Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Welcome to DRB Conversations powered by Exco. I am Brian Morrissey. This is a series of conversations I had with media leaders in Cannes. 0:18 Support for this episode and the others in the series comes from Exco. 0:22 Exco is the smarter video technology driven by real-time machine learning to maximize revenue across every screen, whether that's web, mobile, CTV, or digital out of home. Find out more at ex.co. 0:36 You know, during the 2012 election, if I'm not confusing the elections, Barack Obama caused a stir with an offhand comment he made that, that you didn't build that, referring to business owners who end up relying on the government to create the infrastructure, education, and basic research that powers the economy they sit on top. 0:55 You know, something similar exists in media, where credit tends to accrue at the bottom of the funnel. 1:02 Ryan McConville, the chief product officer at NBCUniversal, joined me to make the case that premium video has been underappreciated as the origin point of culture, and it ends up getting shortchanged by platforms that built their business on top of it. 1:18 Ryan argues that big tech companies end up relying on last-click attribution, essentially cherry-picking credit for demand that television actually created. 1:28 It's a lot like kids hanging around the hoop in pickup basketball instead of playing defense. At least that's my metaphor. Here's my conversation with Ryan. [upbeat music] Welcome to DRB Conversations, powered by Exco. 1:43 I am Brian Morrissey. We're here at our little studio in Zuma, joined by Ryan McConville. Ryan is the chief product officer at NBCUniversal. Welcome. Thanks for having me. All right. You have a 100th anniversary. 1:56 That makes you officially a legacy media brand. Yes, in a good way- [laughs] In a good way... as we were discussing before we got started. Yeah, yeah. 'Cause legacy, legacy means a, a bequest, a, a, a gift. 2:06 Look, bring us along the journey- Uh-huh... right, for technology has come for media. When we go up and down the quadside, I can remember, I think I first came here in 2007. It is completely different. Yeah. 2:18 It's just dominated by the technology companies. Yeah. And there is, there is media standing forlornly sometimes- Yeah, yeah... by the side. 2:28 But talk me through about how you, y- how you modernize the product experience at a legacy media company. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. 2:36 I was th- actually thinking about this story on the walk over here, and the y- the name rebooting. You know, I came from, I have a digital background, so I didn't come from television. 2:45 And but the reason I came to NBCUniversal is that I think there was this moment in time with the advent of streaming and the digitization of TV where the whole idea of a premium video advertising platform, call it TV, was being rebooted, right? 2:59 Yeah. Being rebooted with, with new technology. 3:02 And some of that was, call them legacy companies, like traditional broadcast companies upgrading and evolving, but there, it was also being pushed by the advent of big tech into the TV space, right? 3:16 And it, you know, the macro story that I like to tell and I believe is true, and y- if you kind of look at all the news over the last, call, five to 10 years, you can kinda see it, is big tech came in with their big tech toys, which is, like, first-party data, automation, lower funnel measurement. 3:32 They weren't like- Yeah... they weren't, like, tied to traditional TV measurement, like all of those things, but they were kind of behind on the IP side. 3:39 So what you've been seeing is them kind of buy sports rights and kind of get into the, you know, Amazon bought MGM Studios. 3:44 They're, they're trying to beef up on the content side, whereas traditional broadcasters have rich li- content- Yeah... libraries and IP, and they've had to beef up on the technology side. 3:56 But really what's being rebooted and reborn is this premium video platform powered by the best technology. So it's the best of big, big media- Right... and big tech kind of merged together. But I guess the- Yeah, yeah. 4:07 Yeah... but I guess the question is always, like, everyone comes from one, one side or the other. One side or the other. I used to cover, I used to cover agencies early in my career. Yeah. And it was always the fight. 4:15 It's like, okay, we've got the traditional agencies that own, that are good at the, the brand stuff. They got in the client relationships- Mm-hmm... 4:22 because the interactive shops were, like, the corridor agencies- Mm-hmm... they used to call them, 'cause they had to sit in the corridor during the pitch until they got called in at the last minute. 4:31 [laughs] I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then they would do the matching luggage, which is like- Uh-huh... make a, make a website that looks like this creative thing that we're doing- Uh-huh... 4:37 that's gonna run on TV. And it was like, who's gonna get there first? The people who, you know, know the, the technology side- Yeah... or the people who are on the brand side? 4:47 So there's something kinda similar here- Yeah... because TV is, TV advertising particularly, is changing, right? Yeah. And it is changing in the direction of the internet, right? Mm-hmm. 5:00 And I think it has an ad- an advantage of having seen what happened- Mm-hmm... in the internet, right? And in the internet, the publishers, the media, got completely commoditized. Mm-hmm. 5:10 Maybe slightly different- Mm-hmm... but how do you see that playing out, uh, as, you know, TV becomes more like the internet- Yeah... for lack of a better word? 5:17 Well, I mean, I think a lot of the story remains to be written, but I think speaking for Comcast NBCUniversal, and I, I put Comcast in front of NBC there for a reason, I, I think the unique combination of assets that Comcast has in particular give it great advantages in this sort of, like, meeting of big tech and big media. 5:35 Because Comcast has, owns its own ad technology with FreeWheel, right? Yeah. 5:40 And they have, they have bolted onto that with acquisitions like Beeswax, which is now part of, like, an ad server that's, like, more performant, right? 5:48 Like a, like a meta ad server or like a, a big tech ad server, where it can start to optimize towards outcomes, not just deliver, you know, publisher... flat flighted impressions or something like that. 6:00 You have the kind of internet and internet data and set-top box data that's powered by the cable business, which is all in combination with our ads- Yeah... and our Peacock business. 6:09 So there's a lot of the, the ingredients that you need to combine technology and media exist within the Comcast NBC Universal family. 6:17 And so, you know, a lot of what I'm doing is kind of putting those pieces together in a way that allows our platform to, you know, compete, compete with the best of them, if you will. Yeah. 6:26 I guess what I'm wondering is, is how... 6:28 Look, there was a lot- I feel like there was a, maybe it was inevitable, there were a lot of, like, m- mistakes made where, I mean, a lot of the value is not accrued by the people who were making the content. Mm-hmm. 6:39 Right? You know, people talk about ad tech taxes or what not, and like a lot of the ad dollars obviously got gobbled up by the tech platforms- Mm-hmm... 6:47 instead of, you know, making their way to the people who are making the content. And we're seeing- Can- Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Can I speak? I- Yeah... I'd love to riff on that for a second. Yeah. 6:56 'Cause I, I think it's like it's so relevant both on the content and on the ad side. So, like, when you look at, let's just talk about content for a second. 7:04 So, you know, we are broadcasters of NFL, NBA, MLB, you know, all the big sports moments and cultural moments across the board. SNL, The Today Show, L- Love Island, and some of these big cultural Bravo moments. 7:19 When you look at, like, the content on social media that people are chatting about, the, the source of those stories is premium video, right? 7:27 So, like, a, a 100 billion social posts talking about what happened in the game, what happened on Love Island, it sort of is a feeder from the content side- Yeah... to those environments. 7:38 So, you know, arguably, it, it deserves more credit 'cause it's sort of the or- it's the origin, right- Yeah... of a lot of the cultural moments that get talked about in these other platforms. 7:47 And then similarly, you know, it's sort of a story as old as time, like TV generates a lot of interest and demand, but the big tech companies that were born later or, or built their stacks later, were good at kind of taking credit for the sort of last part of the journey. 8:02 It's like, you know, they're searching- Yeah... they're buying, and we have last click attribution, right? Yeah. We're cherry picking. It's what- Right... kids used to do when we were playing pickup basketball. 8:11 They would hang out by the hoop and- Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You know? [laughs] Exactly. Um- They're not playing defense. [laughs] I- exactly. 8:17 And I think, you know, advertisers also got tricked by that a little bit, where they thought they could just put all their money in performance channels, and we don't have to tick through the case studies, but I think it's come out recently that that's a problem. 8:27 Like, if you only kinda feed, you know, f- feed the bottom of the funnel, you kind of run out of new customers. And so we've been doing a lot of work with data. 8:36 We're launching a new product called the Performance Insights Hub, which we announced at the upfronts, and it's gonna be live in Q4 at the start of the broadcast year, which really kind of gives m- marketers a view into the performance and the contribution of the TV platform. 8:51 And the data is incredibly compelling, but also just validates a lot of things that I think you would think is very intuitive. Mm-hmm. 8:57 Like, we had an advertiser that advertised with us during the Olympics, Liquid Death, the water company. Oh, yeah. 9:02 Not a lot of people know, know that brand or as much as some of the other water brands, so it's like a relatively new brand. 9:07 And I was just on a, on a panel with them this week with LiveRamp, and what they found was when they pre-exposed audiences to their brand message with 30-second storytelling creative inside these big cultural moments, 9:21 and then they found similar audiences in their retail media network channels and they were able to kind of run the data and do the overlap, the click-through rates on their ads for people pre-primed- Yeah... 9:33 with ads in these cultural moments clicked at a, at, at an 86 per hi- 86% higher rate. 9:39 And their CAC, the, their customer acquisition cost, the cost to get them to convert to buy the water in their s- in their performance channels, is 50% lower, right? So 9:49 it, it kinda tells the story just in w- as one case study of how, of the power and contribution- Yeah... of premium video to all the other- Yeah... platforms. 9:58 So, you know, it's contributing both content for people to talk about, and also performance for advertisers to take advantage of it. 10:05 I think what we wanna do here can is be telling the story in a more compelling way, and telling it through automation and always on dashboards. 10:13 So we're, we're remind- either educating or reminding people of the contribution of premium video in these other channels. Yeah. 10:20 And that there's a kind of a better together story, where, you know, CFOs and CMOs, it's not like, "Do I do brand or do I do performance?" To your, to your point earlier. 10:29 Those things are, those things are intimately linked, right? 10:32 And if you take your, your foot off the gas of, of call it brand or, or whatever category they put TV in, it's just gonna raise the cost in your other ch- Right... in your other channels. Yeah. 10:42 And if I could be a conspiracy theorist- Sure... for a minute, I do think as, like, large tech companies, like say Google, sell... are more in the TV business with YouTube- They're gonna start agreeing with us? Yeah... 10:52 they're gonna start to be like, "You know, brand is really important" - [laughs]... after saying everything was just about, like, whoever- Yeah, yeah... clicked was the most important thing. 10:59 I think the, the story is to be- But-... to be friendly to everyone- [laughs]... is it's all performance, right? I know. It's just different parts of performance, right? 11:05 Depends on the- But I think that TV, and I'll call it, again, premium video, the modern-day premium video platform is a bigger contributor than it has been traditionally credited with, and I think that is what the data's starting to, to bear. 11:19 And we're bringing more data to prove that story- Yeah... and more automation to make that process easy. And I think one of the things that has been a lesson is, you know, technology platforms made it really easy to buy. 11:32 Mm-hmm. You know, they would have, you know, a lot of the traditional media companies would have up fronts, and this, and that. Like, there's only a certain number of customers. Mm-hmm. And Google had millions. Mm-hmm. 11:41 They have millions of customers. And just the ease of buying. Mm-hmm. And I think one of the hopes, I guess, for CTV is like, is, uh, it'll be democratized- Mm-hmm... and, you know, advertising. 11:53 How do you th- how do you see that playing out? Like, I mean, I would assume you would rather have millions of advertisers. [laughs] I, I mean, we... Listen, we, we, the more the merrier, right? 12:04 The, but these comparisons are not apples to apples. 12:07 As, as I was, as even saying on the measurement side, whereas TV is good at, like, generating new demand and awareness, like the retargeting and stuff in these some performance platforms are, are... 12:18 You can like sop up, s- like capture the, the interest that ex- that you've created in television. So the, the- I think saying that they need to look exactly alike is probably not where we're really headed. 12:30 But certainly they need more customers than, than they traditionally had when they were doing business, call it manually, you know, over cocktails in the upfronts. Right. And we've already seen that. 12:39 You know, we'll- I'm sure we'll talk about agentic in a minute- Yeah... and the, and the possibilities there. But we've already seen that even with the advent of what, what now feels like traditional programmatic, right? 12:48 So Peacock was a leader in, you know, in, in, in programmatic activation in terms of our partnerships with the major DSPs. 12:56 We were the first major media company to put live sports and make it available programmatically, including the Olympics. Not, not this past Olympics, but even prior Olympics. 13:05 And that's moved our kind of roster of advertisers from the hundreds or low thousands to the tens of thousands already. So, and I think that will get to the hundreds of thousands and beyond. 13:17 Some of the newer iterations of that, just to go kind of further out on the long tail, is NBC in partnership again with Comcast, has launched universal ads, which is, it looks and feels more like an ads manager on a big tech platform. 13:32 So it strips away some of the complexity of, call it an enterprise DSP for a small and medium-sized business- Yeah... 13:38 or a D2C business that's kind of used to working in like an ads manager for, you know, a, for a big tech platform, and is just really looking for performance. 13:48 So that access is not just NBC Universal, but FreeWheel's entire supply pool, which are other major TV broadcasters. 13:56 And so that's, that's a way of going further down the chain and bringing in local and small businesses to give th- to democratize access to them. Yeah. Yeah. 14:04 So you mentioned agentic, and the word agentic was not frequency capped at Can- [laughs]... I don't think. If it was, it's violated the caps, right? Yeah. And someone owes a refund. 14:14 And just maybe it's me getting older and, and maybe being a little bit skeptical, I'm like- Yeah... this is, this is not real yet. Yeah. Like, agents are not out there transacting advertising. 14:26 People are calling a lot of things agentic that are not- Yeah... truly agentic. Yeah. And then they're arguing about what is agentic- Yeah... what is not agentic, and that is all part- Yeah... 14:36 of what, what the, of what weird process that we must- Yeah. Yeah... go through. Yeah. So, so unpack it for me. Tell me where I'm wrong and where I'm right. [laughs] I'd say wrong and right. Okay. 14:46 I mean, like, like no one can argue with the sort of, we were talking about the Gartner. Is it Gartner hype cycle? Gartner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Gartner hype cycle. The sort of the- Art- yeah... 14:54 the, the early stage of the, the triggering event, which I'm gonna get all the names wrong, was like, you know, ChatGPT and OpenAI, and then we've gone to like ma- and then there's maximum hype, right? 15:04 Which is like, I'd say we're like maybe coming out of that phase and getting more into the reality phase of like, how are we gonna, you know, implement this? 15:11 But I'd say, you know, it's funny, everyone is talking about AI here, but even last year, arguably, it was like even more of a buzzword and more of an unknown. 15:21 I think people are starting to hone in on, on real life use cases, and I can give you a couple. Yeah. 15:25 But, but to, to your point, I think there is a, a lot of mixture of hype and, you know, FOMO and trying to get press releases out, you know, quickly, and overstatement- Yeah... and things like that. 15:39 But g- but generally speaking, um- I'm not saying it's a felony. Yeah. It's just an opinion. It's not... Yeah. I mean- [laughs] But I mean, it's probably always existed in the world anyway, right? Yeah. 15:46 But I think I'll just speak for NBC Universal. 15:48 There are real life use cases that are live and being monetized today in a production environment that are 1,000% real, and then there's like the new pushing the boundaries of what AI can do that I think is still in progress. 16:01 Some of the stuff, if I can- Yeah... just for a minute, that has moved from sort of POC to production in terms of AI are capabilities first, first off in like what I would call hyper-contextual targeting. 16:13 So this very old school advertising idea of showing the right ad to the right person at the right time, like produces the best outcome. 16:21 Arguably, TV has done a, a, a good job, I'd say, over the last, you know, 10 years, improving the right ad, 'cause there's new ad formats in CTV, new interactive ad formats, commerce-driven ad formats. 16:33 The right person, the D2C model of streaming has allowed for more data about who you're reaching, right? Yeah. 16:40 So not just like a, a sampled panel, but also the, the DAI, the d- dynamic ad insertion of television now means you can personalize the ads, where the broadcast model, everyone saw the same ad regardless of who you were. 16:53 So the combination of DAI and first-party data has med- made the right person more compelling in television. 17:00 The right time, that third part of the trinity there, I think is where AI has really stepped in in a compelling way. Because the right time maybe historically was like, "I wanna be in sports. 17:12 I wanna be in entertainment." 17:13 But, you know, what if you are, you know, a car company that wants to be around every au- like action movie auto car chase in the hi- hi- the history of the movie library available on Peacock? 17:27 But not only do you wanna be around every car chase, but you wanna be around car chases with a really positive vibe, so like within comedy action movies only. 17:36 And you don't only wanna be in that movie, but you wanna be in the a- the first ad in the pod right after that car chase. That's the ki- type of stuff that we can now do. 17:45 So we are running our entire library through an AI model, and we can pull out custom contextual tags on shows, movies, and we've optimized, back to the point of owning FreeWheel and owning part of that ad technology, the ability to insert those ads at the highest density moments of those contextual scene, scene alignments. 18:07 And what we've seen- 18:09 Is not just that it's like some cool gimmick that like, okay, we can put this thing close to something that feels relevant, but we've then run that through measurement studies in terms of brand awareness, brand lift, search, checkout, you know, using a variety of third-party measurement vendors, and, you know, shocker, all the metrics go up when the ad is more relevant and placed in, in contexts that make more sense for the, the messaging. 18:33 So that is a real live use case that is, that is out and in market today. We're upgrading that starting Q4 to live environments, so you can sponsor sports moments. 18:42 So like if you want to, you know, if you wanna sponsor every... You wanna be the first ad after every buzzer beater in the NBA, like those things are now passed in real time to the ad server. Hmm. 18:53 And if you have custom creative that refers to that queued up, that can be selected and, and, and relate back to a live, a live event moment that just happened. So that's also coming this year in a real way. 19:05 So that's, that's on the sort of contextual targeting and performance side. 19:08 And then I just, on the, on the automation of the o- operations, we launched our first in-production buyer agent actually just this past week, and we had built a number of POCs on that. 19:20 But it is a live agent that our partners at Horizon can go into their platform, their blue platform, and talk to their agent and say, "I'm interested in a Peacock campaign. 19:30 What audiences do you have that might be relevant?" They can upload their own audiences. They can ask for different content and genre targeting. They can do that all through the chat interface. 19:40 They can take VAST tags and upload it directly to the agent and say, "Send this to the ad server." That goes directly in. They can ask for pacing reports, which are sent back to the agent. 19:50 And so all those things are real- Okay, so it's starting to become real... and happening today. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Now, the full, like, agent, like I have an RFP brief. So I'll give you... 20:00 So now that I've told you, just so you believe that I'm not- Yeah... just giving you the- Yeah [laughs]... sunny side, things that are more robust like, "Here's my RFP brief to an agent." Yeah. 20:09 "Give me, give me like rapidly respond with like an whole RFP deck, like all of our ad units, all of our, like, marketing content integrate," like a full brief that like a marketing team would put together. 20:21 Those are the things that are kind of in progress that I think are the next stage, and they link a bunch of different work streams, and they don't just talk to the ad server, but they might talk to, you know, our product marketing suite. 20:32 They might talk to, you know, other systems within that we have to kind of orchestrate together. Yeah. 20:37 So more, call it more robust workflows that are multi-step, I think are the things that are still, that are still making progress but still kinda to come. Okay. Yeah. I'll take that. Thanks so much. Fair. 20:49 Really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, great talking to you. Thanks for having us. [outro music]
