Comcast’s FreeWheel is launching a self-serve ad-buying platform aimed at small- to medium-sized businesses, partnering with major media companies including NBCUniversal, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and Roku. The platform, called Universal Ads, seeks to simplify and aggregate ad buying across TV and streaming, positioning itself as a competitor to digital ad services offered by tech giants such as Meta and Google. The goal of Universal Ads is to solve the problems that have kept SMB marketers out of TV and allowing media companies scale business with these brands. 

The platform will debut for alpha testing this month, with plans to roll it out to the broader marketplace in the second half of the year.

Universal Ads aims to welcome new advertisers into TV at the scale of Meta or Google, which service millions of digital advertisers of all sizes, as traditional media companies seek to boost their streaming businesses in response to the decline of linear viewership. But Universal Ads is also a response to the desire from small and medium-sized businesses that have predominantly relied on social media advertising to reach new audiences, but aren’t equipped to navigate the complexity or high entry costs for TV advertising, said James Rooke, president of Comcast Advertising.

“One of the biggest blockers to not unlocking the power of [TV and streaming] to a whole new set of advertisers that have built their business and spend all their money in digital channels is it’s too difficult. And if we cannot make it as simple as big tech, then it doesn’t matter how great the performance may be, dollars will continue to move out of the TV ecosystem,” said Rooke.

A+E Networks, AMC Networks, DirecTV, TelevisaUnivision, Warner Bros. Discovery and Xumo are also part of the launch. Disney, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video—which, unlike the other companies, are not FreeWheel customers—are not part of the platform. The initiative will be led by James Grant, now general manager of Universal Ads after holding the title VP of corporate strategy at Comcast. Additionally, former Snap executive James Borow, who has contributed to the launch of sales platforms for Snap, Reddit and Discord, has joined Comcast to lead Universal Ads’ product and engineering teams.

The platform was partly inspired by Comcast research that found half of brands that half of brands not advertising on TV feel they’ve maxed out their return on investment on social media, while 89% are interested in starting TV advertising.

While many TV media companies, including Disney, Roku, NBCU and Paramount, have launched similar self-serve ad sites for their streamers, Universal Ads aggregates inventory across its publisher partners with the ability for marketers to automate buying with all of them based on audience targeting and AI optimization throughout the campaign rather than doing so one-by-one. At launch, Universal Ads will focus on streaming and digital video inventory, but plans to support linear TV advertising in the future.

Read more: Inside media giants’self-serve sales strategies

The integration for Universal Ads’ launch partners is aided by the fact they already use Comcast’s FreeWheel as their ad server—FreeWheel claims to be the ad server for 80% of major TV publishers. According to Rooke, TV and streaming companies that are not FreeWheel clients can also join Universal Ads, but it does require some adoption of FreeWheel technologies. 

Universal Ads was built to be as simple and cost-efficient as the platforms offered by digital media companies such as Google and Meta. While demand-side programmatic platforms or third-party inventory aggregators have been ways for major advertisers to manage fragmented TV and streaming buying, they still also come with barriers to entry for small and medium-sized marketers such as maintaining minimum spend requirements, third-party platform and data fees and the burden of learning and integrating into complex platforms.

Self-serve platforms have sought to eliminate these obstacles. And those owned by media companies also claim to offer the most efficient pricing and solve brand safety concerns by being able to more accurately report where advertising runs.

But as self-serve platforms have previously been individual offerings from each media company, they haven’t solved the complex nature of the fragmented TV ecosystem, in which a marketer may need to analyze spending and performance across multiple programmers to reach their goals. Universal Ads addresses this concern in a new way by merging the strengths of aggregators and self-serve services.

“Universal Ads offers the solution to a fragmented premium video advertising marketplace,” said Jeff Collins, president of advertising sales, marketing and brand partnerships for Fox Corporation. “Coming together as publishers allows us to present a singular platform for brands of any size in any category to advertise in premium video—all with the ease and familiarity of buying on social.”

Universal Ads won’t charge third-party platform or data fees for its core offering, and will initially require a $500 minimum spend. After creating an account, including verifying one’s business, marketers will be able to build campaigns based on primary goals, such as maximizing ad views or by selecting target conversion metrics. Universal Ads also offers specifications for audience targeting, and allows uploading first-party data such as email lists. There is also an option for AI to generate TV creative from existing social media marketing assets.

Automated inventory bidding and placement across publishers is an option, or marketers can customize which publishers they want to buy with, and the desired content verticals within them. For example, selecting the option to only buy Fox inventory prompts a drop down list to check boxes for serving ads in Fox Entertainment, Fox Sports, Fox News Media, Tubi or a combination of them.

When an advertiser selects individual partners to buy inventory from, it sends a permission request to that media company, initiating a direct relationship between them. And each publisher is in charge of what inventory they make accessible to the platform.

The platform also allows each publisher to utilize it in go-to-market strategies through individual landing pages. Fox, for example, has its own branded website that it can refer brands to, which flows directly into the buying platform. From there, an advertiser can execute its buy with Fox, and carry over its profile and specifications to deals with each other publisher.

Developers will also be able to build tools, such as additional measurement and creative generation options, through Universal Ads’ Marketing API. This can also help Universal Ads integrate within merchant aggregators for brands that serve advertising through them.

While Comcast has already been testing ads to ensure the platform is fully functional, Universal Ads will onboard a small group of 20 to 30 advertisers this month. The participating publishers’ individual storefronts are planned to go live in May for the TV upfronts, and Universal Ads plans to integrate with its first major merchant aggregator to easily onboard e-commerce brands in the same timeframe. Universal Ads plans to launch fully for the general marketplace mid-year.

While the goal for Universal Ads at launch is to appeal to small and medium-sized advertisers, “the problem of complexity isn’t isolated within this client segment,” said Rooke. “Larger advertisers tell us and all of the media companies the same thing: ‘I wish it could be easier, like big tech, to buy your media’... The challenge exists from the smallest businesses all the way up to the Fortune 100, and there is an opportunity for us as an industry to solve that for all clients.”

Despite the timing aligning with the TV upfronts, ad chiefs from multiple participating media companies said Universal Ads won’t be a major factor in upfront strategies. 

“We see Universal Ads as something that will be more active in the scatter marketplace for 2025,” said Mark Marshall, chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCU. “The way we look at it, Universal Ads will become an essential part of growing the long tail advertiser demand for our business.”

“It’s less of an upfront play and more of an always on tool for our current and prospective clients,” added Fox’s Collins. “Universal Ads makes Fox content more accessible to a wider range of advertisers than our direct sales team can possibly cover.”