Why B2B Marketers Should Be Running CTV Ads with Amit Sharan (SVP Marketing at Tatari)

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the Agentic Web, built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform an AI search, no developer needed. Your website isn't just your home page anymore, it's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company, and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists. Which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI Search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams use to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI Search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at webflow.com/four/exitfive.
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Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Markup AI. AI has made it really easy to produce a lot of content, but producing content fast and producing content that's published ready are not the same thing. By published ready, I mean it follows your brand guidelines, it sounds like you, and it's a good fit for your audience. I'm seeing a lot of marketers right now running their content through a bunch of different AI tools trying to get to a final product, but by the time it comes out the other end, it doesn't sound anything like them. It just sounds like AI.
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**Amit Sharan** (1:57)
True.

**Dave Gerhardt** (1:57)
Markup AI helps you catch that first, so you're always putting your best stuff out there. Go and check it out at markup.ai. That's markup.ai.
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
All right, check this out, you can run TV ads for 50 bucks a day. Most B2B marketers have no idea that's even possible. You hear TV and you think Super Bowl, and I can't possibly afford that or go and do it. Look, my guest in this episode is Amit Sharan. He's SVP of Marketing at Tatari. They're an ad tech platform that lets you buy and measure TV the same way you buy Google and LinkedIn. Before this, he was the first marketing hired for startups, including Live Rail, which sold to Facebook for 450 million. We get into everything you need to know about CTV, heading into 2026 Why programmatic ad buying only touches about 15% of TV inventory. The move, he says, every B2B marketer should be running right now with TV. How and why to retarget your website visitors on Connect to TV and the halo effect that lifts every other channel after your first campaign. He left me with a bunch of notes and making me feel like, man, we need to be running TV ads for Exit Five. So if you're tired of dumping more budget into AdWords and looking for new channels right now, this one's for you. Enjoy my conversation with Amit.
Okay. So you've been first marketing hire at four startups, including LiveRail, which sold to Facebook, aka Meta for 450 million. Now you're at Tatari. You're kind of this early stage marketing guy and you grow things, but Tatari has been a good little run for you. Can you just replay that? Let's use that to set the stage of like, you literally said I'm not going to talk about Tatari. I need you to because it sets the stage for this. So you're SVP of Marketing there, TV advertising platform for brands and agencies. When did you get there? Just tell me about your run at Tatari and what you've been doing, and just to set the stage for our conversation.

**Amit Sharan** (3:57)
Yeah. So been in ad tech now for probably 10 plus years. I was at a early stage company called LiveRail. It was basically a video SSP to use some industry jargon to break down what that means is when you go watch a video online, you press play, you see that pre-roll ad or that mid-roll ad. We were early in that game and 25 percent of all online video flew through our platform. Meta at the time known as Facebook was, they called it Preparing for Winter. I said, winter is coming.