• by Wayne Friedman , March 22, 2021

Continuing to meet growing digital media demands, NBCUniversal's One Platform is expanding data-sharing efforts with its marketing partners -- starting an identity graph and broadening its programmatic partners.

NBCU made the announcement in conjunction with a virtual event on Monday -- One21, which showcases the company’s data and technology offerings.

For the first time, NBCU will be offering “self-service” access to its linear and digital data in new “clean room” environments.

Clean rooms are privacy secure places where two parties can compare respective first-party data with privacy protections -- all to gain deeper understanding of similar or overlapping customers -- and help in an cross-platform planning.

“There is a trend in the market for more data sharing in a privacy-compliant way,” says Ryan McConville, executive vice president of advertising platforms and operations at NBCUniversal, speaking to Television News Daily. “We are not building it with a lot of garden walls around it. We are building it to be interoperable.”

NBCUniversal says partners can run “restricted, permissioned queries across the two data sets without exposing any underlying personally identifiable information.”

In addition, as part of its access to first-party data, NBC is starting its own identity graph, NBCU ID, creating a unified data strategy.

For media planning, McConville says data could show that people who watch certain TV shows on Peacock also buy movie tickets on Fandango, as well as special family-priced tickets for Universal theme parks.

“We are basically creating a single view of our customer across all of our properties,” McConville says. “Those are first-party insights that only NBCU would know.”

In addition, marketers can bring custom audiences to NBC -- which can offer de-duplicated reach for linear or digital platforms -- and then build a plan around that.

Later this year, NBC will be launching what its Audience Insights Hub for new reach measurement models and cross-platform attribution. It's a place where data can be stored and marketers can access in a private way.

As part of this new unit, NBCU announced two leading development partners: cloud-computing platform Snowflake will be the backbone of its clean-room effort and VideoAmp, its first measurement partner.

“We can go beyond Nielsen demo measurement and get to real return on ad spend through in-store sales or foot traffic, using more first-party data.” He adds NBCU has been offering incremental reach data of linear and digital for all of 2020.

Expanding its programmatic efforts, NBCU’s One Platform, its media-buying/media-planning system, has struck a deal with the demand-side buying platform (DSP) The Trade Desk.

With this deal, marketers can access live streaming inventory across sports events, worldwide programming content and inventory from CNBC International.