TV[R]EV Week In Review: Comcast Buys Cute Cartoon Animals; Viacom Gets Down With Roku

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1. Comcast Buys Lots Of Cute Cartoon Animals. Along With The Company That Created Them.

While the other MVPDs seem to be asleep at the wheel, Comcast and Verizon have gone on some major buying sprees as of late. The most recent purchase is animation studio Dreamworks, which Comcast snatched up this week for a cool $3.8 billion.

Now Dreamworks animation is about more than cute animals, but TBH, those cute penguins, pandas and trolls are where the real money lies. Because as the entire nation of Japan can attest, there is no merchandising opportunity where a cute cartoon animal is not appropriate.

Comcast has already seen the beauty of this in the Minions, the cute yellow creatures that populate the Despicable Me series it owns through it’s Illumination Entertainment subsidiary. And if you doubt the power of the Minions, just take a look at what all those boardwalk concessions are giving away this summer. Minions of Minions. Then think about pandas, penguins and Shrek at all Universal’s theme parks.

Yup.

Why It Matters

There are a couple of reasons this is more than just another purchase. While Verizon, with its telco engineering roots, is investing in ad tech products like AOL and OnCue, Comcast is investing in content. And their original content investment, NBCU, is proving a lot less sexy than they’d hoped. That’s not an NBCU problem, it’s an industry-wide problem, as the entire TV ecosystem is built around an outdated model that relies on live viewing and the ad units that support that. We’ve discussed the issues around that model on here ad infinitum, but what’s happened in the past few years is that adherence to that model has made it impossible for network TV shows to really break out the way that streaming and premium cable shows have. By investing in content production, Comcast is also seeking to erase the line between creation and distribution that exists in TV today. That’s a line internet companies like Facebook or Google don’t have to deal with: they own both sectors and can thus avoid many of the legal complexities that handicap the TV industry. If Comcast can own both creation and distribution they become much more like Google and Facebook, which makes it easier to face the internet behemoths head-on.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are a creator, you want to think about the best way to distribute your content. Do you want to hand distribution over to someone else, or do you want to handle it yourself. And if it’s the latter, do you have the chops to handle it? Brands need to understand what their leverage is in a scenario where the media companies are much less reliant on them than ever before. That means producing their own branded content and looking at sponsorships rather than interruptive advertising.

2. Viacom and Roku Strike A Deal

As we noted earlier this week, the networks desperately need data and Roku is rapidly becoming an excellent source of viewership data. In an implicit acknowledgement of Roku’s expanding role, Viacom is going to be working with Roku to provide the data to fuel an addressable advertising program.

Why It Matters

Until now, the “addressable” plans the networks have been offering have all been “addressable adjacent” (e.g. indexed buying rather than true addressable.) But with the Roku deal, it seems that Viacom will actually have the ability to insert ads on the fly into viewer’s streams. That’s a huge breakthrough, that has the potential to become even bigger if other MVPDs follow Comcast and Time Warner and introduce Roku versions of their interfaces. (There are likely to be legal complexities with providing data off those MPVD interfaces, because there always are, but let’s assume they can be overcome.)

What You Need To Do About It

Use it. If your brands advertise on any of Viacom’s networks, think about how addressable might be of value to you and understand why and how you’d want to use it. If you’re a network and your content is available on Roku, get on the phone with Scott Rosenberg at Roku now and see what sort of deal you can strike.