Comcast Pushes New Addressable Advertising Group

• by Wayne Friedman , June 18, 2019

Comcast Advertising, a unit of Comcast Corp., is pushing its own content-distributors industry consortium group for widespread use of addressable advertising, called On Addressability.

Charter Communications and Cox Media, Cox Communications’ ad division, have joined Comcast Advertising.

Marcien Jenckes, president of advertising of Comcast Cable, stated: “Historically, TV has lagged digital in this area, and this must change. “Our industry needs to find a way to fully participate in, and lead, the data-driven future of advertising as only TV can.”

The group is forming because it says “addressability begins with the content distributors."

In March, a TV networks-based industry group called Project OAR -- which stands for Open Addressable Ready -- started an addressable advertising group. This consortium includes NBC Universal, CBS, Disney Media Networks, Fox, Discovery, AMC Networks, Turner, AT&T's Xandr, Comcast's FreeWheel and Hearst TV.

The On Addressability group efforts will include working on industry definitions and standards; educating advertisers on achieving a fully activated addressable world; and identifying best practices and business standards for transacting on addressable campaigns.

Comcast, Charter and Cox Communication are also partners in NCC Media, which sells local/national advertising on cable systems.

As part of its push, Comcast commissioned a study from Advertiser Perceptions, which showed that advertisers would be willing to buy more addressable TV advertising if several key challenges were met.

These included a desire for better measurement solutions (53%); proof of return on investment (51%); making it easier to buy at scale (48%); accessing more addressable inventory availability (34%); finding agreement upon standards across the industry (34%); showing better ways to ensure consumer privacy (32%); securing ways to share data (31%); and coming to a better understanding of appropriate use cases (29%).

These results come from May 2019 research conducted with 290 advertisers and agencies. Respondents pointed to select factors that might influence them to buy more addressable TV.