SAN FRANCISCO – Offering marketers mass reach is what television’s always been about. But in this age of advanced TV, it’s becoming more about “mass, targeted reach,” according to Mike Rosen.
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.
