“We have a lot of data, which now for the first time can really be used.”
Yann Courqueux, VP Home Products, StarHub
This week I leave Europe for once and head to Singapore. On that trip, I’m joined by fellow frenchmen Yann Courqueux, VP of Home Products at StarHub, and Olivier Bastard, Chief Sales Officer at Hoppr, StarHub’s technology partner for Connected TV advertising.
Telcos and Pay TV operators have been in living room for decades, so no question they have the eyeballs. Turning them into addressable TV inventory is where the ecosystem lags way behind CTV, which is among the segments that drove 10.5% growth in European digital ad spend in 2025. With Pay TV penetration shrinking by 5 to 10% a year, in Singapore as everywhere else according to Yann, there’s no other option than for players like StarHub to find new pockets of revenues and instead of investing in net new plays (FAST being one he’s casted aside), it’s crucial to focus first on unlocking additional value from your existing assets.
As the incumbent Pay TV operator and one of the main telcos in the region, StarHub has household composition, location and browsing history alongside what people watch, which Yann calls a goldmine, and its Dynamic Ad Pods swap the ads inside live channels so two households watching the same broadcast see different ones.
Olivier explains how Hoppr adds a layer on top of the ad technology an operator already owns, without replacing any of it. Yann explains why StarHub, already in the advertising business, still needed that layer, and what it took to get live ad replacement running: content partners who had to agree to it and months of technical groundwork.
If you run advertising at a Telco or Pay TV operator, take notes: how StarHub finds a sports fan while they’re watching a film, the flood of orders it expected from programmatic, an electric car brand’s WhatsApp campaign with TV in front of it, and the roadmap Yann gives operators for where to start.
Watch our full conversation, in partnership with Hoppr 👇🏻
That’s it for today.
See you next Thursday for a state of the CTV landscape, my Google Playtime keynote.