging markets. Because each team is made up of subject matter experts, Finecast can share knowledge and grow at a rapid rate whilst maintaining our product and brand integrity.

Plenty more to come

Today we are celebrating four years of Finecast and a continued commitment to the Finecast philosophy that has got us to this point. But there are many more years to come as we continue to think inside and outside the box when it comes to addressable TV. We have seen ideas in 2017 become leading initiatives in 2021 and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for advertising – from opportunities in eSports and shoppable commerce to driverless cars.

Established in every corner of the globe, Finecast are always learning, partnering, and investing for and on behalf of our clients to make sure we will always be leading the way in the future of TV.

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