SAN JUAN, PR — In the not-to-distant future, blockchain-enabled technology could help TV advertisers more accurately measure the effectiveness of their ads and reduce fees paid to intermediaries.
That is the promise of Blockgraph, a division of Comcast’s FreeWheel that has been working on realizing the potential.
The initiative was launched in December 2018, counting Viacom and Charter’s Spectrum Reach as early partners. Now Blockgraph is getting ready to get bigger, with some big announcements in the works.
“Blockgraph has been building a platform that will enable both addressability through secure peer-to-peer audience matching, data-permissioned usage applications, and then ultimately provide a lot of utility to all of the industry for those inventory activations,” says Jason Manningham, GM of Blockgraph, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“To achieve that, we’ve been quietly amassing a group of distributors across a large footprint of TV viewing homes, as well as inventory partners. And there should be a really exciting announcement in the coming month that we’re really excited about.”
Blockgraph is video ad-tech firm FreeWheel’s new industry initiative focused on creating a more secure way to use data and share information.
By decentralizing information flow, the software aims to help:
- advertisers activate their data across screens.
- publishers to more effectively measure yield.
- data owners to monetize their information in a privacy-compliant manner.
“It is designed to become the “identity layer” for the TV industry, providing a platform on which media companies and publishers can offer marketers data capabilities without disclosing identifiable user data to third parties,” Manningham adds.
“Today, everyone who wants to match data is required to send that to the trusted third party. That can be very manual and it requires using these third parties who are putting an extra tax on the ecosystem. Blockgraph is a platform approach, so it allows near realtime matching off of data without exposing the underlying raw data sets. ”
Manningham was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
