As the result of addressability, attribution, data and technology, “I think we are at a time when advanced TV is at scale and there’s only upside from here,” says Comcast Cable’s Marcien Jenckes.
“That doesn’t mean that all media will be bought programmatically,” Jenckes adds in this interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week 2018 in which he talks about the collaborative progress being made by NCC Media, in which Comcast is part owner. “Having those tools in our toolset, when you add them to the scale, quality and engagement of television, there’s no better marketing platform on earth.”
The best thing about NCC Media—whose other owners are Charter Communications and Cox Communications—is that “it is a collaboration across multiple players in the marketplace,” says Jenckes, who is President of Advertising at Comcast Cable.
“Historically, it focused on national sales for local media and that’s really good. It took it from something that was different in every market to a consistent way to buy across the U.S. and in doing that it created what is a six-billion-dollar local national market.
“I think ultimately, remnant or unwired networks will also work well at a national level. I think the ability to turn on addressability at the network level so it’s not just the distributors that do it will also likely happen through a vehicle like NCC.”
While infrastructure, programming rights and extracting data continue to pose challenges, there’s been a lot of progress over the past four years, according to Jenckes.
“Technology is now in place that helps unify audiences across screens and devices,” he says. “That was always one of the big benefits of television the unparalleled scale and fragmentation kind of fought against that a little bit.”
Now that marketers have figured out new ways to run campaigns across platforms and devices, “We aggregate the scale that allows people to find audiences.”
Asked about advances in data, Jenckes cites John Wanamaker’s oft-referenced complaint about not knowing which half of is advertising budget was being wasted.
“That’s just sad. It was the reality for a long time and I think TV got away with it because it was so effective as a medium that you could waste half and it was still okay. But I think the waste just needs to be addressed.”
By unlocking data to find household-based audiences across every screen “makes us much more competitive with digital than we ever have before,” Jenckes says. Household addressability is now available in 70% of TV households. “There’s still a lot to do around standardization, but the promise is there.”
Comcast has made big investments in attribution models because if TV can show it’s true impact for marketers, “everybody will see that the truth is on our side.”
We spoke with him earlier this week after his panel at Advertising Week.
