From its roots aggregating spot cable television buys for advertisers, NCC Media has learned how to \u201crationalize the irrational.\u201d This will certainly come in handy as it expands beyond linear TV into digital.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistorically, we were seen as just an ad rep organization and what we\u2019re trying to do is build adtech underneath it that supports it and drive operational efficiencies into that space,\u201d says NCC Media Chief Data Officer Bob Ivins. In this interview with Beet.TV, he discusses how NCC hopes to unify audience targeting transactions across TV distributors and shares his thoughts on viewer data and privacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that the cable operators have all operated in their own swim lanes,\u201d Ivins says. \u201cThey\u2019ve taken their subscriber files, they\u2019ve appended variables to it or attributes to it, they\u2019ve used that within their infrastructure to do zone-based addressability, but they\u2019ve all been kind of one-off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some operators are versed in video on demand and digital but there\u2019s no uniformity.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou end up with this bingo board of distributor and capabilities and there\u2019s no one line or one row that matches for everybody. What NCC is trying to do is we\u2019re trying to harmonize, standardize and federate those capabilities so that you can actually do one buy, one place and have national capabilities within an infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Consumer TV and digital data from NCC owners Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications forms the basis of a converged data set that NCC says will represent \u201cthe largest data set in television,\u201d as CEO Nicolle Pangis explains in this video interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ivins joined NCC<\/a> in July 2018, having played a pioneering role in the development of the data-driven advertising ecosystem for three decades. He held executive roles at comScore, Mindshare, Comcast, Yahoo and Nielsen.<\/p>\n Noting that \u201cwe rationalized the irrational going back in time,\u201d Ivins refers to a period when executing a local spot cable buy in a market like Philadelphia required transacting with anywhere from four to six operators.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was really hard to do an operation like that. NCC stepped in, they harmonized the process so you had one order, they distributed the execution, you had one set of affidavits that went back to the client,\u201d Ivins<\/a> says. \u201cWe\u2019re kind of doing the exact same thing, but now instead of in that environment we\u2019re doing it a new environment and hopefully we\u2019ll extend it to cross-platform.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked about data and privacy, Ivins believes the industry recognizes its responsibility in ingesting and understanding behavioral data. Given the head start that digital media companies have in advanced consumer targeting, \u201cI think it\u2019s now time for the TV industry to really take advantage of that.\u201d<\/p>\n