The Sales House (TSH) announced a new partnership with Rakuten Advertising to become ad sales representative for Rakuten TV in Bulgaria.

Rakuten TV was launched in 2009 and is part of the 6th largest internet service company in the world – Rakuten, together with the most popular instant messaging application – Viber.

Rakuten TV sits within Rakuten Advertising’s unified portfolio, where advertisers can buy media across a variety of channels. Drawing on first-party data and extensive audience insights, Rakuten Advertising and Rakuten TV offer brands unique discoverability, combining the targeting and tracking capabilities of digital formats with the advantages of TV.

Rakuten TV combines TVOD, SVOD and AVOD and reaches audiences across 43 countries in Europe. As an OTT platform it delivers premium movies, entertainment, and news over the internet broadband connection and not through the traditional ways of reaching subscribers like cable or satellite.

Smart TV penetration in Europe is rapidly growing with now Europeans owning an average of 1.38 smart TVs per household. Rakuten TV partners with the top TV manufacturers – Samsung Electronics, Sony, Philips, Panasonic, LG, Toshiba, and more – who integrate either a preinstalled application and/or a branded button on the remote control in 80% of the new devices.

Smart TVs and the OTT platforms ensure premium environment and a receptive, urban, educated, and young audience for targeted advertising, using the advantages of the Programmatic software. TSH ensures Programmatic TV environment for buying and broadcasting ads to precisely targeted audience in Rakuten TV. Programmatic TV is essential for advertising individualization. While watching the same show, the users will be shown different ads that better correspond to their interests, age, level of income, etc.

It has been estimated that approximately 21% of the consumers in Europe stream and do not watch live TV. This is the incremental audience Rakuten TV is leveraging to grow by 320% YoY.

Rakuten TV broadens the strong portfolio of international media groups that TSH represents in terms of ad sales in Bulgaria, among them Discovery Networks, Warner Media and Viacom.