NBCU Leader: Let’s Join Consumers In ‘One Big Video World’

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True partnership requires constant dialogue, says Laura Molen, the President of Advertising Sales and Partnerships at NBCUniversal. That’s why, every day, Molen consults with NBCU’s marketing partners, listening to their business challenges and sharing the media company’s insights. The goal: collaboration on new ways to achieve their business goals.


Recently, Molen has noticed a recurring theme – advertisers are working to adapt to new audience behaviors and questioning whether they should place the same premium on digital, social, and streaming video as they do on linear. “This question alone is understandable, but to answer it, we need to remember our most important partners—our viewers—who we can learn from and grow with, if we pay close enough attention,” Molen writes in a thought piece.

To answer this question, Molen advises that we must embrace two truths — “that audiences want to enjoy great content, and that where there’s great content, they don’t see deep distinctions between linear, digital, or steaming viewing.”

She continues, “For audiences, the experience of watching their favorite show—no matter the screen or app—is basically identical. And if you focus too much on the differences on paper, you’ll miss the similar value to consumers, or how the experiences are connected. In other words, for viewers, delivery doesn’t change what’s valuable about premium content. If anything, technology has the power to enhance it.”

Indeed, today’s viewers pick their favorite content from a variety of apps and screens, any time they want. But, Molen points out, “The underlying principle—choose the content you love, from companies you trust, on your favorite screen—is exactly the same.”

Because of that, linear, digital, and streaming “aren’t feasts unto themselves; they’re courses that go together,” she concludes. “These experiences of premium content are equally valuable, equally scaled, and meaningfully interconnected.”

As Molen sees it, advancements in digital and streaming managed to give more people the power to watch more of the content they love. She then points to strong metrics that play up NBCU’s total audience delivery: 97% of NBCU’s average delivery is on a big screen—Connected TV accounts for a large portion of that, but so does national linear TV and set-top box VOD, she notes. “While the delivery or advertising experience may be different on the back end, on that big screen, the picture looks the same,” Molen says. “For consumers, that’s valuable.”

As such, this is not only the future of viewing, but it is the future of advertising, Molen adds. In fact, she predicts that NBCU’s digital audiences’ viewing time will reach that of its linear audiences within the next couple of years.

“If we act like linear is the only viewing method synonymous with scale, we’ll never enter the valuable world audiences have created,” she says. “We have to accept the viewer’s reality: it’s one big video world, and we’re all living in it. Let’s not reject that. Let’s reflect it in everything we do.”