NBCUniversal expands data capabilities with new first-party identity platform

NBCUniversal is expanding its data capabilities by combining insights from the media giant's portfolio into a single database that marketers can use to match their own first-party data to better reach and target audiences. Behind the rankings: Ad Age World's Largest Advertisers 2021 Announced at CES today, NBCUnified will be a component of the company’s One Platform audience-centric campaign tool and represents a “major system upgrade” to the first-party data capabilities that NBCU can lend to advertisers of all shapes and sizes, said John Lee, chief data officer, advertising and partnerships, NBCUniversal. “The goal of NBCUnified is to bring a sort of leapfrogged or industry-leading addressability capability within the One Platform,” said Lee, noting that the tool will “better enable advertisers and agencies to bring their first- and third-party data to the table.” With the ongoing shift away from cookies and other third-party ad identifiers, advertisers have been investing heavily in their own data collection, which they’ll now be able to utilize with NBCUnified and its more than 150 million individual consumer-level data points. It’s an important sticking point for advertisers that publishers have been keen to build into their newest offers, including companies like Samsung, which touted the ability for brands to bring their own first-party data to the table when it released a similar tool for smart TV-based campaigns last month. See the latest news from CES here. The company’s database—which it hopes to scale to more than 200 million unique data points by 2023—represents a hoard of information collected from a range of sources, from consumers who book stays at NBCUniversal’s theme parks to those who’ve subscribed to emails from the company to those who have purchased movie tickets via Fandango. “That 150 million people is expressed in an ID now … in a way that makes it very easy for advertisers and agencies to build audiences sort of natively off that data, or match their data to our IDs in our universe with a high match rate and a lot of confidence,” added Lee, who joined the company in July after more than a decade at data management company Merkle. The framework for NBCUnified is based on three core components: NBCU ID, which was developed to bring together NBCUniversal’s first-party audience data across all of its networks, apps, streaming services and other platforms that crafts a profile of consumers under a single, deterministic ID that also takes account for privacy; its data marketplace, which aggregates those data points into niche consumer groups that can be as granular as individuals who’ve watched a certain episode of a TV show, to larger demographics advertisers might like to reach, such as World Cup superfans or sitcom binge-watchers; and partnership integrations, which will allow marketers who sign onto NBCUnified for a campaign to access data spines from ad agencies, measurement consortiums, third-party technology platforms, NBCU’s own data “clean rooms” where sensitive personal data is anonymized, and more. Lee said with NBCUnified the company is looking to compete with the likes of Amazon, which he notes is the clear entertainment leader in first-party, data-based advertising. Lee declined to name specific advertisers that have been in discussions to utilize NBCUnified for their campaigns, though he did confirm that the company has seen “strong interest” from brands in the automotive, e-commerce and quick service restaurant categories. See Ad Age's 2021 Year in Review here.

NBCUniversal expands data capabilities with new first-party identity platform

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