NBCUniversal today announced a slew of new tools for advertisers upfront of the annual CES trade show in January, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The developments span targeting and measurement of ads, together with new ad formats, and represent the following step within the media giant’s yearslong quest to bring the advances of digital performance marketing to TV.
“We’ve been laser-focused on this concept of, how will we take all this great content and really drive the patron experience and the advertiser impact?,” Mark Marshall, chairman of world promoting and partnerships at NBCUniversal, said in a press briefing on Tuesday.
The announcements come ahead of an unprecedented yr that may see NBCU air the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, the World Cup, the NBA All-Star Game and more, allowing advertisers to interact with consumers during what’s expected to be a number of the yr’s most-watched content.
“If we’re going to have this yr, that may never occur again… and we do nothing with it, shame on us,” Marshall said. “All these individuals are going to return into our ecosystem. How will we actually capture them into our ecosystem? How will we retarget them? How will we use that very same technology to really help our clients at the identical time?”
Targeting requests, live
NBCU is embracing artificial intelligence, the technology that’s quickly and dramatically rewriting the playbook throughout promoting and media. A new AI-powered contextual targeting tool constantly scans live content to be certain that ads and inventive elements robotically align with relevant moments, as they occur.
The use of AI is completing what NBCU calls the “targeting trilogy” that enables it to serve — as the promoting cliché goes — the appropriate ad to the appropriate person at the appropriate time using a mix of ad innovation, its identity graph and contextual data, respectively. In a beta test of the contextual tool, an unnamed luxury brand saw increased engagement and favorability across several metrics, including enjoyment of creative, unaided brand awareness and search engagement. Plus, there are other use cases for this sort of contextual targeting.
“There are environments that are usually not addressable with identity signals, given privacy concerns and things like that, so contextual promoting is a privacy-safe method to offer hyper-personalization of ads, even when identity signals is probably not available,” said Ryan McConville, chief product officer and executive vice chairman for ad products and solutions, said in the course of the briefing.
NBCU will even introduce Live Total Impact, a cross-platform tool that leverages real-time viewership of live events and extends engagement across the corporate’s full ecosystem to maximise ad investment in events. The tool, which was beta tested this yr during “Sunday Night Football,” will roll out during live events in 2026 spanning sports and the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
During the beta test, a number one telecom brand using Live Total Impact saw lifts in awareness, memorability, search engagement and website visits, in comparison with benchmarks, with retargeted viewers visiting the brand’s website nearly seven-times more. The results point to the sort of lower-funnel impact often reserved for pure-play digital marketers, per NBCU.
“That is something that has typically belonged to the social, big tech corporations — that ability to retarget based on website visits. It’s now available cross-platform in television,” McConville said.
Evolving ad experience
While NBC will have fun its one hundredth birthday in 2026, Peacock had its own milestone this yr, celebrating its fifth birthday. The goal of the streaming service — which debuted in the course of the height of the pandemic in 2020 — was not only to serve NBCU’s content via a simplistic user interface, but to create an ad platform that differentiated it and delivered for marketers, explained Alison Levin, president of promoting and partnerships, in the course of the briefing.
The streamer has been NBCU’s laboratory for ad innovations like Pause Ads, Spotlight Ads and virtual concessions that connect content with commerce. Ad partners which have run sponsorship creative plus a video ad have seen a 60% increase in return on ad spend versus those who just run creative, Levin said.
To construct on that success, NBCU will launch several new ad units in 2026. Arrival Ads on Peacock will let brands own the primary impression as soon as viewers enter the platform — an experience that NBCU claims is the first-of-its-kind amongst premium ad-supported video on demand platforms.
Peacock will even expand a Live in Browse feature that shows a preview of live content on the house page beyond NBA games to additional sports and entertainment properties. Live in Browse gives advertisers a chance to put a brand logo on the preview, a format that executives say provides a 50% lift in ad recall. NBCU will even bring Peacock’s Premium Pause Ads to the programmatic marketplace. The format drives a 68% lift in ad memorability and has driven a 106% lift in foot traffic for advertisers, per the corporate.
Similarly, NBCU will offer its Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games inventory programmatically. The company will open private marketplace, biddable access for all advertisers through Amazon DSP, FreeWheel Buyer Cloud, Google Display & Video 360, StackAdapt, The Trade Desk, Viant and Yahoo DSP. Plus, Universal Ads — the self-service platform launched this yr by parent company Comcast — will serve as the primary exclusive ads manager for the Olympics.
Measuring performance
NBCU has long been on the forefront of developing advanced measurement tools and advocating for a multicurrency approach for all the promoting industry that higher solves for cross-platform measurement. That journey continues with the launch of Performance Insights Hub, a proprietary intelligence platform that unifies campaign delivery, audience insights and full-funnel, in-flight performance.
“We know marketers are under incredible pressure to exhibit the worth of each dollar that they spend, however the industry, candidly, has lacked reliable, in-flight visibility into premium video performance,” Gina Reduto, executive vice chairman of strategy for promoting and partnerships, said in the course of the briefing.
Built on NBCU’s One Platform tech stack, the platform looks to maneuver reporting from post-campaign to in-flight, helping advertisers higher measure and improve awareness, engagement and conversion. The hub integrates first- and third-party data with partners including Dynata, EDO, Kochava, LiveRamp, MarketCast and VideoAmp, with more category-specific integrations to return.
While digital ad platforms including Google and Amazon have similar platforms for delivering insights to advertisers, Reduto stressed that NBCU is targeted on transparency, interoperability and offering depth of insight with the new hub, while offering cross-platform attribution in a way other ad platforms cannot.
“We’re not grading our own homework,” Reduto said. “Our content, our tech, our innovations have all the time driven outsized advertiser impact. We now finally have a method to make it easily accessible and evident for marketers.”
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