With hundreds of millions of hours of streaming content to sift through, Olyzon.tv, named after Tupac’s album, “All Eyez on Me,” uses AI to classify and target CTV inventory without losing contextual relevance.
When Jules Minvielle, co-founder and CEO of Olyzon.tv, decided to launch his third ad tech startup, he saw the industry at an inflection point.
The open web was starting to look like a ghost town – husks of MFA sites, crumbling display pipes and AI chatbots scraping what’s left. Meanwhile, CTV was heating up, becoming the screen of choice for consumers and the coveted spot for TV ad dollars. And AI tech has only grown more popular with consumers and advertisers.
For Minvielle, CTV’s rise and AI’s rewriting of ad ops were too significant to ignore, and he built Olyzon.tv to converge the two. Backed by a $5 million seed extension led by US-based venture capital firm Cassius Capital, the France-based company is now expanding stateside with a vision for multiformat sequencing and contextual intelligence built specifically for streaming environments.
“I didn’t want to put AI on top of something old,” Minvielle said. “I wanted to build a company where AI is the foundation. Where the tech, the team structure and the strategy are all designed for where the industry is going, not where it’s been.”
AI might get all the headlines, but what matters is how it’s applied, he added. For Olyzon.tv, it begins at the top of the funnel with turning messy, inconsistent briefs into structured media plans.
Ambitionz as an Automated Media Planner
At Olyzon.tv, a five-line campaign brief or a 20-page PDF gets handled the same way: with AI agents trained to translate brand goals into actionable, context-rich CTV campaigns. It begins with AI reviewing the inputs from agencies, whether it’s a summary or a comprehensive deck, and surfacing key brand insights. From there, the system builds a standardized request for proposal (RFP) template.
Olyzon.tv’s AI then connects the brand’s campaign brief to relevant shows by parsing bid request data and syncing it with electronic program guides. This allows the tech to identify what’s airing, down to the genre and tone. It can then enrich the metadata and build precise contextual segments aligned with each campaign’s goals.
“We’re automating what planners used to do manually,” Minvielle said, “Only now it happens at the scale of millions of shows and campaigns.”
Olyzon.tv can also generate tailored CTV ad formats. These formats include interactive overlays, squeeze-backs (where the show content shrinks to show ad inventory around it), home-screen takeovers, pause ads and scannable QR codes. Olyzon.tv’s tech decides which ad format to show based on viewer engagement.
Olyzon.tv is also capitalizing on the second-screen phenomenon by leaning into experiences that allow viewers to interact with their TVs using their phones.
“Over 95% of viewers have a phone in hand while watching TV,” said Minvielle. Advertising is ultimately a battle for attention, and ads that drive engagement between the TV and phone boost attention by up to 12%, he said.
Keep Ya Transparency Up
Still, even with Olyzon.tv’s AI-driven targeting and optimization, transparency remains a major challenge in CTV. So how does the platform give brands and agencies clearer visibility into where their ads actually run?
In traditional linear TV, advertisers knew exactly what shows their ads would appear in, and they chose them based on content alignment or audience panels. But in CTV, Minvielle believes transparency has largely disappeared.
Due to CTV platforms’ reluctance to share show-level data, brands often buy inventory in bundles, by genre or network, with little visibility into where their ads actually run.
“You’re buying impressions without knowing the context,” said Minvielle. “It’s like buying digital but without the return path, targeting precision or performance reporting brands are used to.”
Olyzon.tv tackles this problem by using AI to surface aggregated show-level data. While privacy laws like the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) prevent linking show-level data to individual users, Olyzon.tv provides generalized reporting showing how many impressions ran on each program within an audience segment.
All Eyez on Attention
In addition to tracking user engagement, Olyzon.tv is also all about attention. And attention is becoming top of mind for major brands, Minvielle said.
Olyzon.tv works with a wide range of advertisers across key verticals, including automotive (MG Motor, BMW, Nissan, Audi), luxury and cosmetics (LVMH, L’Oréal), FMCG and retail (Red Bull, PepsiCo, Mars, IKEA) and hospitality (Accor).
“These are the kinds of brands we work with regularly,” says Minvielle. “And most of them evaluate performance based on attention rate and view-through rate.”
For every campaign, Olyzon.tv delivers a post-campaign brand lift study to measure ad impact across key metrics, including ad recall, brand awareness, consideration and purchase intent. Olyzon.tv has third-party measurement providers conduct these studies.
“We don’t grade our homework,” Minvielle noted.
These partners use controlled survey methodology, comparing responses between users who interacted with the campaign and a control group who did not. The data allows Olyzon.tv to isolate and quantify the brand impact of each campaign.
Based on findings from its measurement partners, Olyzon.tv boasts attention rates as high as 99%, according to Minvielle.
He attributes these high attention rates to several factors: precise ad placement within contextually relevant content, audiences’ inherent engagement with the TV screen and the use of high-impact formats.
“Some formats naturally drive more attention,” Minvielle said, “and we focus on using the ones that do.”