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Jason Fairchild
Company
tvScientific
Location
Los Angeles, California, USA
Bio
I am an ad tech entrepreneur and executive with a proven track record of innovating and scaling new technologies and business models at the intersection of media and technology. Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of building foundational industry technologies and leading multiple companies through rapid growth and successful acquisitions. Most recently, I was the Co-founder and CEO of tvScientific (an Idealab company), where I led the business from its inception through our successful exit to Pinterest. We built the first performance platform for ConnectedTV (CTV), combining direct media buying with comprehensive measurement and attribution to make CTV as measurable and accessible as digital search or social ads. Prior to tvScientific, my career highlights include: OpenX (Co-founder & CRO): Built and managed global business development and sales, growing annual revenue to over $700M. My team and I introduced the first programmatic ad exchange for digital media, the first for mobile media ad exchange(via Samsung), and invented Header Bidding technology—now the standard ad infrastructure across display, mobile, video, and CTV. GoTo.com/Overture (Early Executive): Developed the "paid layer" search product that unlocked our syndication model, securing massive partners like MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. I ran global BD until our successful acquisition by Yahoo. Claria & EarthLink: Ran global BD for pioneering behavioral tech platform Claria, following my time as an early executive at EarthLink Network. Beyond my day-to-day operational roles, I served as a board member for Cognitive Networks (acquired by VIZIO) and actively invest in and advise emerging tech companies, including QuickFrame, Boom Payments, Recrue Media, CTVBuyer, RideZiro, and Binary Advertising. I hold 16+ patents and pending applications in behavioral technology and search, with several more pending in audience data aggregation, CTV attribution/measurement/optimization, and social/influencer commerce.
I am an ad tech entrepreneur...
description
tvScientific is the first and only CTV advertising platform purpose-built for performance marketers. The tvScientific platform makes TV advertising accessible and measurable for brands and apps of all sizes. tvScientific offers a self-managed solution that simplifies and automates TV buying and optimization, leveraging massive data to prove the actual value of TV advertising. The platform reaches 95% of AVOD inventory using proprietary, deterministic ID technology to measure ad exposure to outcomes in an approachable, radically transparent, and scalable way. An Idealab company, tvScientific was co-founded by senior executives with deep roots in programmatic advertising, digital media, and ad verification. The company is headquartered in El Segundo, California. For more information, visit https://www.tvscientific.com.
tvScientific is the first and only...
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Actionable Takeaways
The $70B TV Market Is Structurally Broken for Performance Marketers:
Traditional TV advertising was built for reach-and-frequency buyers — GEICO, Budweiser, Delta — who don't care about ROI in the way a DTC brand or e-commerce marketer does. That left 9 million performance advertisers who live and die by cost-per-click effectively locked out of the most powerful attention medium on earth. tvScientific's entire thesis is predicated on fixing that structural mismatch.
Self-Serve Is the Only Way to Democratize TV:
If onboarding requires a salesperson, a media buyer, and a two-week lead time, you will never reach the next million advertisers. tvScientific's self-serve platform gets a performance marketer from zero to live TV campaign in 10 minutes — the same UX model that made Google Ads and Facebook Ads accessible to anyone with a credit card. Friction is the enemy of democratization.
Household-Level Attribution Closes the Measurement Gap:
The reason TV was never taken seriously as a performance channel is because you couldn't close the loop. tvScientific connects the dots at the household level: a CTV ad is delivered, someone from that household types the brand into Google, clicks through, and purchases — and that entire trail is logged, measured, and reported back in the campaign dashboard. When marketers see it, the light bulb goes on.
Incrementality Testing Is the Gold Standard — and It's Now Always-On:
Showing correlation between a TV ad and a website visit is not enough. Incrementality testing - proving that the purchase would not have happened without the TV ad - is what gets CFOs to sign off on TV budget. tvScientific has built always-on incrementality models that give advertisers a continuous, data-science-driven answer to the question: how much of this result did TV actually cause?
AI Is About to Rewire How TV Creative Gets Made:
The traditional TV creative process is expensive, opaque, and built on gut instinct. AI changes this by allowing creative directors to test 17 hypotheses — desert vs. ocean, one person vs. family, red vs. blue car — and get real performance feedback on each visual variable. It won't replace great creative direction; it will give creative directors a scientific feedback loop they've never had before.
The Pinterest Acquisition Is a Once-in-a-Generation Combination:
Pinterest processes more than 80 billion searches per month — more than ChatGPT — and that intent signal is exceptionally clean: people actively expressing what they want. Combine that with tvScientific's ability to reach those same users via CTV ads while they're leaned back and fully attentive, and you have a full-funnel performance stack that, in Jason's words, simply doesn't exist anywhere else in the market.
Conversation Highlights
Jason Fairchild has been at the forefront of every major digital advertising wave — from co-founding the company that invented paid search (GoTo.com) to pioneering programmatic advertising at OpenX. Now, as CEO and co-founder of tvScientific — recently acquired by Pinterest — he’s doing it again: building the infrastructure that brings performance marketing measurement to the $70 billion connected TV market. In this episode, Jason breaks down why 500 advertisers control 85% of TV ad spend, how tvScientific’s self-serve platform gets any performance marketer live with a TV ad in 10 minutes, and why the combination of Pinterest’s 80 billion monthly searches and CTV’s unmatched attention could be the most powerful advertising stack ever assembled.
Topics Discussed
- Jason’s career arc: GoTo.com (paid search pioneer), Yahoo acquisition, co-founding OpenX (first programmatic ad impression, 2009), and building tvScientific
- The $70 billion US TV ad market and why 500 advertisers control 85% of all spend — and what that gap means for the next million performance marketers
- tvScientific as a self-serve, performance-first CTV platform: live with a TV ad in under 10 minutes
- Household-level attribution: how tvScientific connects a CTV ad exposure to website visits, search clicks, and downstream purchases
- Incrementality testing as the gold standard for proving TV’s contribution to ROI
- AI for creative optimization: testing visual variables (setting, demographics, color) at the element level to find what actually drives performance
- The Pinterest acquisition: combining 80 billion monthly intent signals with CTV performance advertising
- Building and scaling a 160-person team with 8 issued patents, heavy on data science and machine learning
