By Suzanne Vranica And Steven Perlberg
Every year, Comcast Corp.'s NBCUniversal hosts a swanky dinner
for advertisers, as the TV network-owner gears up for the spring's
peak ad sales season.
This year, there was a new wrinkle: Before they were served
their fish and lamb at New York's Rainbow Room last month, some
guests sat through a five-hour seminar titled "The Future of
Content, Data & Technology."
The talk laid out how marketers can use NBCUniversal's new data
and analytics tools to target their ads more effectively on the
company's shows. The technology makes it possible, for example, for
a brewer's ads to air on shows watched by beer-buying households,
or for a fast-food restaurant to target lovers of burger and
fries.
If it sounded to the gathered ad executives like the sort of
high-tech pitch that might be given by Google or Facebook, that was
the point. Marketers have been moving money, gradually but
measurably, away from TV and into digital outlets that promise
sophisticated ad targeting and the ability to reach audiences that
are eschewing traditional television.
Now, the TV empire is striking back.
NBCUniversal, owner of channels including USA, Bravo and E!,
along with Time Warner Inc.'s Turner Broadcasting and other media
companies are touting new tools that they say close the gap with
the online players when it comes to data and analytics. That will
be a key feature of their pitches in "upfront" negotiations in
coming weeks, when TV networks sell the majority of ad time for
coming programming.
Turner is offering a product called "Turner Audience Now." The
network said it recently helped a yogurt company target heavy
yogurt buyers across its shows using data from Nielsen Catalina
Solutions, which merges shopper loyalty-card data--a wealth of
information--with TV viewing. Both NBCU and Turner stress that the
data they use for this ad tool is "anonymized"--that is, the
networks don't see the personal information of consumers. The two
networks are seeking to sell up to 30% of their inventory,
including upfront ad time, using the new data tools.
NBCUniversal is pushing a new "Audience Targeting Platform." It
taps into huge databases of information on what products people
buy, and matches it against data from set-top boxes that tracks the
programs people watch on TV. (NBCU said isn't using Comcast set-top
box data for this ad product.)
Networks are also making use of things like databases for
movie-ticket sales and car buying.
Advertisers "no longer have to choose between data-driven
opportunities that digital gives them and the power and scale of
premium video that NBCSHYUniversal gives them," said Linda
Yaccarino, NBCUniversal's chairman of advertising sales.
Meanwhile, some TV executives are going on the offensive,
reminding advertisers of the problems that lurk in the digital ad
ecosystem. They point to bogus Web traffic boosted by computerized
bots, and growing concerns over the lack of "viewability" of online
ads that appear on parts of websites that make them undetectable to
the human eye.
Executives at CBS Corp. and Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN are among
those that have been making this case, people familiar with the
matter say.
"What we are saying is ESPN's digital properties are clean and
well-lit places that have great content," said Ed Erhardt,
president of ESPN's ad sales. "That message is resonating right now
because there clearly is some re-evaluating going on by advertisers
and buyers because of what is going on in some parts of the digital
ecosystem," said added.
Michael Teicher, executive vice president of syndication ad
sales for Twentieth Television said "the TV industry should be
fighting back in unison to raise the flag on these flaws."
(Twentieth Television's parent company, 21st Century Fox, was part
of the same company as The Wall Street Journal until mid-2013.)
For decades, TV networks allowed advertisers to target viewers
based only on age and gender. And even with its new tools, TV
doesn't know as much about viewers as the Web can divine from
monitoring searches, where someone might be typing in "red high
heels, size 9.5" or "fringed lampshades."
However, TV executives want to offer better audience targeting
while maintaining its chief advantage over the Web: to reach large
swaths of the population. That's the reason at once. That breadth
is $66 billion a year is still spent on TV advertising.
For TV executives, counter-balancing the narrative that digital
outlets have an inherent advantage over television is critical. TV
networks across the cable dial are dealing with steep, double-digit
declines in viewership.Analyst estimates suggest that the ad
dollars marketers will commit during this year's upfronts could
sink 7% to about $20 billion.
Marketers including MasterCard Inc., Allstate Corp., Wendy's Co.
and Mondelez International Inc. have begun shifting ad dollars from
TV to digital platforms that can target users based on attributes
ranging from their physical location to shopping habits.
Digital outlets also point out that TV networks have their own
version of "viewability" headaches. Viewers walk out of the room
during commercial breaks, or skip through ads on their DVRs. Trying
to talk down digital channels "ignores where people go for
content," said Sherrill Mane, senior vice president for research,
analytics measurement for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an
industry trade group that represents Web publishers.
"We're not degrading digital's capability," said Michael
Strober, senior vice president of client insights and innovation at
Turner. "What we're saying is that there exists now new technology,
new data and analytics approaches to television that didn't exist
before."
Sales executives are also reinforcing TV's ability to reach
large audiences despite the ratings declines. During a meeting with
ad buyers and advertisers earlier this month, NBC Entertainment
Chairman Robert Greenblatt said one episode of "The Voice"
delivered a larger audience than a month of YouTube viewership,
according to people that attended the meeting.
Over the past few months, the cable industry's trade group, the
Cable Advertising Bureau, has been arming cable ad sales executives
with information to help their case, according to people who have
attended recent CAB meetings. One slide presented to network
executives stated that ads were viewed 709.7 million times during
all airings of Adult Swim's reruns of "Family Guy" in January of
this year.
To deliver roughly the same number of ad views during that time
period on YouTube, an advertiser would have had to buy all views on
YouTube's top 10 networks.
YouTube declined to comment.
It is unclear if the new approach by TV networks will help stop
the flow of TV dollars to digital channels.
"Is it likely going to change a lot of folks' minds about the
balance of their media budgets? Yes. Do we know by how much? No, we
don't," said NBCSHYUniversal's Ms. Yaccarino.
Write to Suzanne Vranica at suzanne.vranica@wsj.com and Steven
Perlberg at steven.perlberg@wsj.com
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