The first time someone introduced Erhan Ciris at an industry event as building “ad tech,” he understood why they said it. He spent the rest of the evening thinking about how wrong it was.
Not offensively wrong. Directionally wrong — accurate at the surface level and misleading about what actually matters. The kind of framing that, if you accept it, leads you to ask the wrong questions and build the wrong things.
Ciris is the founder and CEO of 4D Sight, a company whose technology inserts virtual advertising into live broadcast video for clients including UFC and WWE. On paper, that is an ad tech business. Brands pay for placements. Rights holders receive revenue. Impression reports go out after every event. All of that is real.
But start from “ad tech” as the frame, Ciris argues, and you end up optimizing for the wrong outcomes — chasing inventory volume, CPM efficiency, and ad serving latency against a competitive set of other ad formats. You build a more efficient version of what already exists. That’s not what he set out to do.
“The frame I’ve always used — the one that was there from the beginning, before the first line of code, before the first client — is a rendering problem,” Ciris says. “Can you place a synthetic object inside a real image so completely that it is indistinguishable from the real world? Not approximately. Completely.”
That reframing — from advertising to rendering, from media to perception — has had practical consequences that Ciris didn’t fully anticipate when 4D Sight was founded.
The first is hiring. An ad tech frame draws engineers fluent in programmatic infrastructure, product managers who speak the language of media trading desks, and sales teams with agency relationships. 4D Sight has needed some of that. But the core of the company, Ciris says, looks more like a visual effects team than a media technology company — engineers who pause broadcast footage and argue about whether a shadow is two degrees off on the wrong axis, who have internalized what it feels like when a rendered object doesn’t quite belong in a scene, who are professionally bothered by things most people don’t notice.
“That’s a different culture than ad tech culture,” he says. “The obsession is different.”
The second consequence is about what the company refuses. An ad tech frame creates pressure toward breadth — more formats, more surfaces, more channels, growth through expansion of inventory. The rendering frame Ciris operates from creates a different pressure entirely. Can 4D Sight actually do this right? Because if the insertion isn’t right, the value proposition collapses. A brand earns a different kind of attention when it belongs inside a live moment — inside the fight, inside the game — than it does in a pre-roll or a banner. But it only belongs if it looks like it belongs. The question is never how many surfaces the platform supports. It’s how well it handles the ones it’s committed to.
The third consequence is competitive positioning — and here the reframing has its sharpest edge. In an ad tech frame, the competition is other ad tech: other virtual insertion vendors, other sponsorship formats, other ways for brands to reach a live sports audience. In a rendering frame, the competition is reality itself. The bar is not “better than the other virtual ad.” The bar is indistinguishable from the physical world.
That bar, Ciris argues, is both significantly harder and significantly more defensible. It requires something that doesn’t become easier simply because a competitor decides to pursue it: years of real production footage to train on, years of edge conditions encountered and solved under live broadcast pressure, years of engineers learning exactly where the pipeline breaks and rebuilding it. That kind of competence accumulates the way craft accumulates — slowly, through repetition, in conditions that test it.
“You can’t acquire that by hiring a team or licensing a model,” he says.
When asked what 4D Sight actually is, Ciris gives an answer that lands somewhere outside the standard taxonomy of media and technology companies. “A company that learned to see the way cameras see,” he says, “and to put things inside that vision that weren’t there before.”
The ad business, by his own description, is what the market currently pays for that capability. It’s a large market and the application is genuinely valuable. But the capability — the rendering problem, the perceptual standard, the question of whether a synthetic object can fully belong in a real image — is what he thinks about.
It always has been.