How an Internal Tool Became the First Linear TV Exchange

The tale of companies turning internally built tools into external products is more common than one might guess. Generally, companies go to market selling the product around which the company itself was founded. Surprisingly though, there have been many companies that built tools to support their main enterprise offering and then realized the significant market demand for commercializing the supporting tool.

There are several noteworthy examples including Slack, Tableau and AWS. Slack was initially created as an internal chat tool by employees at the game development company, Tiny Speck. Tiny Speck flopped, but Slack was acquired by SalesForce for $27.7 Billion in 2021. Tableau started as a project for database visualization brought by the US Department of Defense to the Stanford computer science department. Amazon Web Services (AWS) started as cloud infrastructure to support the rapidly growing ecommerce company’s operations. Though most consumers solely view Amazon as an ecommerce behemoth, their AWS business line generated over half of the company’s profits in 2024 at around 20% of revenue!

The evolution of the various internal components of Continuum's platform into an external product offering is much the same.

Continuum started as what the TV industry then referred to as an “unwired network”. Historically, “unwireds” aggregated local cable or local broadcast spots into a national footprint offering for their clients. The core service they were offering was a national TV footprint with pricing efficiencies. What advertisers saved in pricing efficiencies was typically counter-balanced by increased risk in delivery volatility, as these buys would often get priced out by surges in demand.

When Continuum evaluated the linear TV order management software in the market, the same problems kept surfacing: the existing tools were rigid, limited, and not built for complex management required by today’s fragmented ecosystem. So, Continuum built its own. It started with a planning solution that let teams build schedules and forecast impression delivery far faster and more strategically. Over the years, Continuum expanded the platform to manage the entire process end-to-end, from planning and order distribution, to posting, reporting, and billing. As the platform took on more of the operations, it captured more data which Continuum used to build, and now operate, an exchange. This exchange now sits at the core of the platform and automates more and more of the work every day. The goal throughout was to make teams more effective and strategic, and to grow the business without piling on operations headcount — exactly what you don't want to be doing when the inventory you're accessing is declining.

As these various internal tools drove efficiency for our various operations teams, our capacity to run more campaigns with increased complexity grew dramatically. Internal teams were able to plan more TV campaigns more effectively with the same headcount, increase attention to detail, and give more careful examination of campaigns mid-flight to optimize and improve outcomes for our clients. Another benefit was relieving the over-booking pressure felt by the inventory owners. With much improved forecasting algorithms, we were able to cut back on the overbooking tendency of unwired, thus reducing the pressure put on inventory partners and their systems.

Clients giving us just a fraction of their overall TV budgets noticed that our budgets were the best performing out of their TV media mix and kept increasing our share of their TV buys. Eventually, a couple of agencies and advertisers began to entrust their entire linear TV buying responsibilities to Continuum. This has freed them up to spend more time on growing their agencies or businesses elsewhere and leave the TV advertising to us to manage on their behalf.

In an industry where many have run from linear TV to digital, we ran towards the problem to try and build a solution. Linear TV is one of the most impactful advertising mediums. What it has historically lacked is planning ease, market-driven pricing, and transparent reporting. While others abandoned TV in front of these hurdles, we built a comprehensive platform to address each one.  

TV is still complicated, and our clients generally find it’s not worth their time to learn it, plan it, negotiate it, and report on it. We’ve reinvented the way to look at linear television and made TV simple again.

If you’re interested in the impact and reach of linear TV for your own campaign or your client’s, give us a shout. We’re confident that our platform has made TV advertising so much more efficient you will wonder why you ever did it yourself.  

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