Comcast, Cox, Altice Team on Multiscreen Ad Platform

July 5, 2017
Comcast's (NASDAQ:CMCSA) Advanced Advertising Group, a division of Comcast Cable that combines the capabilities of Strata, FreeWheel ...
Natural foods outfit taps Comcast Biz Ethernet
Natural foods outfit taps Comcast Biz Ethernet
Natural foods outfit taps Comcast Biz Ethernet
Natural foods outfit taps Comcast Biz Ethernet
Natural foods outfit taps Comcast Biz Ethernet
Natural foods outfit taps Comcast Biz Ethernet

Comcast's (NASDAQ:CMCSA) Advanced Advertising Group, a division of Comcast Cable that combines the capabilities of Strata, FreeWheel, and Visible World, announced an initiative to develop a new technological solution - the "Blockchain Insights Platform" - aimed at improving the efficiency of premium video advertising. The goal is better planning, targeting, execution and measurement across screens.

The effort expands upon the advertising relationship between Comcast's Advanced Advertising Group and NBCUniversal as well as new collaborations with Disney, Altice USA, Channel 4 (UK), Cox Communications, Mediaset Italia and TF1 Group (France). The companies will work together on an improved advertising approach to facilitate the secure exchange of non-personal audience data for addressable advertising.

Comcast made the announcement at the Cannes Lions in Cannes, France, and intends to formally launch the Blockchain Insights Platform in 2018. In addition to the initial participants, Comcast is in discussions with other programmers, distributors, device makers and marketers from the United States and Europe.

"Television advertising is an efficient and effective way for marketers and their agencies to reach a large audience, yet today the way advertisers use insights to plan, buy and deliver advertising is limited," said Marcien Jenckes, president, advertising, Comcast Cable. "This new technological approach would make data-driven video advertising more efficient and consumer data more secure. We'll work with the participants in this initiative to improve ad planning, addressable targeting, execution and measurement, to ultimately create even more value for the television advertising industry."

One application of the Blockchain Insights Platform would be to help advertisers and programmers match data sets more effectively to build and execute media plans based on custom audience segments and more precisely target across a nationwide footprint of pay TV customers and streaming device users. Concurrently, programmers would be able to offer improved targeting precision across screens. All participants are expected to benefit from reporting and attribution metrics, and new potential revenue streams for participants could emerge for data they can generate for themselves and others.

A feature of the planned Blockchain platform is consumer privacy - each blockchain participant's data would stay in their own systems and they would continue to manage the protection and privacy of their users. The technology includes a series of encryption and rights management layers designed to let participants in the platform ask questions of each other's data without having to access or take possession of anyone else's data to get their marketing questions answered.

Comcast Cable recently unified its video distribution, sales and advertising technology products and solutions under Jenckes, who now oversees two divisions of Comcast Cable Advertising: Comcast Spotlight, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, and Comcast's Advanced Advertising Group.