In a first-of-its-kind integration, the deep partnership will enable utilisation of both person-level and household-level IDs from dentsu’s M1 platform and consumer data products, as well as those of its advertisers, to directly integrate into NBCUnified’s identity platform. This partnership allows for privacy-compliant matches with NBCU’s database of NBCU IDs, which in its initial release will comprise 150 million person-level IDs tied to 80 million households.

dentsu and its media agency brands will now—for the first time ever—be able to utilise its M1 platform on behalf of clients to match audiences using NBCUnified Consumer Match, and leverage NBCUniversal’s first-party knowledge of its consumers—through NBCUnified Audiences—to develop greater insights and more in-depth, higher-performing custom audiences for targeting across premium NBCU TV, video and display inventory. dentsu clients will also benefit from advanced analytics and measurement capabilities enabled by NBCU and dentsu clean room environments.

Cara Lewis, Chief Investment Officer at dentsu Media US added: “This first of its kind partnership with NBCU delivers an innovative addressability solution in the traditional marketplace that can be activated on right away. Bringing together IDs and data from dentsu’s M1 platform, our clients, and NBCU will enable us to uncover more resonant audiences for our clients, fuelling more effective media purchases that are fully transactable.”

Launched in January, NBCUnified was created to be fully interoperable, providing marketers a modern-day, privacy-minded solution to connect data spines ranging from agencies, third-party technology platforms, industry-wide initiatives, consortiums, and NBCUniversal’s clean rooms.

“Identity is increasingly becoming the new currency for the advanced television and digital video industry,” declares John Lee, Chief Data Officer, NBCUniversal. “With this partnership, NBCUniversal and dentsu are taking a leadership position in accelerating our joint ability to allow clients to transact on identity and first-party data across our premium offerings at a level of scale and transparency never before possible.

“This presents our joint clients with a path forward to move away from black-box, panel-based systems to one where our joint identity pool of over 100 million households becomes the currency.”

NBCUniversal is showcasing its capabilities and partnerships across data, technology, and measurement at its developer conference, One22, today. Watch out for news from that later this week.

The conversation began with a reflection on how the pandemic affected brands and the advertising trade. Patel emphasised the deficit of initial insight which could help brands navigate uncharted territory. He said: “I think the pandemic for many clients was tough, and rightly so. You didn’t know whether to stick or twist. There was little to no insight into how you deal with spending during a crisis.” Freedman highlighted the difficulties facing certain brands, when greater ad spend could not translate into increased sales in the short-term. Automotive manufacturers, for example, faced the dilemma of needing to maintain their brand, but simultaneously, retailers were closed, customers could not test-drive vehicles, and consequently, ad spend would have little effect on car sales. She posed an important question: what do marketers do when they can’t simply spend in order to sell product?

Happily, the plummeting of ad spend appeared to have been a short-term phenomenon. Grimmer referenced the recent WARC report that showed strong recovery for the UK ad trade, with spending on advertising reaching £7.7B in Q2 2021 – an increase of 86.5% from the previous year. He asked the panelists what factors they believed drove this remarkable bounce back. Nasr said that, while spending on Twitter by media buyers in Q2 2020 took a nosedive, the recovery was much quicker than he had anticipated.

One reason for this was brands’ greater access to information, insight, data and established econometric tools. This gave advertisers more confidence to spend, as well as time to test and experiment with advertising strategies in new market conditions. Another factor was the trade’s dawning realisation that there did not appear to be an end to the pandemic in sight, and no one was sure when the global economy would return to a state of normality.

Patel echoed this point, speculating that a greater number of companies understood that constricting their marketing budgets would have long-term detrimental effects on brand health. In the case of Sky Broadband, he said, “We haven’t been on brand for a year, so we knew if we continued, it would be a big problem.” Freedman recalled how the “fear of silence” became felt acutely not only by marketers, but the C-suite, who recognised that while savings could be achieved easily by cutting ad spend, the performance of their brands in the long term might be endangered.

Aside from the fear of silence, Patel explained that ad spend increased partly because the media cash that brands would have usually spent, but had saved instead, was released into the market as the pandemic progressed, and media buyers had access to lower entry points. He also praised marketing teams for building the case that ad spend during a crisis, when other brands are more reluctant to invest, gives initiative-taking brands a disproportionate share of voice in the market.

The view that advertising is an investment and not a cost was perhaps put most emphatically by Stacey, especially in the case of brands who are not only attempting to secure market share, but also to create a market from scratch. She said, “We should be arguing with FDs [Finance Directors] that the amount of money spent on advertising launch should be discounted over a certain amount of years like any CapEx. That’s a job for all of us.”

In October  last year, Nielsen – a data and market measurement firm – released a report estimating that, on average, it takes companies three to five years to recover equity lost because of halted advertising, and long-term revenue can drop 2% for every quarter a brand continues to stay silent.