SAN JUAN — If you are a national cable TV network these days, how do you go about crafting an ad sales pitch to big-brand clients?
For Davina Kent, it is increasingly about data.
Kent is the Comcast VP of advanced TV sales who, earlier this year, came on board at NCC Media – the cable sales group Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications – as VP of client partnerships.
Together with Nicolle Pangis, the GroupM exec who joined NCC as CEO, Kent has been transitioning NCC more toward consulting.
“We have kind of restructured the company and a big focus is on client partnerships,” she says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Our goal is really to transition the perception of NCC as a media vendor to a trusted strategic partner with brands directly.
“We really want to be sitting at the table with these large brands and innovating together and co-creating together on how best to navigate that.”
A big part of that is helping brands use data and a holistic view of their marketing efforts. Kent says NCC is trying to help advertisers figure out what they should be doing differently.
That means NCC, which is still staffing up at the senior level, is taking on a more proactive, advisory approach than previously.
“Not all clients are ready for this,” Kent says. “When we first kind of started branching out on the client partnerships and started talking to brands, they said, ‘Well, just give us your data and go away’.
“What we learned is they really don’t have the resources to really dive into that data and make sense of it. The data is only as good as what you can activate off of it.
“So what we’re finding is, we’re building a very large analytic practice, that partners with the client partnerships team where we’re actually sitting with the brands and their data teams and helping them kind of go through all of the data and really doing a clear needs analysis with them.”
NCC recently added NBC’s Marion Hargett, who helped that network sell ads during the last Summer Olympic Games, and Audience Partners’ Andy Addis, who assisted the roll-out of IP-matching technology, as senior vice presidents.
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.
