Disney/ABC, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Fox and other media companies have teamed up on a guide for marketers buying TV ads across multiple platforms.
The FreeWheel Council for Premium Video—which also includes A+E, Discovery Inc., ESPN, Turner Broadcasting System and Univision Communications—issued the guide to address viewer fragmentation and the need to combine TV and digital teams, skill sets and processes.
“The dynamics of the living room have changed and TV is now consumed in a much more personalized way, based on viewers’ preferences for timing, device and service. The impact for advertisers is increased complexity and for media planners and buyers is a need to continue to learn the nuances of these dynamics to reach these valuable audiences efficiently,” said James Rothwell, vice president of Global Agency, Brand and Industry Relations at FreeWheel, in a statement.
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The report focuses on the value of brand-safe premium video, viewership data from connected TVs, and combining digital and linear ad sales teams. The advanced and addressable TV guide from Freewheel, a Comcast-owned company, represents a small section of many traditional media companies’ broader efforts to take ad share back from digital giants like Facebook and Google.
NBCU, Fox and Turner are all members of OpenAP, a cross-audience platform for selling targeted TV advertising formed in 2017 by Fox, Turner and Viacom. OpenAP incorporates Comcast’s Freewheel Shared Insights Platform and uses NBCU’s Audience Graph, a proprietary enterprise data asset that provides a single centralized store of audience attributes.
Earlier this year, Disney launched a new advertising product called Luminate that offers marketers data-based targeting for ads across Disney’s brands including ABC, ESPN, Freeform and the Disney Channels.