Brief: Steven ↔ Chris Maccaro

You took the JWX CRO seat ten months ago, post-merger, after running and selling Beachfront. You inherited two sales motions — JW Player's publisher-tech sellers and Connatix's ad-tech sellers — and a product surface that has roughly doubled in twelve months between Vertical Video, JWX Studio (the Augie acquisition), and True Anthem. You've been publicly bullish on automation and AI as the future of TV ad-sales for years.

Your sellers are now selling the most complex independent video + ad-tech stack in the market into buyers who are getting more sophisticated every quarter. I sit on the buyer side of those conversations — I train the CTV and programmatic teams at Disney, NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, and across the major holding companies. That's an unusual seat, and the reason this 30 minutes is probably worth it for both of us.

👤 About you, briefly (just to make sure I'm not wrong)

Chris Maccaro

Chief Revenue Officer, JWX

📍 NYC — 530 7th Ave

🔗 linkedin.com/in/chrismaccaro

CRO at JWX since June 24, 2025. You succeeded Jenn Chen, who moved into an advisory role.
Most recently: CEO of Beachfront Media. You took it from a traditional TV ad-server into a "modern, programmatic video platform for connected TV" and steered its strategic sale in 2024. You've sat in the founder/CEO seat — you think about revenue, product, and exit value, not just quota.
Before Beachfront: Oath (head of emerging markets), with roughly two decades in digital media and ad-tech before that.
Public POV: in multiple Beet.TV interviews you've argued the industry should reframe "programmatic" as "automation," because programmatic is "still considered a bogeyman" — and that automation benefits both the buy- and sell-side. You've called workflow automation across fragmented TV systems "critical for the future of interoperable TV buying."
You're known for building high-performing teams. That phrase shows up in JWX's announcement language about you. You care about team capability, not just headcount.

🏢 About JWX, in case any of this is wrong

1B+ MAU ~30B plays/mo CEO: Dave Otten Chairman: David Kashak "Independent" positioning

The combined entity of JW Player (founded 2008 — video player / OVP / streaming infrastructure embedded across thousands of publisher sites) and Connatix (video ad server, SSP, contextual ad platform). Merger announced October 9, 2024. "JWP Connatix" was a placeholder; the rebrand to JWX is now in market.
Recent moves:
- Vertical Video (Feb 19, 2026) — embedded swipeable, full-screen video feed for publishers. The strategic intent: let publishers fight social platforms on social platforms' turf, on the publisher's own domain. One-line JS embed.
- JWX Studio — the rebrand of acquired company Augie, an AI-assisted commercial video studio that lets publishers reformat horizontal/long-form into vertical at scale.
- True Anthem acquisition — AI social publishing and distribution.
Strategic narrative: "the industry's most comprehensive independent video technology and monetization platform" — independence (vs. walled-garden adjacent players) is a key talking point.
Customer base: broadcasters, publishers, advertisers — many of them companies whose teams I train.

🧭 Why this conversation matters

You're 10 months into a CRO seat at a company whose product surface roughly doubled in the same window. Sellers now have to articulate video infra, monetization, vertical video, AI reformatting, and social distribution in one breath. That's a lot of surface, and most sellers default to the sub-story they came in with.
You inherited two sales motions that don't naturally talk to each other. JW Player sold publisher tech to dev/product/ops. Connatix sold publisher ad inventory to ad ops, agency, and brand. Now they're one team — with a lot of nuance to learn from each other.
You've been publicly bullish on AI and automation in TV ad-sales for years. The interesting internal question for a CRO who says that publicly is: are my sellers actually using AI in their workflow, and can they articulate AI in our stack credibly to buyers?
Buyers are getting sharper faster than sellers in most ad-tech orgs. The CTV and programmatic teams I train at the major broadcasters and holding companies are absorbing curation, attention measurement, ID, and AI faster than the sales orgs selling into them. I have a lot of data on where that gap shows up.
"Independent" is JWX's lead. Defending that against scaled walled-garden adjacencies — Trade Desk, Roku, Amazon, FreeWheel — is a sharper-pencil argument. Sellers who can make it crisply close more.

📋 What I'd suggest we cover in 30 minutes

5 min — orientation. Yarayah, the merger story, your Beachfront era.
15 min — your view. How's the integration of the two sales motions actually going? Where's the new product story landing cleanly with buyers, and where does it stall? What does AI fluency across your GTM team actually look like in 2026?
8 min — what I see. Patterns I see from the buy side, where most sales orgs are getting it wrong, and the specific places I think there's leverage for JWX.
2 min — next step. If anything's worth more time, a 30-min working session with one or two of your team leads.

🤔 A few questions I'm hoping to ask

How's the integration of the publisher-tech and ad-tech sales motions going? Where's it humming, where do you still see the seams?
Of the newer stuff — Vertical Video, JWX Studio, True Anthem — where does the pitch land cleanly with buyers, and where does it stall?
You've been publicly bullish on automation and AI in TV ad-sales. How does that translate inside the org — what are your sellers actually doing differently in 2026?
What does seller development look like at JWX right now? Internal enablement, external programs, peer learning, AI tools?
When you took the seat last June, what did you say in your first 90 days you wanted to change in 12 months? How's that scorecard looking?

💬 The opening I'm planning

"Chris — really appreciate you carving out the time. Yarayah speaks the world of you, and I've watched the JW Player / Connatix merger with real interest, having spent the last few years training the CTV and programmatic teams on the buyer side at Disney, NBCU, Fox, Paramount, WBD. Before I tell you anything about what I do, I'd love to hear what's keeping you up at night ten months into the seat — and especially how the integration of the two sales motions is landing internally."

🤝 Why I built you this

This brief isn't a pitch. It's the demo.

I train sales teams across media and ad-tech to use AI to do exactly this kind of preparation — research a person, research a company, build a sharp point of view, walk into the room ready. The teams I work with at Disney, NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and across the major holding companies use this approach to close more deals, with less time, against smarter buyers.

If anything in here is useful to your team — the depth, the speed, or the framing — that's the conversation worth having. I do this in 4-week cohorts for sellers, in 1:1 engagements with CROs and Presidents of Sales, and in executive programs for senior leadership.

AI for Sales → CTV Essentials →

Steven Golus · stevengolus.com
Looking forward to today.

Brief auto-assembled from public sources, the intro from Yarayah, and our scheduling thread. Last updated May 1, 2026.