And I’m excited about BravoCon. It was gone for a year. Now it’s back from Nov. 14-16 in Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. What can you tell us about it?
The fandom behind BravoCon is really, really unique. At the last BravoCon, we posted 20 onsite partners, and all of the research that we’ve seen, there was a 99% brand recall across every single onsite partner. We’re seeing a strong response across a wide array of categories: insurance, home furnishing, CPG. There is a lot of appetite for a custom approach and a bespoke onsite approach.
The NBA is also coming back to NBC. How can advertisers get involved? What are the opportunities?
Advertisers are very excited about the NBA coming to NBCU. I think it’s interesting on a couple of points. We’re excited to have the NBA back on broadcast. So when you think about the reach and scale of broadcast, that is really exciting for us, for the NBA, and for our marketing partners. It will be interesting to see how we weave the NBA across our portfolio for marketers.
That’s one of the hallmarks of working with NBCUniversal is that you can certainly tap into a property like the NBA. The NBA will be on NBC on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Suddenly, you have the NBA on Tuesday night as a lead-in to [The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon]. When you think about the storytelling that you can do, that you can carry through, from these live sports events to a Jimmy Fallon program, the storytelling has more legs, and there’s more scale and more ability to cross-promote and cross-pollinate how the brands show up.
You mentioned advertisers of all sizes, so what can you tell us about Comcast Universal Ads, which looks to give small and medium businesses (SMBs) the opportunity to access premium TV inventory?
We’ve been in this space for a bit, and we’ve seen that 50% found their ROI from social video buying has almost peaked or diminished. So the opportunity to come in and have access to TV is really exciting. We saw that in the last Olympics: 90% of programmatic buyers were new to the Olympics. There’s demand for us there, and as we open up all of these channels again, this is just a unique way for us to really be solution-oriented for the SMBs.
Heading into this upfront, Nielsen now has MRC-certified panel plus big data for measurement. However, the industry has been in a multi-currency reality for a while now. How is NBCU approaching measurement and currency?
We’re partnerships agnostic. Our [advertisers] have their partners, and they become our partners. If they want to transact on Nelson One or Nielsen big data plus panel, they can. Everything we do is in service of our mission to make our advertising partners’ media dollars more effective, so we are open to partnerships.
