Scott Schiller, NBCUniversal’s executive VP, digital, advertising sales, closed out the 2015 Advanced Advertising summit with a keynote conversation with B&C editor Jon Lafayette.
The NBCU exec pointed towards the company’s focus on offering a “total audience solution” for its prospective clients and partners. After introducing vertical portfolios broken up into lifestyle, entertainment, live content, which is news and sports, and Hispanic programming, “we created a client solutions group to deal with top clients and [also] as an overall research organization,” said Schiller. “What we found was that we were able to have larger, more important conversations with clients and we’re in the throes of that right now,” he continued pointing to the upfront presentations on the horizon.
This fully unified approach was put into gear after Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, which previously had many separately functioning businesses. “We sought out the integration of a system which would allow us to both offer a total approach to clients during and before negotiations so people can see schedules and understand what they’re buying,” said Schiller “But at the same time it allows us to optimize schedules over time and on the fly.”
NBCU is applying its all-inclusive strategy to social, which Schiller believes will eventually mesh into one media buying group along with programmatic and mobile, to ad sales. “Clients want our content, but they also want to be able to take advantage of social platforms,” said Schiller “We bring to the table packages that include the distribution of content from tweets and handles that we control, allowing us to market social media with the television content."
The executive VP also spoke about CNBC’s move away from Nielsen ratings saying, “what we found over time working with Nielsen, was that their data didn’t necessarily articulate the audience that was there,” referring to the mass viewing off of a single TV set in trading and news rooms. “So we went out and found a firm called Cogent, which is known on Wall Street for its accuracy as a dairy based mechanism… We’re not afraid to make those decisions because we think it shows the true value of our product.”
