The two companies may be at the center of the current swirl of media consolidation chatter, but that hasn’t stopped them making a tie-up of their own in the meantime.
This week, Comcast saw its FreeWheel video ad-tech unit partner with Viacom to improve the future of advanced TV ad advertising.
That adds Viacom to a FreeWheel client list that includes 90% of US programmers, according to Comcast advanced advertising EVP Dave Clark. Clark also holds the title of General Manager of FreeWheel, a unit of Comcast.
Viacom already used FreeWheel to power digital ad decisioning. Now it will also use FreeWheel’s operating platform for premium video, and will deploy features including Holistic Advertising Management to monetize across all screens, FreeWheel’s Unified Monetization Platform and other Comcast technologies.
AdExchanger reported benefits include “managing yield and growing revenue across live TV, set-top box and video-on-demand inventory, plus using Comcast anonymized set-top box data to improve precision in addressable TV targeting”.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Clark explains the tie-up. It will help clients “understand not just on averages but, deterministically, exactly who has been reached by each campaign, how many impressions and how many devices so that you can frequency cap per viewer, per customer,” he says.
As for Viacom’s choice of partner? “They had choices,” Clark adds.
Clark stepped in to the Comcast role from The Weather Channel, where he had been a president.
“Data will be the life blood of television,” he says. “It’s not as easy to plan and buy and run one campaign across all television or premium video, as it is to do the same with the platforms.
“So, TV’s starting to think, ‘Can television as a whole be a platform?’ Can they start with offering their advertisers the one campaign across their entire portfolio of assets, across all screens?”
