• Comcast-owned NBCUniversal announces new One Platform to drive monetisation 
  • Expanded suite of tools has been designed with the aim to enable advertisers to reach a variety of audiences 
  • The company confirmed it is making significant capital investments in new technology

Comcast NBCU smartphone

One Platform: Unveiled by Comcast-owned NBCUniversal ahead of upfront season

NBCUniversal is doubling down on the future of monetisation for advertisers, marketers and consumers, releasing new technology solutions and an all-audience transaction model. 

The company is looking to reinvent how it transacts in the marketplace “from proprietary technology capabilities to best-in-class partnerships”. NBCUniversal has announced the new One Platform ahead of the 2020-2021 upfront season.

The expanded suite of tools has been designed with the aim of enabling advertisers to reach a variety of audiences with ease across its slate of video assets on big and small screens.

NBCUniversal chairman advertising and partnerships Linda Yaccarino said: “One Platform represents the transformation of our business and our roadmap for the future of advertising.

“We’re combining storytelling with scale, technology with trust, and innovation with insight—all in service of our viewers and our partners.”

One Platform will be driven by every impression to be data-informed with new optimisation and targeting solutions which are now available across all screens.

Executives said NBCU will continue to push forward to help advertisers hit their KPIs and create a “real impact” for businesses.

“With new planning and delivery systems, buying and trafficking linear and digital buys becomes as simple as turning on the TV.”

One Platform was first announced at CES in January this year.

Viacom has an optimisation program called Vantage and AT&T’s subsidiary Xandr is working to bridge the telco’s assets with Turner and the rest of WarnerMedia. This new platform from NBCU aims to establish a new industry standard for buying and selling premium video giving marketers four ways to transact.

Investing in future technology
The company announced it is making significant capital investments in new technology capabilities that deliver flexibility, efficiency, and effectiveness to marketers and better ad experience for consumers.

Underpinning NBCUniversal’s new all-audience transaction model for the upcoming upfront season is a combination of both proprietary technology development and best-in-class partnerships across several key areas.

These include optimisation, planning and delivery and measurement.

On optimisation, NBCU confirmed it is expanding its AdSmart suite of advanced advertising products, building on its proprietary audience graph, linear audience optimiser and programmatic linear API.

The company is now expanding its linear optimisation solution to include Nielsen demo target audiences and leveraging market-leading technology and data science from 4C Insights to introduce a first-to-market cross-platform optimizer for unduplicated audience reach across linear and digital.

In a conference call which followed the announcement, Yaccarino said NBCU is in talks with advertisers about how to implement its plan ahead of the upfront season.

She added that its upcoming streaming service Peacock already has a set of pre-launch advertising partners so won’t be part of One Platform for the current upfront, but certainly will be for the next one. All other inventory across NBCU will be available.

“While I don’t have a crystal ball for the upfront, I will say that the enthusiasm in the marketplace has been overwhelming. The team is prepared to move at 100% capacity for One Platform,” Yaccarino said in a report from Deadline.