Two-Way Communications

As Comcast gets close to a deal for control of General Electric's NBC Universal, the big cable operator and Madison Avenue think the merger could lead to some major changes in the $65 billion U.S. television-advertising market. The potential new company could speed the development of interactive TV ads and "addressable advertising." Interactive ads let viewers vote in a poll or use their remote controls to request more information about a product. Addressable, or targeted, advertising uses set-top boxes to route commercials to specific households or neighborhood based on data about income, ethnicity or other characteristics. It lets an advertiser, for example, beam a minivan spot to households with children. Comcast executives are looking at such ads as a benefit of an NBC Universal deal, says a person familiar with the company's thinking. Comcast could use its infrastructure to help NBC's TV networks start selling interactive ads, this person says, adding that Comcast sees a "huge amount of money" in them. Comcast had about $15 million of interactive-ad revenue in the third quarter. "But the big number," Chief Operating Officer Stephen Burke told analysts this month, "will be generated when the industry gets together and allows a national advertiser the ability to advertise across the country." He said that "in a very short period of time" about half of Comcast's 24 million homes will have the technology needed to receive interactive ads.