Stepping up its digital advertising game against Facebook and other platforms, NBCUniversal is rolling out a self-serve way to buy ads in some of its top shows. Target will be the first to bypass NBCU’s sales structure and place ads directly via an application programming interface to target audiences based on the retailer’s consumer data.
“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.
