When it launches in June, the new and as-yet unnamed division within NCC Media has three goals for the national addressable television marketplace: Scale, data consistency and simplicity. “From a scale standpoint, it’s critically important that we get beyond the boundaries of any single provider,” says Andrew Ward, VP, Comcast Media 360.
NCC Media is owned by Charter Communications, Comcast Corporation and Cox Communications.
“Really what we’re talking about is all of MVPD inventory in the live linear environment, the on-demand environment as well as the digital environment,” Ward adds in an interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 event.
“That’s really one of the primary drivers behind the creation of the enterprise. How do we begin to federate those solutions” in a horizontal manner.
Comcast Media 360, Comcast Spotlight’s former national advertising sales team, will form the foundation of the new unit together with resources from NCC Media, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, NCC media said in a news release.
The second goal—data consistency—will address such advertiser concerns as audience segment definitions, which can vary from one media company to the next. Ward also wants to extend that consistency to analytic and data partnerships to bring uniformity to “what is currently an irrational marketplace.”
Simplification will require structuring “an end-to-end solution” to ensure that transacting national addressable TV campaigns is profitable for advertisers.
“Nobody doubts the sound strategy of using richer data to more precisely deliver audiences and measurement those audiences in more robust ways,” says Ward. “But we’ve got to encase that transaction in elegant architecture from pitch to pay, such that the process is simplified.”
The new unit within NCC Media will use viewers privacy compliant, non-personally identifiable data. This is not an issue because the companies involved are subject to 1980’s rules that Ward characterizes as “probably the strongest consumer protection language in the marketplace.”
All of the aforementioned goals have one common thread: To move national TV targeting, measurement and attribution into the future.
“We don’t fundamentally believe that the future of television planning, buying and measurement will sit on top of an age/gender definition and on top of a panel-based survey methodology,” Ward says.
He takes a broad view of the term “addressable” and points to other forms of audience targeting, including by geography. “Our addressable strategy is part of an overarching targeting approach that also takes into consideration various lenses. Context, device, geo and ultimately household,” Ward says.
This video was produced at the Cadent & one2one Media UpFront 2018 industry summit. You can find more videos from the series here. The sponsors for this series are Cadent and one2one Media.
