Philip Inghelbrecht is one of those rare tech founders who doesn’t just talk about “disrupting” an industry—he actually does it. First, he helped create Shazam, the app that saved millions from the agony of humming off-key into Google like a tone-deaf detective. Now, he’s the CEO and co-founder of Tatari, where he’s dragging TV advertising into the 21st century, kicking and screaming.

For years, TV ad buying has been the equivalent of throwing darts blindfolded—except the darts are million-dollar budgets, and the board is a decades-old system that barely knows how many people are actually watching. “The whole industry was stuck in the past,” Philip says. “It was bloated, inefficient, and way too reliant on guesswork. We wanted to change that.”

Tatari is taking TV ads from a world of expensive, handshaky backroom deals into one where advertisers actually know what works—kind of like bringing GPS to a group of lost tourists who thought they could just ‘wing it.’ “Advertisers should demand the same transparency and performance tracking on TV that they get from digital,” Philip insists. “The fact that this wasn’t already the norm tells you everything you need to know about how broken it was.”

Born and raised in Belgium, Philip didn’t grow up dreaming about fixing the mess of TV advertising. But he always had a knack for seeing broken things and figuring out how to make them work better—whether that was music discovery (Shazam), car buying (TrueCar), or now, the dumpster fire that was traditional TV measurement.

After co-founding Shazam and helping turn it into one of the world’s most recognizable apps, Philip turned his attention to TrueCar, where he helped revolutionize car buying by making pricing transparent—again, solving an industry built on a foundation of unnecessary opacity. “People just accepted that buying a car meant getting screwed on price,” Philip says. “That was insane to me. So we changed it.”

That same instinct led him to TV advertising. “I remember sitting in a room with big brands, and they were just throwing money at TV ads with no real measurement,” he recalls. “They were basically hoping for the best. Meanwhile, digital advertising was measuring everything down to the pixel. The gap was ridiculous.”

In 2016, Philip launched Tatari, and if you think the name sounds vaguely ominous, you’re not alone. “It’s actually a reference to ‘Tatar,’ the Mongolian warriors who conquered half the known world,” Philip explains. “We wanted a name that captured how we were going to take on the entrenched powers of TV advertising. Plus, it just sounds cool.”

Tatari’s mission? To make TV advertising measurable, transparent, and as agile as digital. In other words, to kill off the old-school ways of buying TV ads—the ones that made media planners look like they were reading chicken entrails to predict ROI.

“TV ad buying was stuck in the Mad Men era,” Philip says. “Deals were made over drinks, measurement was an afterthought, and advertisers just had to trust that their ads were working. That’s not a business model, that’s a scam.”

Tatari changed that by:

And guess what? It’s working. Today, Tatari powers TV advertising for some of the biggest digital-first brands, giving them the ability to scale their campaigns without throwing money into the void.

Up next: How Philip is calling out the industry’s obsession with upfront deals, why Nielsen’s monopoly is officially over, and how a potential economic downturn might reshape the future of TV ad buying. Stay tuned.

TV advertising has always been the Wild West—except instead of cowboys, it was media buyers in expensive suits throwing around words like “GRPs” and “primetime slots” as if they actually meant something. The whole system was built on a foundation of vague metrics, bloated middlemen, and an almost religious faith in Nielsen ratings.

Philip Inghelbrecht took one look at this mess and said, “Yeah, no.”

With Tatari, he’s not just making TV ads more measurable—he’s making them smarter, faster, and far less reliant on gut feelings and outdated spreadsheets. “The fact that TV measurement was still operating like it was the 90s is insane,” Philip says. “In digital, if your ad doesn’t work, you pull it, optimize, and move on. In TV, people were committing millions to upfront deals without knowing if they’d get a return. That’s like buying a year’s worth of groceries without checking what’s in the fridge.”

So how does Tatari fix this? By making TV measurement work the way advertisers actually need it to work:

Tatari’s biggest flex? They now offer measurement for free. That’s right. Free. “We want brands to measure everything, even if they’re not buying through us,” Philip says. “That’s how confident we are that once they see real data, they’ll realize just how much money they’ve been wasting.”

The ad industry, predictably, had a meltdown. Measurement companies have made billions charging brands for the privilege of knowing whether their ads worked. Now, Tatari is handing that power to advertisers for nothing. “Some people in the industry hate us for it,” Philip admits. “But honestly? Too bad.”

If you ask Philip where TV advertising is headed, he won’t sugarcoat it: it’s going to get a lot more competitive, a lot more measurable, and a lot less reliant on dinosaurs like Nielsen.

“For decades, the industry just accepted that Nielsen was the only game in town,” he says. “Now we’re seeing multiple players entering the space, which is great. Competition drives innovation. It also drives costs down, which is not great for the companies who have been overcharging advertisers for years.”

A few big shifts he sees coming:

So, what’s next for Tatari? More disruption, obviously. “TV advertisers should expect the same agility and accountability that they get from digital,” Philip says. “If they’re still relying on legacy measurement and inflexible contracts, they’re already behind.”

If there’s one thing Philip Inghelbrecht has learned from years of fixing broken industries, it’s that incumbents don’t go quietly. When Tatari started making TV ad measurement free, you could practically hear the collective gasp from the legacy players. After all, these companies built their empires on charging brands and agencies obscene fees just to tell them whether their ads were working.

“Look, the idea that brands should pay a premium just to get basic performance insights is absurd,” Philip says. “Imagine if Google charged you to see how many clicks your search ads got. Advertisers would riot. But in TV? Everyone just accepted it.”

Not anymore.

By giving advertisers next-day measurement at no cost, Tatari is forcing the entire industry to rethink how TV campaigns are tracked, optimized, and valued. And legacy players do not like it. “Some measurement companies tried to downplay what we were doing at first,” Philip says with a smirk. “Then they realized we weren’t bluffing, and suddenly everyone’s trying to play catch-up.”

Tatari’s free measurement move is just the tip of the spear. The real game-changer is how they’re blending digital-style analytics with TV’s reach—giving advertisers the best of both worlds:

Basically, Tatari is making sure TV advertising is held to the same performance standards as digital. The old-school measurement crowd is scrambling, and brands are catching on fast.

“Five years ago, advertisers thought they had to choose between digital and TV,” Philip says. “Now they’re realizing the future is blending both—and it’s about time.”

Philip Inghelbrecht has a habit of breaking things—things that desperately need breaking. First, it was the way we find music (Shazam). Then, the way we buy cars (TrueCar). Now, he’s coming for the bloated, archaic mess that is TV advertising.

“We’re not here to make TV advertising slightly better,” he says. “We’re here to make it radically smarter.”