“There’s that old movie expression don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” Rosen adds.

Yet so far, that’s exactly what the TV industry has done Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales, explains in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization.

Digital and social companies in recent years “have really gone after, data, technology, advanced advertising and measurement in ways that the TV industry really never either had the capability to do or never felt the need to do,” says Rosen.

So he believes “there’s some catching up to do.”

Rosen and Swartz were among the featured speakers at last week’s Beet Retreat in the City: Television Advances as Consumers Choose, which was held at Meredith Corporation’s Luce Auditorium in Manhattan.

With assets like NBCU’s Audience Studio, the company has tried to level the playing field by bringing richer data and advanced audience targeting across all media forms—from national linear to addressable, digital, display and video.

“And now we want to go to that sort of sweet spot for the social and digital companies, which is their promise of delivering business outcomes,” Rosen says.

Like most of his peers, he sees that promise materialize as digital and social companies often taking credit “for something that may be more about correlation than causation, or sometimes just being in the right place at the right time.

“We feel that television has not gotten the credit it deserves for driving so many upper mid, lower funnel actions and behaviors on consumers. If we can get better at demonstrating that, we can get the credit we deserve,” Rosen says.

Asked by Swartz how traditional media mix modeling comes into play, Rosen’s view is that they’re probalistic models, only as good as the data that gets fed into them.

“I think part of the problem that we’ve seen is the data could be better, could be more deterministic.”

To advance its own cause, NBCU can point to advertiser case studies in which a variety of outcomes were measured. They include brand health metrics lift, sales life, driving website traffic, and incremental return on advertising spend.

“We’re seeing great results, we’re sharing it, we’re learning form it and I think that’s going to be a huge model for us going forward.”

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

The pair are announcing that NBCU’s Audience Studio, its suite of audience buying tools, will now plug in to the Adobe system, effectively creating a programatic private marketplace comprising NBCU’s broadcast and cable TV inventory.

The pair-up will mean datasets including from pay-TV providers, GfK MRI, TV manufacturers and brands’ own first-party datasets in Adobe Analytics Cloud can be used to target TV ads.

“We will avail across our entire portfolio … our inventory through an API so that, if a hands-on keyboard, client or agency wants to make purchases across the premium quality brand-safe inventory of NBCUniversal, they can do that now in a much more highly automated self-service fashion,” says NBCUniversal advanced ad and platform sales EVP Mike Rosen, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“We see the adoption end up being more of a hand-in-hand partnership between all three partners – the client, agency and media company.

“When the client is able to – in a more seamless, frictionless way – take data that informs who they’re trying to reach … with the highest fidelity possible throughout, from identifying the segment to creation of media plan to the actual media buy.”

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

And even while advanced audience targeting will be the subject of many conversations at this year’s Upfront season, it will be as a “complement” to the traditional powers of television advertising, Rosen says in this interview with Beet.TV. at the Advanced Advertising Summit.

“When our world of premium video and television first started getting into the world of advanced targeting, it was very much reliant on a lot of third-party segments,” says Rosen, who is EVP, Advanced Advertising and Platform Sales.

Using syndicated data segments “was a great place to start.”

What surprised Rosen was the speed at which advertisers began to bring their own first-party data to the targeting process. “What was so pleasing is that as soon as advertisers and their agencies started to understand the power of this, it started to unlock what they’ve been doing in other worlds, like digital and social, which is using first-party data.”

He describes first-party data as an “incredible competitive advantage because they understand their consumer,” be it e-commerce or brick-and-mortar locations. That same data can “deeply inform linear television, addressable television campaigns, our full episode player, streaming online, our over the top, Hulu.”

Combined with brand-safe content, first-party defined audiences provide “that complete link from client all the way to media buy. That’s incredibly exciting,” Rosen says.

“I think what surprised us in a good way was how quickly we went from third-party data, sort of testing the pipes, to jumping right into let’s really light this up with first party data and get this engine to really run and see the ultimate promise of it.”

During the Upfronts, advanced targeting will be a factor, but advertisers will still concentrate on priorities like tent-pole sponsorships and major sporting events, plus “content and context-first decision making. That’s part of what has made television so powerful and so effective over the years. We see this as a perfect complement.”

This video was produced at the Advance Advertising Summit in New York.   Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C. 

The EVP of Advanced Advertising & Platform Sales at NBCU talks about taking an agnostic approach to more advanced audience targeting and why the Super Bowl and Olympics made for an “amazing” February in this interview with Beet.TV.

Providing a better experience for viewers and advertisers isn’t just about reducing the number of ads. “It’s making the ads work harder,” Rosen says during a break at RampUp 2018, the annual conference by LiveRamp. Using information about contextual targeting is one way that data can better inform relevance of advertising to specific programs.

“All that together should make for a better user experience for our customer, the viewer, and also therefore make the advertising work even better.”

He says advanced TV “keeps getting better and better” as more marketers build out their own data sets. By “plugging into our world of Comcast set-top box data” and privacy compliant identity matching, they are able to transcend “the general lowest common denominator of age and gender.”

So while TV still provides much-desired magnitude, “now it’s about mass targeted reach. So you still have scale, you still have premium brand safety content, but now we can apply data, which means that every dollar is working harder,” Rosen says.

He describes audience-targeting options at NBCU—on a managed-service approach or self-service—as making it agnostic when it comes to the preferences of agencies and brands.

“It’s not programmatic in the way that digital thinks of it, because the connotation there is that it’s remnant or bottom of the waterfall,” Rosen says. “In our case it’s all of our quality inventory across all of our scripted and non-scripted programming that is available for the decisions to be made at the program level across our portfolio.”

February was “an amazing” month for NBCU with the Super Bowl and Olympics. “There is nothing more powerful to unite the country as these sports events and the great storytelling behind it.”

Starting with the 2016 Olympics in Rio “we moved toward looking at total audience delivery as a recognition that yes, so much happens on that main linear screen, but so much of the viewing of this content is happening on every device that this content is available on.”

This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

For companies more used to selling the context of their content to advertisers, the hot new possibility – in the over-the-top TV era – is to instead sell individual viewers, thanks to the myriad data points on offer.

But which are the most viable revenue opportunities, and which choices should distributors leave on the table?

In this panel debate convened at the Beet Retreat, executives from several publishers and distributors weighted up how they tackle the wealth of new options available.

NBCUniversal sales and strategy EVP Mike Rosen:

“I like the word ‘balance’. The culture of our company should be about content-plus-audience. We’re not abandoning content. We don’t want to go to our agencies, our advertisers, and make them choose between the two.

“We sort of see that balance, where, yes, you’re going to sponsor some shows, because your brand belongs there. But, at the same token, there may be other strategies that involve looking across our entire portfolio, and finding the audiences. The two, I think will coexist for a really long time.”

Fox Networks Group Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions Noah Levine:

“A year ago, I was very digitally focused. I’m very convergence focused right now. My team is probably spending about 70% of its time focused on linear. My team focuses on audience, and programmatic solutions across linear, addressable, set top box VOD, and digital.

“A lot of my time, and my leadership’s time, is spent socializing these concepts internally, getting buy-in, developing excitement around these initiatives, because part of our job is to be disruptors, to say, ‘Hey, we’ve been using age, gender as a way to guarantee for very long time’.”

Acxiom VP, Television Partner Development, Craig Berkley:

“I think most of the organizations in traditional TV are aware that this needs to happen, that we need to move towards addressable, and audience based buying, and incorporate all of these into our platforms. Different organizations are in different stages in accomplishing that internally.”

Oath Business Lead, Advanced TV, Brett Hurwitz:

“I kind of go through work each day, wondering ‘What are the obstacles’? There’s obstacles, I think, on the supply side. I think there’s obstacles on the demand side. I think we have to, as an industry, as leaders in the industry, really start breaking down those issues, and tackling them one by one, because I think the evolution is happening remarkably slowly.

“I think traditional linear television delivery has a certain amount of life ahead of it. It doesn’t make sense to me that money is still being spent the old way.”

A+E ad sales president Mel Berning:

“We have all sorts of balls up in the air right now. We would all prefer to get to a world where we’re talking about (advertising) outcomes.

“Until clients, agencies, and all of us are able to get into a real dialogue about what is the right metric to gage the effectiveness of the medium, I think we’re in a difficult spot.”

The panel was moderated by MediaLink A+E managing director Matt Spiegel.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Nielsen’s Total Audience Report solution, for reporting cross-platform viewing of TV and digital content using a single metric, was  delayed earlier this year after key client NBCUniversal dubbed it “bad, inaccurate and misleading”.

Now NBCUniversal has “asked top media buyers, executives at rival TV networks and digital-media outlets, video distributors, ad-tech platforms and even a handful of advertisers to come together on November 28”, Variety reports.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, NBCUniversal sales EVP Mike Rosen says: “Measurement is clearly critical … measurement across different platforms, where there is a disequilibrium, there’s a false equivalency across how different things are measured.

“Are we measuring right, to make sure that the value that is being bought and sold is being credited properly? You need to make sure that the data is accurate enough to inform those decisions. Because garbage in, garbage out.”

Delivering content across devices has, for many companies, been largely solved. But measuring that, assigning viewership to the right audience member and figuring out how to rate it all has emerged as the major current challenge.

Still, for Rosen, these are heady days, when, after years of agencies leading sales discussions, the primacy of quality content has returned as a main drive.

“I never lost sight of the fact that we thought television in whatever form it took, whatever screen it was on, whatever platform of distribution system, still had a vitality to it,” he adds. “What’s wonderful about what’s happening now is we’re getting that chance to prove it.

“I never imagined when I started in the business and I was in the lowly media department that never got to see the client. That now it’s probably where it starts.”

This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

“This is happening so quickly. What we now realize is it’s leading to a very different kind of relationship we have with the end user marketer and their agency,” Rosen says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.

Data has always been an integral part of the TV-buying process, but its usefulness was limited, if not suppressed, by the traditional ways of doing business.

“What would happen over the course of the process from media plan to buy, a lot would get lost in the translation,” Rosen says. “It would get dumbed down from being a pretty precise target that would be informed by data into just the lowest common denominator of age and gender.”

Now it’s common for agencies to present “some incredibly rich” first-party data from their marketer clients. Their desire is to “be able to empower that data to help be a part of the decisioning for what media they purchase from us.”

NBCU has made available $1 billion of its inventory for advanced audience targeting, an effort that Rosen says has been embraced by the marketplace. It’s an example of what he terms the “best advertising environment” of TV and premium video becoming even better.

Asked to define the term programmatic, Rosen says “it’s the automation and data infusion of things that used to be done in a very packaged, managed process by us based on business rules that haven’t changed in decades.”

The approach taken by NBCU is one of being agnostic. This means advertisers can avail themselves of the company’s optimizations—informed by data from Comcast set-top box data from 22 households—or avail themselves of NBCU inventory via demand-side platforms or private marketplace transactions.

“As long as better data, better data segmentation informs the buy, we know it will work harder. We know it will be more effective.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

“Each client and agency will transact directly,” Mike Rosen, NBCU’s EVP of Portfolio Sales & Strategy, told BusinessInsider. Nearly all of NBCU’s ad inventory will be available, except for ads in future marquee events like the Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup, according to Rosen, who will be one of the featured speakers at Beet Retreat 2017 in Miami.

While Target will be able to reach the audiences of its choosing, all of them will be served the same ads. NBCU is being assisted in its latest audience-targeting offering by 4C, which specializes in reaching people on social media platforms.

Last month, Beet.TV interviewed Rosen at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York, where he discussed the search for better ways of measuring and optimizing key performance indicators from campaigns. We are republishing the interview in the wake of today’s news.

It is now two and a half years since NBCU launched its Audience Targeting Platform (ATP), a way to let advertisers use data to reach specific audiences.

In that time, the company has offered up viewing data from 22 million Comcast set-top boxes, combined with other data from first- or third-party sources, to help marketers create more refined viewer segments.

Now Mike Rosen wants to go further.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the NBCU portfolio and sales strategy EVP explains the next step.

“As you start to unlock the value in the targeting side, how can you see the data to understand the outcome measurement?” Rosen asks.

“So… (we’re trying) to better understand what the different outcomes are from the different campaigns. We want to make sure the KPI we get is being properly measured and optimized.”

Rosen says outcomes for data-driven campaigns vary depending on many factors. But one thing all have in common is, they are better informed.

“We moved from simply looking at age-and-gender, which was the currency of our marketplace but also the only real measurement we had to transact, to something more richer – custom segments unique to each client,” Rosen adds.

And it is no longer pocket change that is changing hands in this way. This year, NBCU said it would make $1 billion inventory available for buying using data-based, non-Nielsen methods – equivalent to a tenth of its total ad revenue take last year.

In that time, the company has offered up viewing data from 22 million Comcast set-top boxes, combined with other data from first- or third-party sources, to help marketers create more refined viewer segments.

Now Mike Rosen wants to go further.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the NBCU portfolio and sales strategy EVP explains the next step.

“As you start to unlock the value in the targeting side, how can you se the data to understand the outcome measurement?,” Rosen asks.

“So… (we’re trying) to better understand what the different outcomes are from the different campaigns. We want to make sure the KPI we get is being properly measured and optimised.”

Rosen says outcomes for data-driven campaigns vary depending on many factors. But one thing all have in common is, they are better informed.

“We moved from simply looking at age-and-gender, which was the currency of our marketplace but also the only real measurement we had to transact, to something more richer – custom segments unique to each client,” Rosen adds.

And it is no longer pocket change that is changing hands in this way. This year, NBCU said it would make $1 billion inventory available for buying using data-based, non-Nielsen methods – equivalent to a tenth of its total ad revenue take last year.

This interview was held at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data Summit in New York earlier this month.