NBCU’s Colella Explains The Partnership With Sky, Status Of OpenAP

The sky is the limit for global addressable television at NBCU given its joint advertising initiative with Sky, which NBCU parent Comcast purchased in the fall of 2018. “The exchange of best practices between the two is really going to help us both,” says Denise Colella, SVP of Advanced Advertising at NBCU.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Colella talks about working with Sky, which is 100% addressable, and the value of the OpenAP audience-targeting consortium in the wake of the departure of Warner Media.

NBCU recently renamed Audience Studio, its in-house, audience-targeting offerings, to AdSmart, which is the moniker Sky has used, as Reuters reports. NBCU is sending a team to Europe next month to discuss how to service brands together on a global basis, according to Colella.

“We understand that data’s different and vendors are different and systems are different. But many times, a brand is looking to create a global marketing campaign” based on a common audience target or “different audiences for different locales.”

Given NBCU’s presence in the U.S. and Sky’s in the U.K., Italy and Germany, advertisers “can put a greater footprint on their campaign,” she says.

In the United States, the first attribute of OpenAP is simplification, according to Colella. “Rather than clients going ahead and creating an audience target once for us, once for Fox, once for Viacom, they’re able to create that target audience once and then spread it amongst the publishers.”

Other benefits include scale and unified workflow. “Every publisher that’s in the consortium will offer that same workflow, so it will be easier for our agencies and for our brands.” OpenAP is about to release version #2 of its open workflow. “What it does do is it allows people to transact in the same way. What it doesn’t do is determine spend between the publishers, because of course everyone has their own secret sauce,” Colella says.

Lastly, she adds about OpenAP, “We really try to pool the advanced advertising spend to come up with better solutions for our agencies.”

NBCU’s own identity graph was made available to OpenAP last summer “and we’ll be implementing that later this year.”

Asked about the upcoming Cannes Lions gathering, Colella says that while advanced audience targeting is important, her main focus will be on content.

“We have both talent in front of the camera and behind the camera. Everything from storytelling to video to advertising and we want to bring that to the forefront.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.