SANTA BARBARA, CA – NBCU has brought audience optimization technology in-house, developing its own algorithms and making it more responsive to market demands, says Denise Colella. NBCU had been using market-available software for its optimization activity, the company’s SVP, Advanced Advertising Products & Strategy, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.
“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.
