NBCU Courts Smaller, Performance-Focused Advertisers at One23 Ad-Tech Event

NBCUniversal is launching Peacock Ad Manager to all advertisers in 2023 in an effort to court small businesses and performance marketers, the publisher announced today at One23, its ad-tech-focused showcase for advertisers.

“We’re really democratizing access to television for performance marketing,” Krishan Bhatia, president and chief business officer for NBCU’s ad sales division, told Adweek.

Peacock Ad Manager is a hands-on-keyboard solution where marketers can specify how much they want to spend and the goals they’re trying to optimize for, without the complexities of manning a demand-side platform, said Ryan McConville, evp of advertising platforms and operations at NBCUniversal. The product is designed to be akin to Google and Facebook ad managers, the traditional domains for performance marketers, he added.

Powering the self-serve interface is performance-oriented ad-tech firm TVScientific. The ad manager, which will also come with a pixel to help performance marketers track watchers from ad to purchase, will be fully operational in the second half of the year and covers NBCU’s entire streaming portfolio, not only Peacock, McConville said. Peacock first announced an investment and partnership with TVScientific in April 2022, but only in 2023 will Peacock Ad Manager be available to all advertisers, a spokesperson said.

The tool could provide a boon to smaller advertisers who currently rely mostly on DSPs or aggregators like Roku and Amazon to buy NBCU inventory, said Gjisbert Pols, who helps mobile apps with their CTV strategy as director of connected TV and new channels at ad-tech firm Adjust.

“Mobile app marketers are not used to making direct deals,” Pols said, noting that TV is an increasingly attractive channel in light of the deprecation of mobile identifiers. “This is a great way to make NBCU inventory accessible for these kinds of advertisers.”

NBCU is capitalizing on long-tail advertisers’ diversification from social and search. NBCU has created an SMB Growth Team as part of its restructuring of its ad sales team announced last week. But they’re not the only streamer courting these clients. Hulu announced a self-service tool for small and medium businesses in July 2020. Plus, smaller advertisers with tighter budgets may question if going direct with one publisher provides adequate scale, Pols said.

“It’s a little bit inefficient for a DTC mobile app company,” Pols said. “If you want to run a TV ad you don’t want to be limited to NBCU. You want to run your ads across the board and you see what goes well and then you pick one [publisher to go direct with].”

NBCU’s McConville countered that NBCU’s content reaches more than 300 digital endpoints.

The ad manager is just one of a slew of new products NBCU is announcing at One23 to sway advertisers toward its full-funnel tech stack.

New offerings in targeting, measurement and ad format

In addition to offering products that widen its base of clients, NBCU wants advertisers to be able to get more out of its platform. To this end, NBCU is releasing a new targeting solution, which packages the company’s first-party data into fandom-based insights. The product’s first partnership is with GroupM’s Choreograph data platform.

These insights would help advertisers know that a Bravo Fan is also in the market for an electronic car, for example, enriching and refining the ability of advertisers to use contextual signals effectively.

“You want to buy your audience; you want to buy your content and our TV shows,” said NBCU chief data officer John Lee, describing the fandom-based insights as unlocking a third dimension for marketers. “What do we really know about this audience? Not just what are they casual watchers of, but what do they really care about?”

NBCU is also offering solutions to better measure the effectiveness of advertising outcomes, certifying 27 new measurement partners across categories like multitouch attribution and brand measurement, bringing NBCU’s total list of measurement partners to 38 (including partners previously certified).

The company is also partnering with market research firm MarketCast to create a new metric for advertisers called the content quality index, which evaluates exactly how premium a piece of content is.

As advertisers start thinking of video across platforms as a single category, from traditionally produced shows to social video, NBCU wants to differentiate its premium content from user-generated and hopes the industry adopts the metric broadly, said Kelly Abacarian, executive vice president of measurement and impact at NBCU.

NBCU is also offering new ad formats, including 2D signs and 3D product placement that can be inserted post-production and expanding two relatively new ad formats, Frame and Engagement ads, to Peacock’s live sports offerings.