James Hendricks, a 49-year-old group VP at Charter Communications's Spectrum Reach ad-sales business, died in September while on a visit to the New Jersey Shore, only weeks before he was set to be honored as a Next Generation Leader at the annual NAMIC Conference in New York. At the NAMIC conference on Wednesday, David Kline, the Spectrum Reach president and an executive VP at Charter, said Spectrum Reach was establishing an annual James Hendricks Award "to recognize an employee who exemplifies integrity, tenacity, collaboration and intelligence."

"Simply put, James was an agent of change," Kline said after relating how he and other Charter employees had traveled to a memorial service for Hendricks in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, and learned about non-work aspects of his life, including his devotion to family and community organizations in Ohio and New York. Hendricks had only been at Spectrum Reach for about two years, after working in human resources at ESPN and NBCUniversal, so most of his Charter colleagues only knew him professionally, Kline said.

Spectrum Reach also noted the Next Generation Leader honor for Hendricks in a social post. 

Other Next Generation Leaders honored at the ceremony paid tribute to Hendricks as well. Freddy Rolón, senior VP, programming and scheduling at ESPN, said he and Hendricks were in the same Executive Development Leadership Program class at NAMIC and then worked together at the sports network. He said Hendricks was someone who would encourage people he knew to step up when he saw opportunities for them. "If he believed in someone, he would want them to succeed," said Rolón.

Rolón asked leaders at the conference, inspired by Hendricks's memory, to look for chances to "lift someone up," encourage them and if appropriate coach them "or just let them know that you believe in them."

The NAMIC Conference is part of the cable industry's Diversity Week, which continues Wednesday night with the Walter Kaitz Foundation annual fundraising dinner, supporting foundation grants to organizations including NAMIC. ■

Blockgraph, the ad tech company owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Paramount, said veteran advertising exec David Kline has been named chairman.

Kline, who will continue to serve as executive VP at charter and president of its Spectrum Reach ad sales unit, succeeds Dave Clark, who stepped down as GM of Comcast’s FreeWheel unit in February.

Blockgraph was started in 2017 by Comcast, and making Kline chairman signals that it intends to serve the entire industry, with its technology, designed to safely enable data-driven TV advertising.

“Blockgraph demonstrates what’s possible when innovators in our industry develop forward-thinking collaborative technologies,” said Kline. “I’m honored to have the opportunity to play a leading role in Blockgraph’s important work and continued growth. In the coming year, we will look to gain even more momentum to safely enable industry measurement, addressability, and programmatic tools across a fully privacy-compliant household identity platform.”

Clark’s successor at FreeWheel, Mark McKee has been added to Blockgraph’s board.

“I’m excited to be joining industry leaders on the board of Blockgraph. This is a pivotal moment for the industry and Blockgraph’s technology platform and approach to identity and collaboration are well poised to help the marketplace solve for the fragmentation of TV audiences in the connected home,” said McKee. “I’m looking forward to teaming up with Jason and the Blockgraph team to accelerate the adoption of Blockgraph’s industry-leading, privacy-first, identity operating system across all stakeholder groups in the premium video and connected TV ecosystem."

“These changes to the composition of our board of directors solidify Blockgraph’s standing as a comprehensive, neutral solution for our industry as a whole,” said Jason Manningham, CEO of Blockgraph. “Both David and Mark have extensive track records of leadership at the intersection of video advertising and technology, and I am confident that their guidance will help further establish Blockgraph as the essential solution for data-driven TV advertising.”

In 2018, Charter and ViacomCBS–now Paramount– joined Comcast in supporting FreeWheel’s Blockgraph initiative. Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS turned Blockgraph into a joint venture in 2018. ■

Programmatic advertising is a small but growing piece of the TV ad pie. And it’s only going to get bigger.

“It’s not here today and gone tomorrow; it’s here for good,” David Kline, the new president and COO of ad tech company Visible World, told Mutichannel News in an interview. “There’s not an advertiser out there that doesn’t want to be able to target their audience more finitely.”

Given that as the set-up, it’s little surprise that expanding Visible World’s programmatic business is a top priority for Kline, a former Cablevision Systems and Ensequence exec who came on board soon after Comcast acquired Visible World.

But he’s pretty familiar with the company, as he helped to put together Visible World’s programmatic ad arm, AudienceXpress, as a consultant, and has been serving as a company director.

Kline said he’s now tasked with launching more products and getting Visible World’s programmatic business “super-charged, as we get more distributor partner and more advertiser partners.”

AudienceXpress, Kline said, is already working with several MVPDs, including Charter Communications, Comcast, Cablevision Systems and Cox Communications, and has a distribution footprint of about 75 million homes.

These days, the Visible World unit is buying inventory from them and using its programmatic platform to make more than they can selling ads locally, and “making those 30-second spots work harder.”

Kline acknowledges that programmatic represents a small piece of the broader landscape but it’s expanding rapidly. “We think we can be on the forefront of that growth,” he said.

As for next steps, the company is also developing software that will enable MVPDs, networks and local broadcasters sell their own inventory on a programmatic basis. 

Visible World, the Comcast-owned maker of targeted and programmatic advertising technology company, has appointed industry vet David Kline to the post of president and chief operating officer.

Kline joins Visible World more than a month after Comcast acquired the company, which counts Bright House Networks, Cablevision Systems, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Suddenlink and Time Warner Cable among its clients.

Kline most recently was COO at Ensequence, which introduced a distributor-agnostic interactive advertising platform for MVPDs, programmers and smart TV manufacturers in 2013. Prior to that, Kline was a long-time exec of Cablevision Media Sales, where he oversaw operations for Cablevision's advertising businesses, including local cable, interconnects, regional news channels, national cable networks, newspapers and introduced industry leading advanced advertising products and services.

Before going full-time with Visible World, Kline had been serving as a director of the company and consulted on several initiatives supporting MVPDs and their programmatic inventory sales, the company said. New York-based Visible World offers a programmatic TV platform via its AudienceXpress subsidiary.

"We are delighted that David has officially joined our team," Visible World CEO Seth Haberman said, in a statement. "Because of our shared forward-looking take on the space and his leadership, he has been a critical advisor to Visible World for some time. He joins us now, as we take the company to new heights in increasing the performance of TV ad inventory. Visible World has been a frontrunner in our industry -- and now we are taking the next step in our suite of products."

Comcast’s acquisition for Visible World came about a year after the operator  acquired online advertising specialist FreeWheel.