Universal Ads added eight companies across two new categories to its Business Partners Program on July 30, 2026, giving advertisers a way to bring customer segments and app-measurement workflows they already run on search and social directly into premium TV buying.

Klaviyo, LiveRamp, and TransUnion join as the platform's first Audience partners, while Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch, Kochava, and Singular become integrated Mobile Measurement Partners, according to Universal Ads. The addition, announced from New York, extends a partner program the Comcast-owned platform introduced in 2025 to help brands launch and prove out television campaigns without abandoning tools they rely on elsewhere.

The expansion arrives at an unsettled moment for the platform's corporate parentage. Comcast announced on June 29, 2026, a tax-free spin-off separating its broadband and wireless business from NBCUniversal and Sky, and that announcement explicitly left Universal Ads sitting in what PPC Land described as an unclear ownership position, since Comcast's filing did not specify which of the two resulting companies would retain the platform. Whether the July 30 partner additions belong to the entity that keeps the Universal Ads brand a year from now remains an open question the announcement itself does not address.

What the two new categories do

Universal Ads exists to let advertisers of any size create, buy, and measure ads across premium video, according to the company. Until this expansion, the platform's Business Partners Program covered creative and measurement tools; the new Audience and Mobile Measurement categories close a different gap, one that has separated television buying from the rest of a marketer's channel mix for years.

Audience activation and mobile measurement have long lived inside the same platforms marketers use for search, social, and display, according to Universal Ads. Television, by contrast, has typically demanded its own tools, its own setup process, and its own measurement approach - an added layer of friction for performance marketers who otherwise move fluidly between channels. The stated goal of the new categories is to remove that friction rather than to introduce a new one.

Audience partners: bringing existing segments into TV

Klaviyo, LiveRamp, and TransUnion give brands a way to bring first- and third-party customer segments - audiences they already build and use on other channels - directly into Universal Ads with privacy considerations built in, according to the company.

Eddie O'Brien, Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships and Alliances at Klaviyo, framed the addition around the company's approach to data. "At Klaviyo, we believe customer-first growth starts with data - and that putting that data to work should be simple," O'Brien said. "Our partnership with Universal Ads gives the brands we serve a new way to extend the audiences they already know into premium TV, helping them personalize beyond owned channels and leverage customer experiences for smarter growth."

Adam Paul, Executive Director of Media and Sports Alliances at LiveRamp, described the value proposition in terms of consistency across channels. "LiveRamp helps marketers unlock more value from their data," Paul said. "Our work with Universal Ads makes it easier for brands to bring the audiences and workflows they already trust into premium TV, so they can seamlessly reach the right viewers with more consistency, efficiency, and scale."

LiveRamp's own corporate situation adds a layer worth noting for anyone tracking the identity infrastructure behind this partnership. Publicis Groupe agreed on May 17, 2026, to acquire LiveRamp in an all-cash transaction with a total equity value of $2.5 billion, a deal PPC Land covered in detail at the time, representing a 30% premium to LiveRamp's closing share price the day before the announcement. The transaction is expected to close before the end of calendar 2026, subject to shareholder approval, and LiveRamp is set to continue operating as an independent business within Publicis, reporting through the Groupe's Technology segment rather than being folded into Publicis's Epsilon data platform. LiveRamp's role as a new Universal Ads Audience partner therefore now sits inside two separate ownership transitions running in parallel: Universal Ads' own uncertain future under the Comcast split, and LiveRamp's pending absorption into a holding company that also owns creative and media-buying operations competing with some of Universal Ads' publisher partners.

TransUnion arrives with its own recent momentum in television measurement. On May 21, 2026, TransUnion became the sole media transaction attribution provider named directly in a Google partnership covering YouTube, using its identity graph to connect fragmented exposure signals - a YouTube view on a connected TV screen, a search click on another device - back to a single household or individual without relying on third-party cookies or persistent device identifiers. That existing infrastructure, built to resolve identity across devices without individual-level tracking, is the same underlying capability TransUnion now extends into Universal Ads' self-serve buying environment.

Mobile Measurement Partners: extending app attribution to the biggest screen

Alongside the Audience category, Universal Ads is launching Mobile Measurement Partners as an entirely new category within its Business Partners Program. App advertisers can now work with their preferred mobile measurement partner, or MMP, to extend attribution and measurement workflows across premium TV inventory, according to the company. Setup, notably, typically requires no additional software development kit, or SDK, integration - a detail that matters for app marketing teams wary of adding engineering overhead to a channel they have not previously bought.

The five named partners - Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch, Kochava, and Singular - give advertisers access to install measurement, post-install event tracking, and campaign analytics across the platform's premium TV inventory. Each of these five companies already carries certification across the largest digital ad platforms; Google, Meta, and TikTok have each built formal measurement partnerships around some combination of the same MMPs, according to prior PPC Land reporting on the mobile attribution ecosystem.

The independence of that measurement layer has itself become a live commercial question in 2026. AppsFlyer, one of the five partners Universal Ads named on July 30, agreed on June 22, 2026, to a $2.7 billion investment from Google, Meta, Moloco, and Unity - four of the largest players in digital advertising - in a deal PPC Land reported was structured specifically to prevent any single investor from influencing the company's attribution logic. AppsFlyer processes measurement data for more than 15,000 brands worldwide, and the investment came roughly three months after an earlier attempt to sell the company to private equity buyers Apollo and Fortissimo, at a lower $1.9 billion valuation, collapsed. That AppsFlyer now sits both inside a neutrality-preserving investment structure backed by four major ad platforms and inside Universal Ads' new television measurement category illustrates how central independent mobile attribution has become to advertisers spanning digital and TV alike.

Kochava brings a parallel history of cross-platform certification. The company's badged mobile measurement partnerships already extend across Meta, Google Ads, Snapchat, and TikTok, according to prior PPC Land coverage of Kochava's Partner Certification Program, which formally recognized six advertising platforms for meeting integration-quality standards in December 2025.

Comments from Universal Ads leadership

Greg Lieber, Head of Platform Partnerships at Universal Ads, situated the expansion within the platform's broader ambition. "The goal all along has been for Universal Ads to make TV advertising feel as easy and familiar as social or search, and that has to include the Audience Management, Mobile Measurement Partners, and optimization signals brands already know, manage, and rely on every day," Lieber said. "With partners across Audience and Mobile Measurement, marketers can extend what is already working for them in digital into premium TV and grow their businesses on the biggest screen in the house."

That framing echoes the platform's founding rationale. When Comcast first unveiled Universal Ads in January 2025, James Rooke, then President of Comcast Advertising, described the underlying research problem: a 2024 Comcast-commissioned study of 250 performance-based advertisers found that half of respondents with minimal or no television experience reported diminishing returns from social media advertising, while 89% said they would be willing to try television if the barriers to entry were lowered. The new partner additions target those barriers directly, translating audience-activation and measurement workflows advertisers already trust into a channel that has historically demanded a separate operational playbook.

Context: a partner program built in stages

The Audience and Mobile Measurement categories build on a Business Partners Program Universal Ads introduced in 2025 with creative and measurement partners, aimed at helping brands launch TV campaigns and prove out performance. The July 30 additions bring more familiar tools for creative development, targeting, activation, and measurement into television, according to the company, with the explicit intention of letting advertisers move from social and digital channels into premium video without changing the way they already operate.

This staged rollout pattern is not unique to Universal Ads. Competing efforts to make connected television, or CTV, self-serve for performance marketers have accelerated across 2026. Walmart announced on June 24, 2026, its acquisition of Vibe.co, a self-serve CTV platform that its co-founder and chief executive, Arthur Querou, described as built for performance and e-commerce marketers to run streaming television "the way they run paid social: measurable, fast to launch, and optimized for better outcomes." That platform's client base had grown beyond 10,000 advertisers by the time of the Walmart deal, illustrating how quickly demand has scaled for tools that treat television buying like digital buying.

Universal Ads' publisher roster spans a wide swath of the premium video landscape: A+E, AMC Networks, Cox Media, DIRECTV, Estrella MediaCo, Fox Corporation, Fuse Media, LG Ad Solutions, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Philo, Roku, Samsung Ads, Scripps, Spectrum Reach, TelevisaUnivision, Telly, Vevo, Vizio, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Xumo, according to the company. That publisher base has not changed with the July 30 announcement; what has changed is the set of audience and measurement tools advertisers can now connect to campaigns running across those publishers.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For performance marketers who have built entire operations around search and social measurement stacks, the practical significance of the July 30 announcement lies less in any single partner integration and more in what it signals about television's positioning within the broader channel mix. CTV's share of overall media budgets has grown substantially in recent years; PPC Land's own reporting has traced how CTV's proportion of programmatic ad spend doubled from 14% in 2023 to 28% in 2025, even as measurement standards across the channel remained inconsistent and attribution windows stayed contested.

Bringing named, independently operated measurement partners such as AppsFlyer, Kochava, and Adjust into premium TV addresses a specific version of that inconsistency: it lets app marketers apply the same attribution logic to a television buy that they already apply to a Meta or TikTok campaign, without waiting for the channel to develop its own bespoke standard. Whether that translates into materially higher television ad spend among digitally native, app-first advertisers is a question this announcement alone does not answer; it depends on how well the integrations perform once live campaigns start reporting results.

The broader corporate uncertainty layered on top of this expansion deserves attention from any advertiser evaluating a longer-term commitment to the platform. A partnership program is only as durable as the platform hosting it, and Universal Ads' hosting arrangement is, by Comcast's own admission in its June 29 spin-off announcement, still undetermined. Advertisers building campaign infrastructure around the newly named Audience and Mobile Measurement partners are, in effect, building on a platform whose ownership could shift meaningfully within the next twelve months.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Universal Ads, the Comcast-owned self-serve premium television advertising platform, together with new Audience partners Klaviyo, LiveRamp, and TransUnion, and new Mobile Measurement Partners Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch, Kochava, and Singular.

What: The launch of two new categories - Audience and Mobile Measurement Partners - within the Universal Ads Business Partners Program, letting advertisers bring customer segments and app-attribution workflows they already use on digital channels directly into premium TV campaigns, typically without additional SDK integration.

When: Announced July 30, 2026, building on a Business Partners Program Universal Ads introduced in 2025.

Where: New York, where Universal Ads is headquartered as part of the Comcast Corporation.

Why: Performance marketers increasingly look to television to find new customers, but fitting TV into existing digital workflows has historically required separate audience-activation and measurement tools. Universal Ads is closing that gap by integrating trusted Audience and Mobile Measurement Partners directly into its self-serve buying platform, a move that arrives while Comcast's own pending corporate separation leaves the platform's long-term ownership unresolved.