Comcast, NBC Universal And The Future Of TV Advertising

With the Comcast-NBC Universal merger growing ever closer, many correspondent’s are wondering whether we are any closer to what Ad industry executives have talked about for years – a future where a marketer could buy a single national TV placement that serves up different ads to individual households depending on the viewing and purchase profiles of those homes. There is much discussion as to this in recent weeks, and it is worth listening to what execs have been saying on the matter.

“Now that you have a distributor and a content provider sitting on the same side of the table, that could accelerate movement into this area,”

- said Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer at GroupM, a unit of WPP…

“A portion of the opportunity in address-ability is dependent on partnerships between content owners and distributors,”

- agreed Tara Walpert Levy, president of Visible World, a tech company involved in the efforts to deploy interactive and targeted ad delivery systems…

“Time will tell, but when you put together two critical pieces of the pie like this, it should make it easier to get (address-ability) done on a mass scale.”

Comcast is the largest cable operator with more than 23 million subscribers, and NBC Universal offers NBC and 10 cable channels so there is no doubt that a merger would accelerate this reality.

Steve Farella, CEO at independent media shop Targetcast, says…

“We’re looking for Comcast to take (its) technology and the programming from NBC Universal and push really hard on address-ability, interactivity and customized messaging, because that’s the stuff that has gotten everybody excited about the Internet.”

Comcast and NBC say they aren’t ready to give up on the existing broadcast model, but for how long with such an opportunity at their disposal. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said recently that his company and NBC Universal are committed to “restoring” NBC and its related broadcast assets to a healthy, even dominant position.

“We’re excited by the whole portfolio,” he said.

Any thoughts?