iSpot Launches Sage to Bring the Wisdom of its Data to Clients Instantly

Marketers have a ton of data. Some feel they are drowning in it. They need answers, and they need them quickly. Measurement and analytics company iSpot says it’s ready to deliver.

The ad-tech world has been trying to respond. Artificial intelligence has been stapled to most platforms and products, with questionable results. The new buzzword is “agentic,” an AI that does the work of finding answers for you. Now, it seems like everyone in the ad business has an agentic system.

An adage in the data processing business is “garbage in, garbage out.” Long story short, the result of any computerized endeavor is only as good as the quality of the data that is input.

So, as iSpot introduces Sage, its entry into the agentic AI market, a key point of differentiation is the data that goes into it. 

Like other agents, iSpot Sage will respond quickly to questions posed in plain English that might have taken a room full of researchers a month to answer. The first phase of Sage will answer questions about the effectiveness of creative executions. 

Eventually, iSpot hopes to have Sage use its data on viewership and outcomes to plan media strategies for clients.

Unlike other AI products, Sage’s agentic system has been trained to trust only iSpot data when it comes to marketing intelligence, iSpot CEO Sean Muller told the Measure. And that’s data other platforms don’t have access to. Until recently, even iSpot didn’t have access to the depth of data Sage will use to inform clients.

iSpot launched a private beta version of Sage during the third quarter with 12 customers including General Motors and Airbnb.

“Most of them have been using our creative assessment data already,” Muller said. “This just takes it to the next level.” 

“The market has made it clear that a trusted model, grounded in expert data, is the only AI they want for their video investments. iSpot SAGE delivers on this by pairing the productivity gains of AI with a partner who knows their data better than anyone, eliminating the doubt and manual busy work that has plagued campaign optimization for years,” said Miles Drayton, Global Director, Marketing Intelligence, for GM. 

Now the company is coming out with a public beta.

From its beginnings, iSpot used technology to draw insights from its unique databases. It was the first company to sign an agreement with a smart TV maker to use smart TV impressions in a measurement application. 

Muller said Sage is a quantum leap for iSpot.

The company has taken the information it has on every TV commercial that appears, how people responded to them and the results they generated and used AI to decompile that data to the most granular level. For each of the 2.5 million commercials in its library, that means a frame-by-frame breakdown to determine storylines and themes. And it means word-by-word analysis for each of the hundreds of millions of verbatim survey responses iSpot has.

“We wanted to decompile advertising to a level that hasn’t been done before,” Muller said. To do that, iSpot bought its own Nvidia servers, which he noted was “super expensive.”

Some of the money for developing Sage over the past two years came from the $325 million investment Goldman Sachs made in iSpot in 2022. “They thought it was going for currency, but instead it went to this. This is going to be super powerful,” Muller said.

Those servers give iSpot an infrastructure built on a foundation of a new level of data. It meant “we could understand every theme of every ad, and how much that theme contributed to every metric in a positive way or a negative way.”

iSpot built its agents, which are trained on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude products for general knowledge. But iSpot agents are trained to trust only iSpot data when it comes to answering questions about advertising and marketing.

“There are a lot of people that are just writing workflows on existing LLMs,” Muller said. “The difference is in the underlying data.” He adds that when you ask ChatGPT a question about TV ads, most of the data comes from iSpot’s public site, which has only a fraction of the data to which clients have access.

Muller demonstrated how iSpot Sage works. As an example, he said a CMO might want to know whether the celebrities that appear in the company’s Super Bowl commercials are driving purchase intent. The answer would lead to the marketers rethinking its strategy or changing which celebrities it uses.

“Today that is a very, very lengthy analysis,” Muller said, with people going to different dashboards to find the right ads and the right performance data. You could do that entire analysis in two minutes using Sage.”

Muller typed a query into an interface like ChatGPT’s: “Please analyze all the celebrities from the 2025 Super Bowl and rank them by which ones drive the highest purchase intent for their brand and explain why.”

The answer came back with names and rationales. Tom Brady, Snoop Dogg, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were the top performers. (Users can view the ads through the Sage interface.)

The ads that worked were authentic, fit the product and had the appropriate tone, message and alignment, according to Sage. Sage also had thoughts about celebrity endorsers who didn’t perform well.

“The data show that celebrity power alone doesn’t guarantee purchase intent,” Muller said. “It’s a strategic fit between celebrity, brand and creative execution that truly scores a touchdown.”

In addition to the instant marketing analysis, Sage can speed up the creative ideation process, coming up with concepts for commercials that are rooted in the data about what has worked well. It generates creative briefs, script outlines and storyboard directions. That capability has already been used by a big insurance company, which is producing an ad suggested by Sage, Muller said.

“iSpot brings a massive repository of what people feel about ads, what creative elements and narratives were used and where those ads were seen. The development of Sage promises to expand our potential to forge new connections, using actual intelligence, which means it's data that we can trust,” said GM’s Drayton.

It sounds like Sage is doing the work currently done by many employees at marketers and their agencies. But Muller said he doesn’t expect Sage to replace them.

“I think we're making a lot of people more valuable, more efficient,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, the humans still need to be in control here, and this is why you've got this interface where the human is in control of what it's asking, of what it's interpreting, of the follow up questions, the ultimate interpretation of the data and the ultimate decisioning.”

To use Sage, customers will have to pay for a license from iSpot. “This is another component of what you’re buying from iSpot,” Muller said. He added that he believes iSpot will add customers because of the capabilities Sage offers.

Later this year, Muller expects to expand Sage to include the audience data iSpot gets from sources including Vizio, LG and Charter Communications and certain streaming platforms.

After that it will move into the outcomes data iSpot has.

“We have significant scale across a lot of different events,” he said. "But the way to think about it is we’re building this very simple interface to access it all."