LAS VEGAS — Comcast Advertising has unveiled Universal Ads, an industry platform designed to make it easy for advertisers who have built their businesses on social video and YouTube to buy premium video advertising.
The goal is to open up the power of premium video to millions of advertisers.
“We believe that premium video as a category drives performance, but we’ve got to make it simple to buy and we’ve got to make it as seamless as big tech has done, which they’ve done an amazing job at,” said James Rooke, President of Comcast Advertising, in this video interview with Beet.TV at CES 2025, where Universal Ads was announced.
Built on FreeWheel Technology
Universal Ads is a Hulu-style partnership between a range of TV/video owners, designed to provide a single point of access to a wealth of premium inventory. In doing so, the partners hope simplicity can win over smaller, digital-native advertisers who have never touched TV.
Launch partners include A+E, AMC Networks, DIRECTV, Fox Corporation, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Roku, TelevisaUnivision, Warner Bros. Discovery and Xumo.
Comcast has been talking for some time about why TV, and its various related formats, needs to be made as easy to buy as social and digital have been.
The Universal Ads platform is built on top of the FreeWheel platform, with a marketing API that enables underlying capabilities from FreeWheel to be applied to a new demand set.
“Under the hood is the FreeWheel technology, and we are abstracting capabilities from FreeWheel to provide an experience that is exactly the same as if you were buying social or as others, providing that front door for advertisers to buy premium video at a category, as a category at scale as simple as they can buy social,” Rooke said.
TV Needs Big Tech’s ‘Simplification Playbook’: Comcast’s Rooke
Transparent Metrics and Brand Safety
While Universal Ads’ buying process may be familiar to buyers of social and digital ads, Comcast believes it can go one better by offering premium video.
“We are going to … set the standards … that have been the case for a long, long time with the Fortune 1000, and bring that quality, bring that performative media, bring that transparency, and make it available to advertisers who have built their businesses on social,” Rooke said.
“There is a ton of AI that we’re going to have to apply beyond creative to ensure that we can provide self-serve guidance to advertisers about how their campaigns are performing, what they should do to improve those campaigns — that’s a base expectation.”
You’re watching “Bringing Simplicity to TV Advertising,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series at CES 2025, presented by FreeWheel. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can view all of our CES 2025 content here.
