How NBC’s News Group is shaping NBCUniversal’s commerce bets
By Max Willens
NBCUniversal is getting into the holiday shopping season early.
Yesterday, “America’s Big Deal,” a reality competition show where entrepreneurs compete for deals with retailers by trying to get viewers to buy their products while each episode airs, premiered on USA Network. Also this week, NBCU’s streaming service, Peacock, released the first of two hour-long shoppable streaming specials it will release this year, hosted by longtime Today Show correspondent Jill Martin. And one week earlier, NBC unveiled a rebooted version of NBC Select, a commerce content brand distributed through both CNBC and NBC News’s websites.
These content bets are part of a much larger investment NBCU is making in commerce, one driven, to an extent, by advertisers’ swelling interest in performance marketing and e-commerce. But they are also being built on a foundation that was poured a few years ago by a small digital team at The Today Show, which has steadily expanded into a diversified operation that publishes affiliate commerce across multiple NBC brands, operates a deals business where NBC sells items directly to its audience via native check-out, as well as a growing brand partnerships team.
It recently added shoppable video content to that mix too, via the launch of “Shop Today with Jill Martin,” a monthly shoppable show available on Peacock, as well as recurring weekly shoppable segments, “Shop All day” it airs on Today All Day, a 24-hour streaming channel also available on Peacock.
As was the case for many publishers, the pandemic-driven surge in e-commerce activity was good for business; NBC’s commerce revenues are on pace to grow 80% year over year in 2021, a company spokesperson said. That growth comfortably surpasses the 50% year-over-year growth it saw in 2020; since it launched in 2017, NBC’s commerce business has had average compound annual growth of 110%, the spokesperson said. The company would not share hard numbers.
“In 2020, we were focused on two areas: streaming and commerce,” said Ashley Parrish, svp of commerce for NBC News Group. “In 2021 the focus has been on combining those.”
Even though NBC News has about a decade of experience with commerce-focused content — a recurring on-air segment called “Steals and Deals” first appeared on the Today Show in 2011 — it didn’t begin really investing in its affiliate commerce operation until 2017, when it began hiring editors.
Today, NBC News Digital’s commerce team has “around 50” full-time employees, Parrish said, with plans to add more in 2022 as it ramps up affiliate and deals content, both for its existing commerce brands and elsewhere in NBCU’s portfolio. For example, Comcast Xfinity will launch a rewards program in 2022, and Parrish’s team will be responsible for securing the exclusive offers that Xfinity will offer to customers.
It will also be trying to figure out just how much appetite there is for shoppable video content, a question both publishers and platforms are trying to answer. While NBCU News Group has been able to drive meaningful audience …read more
Source:: Digiday