NBCUniversal hosted its second annual local-to-global developer conference, One22, this week, and announced significant new partner integrations plus updates to the company’s One Platform technology stack. Some of the headlines were:
- NBCUniversal is fully enabling programmatic buying on Peacock and enabling programmatic guaranteed activation of NBCUnified audiences.
- The broadcaster is scaling cross-platform activation with iSpot and cross-publisher activation with OpenAP.
- The ad-funded content giant is driving industry-wide workflow efficiencies with automated cross-platform RFPs in partnership with Mediaocean and Salesforce.
- New advertising products are coming soon that enable brands to pick the right creative for the right moment and boost sequential storytelling to defined audiences.
Full programmatic enablement on Peacock
After enabling programmatic guaranteed access to Peacock on-demand inventory in October 2021, NBCUniversal is now fully enabling Peacock programmatic buying. Consistent with its DSP-agnostic approach, NBCUniversal will launch new Peacock DSP integrations with Adobe, Amazon, Amobee, Beeswax, Samsung DSP, Viant and Xandr, among others. NBCUniversal will also make its NBCUnified audience segments available for activation through programmatic guaranteed buys as well as direct buys.
Scaled cross-platform activation with iSpot and OpenAP
Starting this year, marketers will be able to activate cross-platform advanced audience media buys using iSpot viewership, a trusted data source already adopted by leading advertisers and agencies. NBCUniversal is also integrating its NBCUnified first-party data and identity platform with OpenAP’s OpenID to make it even easier for buyers to activate cross-platform advanced audience campaigns across the entire premium media ecosystem.
Upon campaign completion, marketers will receive aggregated cross-platform, cross-publisher de-duplicated reach and frequency through OpenAP’s XPm framework.
Automated cross-platform RFPs to streamline workflows
NBCUniversal is working with Salesforce and Mediaocean to offer the industry a new way to create, manage and automate converged RFPs across linear and digital. “Available for all agencies and publishers to use later this year, this added layer of automation to One Platform will streamline the day-to-day workflows for planners and buyers,” NBCUniversal explains.
Specifically, Mediaocean’s Prisma and Salesforce’s Media Cloud are coming together, thanks to NBCU’s APIs, to transform how RFPs are processed. Agencies will now be able to submit a single RFP across linear and digital, which will be automatically added into NBCUniversal’s proposal pipeline. Benefits are improved response times and faster, more efficient fulfilment.
Picking the right creative for the right moment – new ad format
At One22 NBCUniversal announced ‘The Harmonizer’ – a tool that will debut in April on Peacock and enable marketers to identify which ad creative to serve audiences based on consumer signals. Those signals could be a viewer’s tenure on Peacock, a specific behaviour like binge watching, or content genre.
“The Harmonizer ensures that brands are aligned and in-tune with consumers’ expectations,” NBCUniversal says. “It will help drive ongoing consideration of brands for consumers at the right moment, based on their specific behaviour.”
Taking viewers through the awareness-to-purchase funnel
Another new ad product, coming within the next couple of months, is Sequential Storytelling. This leverages a specific, targeted audience segment to tell a brand’s story over time and take audiences on a journey through the marketing funnel. “Marketers can pique consumers’ interest on one channel, deepen their engagement in a second installment to drive consideration, and eventually inspire them to purchase,” NBCUniversal says.
Sequential Storytelling will leverage audience segments developed using NBCUnified’s first-party data and make use of the company’s large digital video ecosystem.
Bringing interactive, commerce-enabled experiences to audiences
NBCUniversal Checkout is going to be integrated into Comcast’s entertainment platforms. A Comcast customer could see a must-have product within NBCUniversal programming and simply say, “Shop” into their Xfinity remote control and complete their purchase seamlessly with NBCUniversal Checkout. NBCUniversal Checkout has already been deployed across NBCUniversal’s One Platform and the resulting shoppable activations have consistently proven twice as effective as traditional ads, the company reports.
