RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CA – Purchase data is the ultimate in outcome, so Comcast Advertising this year partnered with Mastercard to combine viewer data with transaction records to analyze campaign effectiveness.
For decades, television advertising has been understood as the quintessential top-of-funnel tool, a powerful engine for building brand awareness and broad-based reach.
Now advertisers are demanding to connect ad exposure on the living room screen to a specific consumer action
“Advertisers want to see business outcomes,” said Dawn Williamson, CRO, Comcast Advertising, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “They want to know that you could attribute the ad exposure to true business outcomes.”
Proving TV’s worth
The Comcast partnership with Mastercard tracks whether a viewer makes a purchase after seeing an ad.
Williamson also highlighted a recent campaign with a supermarket chain that illustrated the potential power of this approach. By linking ad exposure to financial outcomes, the study was able to show a 19-times return on ad spend for the client, a powerful proof point for TV’s effectiveness as a performance channel.
“Right now, what I’m really excited about is TV being recognized as a medium to drive business outcomes,” Williamson said. “I think more and more the opportunity going into the future is TV getting the same kind of acknowledgement as many of our digital counterparts have had in terms of really driving business outcomes.”
Democratizing premium video
Comcast Advertising recently began offering its linear TV inventory programmatically, allowing buyers to bid on and target audiences in a more automated fashion. The broader industry is following suit, with forecasts from firms like eMarketer suggesting that programmatic ad spending on linear TV will grow significantly in the coming years.
“Part of what’s important at Comcast Advertising is being able to provide premium video in a culturally relevant environment, whether it’s Olympics or live sports,” Williamson said. “The other is a brand-safe, trusted environment, and also to enable advertisers to be able to activate media easily, whether we just announced linear programmatic to make it more accessible and democratize the ability to get media.”
Artificial intelligence is also lowering the barrier to entry, particularly on the creative side. For small and medium-sized businesses, the cost and time required to produce a broadcast-quality commercial can be prohibitive. But Williamson said that AI tools are changing that equation.
“Oftentimes advertisers may have found … that TV is inaccessible,” she explained. “What we’ve done is we’re working with AI partners to create creative on TV ready, very quickly in a short time frame.”
Tackling fragmentation with data
As viewership migrates across linear, streaming, and mobile apps, the media landscape has become profoundly complex for advertisers trying to reach audiences holistically.
To create coherence in this complex environment, Williamson said her company is focused on using its first-party data to create a unified view of the consumer. This allows advertisers to target specific customer segments consistently, no matter where they are watching.
“For us, we’re really focused on leveraging our first-party data as an identity spine,” she said. “So then we’re enabling when we’re working with advertisers to target specifically the potential customer that they’re looking for, whether it’s on TV, streaming, apps, etcetera.”
