SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—So-called direct-to-consumer brands have disrupted many product and service categories, from creation to distribution. But when they need more scale they’re turning to television, a trend that prompted NBCUniversal to partner with the agency Giant Spoon.
Last month, the two companies launched Direct to Scale, whose core offerings are media strategy and making premium video advertising on linear TV and digital media more accessible to direct-to-consumer businesses, as Campaign reports.
In the Giant Spoon partnership “we are focused mainly on direct-to-consumer brands that they represent, but not only that, the opportunity is really for us to expand our roster of advertisers beyond the current more traditional legacy advertisers,” says Brian Norris, SVP, Audience Sales, NBCUniversal.
In this interview at last month’s Beet Retreat 2018, Norris talks about transitioning from traditional media currencies and embracing more outcomes-focused metrics. He explains how NBCU’s in-house Future of Advertising Group is focused on “changing how we interact with marketers in terms of making sure that ultimately, we’re providing the most ROI for them long term sustainable growth.”
That process starts with providing the best content for consumers that, in turn, produces better results and better environments. “We’re looking at currencies that measure impact and outcomes as opposed to traditional currencies, which ultimately we’re not able tie business results to traditional measurement currencies,” Norris says.
Having started in TV at Lifetime Television in 2003 before moving on to Viacom and then DISH Media Sales and Sling TV, Norris has a broad perspective of marketers’ evolving expectations.
“I suspect that many advertisers will have different KPI’s and it’s upon us to be as nimble as possible to be able to achieve those results for them.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
