NBCUniversal Partners With Adobe for Addressable Ad Sales

For decades, Mike Rosen has been in the "spray and pray" business, and he's not happy about that. Rosen, now the executive vice president for advanced advertising and platform sales at NBCUniversal, says that for much of his sales career he sold simple demographics to buyers, often only broadly meeting their needs. While media planners used advanced data to define target customers, that information was dumbed down in the buying process since simple demo targeting was all NBCU could deliver.

But those days are over now that NBCU offers addressable TV buying. With a base list of 22 million Comcast homes, the company is able to offer buyers addressable sales at scale. It pulls in consumer data from the company's theme parks, the Fandango movie service (which it owns), its GolfNow tee time app, and a partnership with Apple News that reaches 60 million consumers each month. When all that is merged with audience data from Adobe and other clients NBCUniversal offers a detailed view of consumers that goes far beyond what shows they watch.

Speaking at the Adobe Summit, currently taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, Rosen announced that NBCU has added Adobe Advertising Cloud TV to its self-service programmatic Audience Studio. When NBCU first offered addressable advertising it met with clients and did the work for them of finding target homes. It's self-service platform lets buyers do the job themselves, getting placement on almost any NBCU inventory (with the exception of the Olympics and a few other major events) from their computers.

"You shine a light on our inventory, it's going to stand up really well," Rosen said, expressing confidence that buyers will be impressed by the quality of the NBC portfolio.

Buyers have automated access to NBCU linear TV avails through multiple video DSPs such as Adobe Advertising Cloud. Together, they're building more sophisticated tools for advertisers and transforming how media is bought and sold. Rosen wants to take the best of digital sales and avoid problem areas like viewability and ad fraud to create an effective targeting system.

"How do we change what was a relatively simple marketing area that did one thing well… and start to get much smarter at that?" Rosen asked. The answer starts with having a real conversation about how both sides can use data, and leads to premium broadcast inventory sales with much stronger results.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net