Years after it launched as Comcast Cable’s TV ad sales unit, Comcast Spotlight is rebranding in a move that disassociates it from the Comcast name but provides a new focus on ad outcomes.
The new name, Effectv (“ef-fec-tiv”), is aimed at accentuating the unit’s ability deliver measurable ad results for brands across screens.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comcast Advertising chief marketing officer Maria Weaver explains the rebrand comes after more than a year of reflection along with Landor, a brand consultancy, and Yamamoto, a creative agency that had already worked on Comcast Spotlight.
It comes after the group this year kick-started On Addressability – a consortium including Cox and Charter with the aim of broadening the scale of Advanced TV ad targeting – and after it launched:
- TV Ad Planner, a self-service web tool for small businesses to buy TV ads from as little as $250 a month.
- Instant Impact: an attribution tool that measures visits to an advertiser’s websites that occur within 30 minutes of a TV ad airing.
The rebrand comes with two more new products:
- Audience Intelligence: a tool for planning and running data-driven linear TV ad buys that match target audiences at local, regional or national level.
- Addressable Full Avails: a tool using household-level targeting, based on both Comcast and third-party data, to allow an advertiser to show one of up to five different ads to a viewer.
“The data that we are utilising is our own set-top box data, partnered with third-party data in order for us to identify segments that we know our brands are trying to reach,” Weaver says.
“We can actually say, ‘If you’re trying to reach men 25 to 54, don’t assume that they’re all watching this one channel – we actually can show you a broader swathe of the networks that they’re watching, we can actually target that audience in a broader way’.”
For Weaver, it’s all about enabling three different kinds of ad buyer:
- Small local businesses: “(TV Ad Planner) has opened up a wide pool for us, we are now reaching … brand new folks… mom-and-pop shops. they could still target a specific audience, upload creative, put in a credit card, and off they go.”
- Medium-sized businesses: “We can now … entice people … who thought we didn’t have a way to segment our inventory.”
- National brands: “An auto brand maybe wants to target a certain consumer with their trucks versus … (the) same company wants to target a different audience of families with their SUVs. We can use our data to make that opportunity available to them.”
Effectv shapes up against the likes of Xandr, the advertising and analytics division that was previously pulled from AT&T AdWorks and adjacent units in the increasingly large AT&T and WarnerMedia footprint.
But Weaver is happy to see a range of new joint industry initiatives, like her own On Addressability, are forming through which competitors and peers are teaming to harmonize standards and increase scale for new-wave TV ad-buying capabilities.
“I can recall times when it was very clear that there were like lines in the sand that were drawn and one company didn’t talk to another,” she says. “It’s exciting to see that not be the case right now.
“If we can come at that together so that our advertisers aren’t confused, we’ve won.”
