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The biggest companies in the TV industry are banding together to arm themselves against Google and Facebook
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The biggest companies in the TV industry are banding together to arm themselves against Google and Facebook

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Warner Bros. TV/NBC

NBCU is making new friends

  • NBCUniversal is joining rivals Turner, Fox and Viacom to help advertisers better use data to target people with TV ads.
  • The consortium, dubbed OpenAP, promises to eliminate much of the manual labor and friction inherent in data-driven TV advertising, which is nascent compared to the web.
  • NBCU is not only participating, but licensing some of its own proprietary data and tools to bolster the effort.
  • Ultimately, the TV ad industry needs to up its data and tech chops as it battles giants like Facebook and Google for ad budgets.

NBCUniversal is signing on to help TV advertising transform itself into a digital, data-driven business - one that's ideally better armed to battle Facebook and Google.

So it's partnering with three of its blood rivals: Fox, Turner and Viacom.

About a year ago, those three media titans joined forces to announce OpenAP, a consortium aimed at making it easier for advertisers to target people with specific ads, much like they've become accustomed to doing in digital media.

But a few big companies were glaringly absent, including NBCUniversal and Disney.

Now, NBCU is not only joining OpenAP, but it plans to license some of its premium data and ad products to potentially make the consortium more potent. Disney remains on the sidelines as of now.

The digital advertising industry has exploded over the past decade largely through its use of sophisticated software, data and automated platforms designed to deliver more targeted advertising. The most powerful and successful examples of this of course are Facebook and Google, which boast of unparalleled reams of consumer data.

TV, while still a $70 billion-plus ad market in the US, is still stubbornly analogue in terms of execution, in contrast. NBCU's sales chief Linda Yaccarino has been vocal about TV's need to disrupt itself before its too late.

Most major TV players are trying to get more digital. Yet even as individual TV companies are embracing the use of data to improve their targeting capabilities, ad buyers complain that such precision advertising is tough to execute at scale.

And the more that giant marketers get accustomed to buying ads using digital tools and processes, and the more money that keeps getting funneled to the duopoly, the more pressure there is on the TV business to adapt.

Thus, the idea behind OpenAP was to streamline data-driven TV ad operations, to a degree.

Specifically ,Viacom, Fox and Turned built a web-based product designed to help advertisers mix and match data to create segments of consumers they want to reach (like say new parents) with ads. Theoretically they can use those data segments from TV network to TV network.

When OpenAP debuted, it pulled in data from companies like Nielsen and ComScore. Now, with NBCU's arrival, advertisers will also be able to access additional cable set top data from NBCU-parent company Comcast, as well as several custom NBCU data products. So the data segments available should be that much more robust.

To be sure, OpenAP is primarily about allowing advertisers to create consumer segments for ad targeting purposes. It's not a digital ad exchange where buyers and sellers can trade on TV ad industry. The TV advertising business is not quite there.

But the more big TV names that join OpenAP, the more momentum this form of ad buying gains.