SAN JUAN, PR– Consumer behavior is changing, even if just by virtue of access. In a keynote interview with Joanna O’Connell, vp and principal analyst at Forrester at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Dominick Vangeli, vp of advanced advertising products for NBCU, discussed some of the ways that his company is dealing with this change.
There are consumers that engage with ads and marketers and then consumers of the content itself. Vangeli explained that there’s a lot of change happening between different stakeholders, whether it’s with the client and the agency, the agency and the publisher, the publisher and the distributor, and so on.
“There’s a lot of pressure happening,” Vangeli said. “And that’s why right now it just makes so much sense for a pivot to happen in the marketplace where we finally break through. But with that is a lot of complications because there are so many business models and legacy models, multi-billion dollar business models that are in there, and everyone cares about only what’s on either side of them, but it’s an equation that needs to balance out.”
This will ultimately lead to some level of disruption and discomfort, and fragmentation is one part of that. TV viewership has increased over time, but a great percentage of that has transitioned to a non-live linear stream. Consumers don’t realize this fragmentation, they’re simply doing what is convenient, so it’s up to marketers to build around this complexity.
At NBCU, they’re dealing with this complexity in three different ways. They’re producing more content than ever before, they’re rethinking distribution, and they’re building technology that supports all of the fragmentation. For the latter, NBC is now introducing One Platform.
“We’re at this point where we’ve had these different strategies of bringing things together from a structural standpoint, but also technology in the advanced advertising space with our AdSmart portfolio,” Vangeli said. “And so the amalgamation of all of that has unveiled onePlatform where you can have one plan, one optimization, one view, one measurement, and it all comes together for an advertiser.”
Interoperability, or the ability of computer systems to exchange and make use of information, is what’s helping NBCU to be able to accomplish this.
“Everything we’ve been building around that and on top of that has all been with this philosophy that we believe that there needs to be an interoperable ecosystem for television.” Vangeli said. “We’re still TV, so we’re only as good as the collection of the TV partners we have around us. So if that’s the case, in order for this to truly scale for all of us to continue making transacting easier on television, we need to be able to be interoperable.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
