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NBCUniversal, Fox, Turner and Viacom reached a multi-year agreement to work together to provide advertisers with advanced tools to more precisely target television audiences.
Todays partnership, announced ahead of the television Upfront ad buying season, will marry NBCs sophisticated Audience Studio data with Open AP, a platform that allows advertisers to create targeting parameters and reach the same audience across television networks.
“We have spent the last four years developing the industrys best tools to empower advertisers to target their marketing campaigns to desired audiences,” said Krishan Bhatia, NBCUniversals executive vice president of business operations at strategy. “Were excited to unleash the capabilities of our Audience Studio for the rest of the industry.”
Television networks have been investing in precision ad targeting and automation to compete with their digital rivals. But ad buyers, who have been excited about the potential of moving beyond buying broad demographics, have been frustrated because each network tends to use its own ad products and sources of data.
That means advertisers have to re-invent the wheel if they want to reach the same group — say, affluent Walmart shoppers, or new parents shopping for diapers — across different TV networks.
OpenAP, a joint initiative of Fox, Turner and Viacom, worked to standardize and streamline the process. Advertisers can identify the viewers they wish to target, drawing from Nielsen and comScore data, and reach the same audience segment across their networks. The results are verified through an independent third party, Accenture.
NBCUniversal said it will license its Audience Graph proprietary data — which includes set top box data from Comcast, NBCUs parent company — to OpenAP, to further refine audience targeting.
These new capabilities will allow marketers to create audience segments and buy national television campaigns across each companys portfolio, which, taken together, comprise 50% of the total TV inventory across broadcast and cable.
Eventually, the partners hope to work together on new platforms for automated ad buying, advanced ad formats and cross-platform measurement.
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