The advertising industry has spent the better part of two decades promising that technology would make everything simpler. That promise has been kept about as often as New Year's resolutions to exercise more.
Still, Comcast's Universal Ads unit is making another attempt at simplification, announcing a partnership with Tracer, an analytics company, to stitch together eight previously separate data systems into something resembling a coherent whole. The platform will serve as the operational layer behind Universal Ads' dashboard, using automation to cleanse and organize information that had been scattered across the kind of siloed systems that give media executives headaches.
"The goal is to build on the connected data layer to support more automation, faster product launches and scalable self-serve advertising capabilities over time," Daniel Druger, vice president of product at Universal Ads, said in an interview.
Mr. Druger said the integration would allow teams to move faster and create what he described as "a smoother experience for advertisers." The new system provides real-time visibility into campaign delivery, advertiser spending, forecasting and revenue operations — the sort of behind-the-scenes plumbing that rarely makes headlines but can determine whether an advertising platform thrives or merely survives.
One aspect of the partnership that may prove notable is its attempt to merge digital data aggregation, which has become standard practice in social media advertising, with the historically fragmented information systems used in linear and streaming television. (Historically fragmented is a polite way of saying that the data lived in different buildings and did not speak to one another.)
The timing is interesting. Americans, it turns out, are considerably more comfortable with artificial intelligence when it operates invisibly in the back office than when it appears on their screens. A Bentley University-Gallup survey released this month found that 62 percent of respondents consider it unacceptable for businesses to use A.I. to create people or voices in advertisements, even with clear disclosure.
The lesson, perhaps, is that audiences prefer their automation like good plumbing: essential, efficient and entirely out of sight.
Original story published in MediaPost: "Comcast Combines Silos, Opens Data Pipeline"