New York -- Scott Schiller, NBCUniversal’s executive vice president, digital, advertising sales, closed out NewBay Media's 2015 Advanced Advertising here by disussing the programmer's focus on offering "a total audience solution" for prospective clients and partners.
In his keynote conversation with B&C business editor Jon Lafayette, the NBCU exec delineated the strategy centering on vertical portfolios broken up into lifestyle, entertainment, live content -- news and sports -- and Hispanic programming.
“We created a client solutions group to deal with top clients and [also] as an overall research organization. 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,” Schiller said, pointing to the upfront on the horizon.
This unified approach was put into gear after Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, which then had many separately functioning businesses.
“We sought out the integration of a system which will 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 EVP also described CNBC’s move away from traditional measurement company saying, “what we found over time, working with Nielsen, was that their data didn’t necessarily articulate the audience that was there,” referring to 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 as a diary-based mechanism for its accuracy… We’re not afraid to make those decisions because we think it shows the true value of our product.”
