NBCUniversal, Fox, Viacom, Turner team on advanced premium video ad standards
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 20 April 2018

Four of the biggest broadcasters in the US— NBCUniversal, Fox, Turner and Viacom — have announced a multi-year, co-development partnership focused on new platforms for automated buying, advanced formats and cross-platform measurement and currency.


The companies claim a combined reach of over half of the total TV inventory across US broadcast and cable entertainment. They say they will now be able to address the need to give advertisers a more scalable solution for marrying the reach and scale of premium video with advanced advertising capabilities, accelerating innovation.

The new move will see NBCUniversal’s Audience Studio data capabilities combined with standardised data sets from OpenAP, a consortium of television publishers launched in 2016 by Fox, Viacom and Turner which offers cross-publisher targeting and independent posting for advanced audiences. Specifically, NBCUniversal will license to OpenAP its Audience Graph proprietary enterprise data asset that provides a single centralised store of audience attributes to create and evaluate audience targets for use in media plan optimisation, as well as its Data Sync, a scalable, cloud-based data infrastructure that supports client and agency data matching against audience segments.

Advertisers and agencies using OpenAP will also now be able to benefit from the Freewheel Shared Insights Platform, one informed by non-personally identifiable TV viewing data from Comcast for specific advertising campaign planning purposes. This builds on the data sets currently available to users within the OpenAP platform. Beyond linear optimisation, the companies say that they will accelerate their joint development of API-based self-service tools, standardised measurement and attribution capabilities, addressable offerings and cross-platform advertising technology.

In making the announcement, Krishan Bhatia, executive vice president, business operations and strategy, NBCUniversal, said: “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. 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.”

In a joint statement, Fox’s president of ad revenue Joe Marchese, Turner president of ad sales Donna Speciale, and Viacom head of marketing and partner solutions Sean Moran, added: “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.”