At the recent LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference, Beet.TV caught up with Kevin Greenwald, Sr. Director of Strategic Initiatives at Comcast Advertising. He talked about what Comcast Advertising is excited about as a champion/partner to Comcast Spotlight, FreeWheel and NCC Media in the rapidly changing TV space.
He sees tremendous opportunity in the power of television advertising to target local audiences. “We’re looking to aggressively tackle the opportunity that we see in the local market to bring to bear more audience-driven selling for our advertisers,” says Greenwald.
Then he refers to a white paper titled The New TV issued in March by Comcast Spotlight that examined the range of TV options—from linear to OTT and several other advanced iterations. For example, primetime viewing.
“Today there’s a point of view that so much viewing is captured just in primetime. But really that’s only about a third of viewing and you can still capture a large portion of the audience where two thirds of viewing is happening outside of primetime,” says Greenwald.
He points out that about 87% of total TV viewing happens live and that Comcast can “help you find them on a linear schedule” so that “you can reach as much of them as possible in a premium, brand-safe environment.”
Comcast Spotlight has a “huge local business” wherein advertisers can target audiences in specific zones. In a DMA like Philadelphia, “we can carve that up into a number of smaller zones and let an advertiser that might be a smaller business that only operates in a portion of the Philadelphia market just reach the potential customer base that they have in that zone.”
Also at the LUMA Digital Media Summit, the head of NCC Media, Nicolle Pangis, talks about “chapter two” at NCC, which is the national cable sales group owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications. Referring to NCC, Greenwald says, “We see a real opportunity in conjunction with our partners to bring a lot of new offerings to market that we think are going to be very valuable to advertisers.”
Asked about Comcast’s FreeWheel, he cites publisher-side projects coming to market for Comcast’s programming and MVPD partners. In particular, he mentions pilot tests with NBC focusing on unification, bringing digital and linear together in a single execution. “These pilots enable us to remove the linear schedules from their traffic system and optimize within FreeWheel’s ad server/decisioning system before flowing back into the linear traffic system for execution.
“We’ve seen that yield meaningful results for NBC and we believe that’s a real proof point in the market for us as we work to unify audiences across all screens,” Greenwald adds. “And that is a real core competency for FreeWheel and something we’re laser focused on.
“We believe it brings a lot of value to the marketplace for our immediate customers but also for marketers. It enables them to buy an audience across all screens with one single order as opposed to a siloed execution.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
