“For viewers right now, it’s the Golden Age of Television,” Mike Reidy, senior vice president of digital ad sales for NBCUniversal, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “It’s a great opportunity for viewers to access all the great content that best fits their viewing needs.”

That content includes sports, shows and movies going back decades, offering something for every age group and individual taste.

Another key improvement is the lighter ad loads on CTV platforms. As Reidy notes, NBCUniversal’s Peacock has ad breaks of a minute long and no longer than five minutes an hour. That lighter load helps to keep people engaged with programming, and has the added benefit of helping marketers to stand out among reduced clutter.

Source: Insider Intelligence/eMarketer

“Because it’s on a digital platform, you have all capabilities that data-informed advertising provides,” he said of the improved targeting abilities that help to make ads more relevant to viewers. In addition, NBCUniversal supports transactions for brands seeking to drive transactions with its NBCU Shoppable, NBCU Checkout platforms.

“You add that all up — less clutter, more relevant ads and more engaging ads — and that’s really going to drive brand impact and convergence that brands are looking for, ” he said.

Amid greater fragmentation of the video advertising market among the growing number of streaming channels, Reidy sees an opportunity to advertisers — whether they’re mass market brands or more localized businesses — with a brand-safe environment to reach consumers amid premium content.

With the improved data-driven targeting, advertisers also can avoid showing the same ads over and over to viewers.

“We’re able to build plans and create optimizations so that marketers are truly following those audiences,” Reidy said. “They’re maximizing their reach, whether it’s against age and gender or more customized audiences they’re going after.”

You are watching “Making CTV Happen: A New Ad Infrastructure Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Publica. For more videos, please visit this page.

“One of the newer and exciting announcements for us is Sky with AdSmart,” says Mike Reidy, SVP, Digital Ad Sales, NBCUniversal. Sky being this amazing international leader but also in the OTT space as well.”

In this Beet.TV interview at the recent MediaMath All Fronts event in Manhattan, Reidy also talks about the migration of video viewing to big screens and evangelizing the opportunities of connected-TV and programmatic advertising transactions.

“I think it’s interesting because when digital video viewership first began, it was seen as taking viewers from the big screen to the small screen” amid concerns like viewability of content and ads. “But now with the advent of connected TV, OTT you’re seeing those viewers migrate back to the big TV screen,” Reidy says.

It’s one thing to have “the largest canvas for a brand to communicate via sight, sound and motion” and another to have advanced TV sitting on a digital platform. “So that lends itself to all the capabilities of dynamic ad serving, new interactive ad units as well as data.”

Last month, Comcast united NBCU’s Audience Studio targeting solutions with Sky’s addressable advertising tools. Operating under the AdSmart name, it’s designed to enable global brands to reach customers in international markets and measure results across NBCU and Sky’s TV portfolio, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

Asked about AdSmart’s plans for the United States, Reidy says, “That’s what we’re working through right now, identifying what are the strong points from each of us respectively. But ideally, the long term is that if we have a client that’s looking at things from a global landscape through a global lens, we now have this incredible domestic and international reach to have a much more strategic conversation with them.”

As for working with DSP’s, Reidy says NBCU is “really excited about what MediaMath is doing. They’re leaning really heavily into the connected TV space and this programmatic landscape. We look at them as people we can partner with, collaborate with, to evangelize what the capabilities are here.”

This video was recorded at the MediaMath Connect All Fronts industry conference in Manhattan. The series is sponsored by MediaMath. For more videos please visit this page.