Published June 23
Comcast launched its Universal Ads self-service ad platform in the U.K. this week, in partnership with Channel 4, ITV and Sky, in a concerted attempt to wrestle back the small advertiser budgets that made Big Tech walled gardens, well, big.
The platform is aimed at small and medium businesses (SMBs) and lets them create, buy and measure TV ad campaigns across the three broadcasters from a single interface.
To align with the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Comcast announced that the platform enables advertisers to go live “in minutes” and is designed “to feel as familiar as buying on social,” while delivering “the brand safety and proven effectiveness that only broadcaster-quality TV can offer.”
Universal Ads “retains the performance depth and targeting sophistication that larger advertisers and agencies expect,” the company said.
The U.K. launch follows a U.S. rollout first announced at Cannes last year. According to Comcast, the U.S. version of Universal Ads has already delivered significant uplifts for a wide variety of SMB advertisers.
“Lowering the barriers to premium media can be a game changer for smaller brands. Greater collaboration across broadcasters can simplify TV buys for advertisers, attract new categories and brands into TV and help ensure premium TV remains innovative and competitive alongside global social and digital platforms,” said Rak Patel, chief commercial officer at Channel 4.
Universal Ads is part of the ongoing tussle for brand budgets between TV broadcasters and walled gardens like YouTube. With the self-serve platform, Comcast said it is targeting growth-focused brands, whether digital-native, DTC or scaling beyond social, “that have historically found TV out of reach.”
It is an acknowledgment that a buying platform’s ease of use can be just as important as the performance it delivers in the eyes of smaller advertisers, who can’t tap into sophisticated in-house media buying teams or media agencies.
Thomas Bremond, managing director at Comcast Advertising, International, told The Current last year that the aim was to “replicate the ease and convenience of buying on [search and social media] platforms in the streaming world, effectively creating an ‘easy button’ for buying TV.”
The launch comes at an opportune time, as smaller advertisers appear to increasingly look to TV advertising for growth.
In March, an ITV executive said at the CTV World Summit in London that half of ITV’s advertisers already spend less than £50,000 a year.
Speaking at the same conference, the founder of furniture comparison platform uFurnish.com said she had spent five years building her brand on digital ads before investing in CTV through a media-for-equity deal with ITV.
“The last five years of purely digital didn’t drive that,” said Deirdre Mc Gettrick, uFurnish.com founder, referring to the brand awareness she’d been chasing. Since going on CTV, her metrics shifted: “Conversion is up by 2 points. So when we click somebody out to a retailer, we were converting at about 3%. It’s now 5%.”
At the time, the question appeared to be how British broadcasters could entice more of these small, growing brands to TV. Their attempt at an answer is now live.
“This partnership is an opportunity to show that the quality and impact of broadcast TV is now truly accessible to everyone,” said Karen Eccles, managing director at Sky Media.
