NBCUniversal and Blockgraph Partner to Optimize First-Party Data Activation

NBCUniversal and Blockgraph are looking to bring more efficiency and capabilities to the TV advertising landscape.

Today, NBCU and the privacy-focused tech and data company announced a new partnership to optimize first-party data activation for the media and entertainment industry. The collaboration looks to enhance the use of first-party data in marketing campaigns across One Platform, driving improved outcomes for brands and marketers.

Through data integration with NBCUnified, the partnership will allow advertisers, agencies and measurement companies to use first-party data more efficiently and effectively for planning, targeting and measurement.

Krishan Bhatia, president and chief business officer at NBCUniversal, told Adweek the collaboration is a “continuation and a doubling down of NBCUniversal’s strategy to invest in first-party identity and data,” which the company sees as the future of television advertising.

“This latest chapter and our partnership with Blockgraph is to scale the way that we resolve identities based on the unique participants in the Blockgraph platform and do that a lot more efficiently on an always-on basis,” Bhatia said. “And then ultimately also be able to enable additional use cases within the footprint of the Blockgraph participants that we might distribute content on the MVPDs to enable addressability, attribution, measurement, use cases, etc.”

Blockgraph is owned by Comcast NBCUniversal, Charter Communications Inc. and Paramount, and Jason Manningham, CEO of Blockgraph, noted that NBCU has been a part of the company’s journey for “quite some time,” but this partnership is an evolution of that relationship as the TV world faces more changes than ever.

When talking about the benefits of the partnership, Manningham noted that the three significant trends of the TV and broader marketing ecosystem include the shift from demos to IDs for targeting, the ongoing shift from third-party to first-party data and the shift from cookies to clean rooms for matching.

“We have felt that there is a fundamental need for technical infrastructure that can ultimately address those three macro challenges and help bring together all the different disparate datasets that exist, but do it in a way that allows every single data owner in that ecosystem to feel comfortable with how their data is being connected with their supply chain partners, whether it’s measurement companies, distribution partners, brands directly, so on and so forth,” Manningham said. “And that’s really what Blockgraph offers.”

Since it was first announced in January 2022, NBCUnified has scaled to around 200 million IDs and 90 million households, becoming the underpinning of how NBCU partners with agencies and clients to connect marketer data with the company’s first-party data.

In addition, 60% of the company’s campaigns on its streaming portfolio are already based on first-party data and advanced advertising segments, leveraging both marketer data as well as other unique data sets.

With the new partnership, NBCU looks to build on those numbers and capabilities, improving interoperability at scale.

“In the past, the way you would actually merge datasets through crosswalks was both operationally inefficient as well as high cost because you had lots of different vendors involved in that process,” Bhatia said. “And we increasingly believe that there can be a more direct connection between marketers and programmers like ourselves through platforms like Blockgraph that take out a whole bunch of the inefficiency that exists, take care of the permissioning of data matching use cases and allow us to grow that 60% of our business.”

A more efficient future

When it comes to unlocking the value of data-driven TV, Manningham noted that the essentials include making sure there is true data control, fidelity and safety throughout the process as well as making sure you’re matching with scale and simplicity in a fast, effective way.

“If you think about where we are in the industry as the world is starting to go towards more AI, I think being able to bring together first-party datasets and use them in an effective, ethical and very efficient fashion, we’re entering the stage where TV will ultimately become even greater of a marketing vehicle, and it’s already the best,” Manningham said.

For Bhatia, the partnership represents another way of encouraging industry collaboration and breaking down silos in an increasingly fragmented video ecosystem. It’s also a push to allow marketers to connect with diversified audiences beyond broad demographic segments.

“This is another massive step forward for us to be able to give marketers the tools to be able to tailor and target and measure their marketing messages to the people that matter, first and foremost,” Bhatia said. “And doing that as efficiently as possible and at scale, we’re looking forward to many more partnerships to help unlock that.”