Jamloop's 70-30 Blueprint Puts Streaming TV at the Center of the Media Plan
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
Leif Welch named his company after a music startup that failed inside a year, and he kept the name through the rebuild anyway, because the idea sitting underneath it, connecting buyers and sellers with more transparency than either of them was used to, had always been the part worth keeping.
“It’s all about creating some kind of a marketplace to connect buyers and sellers with more transparency,” Welch says. Fifteen years ago that meant a marketplace for musicians to find new and used gear, paired with a social network for local players. It ran for close to a year and went nowhere. Musicians, as Welch puts it, don’t have a lot of money to begin with. When he relaunched Jamloop as a media company, the name came along. Jam for a team creating something out of nothing, loop for connecting people with full transparency.
Jamloop is now a platform for brands, and the agencies that represent them, to advertise on streaming television. Welch describes it as a Facebook or Google ads platform for the streaming TV world. Pick your audiences, get up and running, then read the results in an analytics dashboard that tracks who saw the ad and what happened next. Store visits, website visits, purchases, and whether you earned a true return on ad spend.
Creating Demand Instead of Only Capturing It
Welch was about to give a keynote at eTail Boston when we sat down, and the argument he previewed lands on a tension most retail marketers feel in their budgets. Search and social have worked extremely well, and customer acquisition costs keep climbing as those channels saturate. So what does a brand do when the channels it depends on keep getting more expensive?
“At some point you can’t just focus on bottom-of-the-funnel tactics around capturing demand. You actually have to create that demand to begin with, and that’s what television has always been really, really good at,” he says.
The case for connected TV is that it does both jobs. The big screen carries the emotional impact that builds brand awareness, and because it is a digital format, it is fully targetable, trackable, and measurable. Welch wants search and social to keep running, with streaming TV added into the mix and a plan behind it.
Two Different Jobs for AI
Asked where AI belongs in advertising, Welch draws a line between content creation and campaign operations.
On creation, Jamloop leverages AI to generate creative for brands that have never been on television, and generally does not charge for it. He calls the output reasonably good for a quick and dirty version of an ad, with human intervention still needed to make it professional. Where AI earns its keep on the creative side is versioning. “You want to be able to create multiple versions and then do A-B testing and seeing what works,” he says. A retailer with physical stores can vary the message by location without reshooting a commercial.
On planning, execution, and analysis, AI is built into the platform itself rather than bolted on as a feature. It helps build a sensible media plan, interprets campaign data, and keeps optimizing. “It’s not a separate piece of the platform, it’s just the way the platform works,” Welch says.
The 70-30 Blueprint
Welch closes with the blueprint Jamloop is putting in front of advertisers now. “70% of your media spend should be allocated to streaming TV advertising, CTV, which is the foundation,” he says. That foundation builds awareness and frequency. The other 30 percent blends in formats that move viewers down the funnel. Short form online video, display ads, and pause ads, the high impact interstitials that appear when a viewer pauses their show.
“That’s the secret to success on a CTV campaign,” Welch says.
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