Major media companies and advertising agency holding companies this year formed a Joint Industry Committee to help set standards for ad transactions in cross-platform premium video. A key goal is to eliminate the barriers among companies that want to protect the privacy of their customers while also finding ways to harness first-party data to make the advertising market more efficient.

“Our biggest challenge is we have walled-garden data, much like any other walled garden does on who our consumers are — their ad exposure, their content consumption and the understanding of just how often we’re reaching them and for how long,” Kelly Abcarian, executive vice president, measurement and impact at NBCUniversal Media, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Mike Shields.

“To unlock that data in a privacy-minded way is exactly the North Star that we’re hoping the JIC will help us achieve,” Abcarian said. “The work that we’re doing together is to really harmonize and bring together a standardized, CTV-scaled streaming dataset.”

NBCUniversal, a unit of Comcast, has evaluated the many ways to measure cross-platform audiences with request for proposal (RFP) from a variety of vendors. A key goal was to use its findings to help make the media marketplace more transparent and comparable.

“This was never about NBCU alone. This is about bringing forward better measurement across the premium video marketplace to allow us to transact with confidence and to transact on cross-platform, unified audiences,” Abcarian said. “Our audiences are across every screen, and we want to make sure that measurement is accurately counting them wherever our consumer wants to be reached.”

You’re watching “The TV Upfronts in Transition,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by AudienceXpress. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.