Telecom and media giant Comcast Corp. announced today the development of a new blockchain solution for premium advertising.

Built on a distributed cryptographic ledger, or a blockchain, the Blockchain Insights Platform is aimed at improving the efficiency of premium video advertising with the expectation it will reduce costs while delivering better planning, targeting and execution of ads. A number of global companies have joined Comcast, including NBCUniversal, Disney, Altice USA, Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, Cox Communications, Mediaset Italia and TF1 Group in France.

Within Comcast, thie project will be led by the company’s newly announced Advanced Advertising Group, a division that combines the assets and capabilities of capabilities of Strata Marketing Inc., FreeWheel Media Inc., and Visible World.

“Television advertising is an efficient and effective way for marketers and their agencies to reach a large audience, yet today the way advertisers use insights to plan, buy and deliver advertising is limited,” said Marcien Jenckes, Comcast Cable’s president of advertising.  “This new technological approach would make data-driven video advertising more efficient and consumer data more secure.”

Blockchains have been explored across numerous industries because of the technology’s inherent capability to maintain the privacy of data stored in the blockchain, while still allowing the efficient processing of that data to provide insights. To that end, Comcast and its partners will look to use blockchain technology to protect consumer privacy. Each participant will maintain its own data and manage the protection and privacy for its own users.

That protection is afforded by layers of cryptographic protection built into the blockchain technology. With those rights management layers and encryption embedded in the participants’ blockchains, the platform will allow partners to ask questions (and run analysis) of data across blockchains without ever taking possession of the underlying data.

The primary application of the Blockchain Insights Platform is to provide advertisers a larger pool of data about consumer activity, interests, device usage and other metadata to assist with ad targeting. With more of this information gathered from a broader number of sources, advertisers would be better able to understand pay-TV customers and streaming device users.

All participants stand to benefit from the resulting reporting and attribution metrics – such as how well a particular TV program does for web viewers versus people who enjoy watching on phones or tablets – while also protecting the privacy of those customers.

Comcast made the announcement today at the 2017 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in Cannes and plans to launch the Blockchain Insights Platform in 2018.

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