The company had already streamlined its considerable ad sales offering as ertising/oneplatform/.
Now NBCUniversal is consolidating the under-the-hood data that powers it all.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Lee, Chief Data Officer, NBCUniversal, details the company’s newly-launched data platform, dubbed “NBCUnified”.
Data difference
The new NBCUnified platform comprises NBCU ID, Data Marketplace and Partner Integrations.
Whilst NBCUniversal has had a data offering for some time, Lee, who joined in July after a lengthy stint at Dentsu/Merkle, says Unified is a “big leap forward” in two respects:
1. Reduced reliance
“Our new ID graph is 100% based off of first-party data and first-party interactions that we have with our consumers only,” Lee says. “We’re removing any dependency we had on other types of signals.”
2. Total audience signals
“We are releasing, for the first time, a catalog of really significant first-party data – not just who the consumer is, but how they interact with our content, with our consumer experiences, all the way down at a very granular level, down to a individual programme or title, down to the sort of web and app content that they’re consuming, all the way to our theme parks, our e-commerce experience, et cetera.”
Trending up
Across the media business, those two trends are intersecting as the Venn diagram everyone is chasing – amassing opted-in first-party customer data and actioning it across a multitude of devices and services.
NBCUniversal will hope its stance as both a programmer and, through Comcast, a distributor, will give it a leg-up in that regard.
And the footprint is considerable.
Lee says Unified will start out with hundreds of customer attributes attached to 150+ million US IDs, evolving to 200+ million and thousands of attributes.
Scale for sale
“It’s going to be unlocking addressability and advanced audience targeting across not just our digital and streaming properties, but crossing over into linear,” he says.
“Everything that the advertiser can touch and buy from NBCU will be accessible and addressable through this new platform at really big scale.
“This new ID graph and all of this data allows for far more advanced targets to be created and to be scored and indexed against our linear offerings, as well as our digital offerings.”