The new name, Effectv (“ef-fec-tiv”), is aimed at accentuating the unit’s ability deliver measurable ad results for brands across screens.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comcast Advertising chief marketing officer Maria Weaver explains the rebrand comes after more than a year of reflection along with Landor, a brand consultancy, and Yamamoto, a creative agency that had already worked on Comcast Spotlight.

It comes after the group this year kick-started On Addressability – a consortium including Cox and Charter with the aim of broadening the scale of Advanced TV ad targeting – and after it launched:

• TV Ad Planner, a self-service web tool for small businesses to buy TV ads from as little as $250 a month.
• Instant Impact: an attribution tool that measures visits to an advertiser’s websites that occur within 30 minutes of a TV ad airing.

The rebrand comes with two more new products:

• Audience Intelligence: a tool for planning and running data-driven linear TV ad buys that match target audiences at local, regional or national level.
• Addressable Full Avails: a tool using household-level targeting, based on both Comcast and third-party data, to allow an advertiser to show one of up to five different ads to a viewer.

“The data that we are utilising is our own set-top box data, partnered with third-party data in order for us to identify segments that we know our brands are trying to reach,” Weaver says.

“We can actually say, ‘If you’re trying to reach men 25 to 54, don’t assume that they’re all watching this one channel – we actually can show you a broader swathe of the networks that they’re watching, we can actually target that audience in a broader way’.”

For Weaver, it’s all about enabling three different kinds of ad buyer:

• Small local businesses: “(TV Ad Planner) has opened up a wide pool for us, we are now reaching … brand new folks… mom-and-pop shops. they could still target a specific audience, upload creative, put in a credit card, and off they go.”
• Medium-sized businesses: “We can now … entice people … who thought we didn’t have a way to segment our inventory.”
• National brands: “An auto brand maybe wants to target a certain consumer with their trucks versus … (the) same company wants to target a different audience of families with their SUVs. We can use our data to make that opportunity available to them.”

Effectv shapes up against the likes of Xandr, the advertising and analytics division that was previously pulled from AT&T AdWorks and adjacent units in the increasingly large AT&T and WarnerMedia footprint.

But Weaver is happy to see a range of new joint industry initiatives, like her own On Addressability, are forming through which competitors and peers are teaming to harmonize standards and increase scale for new-wave TV ad-buying capabilities.

“I can recall times when it was very clear that there were like lines in the sand that were drawn and one company didn’t talk to another,” she says. “It’s exciting to see that not be the case right now.

“If we can come at that together so that our advertisers aren’t confused, we’ve won.”

“We absolutely know that we have to get beyond the core linear product because we want to essentially be platform agnostic,” says VP of Research & Insights Andrea Zapata. “Just as we are now network agnostic when it comes to reaching customers and making our recommendations, just as we are now daypart agnostic.”

In this interview with Beet.TV, Zapata explains how it’s “still early days here” in proving the value of TV beyond simple ad recall and viewer sentiment. “I think for television now it’s absolutely crucial that we start proving our value as we go down that funnel. It’s not just good enough to say that we got people to see your ad.”

Comcast Spotlight’s approach is rooted in the belief that if it’s going to be making audience targeting recommendations, it should be able to prove they worked. “For us, attribution is did the person who saw your ad take an action and can we measure that. We know you’re going to measure it. You absolutely should. It’s your responsibility,” says Zapata.

Deciding on partners is “a very rigorous process,” she adds. “I always say God bless our vendors because they have to go on this journey with us.”

With TVSquared, the process started with a proof of concept followed by a pilot and scaling. “We’re in north of sixty markets, so for us we’ve got thousands of sellers and thousands upon thousands of clients. We want to make sure the solution that we’re building for can answer core questions and scale appropriately.”

Initially, Comcast sought to determine if exposure to TV commercials drove website traffic for advertisers, whose websites are tagged by TVSquared. “They get the option of two KPI’s or two pages based on their campaign objectives,” Zapata says.

Within 30 days, Comcast sales personnel and advertisers can log into dashboard “and see if there was any lift to performance after exposure to an ad. For us it wasn’t good enough to see lift website over a long period of time,” so Comcast chose to use a 30-minute window of time after exposure to an ad.

It’s a case of correlation as opposed to causation. “Giving the right credit to television but not all credit,” says Zapata.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

Zapata will be a speaker at the #BeetRetreat  August 7 at GroupM.  Here is the speaker line-up:

Kelly Abcarian, GM, Video Advanced Advertising, Nielsen, @kellyabcarian

Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader for Media & Entertainment, E&Y, @digitalstrategy

Mike Bologna, President, one2one Media, Cadent, @CadentTV

Tim Castree, CEO, GroupM North America, @castree

Marc Cestaro, Director, Addressable Lead, MODI Media, @ModiMedia

Brendon Condon, CRO, Comcast Spotlight, @ComcstSpotlight

Jennifer Donohue, VP, Local Advertising Sales, Hulu, @hulu

Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer, NCC Media, @bobivins

Ryan Jamboretz, Chief Development Officer, Amobee Broadcaster Solutions, @r_jamboretz

Jo Kinsella, CRO & EVP, TVSquared, @JoKinsellaTVS

Joe Marchese, Entrepreneur In Residence & Co-Founder, Human Ventures, @joemarchese

Brian Norris, SVP, Direct to Consumer, Ad Sales, NBCU, @thebriannorris1

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, @joannaoconnell

Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, @BGCPR

Sean Robertson, General Manager, Partnerships, DISH Media, @DISHMedia

Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy & Insights, @HowardShimmel

Philip Smolin, Chief Strategy Officer, Amobee, @philipsmolin

Ashley Swartz, CEO & Founder, Furious Corp., @RedFuryNYC

Brian Wallach, SVP, CRO, Advanced TV, Freewheel, @bw10

Andrea Zapata, VP, Research & Insights, Comcast Spotlight, @ComcstSpotlight

This typically means selecting one or two dayparts and perhaps five or six networks in all and maybe a sports package, Zapata explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Those clients of ours who buy in a very specific way, they will get lift to their website,” she says. “But with the same budget, and this is what’s incredible for me, if they’re willing to take a more data-driven approach to their planning and buying process, and they open it up to all day” the results multiply.

“If they open up the five to seven networks or the sports package to forty-plus networks, which I know sounds crazy, but that’s where your customer might be.”

Zapata says in that scenario, results can go from a 2-3% lift to as much as 8%.

“What we have found is that the reach can go from twenty percent of your backyard to sixty percent of your backyard. Reach is vitally important, so use TV for what it’s good at, don’t constrict your customer you can yield better outcomes.

“So what our guts once told us is actually being demonstrated with validation outside of just our guts.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium.  For more segments, please visit this page.  This series is presented by TVSquared.

“The local marketers are some of the most sophisticated marketers that you’ll find out there,” says Comcast Spotlight Chief Revenue Officer Brendan Condon. “Primarily because when you think about their investment spend in media, in advertising, it could be a significant portion of their operating expense. So they can’t afford to make mistakes.”

In this Beet.TV interview at the recent Advanced Advertising Forum in Manhattan, Condon offers up the example of a local pizza client.

“I know exactly who my audiences are,” he quotes the client as saying. There’s the CEO of food (“the mom feeding her children”) followed by sports fanatics “who are only ordering pizza when they’re watching sports.” Then there is “this other segment of people who are buying pizza because it’s more cost effective or an efficient way to save money and yet have a sustainable meal while watching television or doing anything else.”

Armed with those insights, Comcast Spotlight produced three different audiences by types of viewers, the content they watch on TV and the corresponding geographic trading areas. Then it created “different proposals and plans so that they could have different creative or different messaging with the same creative to three different audiences, again within the same geography,” Condon says. “Three years ago we could not do that.”

Condon arrived at Comcast Spotlight in the fall of 2018 from AdMore, an audience-based programmatic television advertising platform, and REVShare, one of the nation’s largest short-form direct-response providers, at Cannella Media. He explains how Comcast Spotlight has reorganized to get even closer to local advertisers.

“We’ve de-layered the management team so that not only the senior leadership but all the way down to the sellers they’re freed up to spend more time with their clients. Being consultants and understanding what’s their business, what are the nuances and the challenges that they have and how can we provide a scalable viable solution for them.”

Part of the process is re-educating local businesses to the reality of modern-day TV consumption, given that the average household watches 17-plus networks on any given day.

“For us as an MVPD or anyone within the industry, you have to be able to go broader to get across those networks and go deep with the same level of out-of-pocket costs so that you’re therefore becoming much more efficient,” says Condon.

For marketers that have always wanted just to advertise in primetime programming, he cites The New TV-a recent white paper showing how just over two-thirds of all viewing occurs outside of primetime. Others have just wanted to be in live programming consisting of news and sports.

“There’s other things that happen episodically live that we can target on the localized basis on your behalf that will be just as effective if not even maybe more efficient than what you’ve been traditionally doing,” Condon says.

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.

“We think a big-data approach can change that,” Evans adds in this Beet.TV interview. He describes it as “a major innovation that our clients are really leaning into.”

It starts with advertisers tagging their websites and Comcast creating a baseline of minute-by-minute traffic to those sites so that it can show subsequent lift generated by campaigns.

“When ads run we measure over the next thirty minutes how much their website traffic goes up correlated with that ad running. We have a model where we take credit for the increase in website traffic over the course of the thirty minutes,” says Evans.

Among the insights to be gained in addition to total incremental website traffic is how many times individual viewers visit the websites and how many of them drill down into product pages. Data also show how different creative iterations performed, along with specific days of the week and geographies.

“It’s an eye opener for them because it’s the first time they’re really been able to have proper accountability for television advertising at the local market.”

Comcast hopes to improve the perception of local TV from “pretty much white space” as regards ad campaign attribution.

“We’re in effect training and educating our clients to work with us in a way where television is held accountable for its results,” Evans says. “We are creating an ongoing dialogue with clients how to improve it over time. We think there’s going to be a whole generation of local advertisers that are now going to think about television in this way and it will really be a game changer.”