A woman of influence: Teresa Phillips

Santa Clara, CA (March 24, 2025)—Spherex, a leader in video content compliance and analysis for the media and entertainment industry, has expanded its flagship product, SpherexAI, to power contextual advertising. The new feature enables advertisers to target audiences more precisely based on the cultural and emotional context surrounding the content they are viewing to maximize campaign effectiveness. Spherex will demo SpherexAI at Booth W1456 at NAB 2025 in Las Vegas.

SpherexAI’s multimodal platform analyzes streaming video by evaluating thousands of visual, audio, dialogue, and on-screen text signals to generate scene-level metadata. This scene-level intelligence helps advertisers match ads at the right moment based on the mood, theme, and tone of the content to strengthen connections with audiences.

SpherexAI further allows advertisers to deliver more relevant ads within content, ensuring cultural sensitivity and brand safety. Leveraging its patented Cultural Knowledge Graph, SpherexAI helps advertisers tailor campaigns for audiences in any market, ensuring they align with local market regulations and cultural norms across more than 200 countries and territories.

Spherex's deep understanding of regional values and local sensitivities enables advertisers to convey culturally relevant messages while avoiding ad placements in potentially controversial or offensive scenes, reducing the risk of backlash that could harm a brand's reputation.

SpherexAI uniquely enables advertisers to:

• Ensure Strategic Ad Placement: Scene-level intelligence understands key moments within scenes, enabling ads to be positioned precisely when viewers are most emotionally receptive, increasing engagement and effectiveness.
• Boost Engagement and Recall: By identifying context at the scene level before the break, ads seamlessly integrate into the storytelling experience, reinforcing brand messages rather than disrupting them.
• Scale Across Global Markets: SpherexAI is the only platform with global cultural intelligence to accurately predict how local audiences perceive video content in over 200 countries and territories, aligning with local values, norms, and cultural expectations.
• Enhance Brand Safety: SpherexAI prevents ad placement in contexts that may be inappropriate, offensive, or conflict with brand values or cultural sensitivities.

"Spherex is leveraging its expertise in video compliance to help advertisers navigate the complexities of brand safety and monetization," said Teresa Phillips, CEO of Spherex. "SpherexAI is the only solution that blends scene-level intelligence with deep cultural and emotional insights, giving advertisers a powerful tool to ensure strategic ad placement and engagement.”

Spherex will be exhibiting at NAB at Booth W1456 in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. To book a meeting and demonstration, visit the Spherex Booking page.

About Spherex:
Spherex is a global technology and data company transforming how media and entertainment enterprises create, adapt, and deliver film and television to audiences worldwide through expert-centered AI and machine learning. With unmatched expertise in culture and regulatory compliance, Spherex works with the world's largest media companies, movie studios, networks, distributors, and streamers to build larger audiences, speed up content discovery, drive more video views, and generate higher revenue. Learn more at www.spherex.com.

As co-founder and CEO of global data and technology company Spherex, Teresa Phillips is pioneering technology that is changing the future of entertainment.

Leading a team of data scientists, AI engineers and content analysts, Phillips and her team are making sense of the crowded content landscape worldwide so media and entertainment companies don’t get lost in translation. Collaborating with major studios, networks, streamers and content creators, they are transforming how media and entertainment enterprises create, adapt, and deliver film and television to audiences worldwide through AI and machine learning.

Prior to establishing Spherex, Phillips was the founder and CEO of venture-backed startup Graspr, a platform that housed a library of DIY videos where users could also share their ideas and expertise. Phillips held executive roles at both Yahoo!, where she helped craft the company’s successful partnerships with SBC (now AT&T), British Telecom and Rogers Communications, and at Time Warner, where she was part of the cross-company effort to migrate systems, products, and operations in support of Time Warner/Media One's joint venture - Road Runner.

Q: WHAT IS YOUR BACKGROUND, AND WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON?

My career began in the U.S. Army as an executive assistant to four-star generals and diplomats. I served two tours at the Pentagon and NATO. The five years I spent supporting the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe at the end of the Cold War was particularly pivotal in shaping my global mindset, leadership style, and career. Collaborating daily with NATO nations’ civilian and military personnel, I quickly recognized how individual culture shapes how we think, communicate, express emotions, and interact in business and personal settings. Culture influences every aspect of our lives.

Over the past two decades, I’ve held executive positions at both Yahoo! and Time Warner, as well as founded a venture-backed startup. I’ve built a career at the intersection of technology and media, leading teams in product development, business operations, and business intelligence.

At Spherex, we are creating a new business category in culturalization for the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry. Spherex has developed the first-ever cultural intelligence platform that applies machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze and process millions of hours of video content created daily for innovations in content recommendations, audience targeting, and cultural compliance with global regulations. We assess every movie and TV series on every platform to make it culturally relevant and appropriate, from compliance and ratings to audience demographics and title, down to religious references and cultural taboos. Through this process, we save content providers and streaming platforms money, increase their audience reach, drive new revenue, keep them brand safe, and make their content more appealing to all audiences.

Q: WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO GET STARTED WITH SPHEREX?

Since my time at NATO, I’ve been interested in culture and globalization. I believe that cultural awareness and tolerance achieve understanding and harmony, which are the gateways to globalization. Media & Entertainment helps us get there faster. It is the only industry that can produce a product (e.g. a movie or TV series) and simultaneously release it worldwide. A movie has the powerful capacity to connect us emotionally, opening our hearts and minds to different cultural, religious, and gender differences in countries around the world. Today, tens of billions of dollars are spent annually producing content for global distribution, yet very little time and money are spent considering how that content will be perceived by local audiences. My vision for Spherex is to create a cultural dimension that can be embedded in content and associated with viewers to meaningfully connect global storytellers with their local audiences.

Q: HOW HAVE YOU ATTRACTED CLIENTS AND GROWN YOUR COMPANY?

Most of our growth has come from referral business and word-of-mouth. In the industry, we are known for our deep domain knowledge and expertise in facilitating international expansion by way of providing local age ratings, supply chain operations, and metadata. The wonderful aspect of our industry is its connected ecosystem. In a global marketplace serving both supply and demand sides, every transaction touches at least two entities. Even though M&E is a huge global industry, it is still quite small in terms of how closely companies work together across the supply chain. This tight integration allows us to grow organically and very quickly.

Q: WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS FOR THE FUTURE?

Because we’re creating a new business category, we must educate the marketplace about culturalization and the need to adapt content worldwide. We’ll continue to evolve our technology platform in order to scale. The ultimate goal is to be the ubiquitous provider of culturalized listings worldwide, which entails applying artificial intelligence to generate personalized versions of artwork, trailers, and other assets that resonate with cultures around the world. Our industry has a high level of reusability in that once a title is created, it can be relicensed in perpetuity. This means our culturalized listings can be used in every country by every storefront at any time.

Q: WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES YOU HAVE FACED SO FAR?

It was a herculean effort in analyzing cultures around the world to gain insight and knowledge; then codifying that knowledge and embedding it in systems so that we can act on it. Without machines, humans alone cannot determine how a film should be adapted to better connect with audiences, in say, Brazil, Singapore, Russia, and Indonesia – all at the same time. Another challenge is that cultures and societies are always changing and evolving, so we must stay closely aligned with content regulators worldwide to update our system rules when they update their policies and laws.

Q: WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE FOR FEMALE FOUNDERS WHO ARE JUST STARTING OUT?

My advice for new female founders is to find your north star and follow it – day and night. While others can give you advice on stops to make and things to pick up along the way, only you can choose the path that’s best for you. There is no simple formula, no secret to success, or no “one right way” of doing anything. Pack the 3 C’s and you’ll do fine: Courage, Compass, and Conscience. Trust your instincts, open your heart, and sharpen your mind. Above all, take care of yourself and enjoy the journey!

Source: Databird Busines Journal

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Santa Clara, CA (July 7, 2023) – Spherex, a global technology company serving the Media & Entertainment industry, announced today that its proprietary title monitoring solution would support Vertical and the monetization of its high-profile releases across MVPD cable companies in the U.S. Spherex's solution applies leading-edge technology to provide accurate and holistic monitoring of global title availability.

As the only worldwide provider of title monitoring and local age ratings, Spherex will ensure Vertical’s premium Transaction Video On-Demand (TVOD) titles are available for rental and purchase for U.S. cable consumers.

"Vertical is a well-known and highly respected film distribution company with a long history of working with Tier-1 talent. We're pleased to support its U.S. MVPD release strategy and help expand audience engagement by providing accurate and timely reports and alerts on the non-availability of titles," said Teresa Phillips, Spherex CEO.

"We are excited to partner with Spherex and utilize its monitoring platform to help us distribute Vertical content to movie fans nationwide," said Jason Pecora, EVP of Distribution. "Spherex is a recognized leader in content monitoring, and we look forward to leveraging their technology to support our continued growth."

About Spherex:
Spherex is a global technology company transforming how media and entertainment enterprises create, adapt, and deliver film and television to audiences worldwide through expert-centered AI and machine learning. With unmatched expertise in culture and regulatory compliance, Spherex works with the world's largest media companies, movie studios, networks, distributors, and streamers to build larger audiences, speed up content discovery, drive more video views, and generate higher revenue. Learn more at www.spherex.com.
         
About Vertical
Founded in 2012, Vertical has become a leading global independent distributor releasing films across all mediums. Vertical's unique combination of full-service marketing and highly effective sales services provides collaborative solutions for filmmakers, as the company leverages creative and platform relationships to maximize revenue streams from all content providers. Learn more at www.Vert-Ent.com.