With demand for data-driven advertising rising, Comcast Corp., Charter Communication and ViacomCBS have agreed to form a joint venture that would own Blockgraph, a platform aimed at letting marketers and media companies handle data securely.

Blockgraph was started in 2017 by Comcast’s FreeWheel unit and the initiative was joined by Charter and Viacom in 2018.

Jason Manningham, previously general manager of Blockgraph under FreeWheel, has been named CEO of the joint venture, which will be equally owned by the three partners.

The companies declined to say how much they are investing in the venture.

“The value that Blockgraph brings to the industry has never been more important,” said Manningham. “Together with Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS, we have the opportunity to reshape data driven advertising in a way that’s better and more sustainable for brands, publishers, content distributors and above all else – audiences.”

The companies said that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the urgency among marketers for better targeting and higher returns on their advertising investment.

“When we began to develop Blockgraph several years ago, we knew that the ability to apply data-driven insights to all media, including TV, in a way that protected privacy, was going to be hugely important to the future of our industry. Now, some three years later, that couldn’t be truer, and the alternative that Blockgraph offers could not be more valuable,” said Marcien Jenckes, president of Comcast Advertising.

Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit has been integrating Blockgraph into its AdSmart platform.

“Bringing better data to television for planning, targeting and measurement represents a huge opportunity for our industry, and above all, for advertisers,” said David Kline, executive VP at Charter and president of Spectrum Reach, its ad division. “In order to recognize this opportunity, however, we need to continually and fully ensure that we can use data in a way that protects the privacy of users through technologies that facilitate aggregated and anonymized use of our data. This is an ongoing concern to be addressed collaboratively across the industry, which is why we are so supportive of Blockgraph.”

“Data confidentiality is a necessity for addressable advertising to work at scale. Blockgraph is a platform that will make that easy to implement,” said John Halley, COO, advertising revenue, and executive VP, advanced marketing solutions, ViacomCBS. “We are committed to solutions that enable us to better serve our advertising partners. Blockgraph has the right business approach and partnership framework to successfully move the video ecosystem forward.” 

NEW YORK — Amid all the new shows being launched at upfront presentations last week, there were some announcements made about the way advanced advertising techniques could help networks sell products.

At ESPN, big data about the emotions of sports fans and real-time information about what’s happening in games are being tapped to create more effective advertising.

ESPN’s analytics team broke down games into emotional triggers, said Vikram Somaya, senior vice president and global data officer. More than 700 triggers can happen over a single NFL game, he said. That data was overlaid on the millions of fans who connect with ESPN.

ESPN mapped those fans and all of the emotions they could be feeling during a game — triumph, happiness, anticipation, dismay and more. Then it got together with its sponsors. Coors Light tapped into fans’ moments of anticipation, running emotion-related, tailored messaging, before, after and during games. The ads drove a 16% lift in brand consideration, including a 31% increase during pregame.

Ed Erhardt, president, global sales and marketing at ESPN, said emotional databased sales are a small part of ESPN’s business, but with 30 advertisers now employing it, it is likely to grow.

At Turner, ad sales president Donna Speciale talked about the need to improve advertising. “Television is still the most powerful medium for your marketing message,” she said. “But I think we can agree our industry was in need of a reinvention.

“Helping our partners thrive starts with creating the right experiences for our fans, so two years ago we announced reduced commercials in primetime, first on truTV and later on TNT,” Speciale said. “That investment is paying off with powerful results in three key areas: deeper engagement, increased brand awareness, and increased sales versus the traditional pods. Now I understand you’re tired of paying more for less. Well now, consider paying more for more.”

After attending last week's network television upfronts, it is hard not to recognize how advanced the business really is and how much of what we have been talking about for so long has become reality. Television is no longer just about ratings, units and GRPs, but rather about the ability to effectively utilize data and technology to target and measure more specific, granular audiences within best-in-class content and an array of alternative distribution formats.

The concept of buying audiences and hyper-targeting is not new. It has been a standard practice in digital marketing for some time and has more than proven its value to the market. However, we are now lifting these trends and tactics and applying them to television at full scale, thereby demonstrating the value with metrics far beyond impression delivery.

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Five years ago, targeting in television consisted of standard demography, and reaching those identified demos was heavily based on using the content as the surrogate for the audience.

Today, every major TV network has incorporated the necessary data sets into their portfolio that allows advertisers to understand how the content they are aligning their brands with delivers against highly customized, handpicked segments.

In many cases, the transaction is based on the delivery of the commercial to those specified audience segments. These are valuable tools but, more importantly, it gives advertisers choice and options, which is critical in this ever-changing, highly connected and fragmented marketplace.

While data may be the backbone of this television evolution, it is not the only contributing factor. Technology now has a seat at the table. Measurement is no longer limited to our standard sources and delivered in confined buckets. Advertisers have true crossplatform reach and frequency understanding available to them, which allows for the application of technology towards near and soon-to-be-real-time optimization.

When thinking about television, it’s easy to keep the conversation focused on national networks and mass reach; however, it is important to recognize the role multichannel video programming distributors play in the transformation of TV.

Looking back again those five years, the notion of “addressable” targeting and campaign-level attribution were somewhere between a dream and a test. Today, more than 50% of U.S. TV households can receive a highly segmented message to the individual set-top box, with the results tied back to a sale.

Yes, we finally can identify households based on the type of car they drive, what brand of soup they purchase, what they watch on TV and even those who suffer from seasonal allergies. The identification and messaging to these homes is made possible through technology, data management and innovative business planning by many of our country’s largest pay TV providers. `

This mechanism of targeting an attribution is right out of the digital playbook, but without the concerns surrounding fraud and viewability.

The most exciting part of the television business today is that nothing is off the table.

Applications that we thought would never surface are being built as we speak, and the vision of a data-driven, majority addressable and semi-automated marketplace is within our grasp.

When I speak to advertisers and they tell me they have moved beyond the “test and learn” stage, and are truly vested in a data and technology market, it only increases my confidence in the future of our business.

Nick Troiano leads a family of Cross MediaWorks companies focused on addressing the current and future needs of television advertisers. Those companies include Cadent, a leading provider of media, advertising technology and data solutions for both advertisers and pay TV providers; TCA (The Cross Agency), a data-driven performance-based marketing agency; and one2one Media, a newly formed company focused on expanding and streamlining the addressable video marketplace.

Image by John Lund/Getty Images.