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Comcast plans to launch a new advertising platform that will make it easier for smaller businesses to buy ad time — and, the company hopes, to beckon some advertisers away from social media and digital outlets and over to traditional TV’s streaming businesses.
On Monday, Comcast announced the creation of Universal Ads, a new platform for advertisers to buy spots on premium video content on the streaming businesses of traditional media companies. The announcement comes ahead of the annual CES tech conference in Las Vegas.
Comcast has signed partnerships with other media companies, giving advertisers the ability to buy spots on a variety of outlets. So far, Comcast-owned NBCUniversal and ad-supported streamer Xumo are part of the platform, as well as A+E, AMC Networks, DirecTV, Fox Corp., Paramount, Roku, TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery. Others are expected to join in the coming months.
“Universal Ads is intended to create new demand from advertisers who have not traditionally worked with us,” said Mark Marshall, chairman of global advertising and partnerships for NBCUniversal, CNBC’s parent company. “And while we’re starting with streaming and [small- and medium-sized businesses], in a future state this can be for linear and for agencies as well.”
Universal Ads, which will launch in the first quarter, is meant to create an easier experience for advertisers of all shapes and sizes to buy up ad time, which can be a notoriously complicated process in comparison to purchasing ads for platforms such as Meta, YouTube and TikTok, said James Rooke, president of Comcast Advertising. It’s designed to mimic the process of buying ads on social media content and tech platforms.
“The head scratcher is that there’s a sort of large number of advertisers who’ve built their businesses, or started to build their businesses, on the backs of social video,” said Rooke. “Yet when you talk to these advertisers there’s an increasing wish to diversify away from a very limited number of big technology companies.”
Rooke said the challenge has been that these big tech companies “make it super simple to transact on their platforms,” whereas traditional media, or so-called premium content, does not.
Marshall said he and Rooke had been in discussions over the last several months on how to “create new demand opportunities” for the nontraditional advertisers.
Comcast built the free, self-service platform using its ad tech company FreeWheel. Many of the partners that have already signed on are FreeWheel clients.
There are also plans to offer free, automated artificial intelligence tools to help produce the ads, which can be another pain point for smaller companies.
“Universal Ads has a tremendous opportunity to steal market share from our competitors in a very unique and collaborative way that will fundamentally change the advertising landscape,” said Marshall.
Going on the offensive
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The media industry has been in a period of tumult, as consumers have gravitated toward streaming services and away from traditional TV.
But further eclipsing this content is the time spent on social media and tech platforms. YouTube continues to grab a large share of TV viewing time, according to Nielsen. Younger generations are leaning more into social media such as TikTok.
Streaming services, from Netflix to NBCUniversal’s Peacock, have been increasingly emphasizing advertising to reach profitability. Streamers have been nabbing a bigger share of ad dollars in recent quarters, but that pales in comparison to the advertising revenue generated by tech giants.
Marshall noted that social media has “generated immense scale” when it comes to the number of advertisers drawn to the tech platforms.
“Take a Meta for example. They have over 10 million advertisers who spend on search and social, whereas NBCUniversal is only in the thousands,” said Marshall.
While GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, called TV “the most effective form of advertising” in a recent report, it expects the segment to grow less than 2% in 2025 to $169.1 billion in total global ad revenue.
Ad revenue for “pure play digital,” which excludes the streaming arms of traditional media but includes platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, is expected to grow by 10% to $813.3 billion globally in 2025, according to GroupM estimates.
In the U.S., social media ad spending is estimated to have hit $90.35 billion in 2024, up roughly 19% from the year prior, and is expected to rise another 13.6% to $102.66 billion in 2025, according to eMarketer.
While industry executives anticipate the ad market will stabilize in 2025 for traditional media companies, the trends of prior years are also expected to continue — meaning ad budgets for digital media will continue to eclipse traditional media.
“You can continue to compete in a diminishing market, or you can go on offense and you can go after where the growth is,” said Rooke. “We have to be fishing in the ponds where the growth is.”
Large-scale advertisers and brands still spend heavily with traditional media outlets when it comes to live sports and events. Fox executives have said the company already sold out of Super Bowl ads for February, which reportedly cost about $7 million each. The college football season, especially with the expanded College Football Playoff format, has also attracted hefty ad dollars.
Key to the Universal Ads platform has been signing up the other media companies, Rooke said, in order to present a unified front in trying to attract more ad dollars from digital platforms.
“In recent years, individual ad platforms and walled gardens have created obstacles for smaller and medium-sized companies lacking the resources needed to effectively manage multiple platforms,” said Amy Leifer, chief advertising sales officer at DirecTV.
Leifer, along with executives from NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox, called out the importance of reaching small- and medium-sized businesses as advertisers.
“The idea of empowering small- and medium-sized businesses to connect with audiences through premium content, especially on connected TV, aligns perfectly with the growing demand for flexibility and efficiency in ad buying,” said Ryan Gould, Warner Bros. Discovery’s executive vice president of sales in streaming, digital and advanced advertising.
Media executives recently told CNBC that traditional linear TV is still an important outlet for advertisers because it reaches more demographics than social media does. They also noted that linear and streaming are no longer thought of in different contexts, and are grouped together in conversation.
Advertisers seeking platforms outside social media are “looking for a new product because they’re seeing sort of diminishing returns from the existing channels,” Rooke said.
“They’re running out of new audience,” he said.
Disclosure: Comcast owns CNBC parent NBCUniversal.
