LONDON – A year ago, NBCUniversal brought together a cross section of advertising and media executives in New York to confront industry “inertia.” Its own remedies represent a “very strategic cadence” that includes its growing use of contextual ad offerings, says Linda Yaccarino.
Core pillars of that cadence are measurement, commercial innovation and technology, The Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent EGTA Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018.
The goal behind NBCU’s State of the Industry Forum could be boiled down to one element, according to Yaccarino. “Our behavior, processes, do not reflect consumer behavior as they exist today.”
She uses the word “fatigued” to describe the sentiment that existed within NBCU because the company was certain that “advertising is likely to change more in the next five years than it’s changed in the last fifty. We needed a reset.”
On the measurement side, Yaccarino says nothing has changed in more than a decade. “Think about consumer behavior and we could use measurement just as one example. The iPad didn’t even exist.”
Last April, NBCU developed the all-screen measurement currency called CFlight because “we couldn’t wait any more so we decided we’ve got to do it ourselves.” CFlight measures all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions on every platform, as Advertising Age reports.
“The good news is, other companies are starting to adopt that CFlight measurement,” Yaccarino adds.
NBCU has been promoting its contextual intelligence platform, which matches specific ads to specific programming, another step toward commercial innovation. “We’re able to marry the content that is contextually connected to our advertisers’ commercials. It’s the first scaled tool that we’re able to offer the advertisers.”
Asked about her expectations for CES 2019, Yaccarino says her activity will include giving clients “a performance report” that encompasses things like CFlight and PRIME PODs, which reduced clutter by 20%. “Show them that our hunch was right and it’s working, and it’s working really well.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
