Mark your calendar for Mediaweek, October 29-30 in New York City. We’ll unpack the biggest shifts shaping the future of media—from tv to retail media to tech—and how marketers can prep to stay ahead. Register with early-bird rates before sale ends!
NBCUniversal’s One Platform is looking to be a one-stop shop for targeted advertising.
Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week, NBCUniversal is unveiling One Platform Total Audience, which the company touts as its next step in cross-platform, audience-based advertising. With the offering, marketers can take advantage of NBCU’s AI-driven planning and activation tech, leveraging the company’s new investments in automation and data to provide deduplicated reach through a single buy across linear and streaming.
“We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars to get to the point where we sit today, which is finally to be able to have linear and digital on one media plan, and you’re able to look at it holistically,” Mark Marshall, chairman of NBCUniversal’s advertising and partnerships group, told Adweek. “We’re using machine learning and predictive analytics to make sure we’re delivering the right audience to the right advertisers.”
Looking to utilize interoperability across NBCU’s portfolio, the technology leverages the company’s first-party data, along with advertisers’ data sets, to better reach target consumers with scale and transparency.
The offering’s machine learning automates budget allocation across linear and streaming advertising for an optimized, targeted media mix. And Marshall said One Platform Total Audience, which is meant to be a complement to existing agency systems, gets granular, even accounting for things like genre, tone, emotion and other elements to add incremental reach and make media plans more effective.
“We’re laser-focused on the idea of making every marketer’s dollar work harder than their last dollar, and AI is going to help us do that,” Marshall said.
The company will also add programmatic guaranteed for media buys with One Platform Total Audience, as well as new buy-side automated order and workflow management.
Marshall calls the One Platform Total Audience offering a “game-changer,” and clients are already responding.
Despite advertising taking a dip in general last year amid economic headwinds and a changing TV marketplace, One Platform Total Audience has sold out across all major categories including tech, auto and retail for Q1 2024.
“The marketplace has been overwhelmingly positive about the early results in some of the testing that we’ve done,” Marshall said. “We’ve already seen a 25% increase in brand engagement by looking at it through total audience.”
As a result of the early success, the company will also expand access to One Platform Total Audience in Q2 2024.
Marshall told Adweek this is the most excited he’s been about a new offering in a decade, giving marketers the scale of the more than 226 million people that NBCU’s content reaches each month while adding precision and targeting to reach actual consumers rather than just traditional broad categories such as adults 18-49.
“Measurement is going to change this year. Nielsen is going to change. Cookies are going away. Everyone’s marketing plan is going to be thrown up in the air, including their media mix models,” Marshall said. “We’ve got to get smarter, and this allows us to do this and take advantage of this scale of NBCU.”
