• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 6, 2025

Comcast on Monday unveiled a platform to make buying ads across TV, linear and digital as easy as on search and social media platforms. The idea is to allow more small businesses to use performance and premium TV advertising.

A+E, AMC Networks, DirecTV, Fox Corporation, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Roku, TelevisaUnivision, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Xumo were named as the launch partners. 

Comcast executive James Grant will lead the Universal Ads initiative. Former Snap executive James Borow -- who helped Snap, Reddit and Discord launch their ad businesses -- has been hired to lead the Universal Ads’ product and engineering teams, in collaboration with the FreeWheel product and technology team.  

The platform, announced at CES 2025, is set to debut in the first quarter of this year. It is powered by FreeWheel technology that supports video advertising for a variety of premium U.S. publishers.

The Manager for the free self-service TV ad-buying tool works similar to the way that Google, Microsoft, and Meta drove ad buying from some of the smaller companies on their respective platforms.  

Mark Marshall, chairman of NBCUniversal Global Advertising & Partnerships, believes TV has always been a “performance vehicle for brands,” and that Universal Ads will put the reach of premium content TV is known for into the hands of more marketers.  

Comcast describes Universal Ads as its first cross-industry collaboration for this type of scale to simplify access for small and medium-sized businesses looking for performance-type formats.  

James Rooke, President, Comcast Advertising, believes the platform was built in in response to what advertisers have been asking for—to make TV ads simple to buy and measure. Something for the needs of performance marketers.

A 2024 study of 250 performance-based advertisers conducted by Comcast Advertising showed 50% of advertisers who have never advertised on TV or only done so minimally felt that their return on investment (ROI) from social media had peaked or lessoned. Eighty-nine percent of them indicated they were willing to try TV advertising.

The network was built on a shared technology infrastructure across publishers, performance advertisers, who were previously limited in their ability to purchase premium, brand-safe inventory from some of the top TV publishers. This platform, Comcast believes, changes the buying landscape.

Comcast also plans to offer free, automated AI creative production of TV commercials, and a marketing API that will enable developers to build reporting, measurement, creative generation, and other applications.