NBCUniversal, which today is hosting its One21 event to showcase its One Platform that gives advertisers a way to reach target audiences at scale, has made a big push into mixing content and commerce. Its platform marks a convergence among a variety of technologies that encompass linear and streaming TV, connected devices, online payments and high-speed internet.
The technologies make it “possible to drive that experience where you can see something in a piece of programming and at that moment of inspiration decide that you want it, and in a couple clicks have it on the way to your home,” Evan Moore, vice president of commerce partnerships at NBCUniversal Media, said in this interview with Beet.TV.
“That’s what we’re here to do with One Platform Commerce, which is our suite of integrated commerce capabilities, is to drive those transactional moments, to drive from passion to purchase with NBCU content, wherever that content appears,” he said.
The company distributes content through linear, digital, streaming, Spanish-language, local TV stations and social media. On social networks like Facebook and Instagram, NBCUniversal provides a way for consumers to buy products directly with instant checkout features.
“We’re providing a platform for a retail partner to come in through a single point of entry and drive commerce through our content across the entire ecosystem of touchpoints that we have with viewers and consumers,” Moore said.
Its Shoppable TV platform integrates programming with e-commerce by showing QR codes that viewers can scan with a smartphone camera to visit a shopping site. In the past year, NBCUniversal gave viewers of the French Open tennis tournament a way to buy the jersey worn by star player Novak Djokovic, and to order a “blonding brush” in the show “Very Cavalleri.” During the holiday season, viewers of the “Today” show on its Peacock streaming platform could buy products featured in a “steals and deals” segment.
“We can also drive commerce experience across the web through either our articles or interactive videos,” Moore said. “You can be reading a shoppable gift guide or watching a piece of video content and actually clicking on the products that are featured in that content in real time, add them to a shopping cart and purchase all without leaving the NBCU content experience.”
The company plans to widen the interactive platform beyond the current number of seven properties, which include the Today.com, E! Online and Telemundo.com websites.
“We’re going to be expanding across the rest of the portfolio this year, including national cable networks like USA, but also across all the local stations as well,” Moore said. “When I look at these new tools, it’s really changing the types of experiences and content that we create for consumers and the value we can bring to them through that experience. There’s a lot to be gained for us, for consumers and for brands.”
]]>As part of the expanded agreement announced late last month, Twitter will provide broader sales support for NBCUniversal’s advertising partners, which empowers global, national and local marketers .
For an overview on the scope of the alliance, Beet.TV interviewed Joe Cady, SVP Strategy and Development at NBCU. He explains that this is part of an overall global expansion as part of the NBC Universal One Platform that was announce late last year.
According to NBCU, since kicking off the partnership in 2013, NBCU and Twitter have enjoyed significant growth and engagement. Total campaign growth has exceeded a 10x trajectory and in 2020, global video views for all NBCUniversal Twitter handles have grown 26% on average, alongside a 25% increase in campaigns year over year. And in late 2020, NBC Olympics and Twitter extended their innovative content partnership, working together to amplify NBC Olympics’ vast coverage of both Tokyo and Beijing.
]]>There are consumers that engage with ads and marketers and then consumers of the content itself. Vangeli explained that there’s a lot of change happening between different stakeholders, whether it’s with the client and the agency, the agency and the publisher, the publisher and the distributor, and so on.
“There’s a lot of pressure happening,” Vangeli said. “And that’s why right now it just makes so much sense for a pivot to happen in the marketplace where we finally break through. But with that is a lot of complications because there are so many business models and legacy models, multi-billion dollar business models that are in there, and everyone cares about only what’s on either side of them, but it’s an equation that needs to balance out.”
This will ultimately lead to some level of disruption and discomfort, and fragmentation is one part of that. TV viewership has increased over time, but a great percentage of that has transitioned to a non-live linear stream. Consumers don’t realize this fragmentation, they’re simply doing what is convenient, so it’s up to marketers to build around this complexity.
At NBCU, they’re dealing with this complexity in three different ways. They’re producing more content than ever before, they’re rethinking distribution, and they’re building technology that supports all of the fragmentation. For the latter, NBC is now introducing One Platform.
“We’re at this point where we’ve had these different strategies of bringing things together from a structural standpoint, but also technology in the advanced advertising space with our AdSmart portfolio,” Vangeli said. “And so the amalgamation of all of that has unveiled onePlatform where you can have one plan, one optimization, one view, one measurement, and it all comes together for an advertiser.”
Interoperability, or the ability of computer systems to exchange and make use of information, is what’s helping NBCU to be able to accomplish this.
“Everything we’ve been building around that and on top of that has all been with this philosophy that we believe that there needs to be an interoperable ecosystem for television.” Vangeli said. “We’re still TV, so we’re only as good as the collection of the TV partners we have around us. So if that’s the case, in order for this to truly scale for all of us to continue making transacting easier on television, we need to be able to be interoperable.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>“We believe powerful content creates the best environment for advertising and efficacy. It’s an attention economy where consumer choice reigns,” Ashley Luongo, the vp of Adsmart advanced advertising sales, told Jon Watts during a town hall at the Beet Retreat in San Juan. “That clutter makes it hard for marketing to break through.”
At the core of Adsmart’s approach is a dedication to the consumer experience. Ad avoidance is something that the ad industry is dealing with, and creating a positive experience, Luongo says, is something “we lost the plot on. So we’re pulling it back to put customers at the center, so ad assets don’t create the avoidance.”
Data strategies help inform better messaging that then helps advertisers stand out, doing more for buyers at the same time as it’s improving the customer experience. The cross-portfolio approach changes how buyers work with NBCU, says Luongo. Where a potential buyer might enter the company through a division, like sports or entertainment, the Adsmart approach breaks down barriers to transact on the basis of “audience and automation.”
With the advancement of initiatives like Adsmart and One Platform, Luongo says that NBCU is on its way to opening the door to global transactions that are easier and forward-looking for the industry.
“We’re at this point where we’ve done enough test and learn, it’s time to do,” says Luongo. “Locking arms with the industry we can do better together. If you wanna go fast go alone and if you wanna go far go together. It allows the market to transact with publishers in an audience based way.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>NBCU has gone through years of innovating in order to solve the problem of being separated by vertical. After a number of steps along the way, the company has now arrived at One Platform.
One Platform has allowed the company to continue innovating with some exciting new features.
“Some of the optimizers that we’re building help us look at the TV universe in one place but also now cross-platform, and the ability to finally plan for unduplicated reach and frequency against both our TV and digital portfolios,” says Vangeli.
Vangeli, like many others in television, hopes for unification across the industry, but admits that it has been complicated. More than ever, there’s a need to change because of the dynamics in the marketplace.
“The fragmentation is at an all-time high,” says Vangeli. “The consolidation is happening faster than ever before, and the consumers are just engaging with brands in different ways, so it’s time now for everyone to come together.”
NBCU is trying to help in this cause through initiatives where they’re looking at OpenAP to look for ways to align on different standards for different technologies that can help everyone in the marketplace.
“We’ve all been working on these data strategies, this product development roadmap, to get this point where now we can say, ‘We’re ready to do things differently, let’s do it.’” Says Vangeli.
Along with standardization, the question about alternative currency and measurement is something that he’s not sure we have an answer to at the moment, too.
“Will there be something that gives us more than just the age and gender reads that our agencies just continue to be held accountable to by their clients?”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV, Colella talks about working with Sky, which is 100% addressable, and the value of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium in the wake of the departure of Warner Media.
NBCU recently renamed Audience Studio, its in-house, audience-targeting offerings, to AdSmart, which is the moniker Sky has used, as Reuters reports. NBCU is sending a team to Europe next month to discuss how to service brands together on a global basis, according to Colella.
“We understand that data’s different and vendors are different and systems are different. But many times, a brand is looking to create a global marketing campaign” based on a common audience target or “different audiences for different locales.”
Given NBCU’s presence in the U.S. and Sky’s in the U.K., Italy and Germany, advertisers “can put a greater footprint on their campaign,” she says.
In the United States, the first attribute of OpenAP is simplification, according to Colella. “Rather than clients going ahead and creating an audience target once for us, once for Fox, once for Viacom, they’re able to create that target audience once and then spread it amongst the publishers.”
Other benefits include scale and unified workflow. “Every publisher that’s in the consortium will offer that same workflow, so it will be easier for our agencies and for our brands.” OpenAP is about to release version #2 of its open workflow. “What it does do is it allows people to transact in the same way. What it doesn’t do is determine spend between the publishers, because of course everyone has their own secret sauce,” Colella says.
Lastly, she adds about OpenAP, “We really try to pool the advanced advertising spend to come up with better solutions for our agencies.”
NBCU’s own identity graph was made available to OpenAP last summer “and we’ll be implementing that later this year.”
Asked about the upcoming Cannes Lions gathering, Colella says that while advanced audience targeting is important, her main focus will be on content.
“We have both talent in front of the camera and behind the camera. Everything from storytelling to video to advertising and we want to bring that to the forefront.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>“We have now developed our own algorithms, we have a full development team, and we’re able to really custom develop it to match our inventory,” Colella says. “Nobody knows our inventory structure better than us. So this allows us to innovate more quickly and to respond to the market more nimbly as well.”
NBCU makes all of its advertising supply available through its audience optimization product. “Whether it’s programmatic TV or linear optimization, whatever’s available will be made available through those platforms. We don’t differentiate,” Colella adds.
“Typically, the live sports programs and our big-ticket items will obviously go on sponsorship. But if something hasn’t been sold we make it available.”
In April of 2018, NBCU joined the TV audience-targeting consortium OpenAP led by Fox, Viacom and Turner. In so doing, it brought its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.
“We’ve been spending a lot of time to really understand what we can bring to bear and how best to work with the group so that we can make it easier for our advertisers to buy on an audience basis,” Colella says of OpenAP.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“We understand that brands are going to demand their own special measurement. It’s not our place to determine exactly who they should use,” says Denise Colella, SVP, Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy, NBCU. “So we’re allowing them to use a suite of attribution partners that we partner with to make sure they can measure anything they do.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Colella expresses enthusiasm for NBCU participating in the OpenAP audience targeting consortium and the need for added speed in moving the TV industry forward.
When NBCU looks at cross-platform viewing, it tries to deliver a “premium experience” regardless of where its content is being consumed by using a device graph that reflects that consumption, according to Colella.
“We’re able to use OpenAP to make sure that our planners can plan and the brands can plan across publishers” and then use a suite of offerings that are “great towards being able to measure these campaigns across platforms.”
Having recently joined OpenAP, “We’re very excited to work with Fox, Viacom, Turner to make sure that the industry is really moving ahead at the breakneck speed that we need to be going at. They’re our first partners that we’re so excited about.”
For attribution, NBCU is working with iSpot and is testing with Data + Math, among others. With iSpot, the company works with advertisers to define the outcome they want to measure and then tracks the success of the campaign, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
“Not every partner is going to be the best at every vertical, so we make sure we have a good host of those,” says Colella. “So we have an entire group that’s dedicated to just managing our data and partnerships.
“The overwhelming effect is that everybody wants the same thing. They all want to be across platforms, they all want to be able to plan that way and they all want to be able to measure that way.”
This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>So says one veteran media buyer who now helps enable the opportunity for peers through one of the major digital platforms.
“As someone who worked at media agencies for my whole career, primarily as a TV buyer,
what’s been remarkable and transformative is how the way TV is planned and bought and sold is really changing,” says Adobe Advertising Cloud GM Todd Gordon in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Right now, we’re at a tipping point when it comes to data-driven TV. You see major players increasingly making investment … NBCU’s announcement leading up to the upfront that they were going to do $1 billion sales …”
The last few years has been marked by a lot of talk about the opportunity – specifically, for brands and their buyers to bring either their own customer datasets or third-party datasets to the table when constructing TV ad buys.
But, in the last year in particular, the talking has stopped. Turner, Viacom and Fox announced OpenAP, their gateway to help buyers do just that. And NBUx launched NBCUx to do the same.
“The last few months, we’re really starting to see that come to fruition,” adds Gordon, who held positions at MediaCom and Magna Global before joining TubeMogul and then Adobe, via its acquisition of the video platform.
But Gordon also recognizes advertisers have a growing demand for clearer understanding on how their budgets are spent in complex digital systems.
“We think it’s critical to enable third-party auditing,” he says. “For everyone involved in the ecosystem … the greater transparency that is offered, the greater opportunity for us to move the business forward.”
]]>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.
]]>“That’s really exciting because we’ve been investing in our data capabilities and our audience platforms for a couple of years now and we’re ready to put our money where our mouth is,” Colella explains in an interview at the recent Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.
In the past, NBCU’s Audience Targeting Platform was available only during the Upfront period, while its NBCUx programmatic linear product was limited to buys in the scatter market. “Now that we’re seeing the great results that we’re getting and we’ve invested in the ability to scale these, we’re turning all of our data products always on,” Colella says.
Part of the momentum comes from advertisers, which are increasingly investing in their own data infrastructures to enhance TV audience targeting. NBCU has a unique position in that advertisers can use their own data and demand-side platforms to buy programmatically on NBCU’s platform, according to Colella.
“At this point in time we know who is consuming the content,” she says. “The value proposition is really to speak to consumers individually and make sure we’re providing the best return on ad spend for our advertisers.”
Given its plethora of properties—ranging from entertainment to sports, news to Hispanic brands—NBCU has no shortage of insights into its more than 100 million unique visitors.
“We know a lot about our consumers, whether it’s what platform are they consuming our content, when are they booking golf games with our properties like Golf Now, what movies are they watching on Fandango and when are they going to the theatre,” Colella says.
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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