Inside Universal Ads, Comcast’s New CTV Buying Platform
James Grant (Courtesy of Comcast)
Welcome to the wonderful, weird world of TV advertising, James Grant.
Grant is general manager of Universal Ads, the platform announced last week at CES by Comcast Advertising designed to make connected TV advertising easier to buy, particularly for the small- and medium-sized businesses currently putting their marketing dollars into search and social media.
In addition to Comcast’s NBCUniversal, programmers A+E, AMC Networks, DirecTV, Fox, Paramount, Roku, TelevisaUnivision, Warner Bros. Discovery and Xumo (a joint venture of Comcast and Charter Communications) have signed up already.
Grant told TVRev other programmers have already expressed interest in joining. And while Universal Ads’ initial focus is on steaming CTV inventory, he says the platform is eager to make ads on linear channels available to clients soon.
Universal Ads, built on top of technology from Comcast’s FreeWheel unit, was launched with considerable fanfare and the promise of serving thousands of new CTV advertisers. It was pitched as an “easy button,” in contrast to the current process of buying TV advertising that has proved too complicated for many small businesses.
Grant said UA is intentionally being rolled out slowly and deliberately.
“We know the interest is there. I've had dozens, hundreds of buyers and agencies and ad sellers come to us to say, we're ready to go,” Grant told TVRev.
The response [to the launch announcement] was overwhelming and it makes that strategy to be deliberate challenging,” Grant said
Comcast has been testing UA with a handful of customers since October.
“We are running money through the service now and have a plan to slowly onboard customers over the next few months to ensure the product is optimized and performing as promised,” he said. “The last thing we want is one and done buyers. We want UA to be a fundamental part of a broad swath of advertisers’ day-to-day business.”
Defining the small- and mid-sized business category can be tricky.
For us. I just think of it as anyone who doesn't buy CTV in a sustained habitual way or doesn't buy it at all,” Grant said.
Comcast currently engages with tens of thousands of advertisers. For the CTV industry as a whole, there are about 100,000 current buyers, he noted.
“When you look at Meta and YouTube and other social media companies, they built these wonderful businesses by making their media available to millions of buyers, Grant said. “So SMB doesn't need to be a tiny business. There are a lot of really big buyers that don't buy see TV today and we're creating this to serve them as well.”
Grant is new to the advertising business. He started out getting coffee for agents as a mailroom assistant at CAA, where he learned about the TV business by reading Broadcasting & Cable. After earning an MBA, he was a media and tech consultant and strategist at Boston Consulting group.
He joined Comcast, working on projects including Peacock and Xumo before building Universal Ads.
“Comcast has a lot of ways to serve the agency market,” Grant said. “Our main focus is on expanding demand and reaching new buyers and bringing new buyers into CTV.”
The idea was to simplify the buying process by mimicking best practices from social media and YouTube. Comcast hired people from the digital walled gardens–including head of product and engineering James Borow , who created Snapchat’s ad manager–and familiarized them with the TV business.
“I brought everybody to the Universal backlot to show them that media is pretty cool,” he said.
Initially, UA has two products for users.
The first is Universal Ad Manager, which enables audience-based buys across all of UA’s publishers.
“Our thinking was let’s have a broad and deep inventory pool so that whatever result our advertisers want out of a campaign is optimized,” Grant said. “The more supply you have, the cheaper and the better you can deliver against an advertiser’s goal.”
The second product for accessing inventory is being called store fronts. Store fronts give the buyer the ability to buy ads in content from individual publishers.
“Some advertisers want to be able to control what content their inventory is running on, and we want to broker access to that content in an automated self-service capacity,” Grant said.
Some media companies, including NBCU and Paramount, have already established their own self-serve ad buying platforms for smaller advertisers.
“We’re creating another way of engaging with buyers. We don’t intend for it to replace anything that’s in-market,” Grant said. “We think it enables sellers to do their work more effectively and broaden the number of clients that each individual seller can engage with. The core value of this, which is benefiting everyone in CTV is increasing the number of companies that buy CTV. It’s really an industry play and we think we can be really helpful to all our publisher customers.”
In the near future, UA plans to launch a third-product, which would integrate its platform with third party companies that work with smaller businesses in areas other than advertising. Those third parties would include retail media.
“We’re open to all kinds of partnerships,” Grant said.
Universal Ads is also interested in bringing in additional programmers with ad inventory.
“There’s been a lot of inbound interest and our hope is to create the broadest and deepest pools of inventory,” Grant said. “As long as they're brand-safe, non skippable, you know, appear in the living room–all the things that make CTV premium video a really unique, and valuable medium for advertisers–we want that inventory as part of our marketplace.”
The biggest traditional programmer not in the UA pool is The Walt Disney Co., which also is not a user of FreeWheel ad tech.
YouTube, which has the largest share of CTV usage among streamers according to Nielsen, is also not on UA. Grant said he doesn’t consider YouTube “premium” inventory.
“We want to be able to back up our commitment to brand safe, premium TV. It's just a different medium,” he said.
UA has plans to go beyond streaming and make linear inventory available to users.
“Definitely, it's on the road map. There are technological issues to making linear addressable that we're working through. We need to make sure that every impression we sell, there's a standardized lexicon of how you define audience, segments, and how you kind of aggregate a campaign's results so that advertisers can see how it performed across all the inventory we make available,” Grant said.
“Linear is still the most scaled way to reach audiences,” he added. “And so in the spirit of making our inventory as valuable as possible, enabling advertisers to optimize campaigns across a big pool of inventory it's important to us that linear be part of this longer term.”
Advertisers using Universal Ads will be able to buy targeted audiences or use contextual tools to deliver commercial to the the consumers they want to reach.
“We have solutions for both out of the gate,” Grant said.
“This is all built on Freewheel and FreeWheel has the ability to define an impression by age, gender, income,geo,” he said. “We also have the ability to target by certain content genres. Not shows, but genre. Longer term, we have a lot of aspirations to be as granular and valuable to advertisers as possible.”
In addition, UA can enable pixels that will enable retargeting and provide a return signal that will enable advertisers to create more specific audience targets, he said.
UA is intended to work with the current ad-sales assets of Comcast and the other media companies that have signed on.
“This whole business started because we were looking at all of these wonderful assets Comcast has across its portfolio. And we said, gee, you know, if we brought all this stuff together, we think we could do something special,” Grant said.
He noted that Comcast has one of the largest video ad sales forces.
“The NBC network has a ton of world-class sellers, and then across NBC Local and Effectv, we have boots on the ground with the best Rolodexes in all of the major DMAs,” Grant said. The key to launching this is figuring out the right way to deploy UA deliberately and work with those teams to make sure they're trained and able to bring this to market the right way.”