Telly falls short of delivering half a million TVs, but says people are watching

There’s ad-supported television, and then there’s Telly, a company that’s so ad-supported it’s giving away free 4K televisions in exchange for data and eyeballs.

If you haven’t heard, the company’s gimmick is a second “smart screen” installed underneath the TV, showing, among other features like the weather and sports scores, digital ads, subsidizing the free TV.

“All TVs come with ads. It’s time you got cut in. Brands pay for the non-intrusive ad on the second smart screen. Those ads pay for Telly. Plain and simple,” the company’s website reads.

Telly’s rollout last year earned tons of coverage, and the company then said it expected to ship 500,000 televisions by the end of 2023. That didn’t happen, Telly founder and CEO Ilya Pozin told Marketing Brew. So far, the company, still in beta mode, has shipped “thousands of devices,” though he declined to specifically say how many.

“Instead of rushing to ship 500,000 this year, We’re planning for a much bigger scale,” he said, emphasizing that the company was now working with “higher quality” manufacturers and device partners. Close to 400,000 people are currently on Telly’s waiting list, he said.

“It is important to note this was a strategic business decision we made,” Dallas Lawrence, Telly’s chief strategy and communications officer, told us over email.

• To coincide with CES, the company said in a press release Tuesday that its usage was “twice the national hourly average” for living room TV viewing time and that its second-screen ads had a 60% higher recall rate, in one case study. Telly also said it would unveil e-commerce capabilities, letting viewers shop on their TVs.

Telly is also partnering with the purchasing data company Attain, which manages apps like Klover and Frisbee, where users can connect their credit and debit cards and, in some cases, upload shopping receipts in exchange for cash and rewards. Attain is giving away 100 Telly TVs to its customers, connecting Telly’s viewership data with Attain’s purchasing data, down to a user’s hashed email. Because consumers are explicitly opting into each company’s features, both Telly and Attain call their data “zero-party data,” which may or may not be a real thing.

“The data that they are able to capture is completely complementary to the type of data that we work with, with our consumer base,” Brian Mandelbaum, Attain’s CEO, said.

Pozin still believes in its value exchange—users get a TV, and Telly gets that sweet, sweet viewing data. The company asks users questions about things like the cars they drive, their lease payments, their cell carriers, and their insurance providers, he said. There’s even a sensor on the television that can detect how many people are in a room watching, or whether someone has left the room. Like Nielsen, Telly has created a panel of viewers, data about which can then be sold to advertisers.

While a majority of Telly’s inventory is bought programmatically, the company also has direct deals in place, running ads for Kia, Michaels, and Experian, Pozin said. With ad-supported cable and streaming services, most commercials only run during commercial breaks; Telly’s second screen is on the entire time, he said.