How TV can go on the offensive in the battle with global tech
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The Media Leader talks to Thomas Bremond, managing director of Comcast Advertising International, about why now is the time for TV to demonstrate its performance capabilities.
Comcast Advertising (the advertising division of Comcast) arrives at Cannes Lions 2025 with a clear vision of how premium video providers (spanning national broadcasters, cable networks and ad-funded pay-TV channels) can compete more effectively against digital tech platforms.
That vision has been outlined over the space of two years and starts with making TV easier to buy for clients and agencies that have been struggling with the complexities of a fragmented, cross-platform video universe.
It envisages doubling down on the performance capabilities of TV and proving its value in driving short-term business outcomes. This will help TV talk the language of digital while maintaining its brand-building superpower.
The vision includes increased national and international collaboration among media owners with high-quality, brand-safe inventory so TV can be presented as a platform, with a single access point and a familiar user experience, to two increasingly important groups of buyers.
The first of these are the global traders representing major brands that are buying media for large-scale, multi-market campaigns. They have been able to buy YouTube, Meta or TikTok as unified international buys and Comcast Advertising wants TV to be “in the room” with an even more effective unified inventory option.
The second group of buyers are the millions of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are focused on performance outcomes and have previously used search, social and non-premium video as their window to consumers. The expectation is that TV can take a greater share of their budget.
Comcast Advertising has backed the ambition to take more global budget and more SMB performance budget with game-changing multi-publisher marketplace platforms such as Universal Ads, launched in the US in January and is designed to enable TV to compete harder for performance budget.
That budget could come from large brands and the largest agencies, but there is a particular interest in tapping the SMB market.
Universal Ads enters beta trials after Cannes Lions and Comcast Advertising will use the event to explore its international possibilities.
Organisational changes
In the run-up to the festival, Comcast Advertising has announced important brand realignments and organisational changes designed to underpin its advanced TV advertising ambitions.
In the US, the Effectv brand has been retired and, separately, a Media Solutions team has been introduced as a single point of entry to Comcast Advertising-represented media, spanning broadcast, streaming, national and local.
The Media Solutions team is also tasked with improving the client experience for the smallest and largest advertisers, and ensuring ad exposure is linked to business outcomes.
Comcast Advertising has also announced the expansion of its international business (now called Comcast Advertising International), which will include its own newly launched Media Solutions team.
The global Media Solutions division will collaborate with teams at NBCUniversal and Sky, and partner other international premium media owners across the US, UK and Europe. It will also sell the media solutions previously offered by AudienceXpress.
FreeWheel, the global technology platform for premium video advertising, is also part of the Comcast Advertising infrastructure.
Thomas Bremond, who was previously senior vice-president and chief revenue officer, international, at FreeWheel, becomes managing director at Comcast Advertising International.
He is tasked with spearheading growth outside the US and continuing the work that is helping TV offer the best of digital and behave more like a unified platform in the battle for ad revenues against the digital behemoths.
Bremond will still lead FreeWheel, too, whose tech is central to Universal Ads, among other things.
Describing the new organisational model, Bremond points out that the digital tech platforms and a growing number of ad-supported streamers offer a global footprint, so it is important that broadcasters and other premium video providers can offer global scale when necessary. This applies to Comcast group inventory too (including NBCUniversal and Sky).
There is a strong focus on transparency within the new organisation, he says, so the market knows who represents media and who works on neutral technology, including the multi-publisher marketplace solutions.
Collaboration is at the heart of Bremond’s mission. At one level, this means seeking new synergies that will benefit buyers across Sky, NBCUniversal and potentially Versant, the NBCUniversal cable network spin-off whose brands include CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, E!, Syfy and Golf Channel, whose inventory will be sold by NBCUniversal for at least two years.
The collaboration remit also extends to the premium video providers using FreeWheel technology.
Visionary platform
The international Media Solutions team is trying to help premium video owners gain incremental revenues. “Broadcasters have their own sales teams to take national budgets. We can make their inventory available [for international campaigns] to buyers in the UK or US or other markets,” Bremond explains.
He recalls how one major broadcaster told him: “We have noticed more and more of what used to be our local budgets moving to a centralised hub trading outside our country.” This broadcaster faced the prospect of dealing with a trader that does not know their brand and probably does not know the differences between leading broadcast brands across Europe.
“That trader will know YouTube, though, and they will know Netflix,” Bremond observes.
Commenting on the multi-market platform designed to compete for global budget, Bremond says: “National broadcasters already have a window in their local market. If they use this, they get a window in Amsterdam or London or wherever the traders [taking international campaign budgets] are located.”
Turning to Universal Ads, Bremond reveals that there are feasibility discussions about bringing it to the international market, but for now this solution is focused on the US. He calls Universal Ads a visionary platform and again emphasises the focus on creating incremental demand for premium video providers.
“It does not replicate something that exists — it is new and that is the attraction to the market,” Bremond adds.
Universal Ads illustrates the Comcast Advertising mantra of making TV a better product for media buyers by improving the buying experience.
“The premise is that until television becomes easier to buy, it will be impossible for this medium to be favoured by marketers that traditionally buy from global tech platforms like social media,” he declares. “Making TV easier to buy was the number one priority.
“We believe that if you don’t think like a platform, you cannot compete with the platforms.”
Universal Ads was designed by developers from outside the TV industry with experience building global advertising platforms.
“We said it had to replicate the way people trade with Meta, TikTok, Snap and the other platforms where people buy for performance campaigns today,” Bremond continues. “We needed those buyers to recognise the environment and know how to handle it, so buying TV did not feel like a new experience.”
Another priority for Universal Ads was tight integrations with ecommerce platforms like GoDaddy and Shopify.
Simplification and performance capabilities
In Cannes, the new-look Comcast Advertising will be discussing the tech and data innovation that underpins its collaborative platforms and its other work, and the vision for a TV industry that competes harder for budget it has been losing (international and performance) because of legacy challenges that were exploited by global tech platforms.
“One of the big messages is simplification,” Bremond confirms. “It has become harder to use TV, even for building brands, because of the complexity of buying TV on a cross-platform, cross-publisher basis.
“We use the example of a brand buyer who has €1m budget to spend on a Friday morning. It is much harder to spend that across TV than other video platforms. We need TV to be available to those buyers.
“It is super-important that TV demonstrates its performance capabilities. TV has not always received the credit it deserves for driving search and other activation, so there is a focus on attribution and measurement.”
Media owners must trust that their data will be safe when contributing to a better understanding of performance, Bremond adds.
Ensuring a trusted ecosystem is another page in the Cannes story: “We are also talking about the need to remove friction between brands, agencies and inventory, removing hops in the value chain, so that more money reaches publishers or returns back to clients.”
Bremond believes this is a good moment for TV to beat its drum. He claims a growing number of brands find it difficult to find incremental audience on the global digital platforms and keep hitting the same consumers over and over again. TV can give them the new reach they need, he argues.
As the TV industry makes its annual pitch at Cannes, he concludes, traditionally digital-first marketers could be ready to make some changes of their own.