Consumers are dividing their screentime among a wider variety of devices, challenging marketers to get a unified view of their target audiences. Media and entertainment giant NBCUniversal is working to provide those insights by aggregating data from its different businesses and their touchpoints with millions of consumers.
“We need to consolidate in a privacy-first, transparent way our understanding of who that consumer is across all of those businesses,” John Lee, chief data officer of NBCUniversal Media, said in this Beet.TV video hosted by consultant Jon Watts. “Jeff Shell, our CEO, wants to be able to create a singular experience for that consumer that is data-driven….Our advertisers are absolutely interested in getting more insights on their consumers – that first-party data at scale like that is so scarce.”
NBCUniversal’s operations not only include its television networks and film studios, but also amusement parks, ecommerce sites and video streaming service Peacock. To combine its data from engagements with 230 million adults each month, the company last month introduced NBCUnified as a first-party data platform.
“We’re not relying on cookies and third-party device signals and so forth,” Lee said. “We’re making that open to our advertisers and to our partners to use interoperably.”
Marketers can use the database to match with their own first-party customer data in a clean room that prevents the sharing of personally identifiable information (PII) about consumers. Clean rooms are useful for audience targeting and overlap analysis, ad campaign measurement and media attribution.
“The future … is first-party-rich data owners working in a peer-to-peer sort of networking manner, making their data interoperable through privacy-safe means like the clean room,” Lee said.
That future will include addressable advertising on linear television, which lets marketers reach different households with different commercials during the same shows. Brands also will shift their ad spending to streaming platforms that viewers watch on connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones.
“More of that spend will happen through the connected TV and the digital end of things – and with a household-level granularity standard,” Lee said. “Linear won’t be gone anytime soon, we all understand that, but that will tie together how we buy linear connected television — what I’ll call programmatic digital. Within this, digital video will all be united by a new identity standard.”
You are watching “Advertising Transformation: What’s Next for Converged TV and Video,” a Beet.TV Virtual Leadership Summit presented by Mediaocean. For more videos, please visit this page.
