NBCUniversal Creates Cookie-Free, First-Party Identity Platform for Marketers

As marketers are looking to navigate a world without cookies and device IDs, NBCUniversal is creating a first-party roadmap for them. The company is rolling out NBCUnified, its new first-party consumer data and identity platform for marketers. The platform, due to debut in Q2, incorporates NBCUniversal’s network of consumer touchpoints across its entire portfolio into a scaled data offering for marketers within its One Platform ad offering. “Advertisers will have a scaled audience that they can match to, and deliver, activate and measure against, that is cookie-free,” said John Lee, chief data officer, NBCUniversal advertising and partnerships. NBCUnified “powers the ability to bring one audience that can be planned, activated and measured at an individual ID level, using first-party data across linear, CTVs/OTT and digital.” NBCUnified is comprised of three components: NBCU ID, the data clean room and proprietary identifier that NBCUniversal introduced last March; a data marketplace that combines third-party data providers with thousands of consumer behavior attributes; and partner integrations with industry consortiums. NBCUniversal Wants to Be a Technology Company Too NBCU ID currently has 150 million unique individual IDs and 80 million household IDs, drawn from NBCUniversal’s interactions with consumers. The company projects that it will exceed 200 million unique IDs by the end of 2022. The data marketplace incorporates third-party licensed data providers (which NBCUniversal has declined to name), alongside thousands of consumer behavior attributes related to how people consume and interact with its news, sports, movie, entertainment and theme park offerings. “We’re going to be offering our first-party data up at huge scale for the first time,” said Lee, which will “create usable attributes that are going to be available at that individual household level.” The partner integrations component of NBCUnified includes the company’s own proprietary clean rooms as well as data from industry consortiums like OpenAP. Agencies will be able to combine NBCU’s first-party data with their own data sets to create new segments. “This is going to enable advertisers to match once, create an audience once and have a very seamless way of planning and activating across all of our inventory sources without having to use multiple entry points and tools,” said Lee. "NBCUnified is designed to give all marketers—from local businesses to DTC companies to big brands—a complete picture of their existing and potential customers and the advertising experiences that move them to action. Because when marketers use data to understand more about who they’re reaching, they can more effectively determine how, and with what message, to reach them," Krishan Bhatia, president and chief business officer, global advertising and partnerships, NBCUniversal, wrote in a new blog post about NBCUnified. This is the first offering from NBCUniversal’s enterprise data organization, which is headed up by Lee. NBCUnified will also support NBCU’s new measurement tools, as it will provide the person-level, household identity and data spine underpinning those new measurement metrics. “Our strategy is not to be a walled garden, but to be a first-party data platform that is privacy first, but also facilitates the cross-platform optimization that advertisers seek,” said Lee. While most transactions will take place through a clean room, “unlike true walled gardens, we are not preventing the use of our data for cross-platform reach and frequency, and measurement use cases.” NBCUnified will continue to grow and scale following its Q2 launch, because initially, “we're probably harvesting about half or less of the total first-party identity and data signal that exists within NBCU,” said Lee. “It's just going to take us time tactically to comb through all of that data, rationalize it and productize it.” Are Data Clean Rooms the Future of Attribution?