NBCUniversal is getting into the streaming game with next month’s rollout of Peacock, setting the stage more innovation and value-added services for advertisers. Peacock’s service includes free, ad-supported streaming that has the potential to support more interactivity between brands and consumers.
Laura Molen, president of advertising sales and partnerships at NBCUniversal, discusses the future of advertising in this episode of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum.
Speaking to Bill Koenigsberg, the president, CEO and founder of media services agency Horizon Media Inc., Molen said Peacock has strong potential to convert viewers into shoppers with the development of supporting technologies.
“Free, ad-supported streaming…is the future, not just of viewership, but how advertising can work,” she said. “We can work together with marketers to create a commercial experience in a whole new way.”
The company is currently testing voice-activated remotes that let viewers respond immediately to advertising, Molen said. She also foresees innovation for ad inserts, product placements and channel design.
You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB. The series is presented by 605 and Magnite. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Laura Molen, president of advertising sales and partnerships at NBCUniversal, discussed how those dynamics helped the scatter market to recover in this episode of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum.
Speaking to Bill Koenigsberg, the president, CEO and founder of media services agency Horizon Media Inc., Molen said demand started to pick up going into Memorial Day weekend, traditionally a heavy promotional period for advertisers as summer gets under way.
“The floor right now isn’t dropping. We’re actually so encouraged by the second quarter scatter market,” Molen said. “Marketers know that they have to market their way out of this to really get their companies back on track.”
A key test for broadcasters will be the upfront market, which typically offers lower prices than last-minute media buys in the scatter market. Molen said that while some advertisers have changed the timing of their campaigns, they are looking for opportunities in the upfront.
“We’re hearing from marketers that they’re still very interested in the upfront market,” Molen said. “If you are looking to secure inventory to get your message out there, particularly in certain time frames, the upfront is the way to go.”
With marketers facing greater pressure to get the most out of their media budgets during a period of heightened economic uncertainty, business outcomes have become a more important metric than ad impressions.
Molen said NBCUniversal has responded to those demands for business outcome guarantees, both for traditional brands and direct-to-consumer startups seeking to drive a response.
“For some clients, that meant traffic in stores, traffic online, subscriptions — all different kinds of business outcomes,” she said. “We are really invested in continuing to help our clients to measure what’s most important to them.”
You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB. The series is presented by 605 and Magnite. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>While the People’s Choice Awards had long been owned and produced by Procter & Gamble, “We wanted to make it new young and fresh in E!’s voice. And we recognized that if we just did it in the linear space it really wouldn’t be new and fresh. So we had to use our partnerships to offer marketers even greater opportunities for their content they were doing with us,” Molen says.
In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, she explains how NBCU custom builds programs for marketers that span various channels and platforms in “one cohesive plan.” At the awards ceremony, Ebay sponsored backstage views while Subaru had a commanding presence near the red carpet, as Variety reports. Metro by T-Mobile sponsored a “live look-in” of a music performance by Rita Ora that garnered 2.3 million social media views—an audience that was 90% composed of 18-24-year- olds, according to Molen.
“So it’s that kind of impact that we’re looking to help marketers make by distributing their content wherever the consumer is. On Telemundo, we see this all the time.”
NBCU has social partners that include Snap and Twitter, while its Social Synch offering makes it easy for brands to reach audiences across various social media platforms.
“We sell all of our content, even if it’s distributed across other people’s platforms,” Molen says. “We give our marketers one cohesive plan, making it very easy for them to buy.”
She draws a parallel between premium content and most of social media because “that’s where the conversation is around premium content and long-form content.” Her conversations at CES include improving the commercial experience so that consumers enjoy the content better “but they also engage more deeply around a marketer’s brand.”
Some advertisers are rediscovering the value of premium content, having seen “a lot of shiny objects” and had issues with certain platforms. “Working with NBCUniversal we can give them the things that they need in data, in distribution, in commercial innovation, in ROI and attribution.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>The 500,000-square-foot Telemundo Center houses “eight studios the size of eight football fields and newsrooms to create all of our original content for Telemundo and beyond,” says Laura Molen, EVP, Lifestyle & Hispanic Advertising Sales Group, NBCU.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Molen, who took over Telemundo last year, explains the company’s Hispanic market dominance along with its total market approach to programming that includes news, live events and the upcoming 2018 World Cup Russia.
Telemundo Center is now home to Telemundo Network, Telemundo Deportes, Noticias Telemundo, Telemundo Studios, the Universo cable channel, Telemundo International and its digital operations, according to Forbes.
“It’s not a surprise that the U.S. Hispanic market is the biggest growing market,” says Molen. “In most industries, the U.S. Hispanic is making up if not all most of the growth of the products.”
She cites research done in conjunction with IPG’s Magna unit showing that a total market approach that uses English-language ads across networks and platforms isn’t the best way to reach Hispanic consumers. According to the research, 71% of bilingual Hispanics in the sample chose to watch Spanish-language content, while 61% of Hispanics said that total market ads did not resonate with them, as MediaPost reports.
“What we’ve heard from marketers is that it’s expensive” to research and target Hispanics, says Molen, adding that Telemundo has held some 400 meetings in the last four months to explain the breadth of NBCU’s resources.
Some marketers that opted for a total market approach in which Hispanics had been included in “just our regular group…found it wasn’t working with them because it’s a very different mindset, it’s a different culture. And so they feel like they’ve gone too far back.”
Telemundo offers what Molen describes as a “true total market approach to premium content.” For retailer Target, that involved a televised awards program with a feature titled Red Alerts in English on E! and in Spanish.
“It is doing incredibly well. Target is so happy with the program and more and more marketers are asking us to come up with total market” solutions, she says.
]]>So-called CFlight is a new measurement metric that aims to give advertisers a total sense of campaign viewership across screens, creating a new currency and offering guarantees of campaign performance in the company’s programming.
“If you look at how viewers watch premium content today, they’re viewing it on all different screens,” NBCUniversal’s lifestyle and Hispanic ad sales group EVP Laura Molen tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
But that has posed a challenge for companies like hers: “We’re not getting credit for so many things including co-viewing and digital or all screens viewership across the board.”
CFlight means NBCU is going customer in its bid to demonstrate, to advertisers, a higher rate of aggregate viewership than recorded by many other yardsticks. It will encompass viewing across live, on-demand, broadcast and other digital methods.
“We’re seeing that up to 15% of viewership is being lost or now being captured across all these different screens,” Molen laments.
So how will CFlight work? Molen says it will take data from a number of different measurement sources, helping advertisers project viewership but also to measure actual impressions after a show and an ad have aired.
NBCU’s announcement came after years in which measurement agencies have launched new services aimed at measuring consumers’ viewing across devices.
“We’ve been working with the measurement companies and really we’re hoping that someone would come and there’d be one way to measure it. Nothing was coming to the forefront,” she adds.
So Molen says there was “overwhelming consensus” at ad agencies and marketers that there was a need for something new.
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