Advertisers can now find CTV audiences with a new agentic AI chatbot

A new, agentic AI chatbot is helping advertisers find actionable, targeted audiences on connected TV (CTV) within minutes, cutting out the friction that’s long plagued data collaboration.

At an Advertising Week New York unveiling, Blockgraph founder and CEO Jason Manningham said ‘Instant Audiences’ is the first tool to marry agentic AI with household identity to reach local audiences. These groups can be as specific as eco-conscious families in Detroit or underperforming stores within five miles of a specific zip code.

“For too long, audiences have been trapped inside walled gardens and black boxes,” Manningham tells The Current. “Instant Audiences changes that. It’s the first time marketers can describe who they want to reach in natural language and instantly get back deterministic, household-level audiences they can actually use across TV, streaming, and beyond.”

The rise of agentic AI and chatbots like ChatGPT has led several companies, from agencies to major tech players, to create their own closed systems fueled by their first-party data. That data foundation powers the insights the chatbot can deliver. Blockgraph has extensive data partnerships along with consented data from Comcast NBCUniversal, Paramount and Charter, who took equal ownership of the data collaboration firm in 2020, three years after its founding.

Bombora’s VP of global data partnerships and strategy, Josh Peters, believes the whole advertising industry is moving toward this kind of multi-sourced AI.

“This is more inevitable than a surprise,” Peters tells The Current. “Everyone is already building [something like this], if they haven't already.”

Smarter audience access

Historically, the promise of connecting to audiences has been too jumbled, too difficult and too much work for advertisers to access and quickly action. Agentic AI is making that process more efficient.

Sooth, a predictive data intelligence company, gets over 100 million data signals within its walls. The company’s founder, Ian Baer, says that many of those signals are not necessary for most advertisers within a specific campaign. Zeroing in on the precise characteristics needed is crucial. This is where precise targeting and the back-end data foundation can find the right fit.

Comcast Advertising is all in on simplifying activation while offering new ways to build highly resonate audiences. “Instant Audiences represents a major step forward by bringing the power and ease of AI and the certainty of deterministic identity to localized targeting —all while protecting consumer privacy,” Comcast Advertising’s chief revenue officer Dawn Williamson said in a press release.

But it’s not just building those audiences so quickly that matters to Bombora’s Peters; transparency into how they’re created is key. When he’s had a question about how a campaign’s audience and scale was built, he’s always been able to ask the media planner to map it out for him. He hopes that the level of transparency with Instant Audiences is the same.

A main tenet of Manningham’s vision is open-source tech that is not locked within a third-party black box. Instant Audiences is available via API, which Manningham demoed as a seamless experience: just put a description into the chatbot, click a button and activate your campaign across TV.

The concept has yet to be proven in market. But Manningham is ready to dive in with all parts of the advertising ecosystem and show that Comcast NBCUniversal, Paramount and Charter’s bet on democratizing and simplifying data with Blockgraph was the right one. “If you build campaigns, we want to work with you,” Manningham said at the Tuesday evening Instant Audiences reveal. “If you activate campaigns, we want to work with you. If you measure campaigns, we want to work with you.”