Pay-TV Companies Partner to Better Target Ads -- WSJ
May 30 2020 - 2:02AM
Dow Jones News
By Patience Haggin
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (May 30, 2020).
Three of the nation's largest pay-TV companies are taking joint
ownership of a platform designed to make it easier for brands to
harness data to serve targeted ads to people watching cable TV, a
move that comes as cost-pressured ad buyers are increasingly
turning to targeted advertising.
Comcast Corp. is spinning off its Blockgraph LLC unit and
selling two-thirds of it to Charter Communications Inc. and
ViacomCBS Inc. in an effort to give greater scale to ad buyers
relying on the platform. Each company will own one-third of
Blockgraph as a result of the deal, which the three partners
announced Friday. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
Targeted advertising -- serving specific ads to specific viewers
based on their interests, demographics and consumption habits --
has been widespread on websites and online-video services for
years, but is still in its infancy when it comes to traditional TV,
where advertisers have fewer opportunities to gather information
about viewers consuming TV from a living-room set-top box than they
would from a smartphone or a computer.
Blockgraph acts as a service that helps brands and ad-inventory
sellers match data sets without sharing too much personal data on
the viewers, the company says. For instance, if a car maker buys a
data set of people in the market for a car, it could use
Blockgraph's technology to match that list up with cable
subscribers based on their home address, Blockgraph Chief Executive
Jason Manningham said. The car company could use this data either
to learn which programs and time of day draw more viewers from
their desired audience, or to buy ads targeted only at households
on the in-market list.
"For the ad buyer, it's really about scale and simplicity," Mr.
Manningham said. As a joint venture, Blockgraph provides "a massive
scale of inventory that can now be unlocked."
Privacy restrictions have served as an obstacle to the growth of
targeted TV advertising because data matches often rely on
personally-identifying data such as viewers' home address.
Comcast and Charter are the country's two largest cable
companies, accounting for nearly half of U.S. TV and broadband
households, and ViacomCBS is one of the largest owners of cable and
broadcast channels.
The joint venture is launching at a precarious moment in the TV
ad market, when the coronavirus pandemic has many brands cutting
their marketing budgets and thinking more strategically about ad
placements. The pandemic has prompted marketers to walk back their
planned TV ad-spending commitments and think more strategically
about advertising expenditures.
Write to Patience Haggin at patience.haggin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 30, 2020 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
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