Kelly Perone: Pioneering an Audience Delivery Approach for Television’s Future

As Senior Vice President, Product Strategy, Kelly Perone leads a team that is developing innovative products and solutions as Effectv embarks on its mission to become the world’s smartest audience delivery company.

Q: Tell us about your role.

A: I lead product strategy for Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable. In this role, I oversee a team that is responsible for Effectv’s innovative products and solutions, which are aimed at delivering audiences to advertisers across all screens and devices.

Q: Over the past few years, Effectv has transformed to an audience delivery organization, driven by the evolution of its offerings. What’s it like to be spearheading and driving that change, from a product strategy standpoint?

A: It’s an interesting, dynamic and exciting time to be at Effectv.

Effectv was previously called Comcast Spotlight, and since rebranding the company in late 2019, we have made significant progress in evolving the organization as it embarks on its mission to become the world’s smartest audience delivery company and product strategy plays a key role.

From concept to development, my team spearheads the roadmap of Effectv’s innovative products, many of which are aimed at simplifying our customer experience and creating opportunities to reach their audience across all stages of the marketing funnel. Many of our new industry offerings provide advertisers with solutions that combine the targeting and measurement of digital, with the reach and impact of television. We do this by unlocking the insights from aggregated viewership data and overlaying technology to create products that reach a customer’s target audience.

One example is our new audience addressable product, developed in collaboration with our Comcast Advertising sister brand, FreeWheel, a technology platform connecting buyers and sellers. This product is noteworthy because the technology enhances our ability to deliver target audiences in a more unified fashion across linear and streaming TV. Addressability is an important tactic in terms of being able to deliver more efficient incremental reach and improved overall campaign performance. The new audience addressable solution allows us to scale this capability as part of our broader focus on deploying audience-based, multi-screen marketing solutions for our clients.

Q: Why the focus and shift toward audience delivery?

A: We are at a pivotal inflection point in TV advertising. The industry is moving toward a new era of audience-driven growth and impression-based buying, with a focus on addressability, programmatic, data, reporting and digital capabilities. Effectv is at the forefront of that shift and helping to pioneer the next chapter in TV advertising’s future through our industry-leading suite of products, which will transform the media experience for advertisers and consumers.

Q: You’ve been described as very “entrepreneurial” in your approach. Where does that mindset and philosophy come from?

A: I grew up on a fourth-generation grain farm in Iowa, one that my father, brother and nephews still run. Growing up on this farm and then taking my first big risk – by moving cross country to New York, from a town of 500 to a city of over 8 million – taught me how persistence and pragmatism can turn a vision into reality. And that it’s important to take calculated risks – when the payoff is worth it and there is a path/future to forge.

That entrepreneurial background has found its way into my professional career, as I worked at various media and ad tech start-ups before joining Comcast. My first job in New York City was at Donovan Data Systems (which later merged with MediaBank to become Mediaocean), and it was there that I helped create the company’s original digital campaign stewardship program.

To this day, I’ve continued that approach of taking risks: In the middle of the pandemic, my husband and I opened a brandy distillery. Being a small business owner offers a real, pragmatic grounding to my professional, entrepreneurial approach in business, but it’s also exciting to establish a brand in a crowded marketplace – while raising my six-year-old son!