Comcast tempts DTC brands away from paid social due to rising costs and brand safety issues

It’s a move many DTC and SME brands would welcome, according to eight media buyers working with DTC clients that spoke with Digiday. That said, it doesn’t mean a shift in DTC spend to TV is a fait accompli.

Pull and push

Built by Comcast ad tech firm FreeWheel, Universal Ads grants buyers access to ad inventory across NBCUniversal, A+E, AMC Networks, Fox, Paramount, Roku, TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery, among others.

“What we’re trying to do is unlock that [latent] demand and create a front door into the premium video category,” said Comcast president James Rooke, who spoke with Digiday from CES, where the platform was unveiled.

Specifically, Rooke wants to open the door to the thousands of advertisers beyond Fortune 500 rankings. He described them as “digitally native, direct to consumer companies that have never bought our category, but are looking for new qualified audiences to scale their businesses.”

According to a survey of 250 non-TV performance advertisers Comcast conducted last year, 50% said they’d detected worse returns on their paid social spend, while 89% said they’d be willing to try TV.

The platform includes a marketing API that Rooke said will bring DTC and small-business marketers the measurement and attribution for TV and CTV ads they’re used to getting for social.

“We have a tremendous opportunity to steal market share from our tech competitors in a very unique and collaborative approach that will change the advertising landscape in a big way,” said Mark Marshall, chairman, global advertising and partnerships, NBCUniversal, in an email. Marshall declined to share precise revenue expectations.

Comcast’s move follows the launches of self-service platforms by Paramount last year, Peacock in 2022 and Hulu in 2020.

According to Rooke and Marshall, the aim is to attract DTC advertisers and SME brands that might previously have steered clear of TV, due to either price or lack of attribution.

“I could see it working for someone that is trying to get into the CTV space, but don’t know how,” said Eric Tilbury, senior director of ad operations and product solution engineering at Inuvo, an ad tech startup that provides media buying services.

Less bang for the buck

Though buyers still say paid social is a key component of the DTC and SME advertising playbook, several told Digiday there’s plenty of reasons for brands to begin looking elsewhere. 

From a DTC perspective, the channel is choked with ads for competitors, and it’s costlier than it once was.

Paid social has indeed become more expensive for advertisers in recent years. According to performance marketing agency Gupta Media’s social media CPM tracker, Meta’s average CPM rate for 2023 was $7.15, increasing to $7.50 in 2024; TikTok’s CPMs came in at $3.48 in 2023, stretching to $3.77 in 2024; and Snapchat’s CPMs rose the fastest, averaging $5.20 in 2023, but bumping up to $7.65 in 2024.

“We’re clearly at a point where we’ve reached diminishing returns,” said Katy Geisreiter, planning director, Media by Mother. Her colleague, account director Daniela Elvira, agreed: “It’s not scaling as it did before. It’s heavily saturated.”

Scott Harkey, founder and CEO of full service agency OH Partners, noted that he’s experienced diminishing returns on search and social “for the last two or three years.”

Another factor that could push nascent brands toward TV and CTV? Meta’s recent decision to fire its fact-checkers and roll back misinformation guardrails. Though so far treated with wariness rather than panic by advertisers, the move makes it easier for execs like Rooke to persuade brands shifting from short-term to long-term activity to consider premium video.

“What Meta has done is great for Universal Ads,” he said. “There is an opportunity to define premium video as a highly transparent, brand-safe category, and now you can access it in a single, simplistic way with scale.”

Up the funnel

Even in an era of declining linear viewership, TV’s reach makes it a blunt but effective instrument — and marketers at maturing DTC brands understand its value, said John Gladysz, head of product at Noble People, which counts Bose and Marco’s Pizza among its DTC clients.

Streaming video and TV are effective tools for bringing a brand to new audiences — and money spent on them could provide a greater return in time by widening a brand’s customer base, compared with budget assigned to paid social that drives sales from the same set of consumers.

“If you’re looking at your upper- and your mid-funnel, there’s real cost benefits to leaning into richer things: CTV, YouTube, [premium] video. Two or three of those impressions are going to go a lot farther than nine or 10 social impressions,” Gladysz said.

Dan Salkey, co-founder of creative agency Small World, which works with DTC brands such as Dr Squatch, agreed. “We’re starting to see scale ups add in TV in a way that is more savvy and smart,” he said, but he declined to provide specific client spend figures.

They’re not the only answers, though. Out-of-home, streaming audio, podcasts and radio can each fill a similar role for marketers wielding smaller budgets. 

OH Partners’ Harkey suggested that Universal Ads’ ability to draw in these smaller advertisers would depend on the quality of measurement derived from its API access, given the caution shown around TV by performance marketers.

He’s onto something with that observation. And for Matt Larson, vp of media and connection strategy at Collective Measures, that’s actually the “big question … The challenge will continue to be the ability to attribute those sales back to the efforts themselves.”