Dive Brief:

• Omincom's media services division Omnicom Media Group (OMG) will be the first agency to integrate with the NBCUniversal Audience Insight Hub, per details emailed to Marketing Dive. The Audience Insight Hub is NBCU's proprietary data clean room environment that seeks to provide interoperability between the media company and its partners.
• OMG will be able to run permissioned measurement queries across NBCU's first-party data and data from Omnicom's Omni system without exposing personally identifiable information. The integration will also allow OMG to utilize certified reach measurement models to help clients and partners conduct reach and frequency analysis.
• The integration is NBCU's latest move around data, technology and measurement in advance of an upfront season expected to focus on these areas. The company will host its developer conference, One22, on March 22.

Dive Insight:

NBCUniversal's integration of OMG into its Audience Insights Hub is further evidence of the key role data will play in the offerings of media companies and agencies, amid both a tightening data privacy landscape and increasing challenges to legacy measurement platform Nielsen. The integration connects first-party data from NBCU and its partners with Omni, which OMG claims has more privacy-compliant datasets than any competitive data offering, along with a suite of propriety applications that can help advertisers unlock "an unprecedented level of marketing orchestration," per a press release.

NBCUniversal has led the way in 2022 as media companies begin plotting the future of measurement and identity in earnest. The conglomerate at CES in January unveiled NBCUnified, which brings together first-party data from across its portfolio of TV networks, streamers, theme parks and more. NBCUnified ties together a variety of third-party data sources in a privacy-minded fashion, including through the use of its clean room.

Investments in clean rooms are expected to help drive data-related spending encompassing identity, analytics, measurement and attribution and which jumped 26% YoY to $29.3 billion in 2021, per a Winterberry Group study. Omnicom's data and analytics unit Annalect in May 2021 partnered with data collaboration platform InfoSum to expand its capabilities around data clean rooms.

NBCUniversal will likely unveil more developments around data, technology and measurement at its One22 developer conference on March 22 in advance of its May 16 upfront. Fellow media conglomerate Disney held its Tech & Data Showcase on March 3, announcing — among a host of developments — that it tapped Horizon Media as a collaborator and is exploring a path to activation with The Trade Desk around its clean room, which was built with data technology companies Habu, InfoSum and Snowflake.