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On the TV side, NBCUniversal is best known for its linear networks like NBC, USA and Bravo—but the company now projects that consumers will spend an equal amount of time with its digital properties within 18 months—or roughly the end of 2022.
Krishan Bhatia, NBCUniversal’s president and chief business officer for global advertising and partnerships, said the company is currently in a “watershed moment” when it comes to driving convergence.
“We led with a 70[% linear]/30[% digital] allocation in terms of how consumers are spending time with NBCUniversal properties,” Bhatia told TV editor Jason Lynch on Tuesday during Adweek’s NexTech event. “We put the yardstick further out 18 months from now, to say we’ll be in a 50/50 environment.
You can’t really tell the difference anymore between what’s a linear viewer [and] what’s a streaming viewer. In the end, there are consumers that are presumably in the target for a marketer, and you want to get your messages in front of them.”
When it comes to getting marketers more comfortable with the digital side, Bhatia described it as a “multiyear journey” to align the marketplace.
“Every time these new platforms emerge, I think there’s a reluctance by the marketplace in general to embrace it, because it’s inherently more fragmented and more complicated and less measured, etc.,” said Bhatia. “And so I think those are all valid concerns, but we’ve created a foundational layer that now allows us quite frankly, for any consumer interaction with any of our content or even third party partners that we work with to be incorporated into a seamless way of finding those audiences, building plans against, them delivering against those commitments and ultimately measuring the impact.”
Upfront drives ‘a converged marketplace’
Last month, NBCUniversal completed its strongest upfront in company history, surpassing 2019’s with a nearly $7 billion haul with $1.5 billion coming from digital sales alone. Peacock accounted for $500 million of those digital commitments.
“This upfront, I think, was the anchor of driving a converged marketplace,” said Bhatia.
Bhatia pointed to the strength of the company’s OnePlatform offering, as well as increased technology and data adoption this upfront. OnePlatform had a 90% adoption rate in the marketplace, meaning that 90% of clients that NBCUniversal conducted business with during the upfront adopted a “completely cross-platform, converged way” of buying.
“We’re making our OnePlatform technology stack more interoperable with partners than ever before, both in terms of the automation layer of how do we actually conduct business on an ongoing basis, that drives automation actually in the upfront process itself, but certainly the transactional process throughout the year,” said Bhatia.
NBCUniversal is busy building out an enterprise-wide data platform for the company, most recently hiring John Lee as the company’s first chief data officer.
“That’s the power of a company that NBCUniversal I think is unrivaled in, in that we can unlock an understanding of over 200 million people that we reach on a monthly basis, into a first-party identity and data-driven approach of building consumer experiences, building recommendations and content strategies, building marketing strategies and yes, also building advertising value for our brand and marketer clients,” said Bhatia.
