The days of connected TV serving merely as a way to chase cord-cutters are over. Streaming has graduated from an incremental reach play into something advertisers increasingly expect to deliver measurable business outcomes.
Where brands once viewed streaming as a top-of-funnel branding exercise separate from their performance budgets, they are now demanding evidence that premium video contributes to bottom-line results.
“We anecdotally have always known that premium video is performant, and now we can really prove it,” said Kristina Shepard, evp, streaming and performance sales and partnerships, NBCUniversal, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Streaming finds its place in the funnel
According to Shepard, the industry now recognizes that CTV occupies a critical middle-funnel position, with measurable effects on lower-funnel channels like search and social.
“We have the tech and tools and the digital infrastructure that digital and social brings to bear, and we can really leverage that component to make sure that streaming video is performant,” Shepard said. “We now have the tools to prove it, and brands are really leaning in.”
NBCUniversal has been testing this thesis with advertisers. Shepard pointed to work with Tinuiti and Noble, a sneaker brand, examining what happened when the brand shifted spend from branded search into premium video. “It drove a lift,” she said, suggesting streaming’s role in driving incrementality across the media mix.
AI agents negotiate media buys
Artificial intelligence is beginning to automate what has traditionally been a labor-intensive buying process. At CES, NBCUniversal announced a partnership with Newton Research and RPA to pilot agentic AI for media transactions.
“Newton Research built a buyer agent for RPA, us through our FreeWheel relationship built the seller agent, and through that workflow was actually able to have the agents talk to each other and buy linear and streaming for live sports,” Shepard said. “I don’t know that two years ago, even a year ago, we would have thought was possible.”
The proof of concept points toward a future where routine negotiations happen between machines. “Having AI agents and AI in the workflows both internally and for advertising products is really giving us the ability to move faster, be more efficient, remove that manual mundane, and allow us as humans to be more strategic, more creative,” she added.
Contextual targeting reaches the scene level
Attention metrics are pushing NBCUniversal to develop ad products that connect commercial messages more tightly to content. The company has rolled out what it calls contextual targeting live, using AI to analyze decades of programming at the scene level.
“If a brand wants to align with a holiday kiss, we then not only can target just that show or just that episode, we can actually get down to the scene level, know when that holiday kiss happens within the show, and then serve an ad with creatively relevant branding in that first slot in that ad break,” Shepard said.
The approach appears to benefit both advertisers and viewers. “We see that not just drive better advertiser results, we actually also see the viewer see much more enjoyment from the overall experience when they see a wink and a nod of that commercial winking back to the content itself,” she said.
You’re watching coverage from The AI Media Summit, A Beet.TV & Horizon Media Collaboration, presented by Seedtag & The Trade Desk. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
