The following article provides highlights from an interview between Krishan Bhatia, NBCUniversal’s president and Chief Business Officer, and Ari Paparo, founder and CEO of Marketecture Media. Register for free to watch more of the discussion and learn how reimagined targeting is transforming the ways brands go to TV.

As an increasingly diverse set of marketers bring their campaigns to TV and CTV, each with unique goals and objectives, channel- and platform-agnostic partners have become essential to advertiser success.

Responding to the evolving TV environment, NBCU has positioned itself as an activation-agnostic solution — its platform is tailored to accommodate numerous use cases across linear and connected channels.

NBCUniversal’s president and Chief Business Officer, Krishan Bhatia, recently spoke to Ari Paparo, the founder and CEO of Marketecture Media; they discussed NBCU’s One Platform and how the company is investing in product development and not just media sales.

How NBCU created an ad tech platform for audience building, optimization and full-funnel measurement

NBCU’s platform emerged in response to advertisers’ search for solutions in an increasingly fragmented video landscape — one in which people were engaging with brands through linear TV, streaming, social media and other video-first avenues. In response, Bhatia’s team sought to create an automated, data-enabled and measurable way for marketers to reach consumers in all those places.

“It’s an inherently complex problem to solve,” Bhatia said in the interview. “So, we’ve been investing in this space for roughly six to seven years now in earnest, building a foundational layer and then adding increasingly advanced feature functionalities and capabilities on top of that.”

The result is NBCU, which reaches some 230 million consumers within the U.S. each month across distribution points. Bhatia highlighted a specific case in point.

“‘How do I reach more targeted audiences in linear TV where I can’t actually serve addressable ads because it’s largely still a broadcast model?’” he said. “Generally, it’s called data-driven linear.

“Our product, as a part of One Platform, is called AdSmart, and it’s a way for you as a marketer to establish a target audience that’s based on criteria and attributes that either you bring or CRM data or that we help define through our first-party data and potentially third-party datasets,” Bhatia continued. “We agree on a target segment, and we then find those audiences across all of our touchpoints, both on linear and then, if you want to extend that to streaming or digital platforms.”

Next, Bhatia said, the NBCU team works with the advertiser to build an optimized plan, which reaches the target audience with a significantly higher reach because it is designed to over-index audiences based on the networks and individual properties they’re watching.

From there, the plan is optimized on a pre- and mid-flight basis, so the advertisers are delivered maximum reach at equal frequency. The NBCU team measures everything on the back end with a supply of attribution partners according to the advertiser’s vertical.

“If you transition from the consumer …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron