NBCUniversal pulls its consumer data into new marketing platform

NBCUniversal is launching NBCUnified, an identity platform for marketers that incorporates NBCU’s first-party consumer data from across its portfolio.

That includes data points from NBCU’s movies, entertainment, news, sports, ecommerce, subscriptions and theme parks businesses—which the company said together engage more than 230 million adults each month—in a single database that can be matched with marketers’ data. That data—which does not include data from Comcast’s broadband, wireless or video products—can then be used to serve targeted and personalized advertising.

NBCUnified will be the first offering to be launched out of the company’s dedicated enterprise data organization, led by the company’s new Chief Data Officer John Lee. The platform is scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2022.

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Lee said his team was tasked with building platforms that will be used on both the business side and the advertising sales side of NBCUniversal. That means providing businesses like Universal Studios and Peacock with data capabilities and assets for consumer personalization, addressable advertising and product strategy down to making decisions on movies or series to greenlight and script changes.

On the advertising side—run by Linda Yaccarino, chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCU—NBCUnified will serve to support NBC’s advanced targeting and measurement capabilities. The company went so far as to say that NBCUnified will be “the backbone” of NBCUniversal’s overall Measurement initiative, which was announced late last year.

Lee said NBCUnified is comprised of three key components: NBCU ID, Data Marketplace and Partner Integrations.

NBCU ID, which was first introduced as part of NBCU’s ONE21 platform, uses more than 150 million first-party personal IDs and 50 million household IDs, and expects to exceed 200 million by 2023. That data comes from transactional platforms like Fandango, subscription platforms like Peacock and email lists along with “billions of digital interactions” through NBCU’s apps and websites.

Lee said it all adds up to provide reach to more than 230 million U.S. adults, providing additional runway to expand NBCU ID’s initial reach.

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The Data Marketplace will offer up third-party data across different demographics and consumer categories, but it will also include NBCUniversal’s first-party data.     

“We’ll initially be introducing hundreds and then ultimately thousands, as we go into 2022, of data attributes signal consumers’ consumption and preferences related to all of our news, sports, entertainment, movies, theme parks and commerce, down to an individual level and all the way down to specific title and program levels,” said Lee, suggesting that NBCU will be able to create “superfan-level” audience segments for targeting consumers.

Finally, Partner Integrations is about interoperability around matching third-party data with NBCU’s IDs. Part of that will involve NBCU’s clean rooms (or Audience Insights Hub), which are privacy-safe environments that allow for anonymized data sharing between agencies, advertisers and other partners without having to actually transfer data between parties.

“The clean room is really the centerpiece of our interoperability strategy and I think we’re not alone in believing that that’s the future of how data moves within the ad ecosystem,” said Lee. Data interoperability has involved things like third-party cookies as a common currency or creating a match table and shift data from one point to another. “We’re in a world where that’s just getting more and more sensitive in addition to the fact that it’s inefficient, expensive and slow.”