MIAMI – What used to be transactional relationships based on dayparts and demographics in the television business is quickly evolving into “more of a data relationship,” according to NBCUniversal’s EVP of Portfolio Sales, Mike Rosen.
“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.
