The new chief revenue officer of an industry initiative aimed at helping marketers and publishers share audience data segments without technology intermediaries has issued a call to major data and broadcast partners, as he joins the company.

Aleck Schleider has joined Blockgraph from Amobee, where he was SVP of client and data strategy.  The company announced today.

“We’re really talking to all the major players out there that are that are all trying to figure out the best way to collectively enable the industry in a collaborative effort where everyone benefits, but everyone has control,” he says to Beet.TV in this video interview.

“It’s the programmers and broadcasters who are now figuring out ways to make their traditional linear spots become addressable. We’re talking with all the major data partners, syndicated, or CRM companies that are managing first-party data, as well as the measurement companies.”

Blockchain for ads

The initiative was launched in 2017. It uses peer-to-peer technology to let marketers, publishers and distributors match audience segments without sharing consumers’ identifiable information and without any technology intermediaries.

The idea of applying blockchain technology to advertising industry problems has been circulating for a few years.

Exponents believe blockchain’s use of an “immutable ledger”, a record of every transaction and event, stored in unison by every node in the network, can give ad buyers deeper insight and more certainty into where parts of their spend are actually going.

“The core function of Blockgraph is really to support a collaborative solution platform, that allows the industry to excel in terms of removing a lot of friction for bringing data into an addressable environment,” Schleider says.

“If you think about Charter and Comcast as a whole, in a collaborative effort, their ability to actually bring data into the TV environment, across set-top box or across broadband, is a superior function. Blockgraph was developed to take advantage of that superior function.”

Collaborating for control

Blockgraph, which already included Comcast, ViacomCBS and Charter’s Spectrum Reach as partners, recently reconstituted as a joint venture, in which the three groups will take equal ownership. Jason Manningham, who was GM of the project, became CEO.

Comcast’s NBCUniversal also began integrating Blockgraph into AdSmart, the pioneering addressable TV platform it got when Comcast acquired Sky.

In forming as a JV, Blockgraph is another example of the collaborative approach that has taken hold in the TV industry over the last year and a half, as broadcasters have realized they need to come together to achieve scale.

Comcast’s Blockgraph Sets Up As A JV With Charter, ViacomCBS

Privacy and power

“What we’re doing is facilitating for the companies that have and manage their own data assets, to control those assets, to rights-manage those assets, and to allow for the enablement within the control, without the data leaving their systems, to support the ecosystem who wants to utilise their data and their services for addressable TV,” Schleider adds.

“It’s all permission-based. We’re just enabling a more privacy-centric away to facilitate that direct conversation between the two partners without any middle man in place – better, faster, efficient, less expensive”

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews