Comcast Launches Blockchain Solution with Multiple Major Broadcasters Already on Board

Comcast’s Advanced Advertising Group, a newly-formed division of Comcast Cable that is composed of Comcast’s various ad tech acquisitions – Strata, FreeWheel, and Visible World – announced today today announced an initiative to develop a new blockchain-baed solution aimed at improving planning, targeting, execution and measurement across screens. The “Blockchain Insights Platform” will be piloted by Comcast-owned NBCUniversal but also with various other major broadcasters around the world including Disney, Altice USA, Channel 4, Cox Communications, Mediaset Italia and TF1 Group (France). The companies will work together on a ‘new and improved advertising approach which would facilitate the secure exchange of non-personal, audience insights for addressable advertising’.

The Blockchain Insights Platform will officially go live in 2018 and Comcast say they are already in discussion with programmers, distributors, device makers and marketers from the US and Europe.

“Television advertising is an efficient and effective way for marketers and their agencies to reach a large audience, yet today the way advertisers use insights to plan, buy and deliver advertising is limited,” said Marcien Jenckes, President, Advertising, Comcast Cable.  “This new technological approach would make data-driven video advertising more efficient and consumer data more secure.  We’ll work with the participants in this initiative to improve ad planning, addressable targeting, execution and measurement, to ultimately create even more value for the television advertising industry.”

One application of the Blockchain Insights Platform would be that advertisers and programmers could match data sets more effectively to build and execute media plans based on custom audience segments and more precisely and efficiently target across a nationwide footprint of pay-TV customers and streaming device users. Concurrently, programmers would be able to offer improved targeting precision across screens, increasing the value and quantity of monetized inventory.  All participants would ultimately benefit from the resulting reporting and attribution metrics, and new potential revenue streams for participants could emerge for data insights they can generate for themselves and others.

An inherent characteristic of the planned Blockchain Insights Platform is consumer privacy – each blockchain participant’s data would stay in their own systems and they would continue to manage the protection and privacy of their users.  The technology includes a series of encryption and rights management layers that would result in a system that lets blockchain participants in the platform ask questions of each other’s data without having to access or take possession of anyone else’s data to get their marketing questions answered.  This technology simply provides a more efficient platform for the premium video marketplace, while keeping individual data sources safe, private and secure.