Precise TV, which touts itself as providing a kid-safe contextual video advertising platform, has hired Denis Crushell as chief commercial officer.
Crushell is responsible for leading the London-based company’s sales and partnerships at it expands beyond YouTube to to connected TV and other digital platforms. He is a six-year veteran of Tubular Labs’ digital video measurement business, and was most recently the chief revenue officer. Crushell previously worked as a commercial leader at Google and YouTube before that.
“I’m astounded at what the Precise TV team has built, entirely bootstrapped,” Crushell said. “I’ve seen plenty of impressive engineering in the video technology industry, and Precise TV’s self-learning system is like no other.”
Precise TV was founded in 2015 by Christian Dankl, formerly an exec at ProSiebenSat.1, Disney’s Maker Studios and social media advertising firm AdParlor, and Nadav Shmuel, previously U.K. managing director at AdParlor.
“Denis is an industry leader and connected to some of the most influential companies and executives transforming the online video and convergent TV world,” said Dankl, Precise TV’s chairman. “Denis joins at a pivotal moment to help expand our platform to connected TV and eventually all video platforms.”
Precise TV says it’s the world’s first YouTube ad platform that is compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and other regulations, by using contextual analysis to serve brand-safe, relevant and privacy compliant video campaigns aimed at young audiences and families.
There’s a growing market need for a solution like Precise TV, Dankl said, because advertisers can’t use behavioral targeting to reach kids — Facebook and Google no longer allow age-based targeting of ads to anyone under 18. According to Nielsen data, nearly 30% of YouTube viewers are between 2 and 18 years old in the United States.
Precise TV’s headquarters are in London. There are offices in New York and L.A. as well as Sarasota, Fla. and Sydney, Australia. It employs around 30 people. Dankl said that PreciseTV is profitable and has not received any outside investments. To date in 2021, the company’s revenue has more than doubled, he said. Clients include Hilton and Adobe as well as Jaguar, Adobe and Chanel.
Precise TV’s competitors include GumGum, which earlier this year $75 million investment from Goldman Sachs, and Zefr.