NBCUniversal is joining OpenAP, the cross-audience platform for selling targeted TV advertising formed in 2017 by Fox, Turner and Viacom.
The company will contribute its Audience Studio data capabilities to OpenAP’s standardized data sets. NBCU will license to OpenAP its Audience Graph, a proprietary enterprise data asset that provides a single centralized store of audience attributes as well as its Data Sync, a cloud-based data infrastructure that supports client and agency data matching against audience segments.
OpenAP will also incorporate Comcast’s Freewheel Shared Insights Platform.
“We have spent the last four years developing the industry’s best tools to empower advertisers to better target their marketing campaigns to desired audiences. We’re excited to unleash the capabilities of our Audience Studio for the rest of the industry and share our underlying technology to propel the entire business forward,” said Krishan Bhatia, Executive Vice President of Business Operations and Strategy at NBCUniversal, in a statement.
“OpenAP was formed with a clear mission: to bring the industry together in order to advance the experience, efficiency and effectiveness of advertising. With NBCUniversal aligning with the consortium, we are all accelerating the industry’s efforts in providing more premium scale to drive greater adoption of advanced audience targeting, while laying the groundwork for future innovation,” said Fox’s President of Ad Revenue Joe Marchese, Turner’s President of Ad Sales Donna Speciale, and Viacom’s Head of Marketing & Partner Solutions Sean Moran in a joint statement.
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Fox, Turner and Viacom formed OpenAP in March 2017 to offer ad buyers and agencies a more transparent way to purchase targeted advertising.
For NBCU, the jump into OpenAP arrives shortly after the company announced its new cross-platform viewership metric, CFlight.
The media company intends to use its new metric as a new currency and as a campaign performance guarantee to marketers, according to Deadline. As the report points out, NBC will continue working with measurement firms like Nielsen and comScore as they too build new metrics to adjust to changing viewership patterns.