Dive Brief:

• NBCUniversal has plans to offer advertisers a guarantee of reaching targeted audiences based on Nielsen ratings.
• In order to offer the guarantee, the network is allowing advertisers to use data to target ads to specific genders and age demographics.
• And to allow marketers to target audiences across TV, digital and social media marketing channels, NBCUniversal launched a new division, Audience Studio, designed to do just that.

Dive Insight:

“In any business, the more a company is willing to stand behind and truly put its money where its mouth is in terms of the results and efficacy of what they’re doing, [that’s] always going to be important,” Mike Rosen, executive vice president of advertising sales at NBCU, told the Wall Street Journal.

NBCU’s Audience Studio combined four products – Audience Targeting Platform for TV, NBCUx for digital, NBCU+ Powered by Comcast for set-top boxes, and Social Sync for social media – to simplify advertising across those channels using the same set of data.

At the time of the launch Krishan Bhatia, executive vice president of business operations and strategy at NBCU, told the Journal, “If before you had this Chinese Wall between groups, with this, you are permeating that. Going forward, a brand can now align their data inputs and outputs.”