NBCUniversal is joining the ranks of targeted TV advertising alliance OpenAP, a platform started by Fox, Turner and Viacom last year to help streamline and standardize advanced advertising efforts.
The four companies said the multi-year partnership is focused on new platforms for automated ad buying, advanced formats and cross-platform measurement and currency.
“OpenAP was formed with a clear mission: to bring the industry together in order to advance the experience, efficiency and effectiveness of advertising. With NBCUniversal aligning with the consortium, we are all accelerating the industry’s efforts in providing more premium scale to drive greater adoption of advanced audience targeting, while laying the groundwork for future innovation,” said Fox’s president of Ad Revenue Joe Marchese, Turner’s president of Ad Sales Donna Speciale, and Viacom’s Head of Marketing & Partner Solutions Sean Moran, in a joint statement.
NBCU will add its Audience Studio capabilities to OpenAP’s standardized data sets. OpenAP will license NBCU’s Audience Graph, a proprietary data asset that provides a centralized store of audience attributes, along with its Data Sync, a scalable, cloud-based data infrastructure that supports client and agency data matching against audience segments.
OpenAP will also integrate TV viewing data from Comcast’s Freewheel Shared Insights Platform for campaign planning.
These added capabilities will enable markets to great audience segments and purchase national TV campaigns across each of the company’s portfolio, which, together, comprise 50 percent of the premium video marketplace across national broadcast and cable.
“We have spent the last four years developing the industry’s best tools to empower advertisers to better target their marketing campaigns to desired audiences,” said Krishan Bhatia, EVP of business operations and strategy at NBCU. “We’re excited to unleash the capabilities of our Audience Studio for the rest of the industry and share our underlying technology to propel the entire business forward.”
