How NBCU’s new tools boost ads as live TV events take center stage
NBCUniversal today announced a slew of new tools for advertisers in advance of the annual CES trade show in January, per details shared with Marketing Dive. The developments span targeting and measurement of ads, along with new ad formats, and represent the next step in the media giant’s yearslong quest to bring the advances of digital performance marketing to TV.
“We’ve been laser-focused on this idea of, how do we take all this great content and really drive the consumer experience and the advertiser impact?,” Mark Marshall, chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, said in a press briefing on Tuesday.
The announcements come ahead of an unprecedented year that will see NBCU air the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, the World Cup, the NBA All-Star Game and more, allowing advertisers to engage with consumers during what’s expected to be some of the year’s most-watched content.
“If we are going to have this year, that will never happen again… and we do nothing with it, shame on us,” Marshall said. “All these people are going to come into our ecosystem. How do we actually capture them into our ecosystem? How do we retarget them? How do we use that same technology to actually help our clients at the same time?”
Targeting requests, live
NBCU is embracing artificial intelligence, the technology that is quickly and dramatically rewriting the playbook throughout advertising and media. A new AI-powered contextual targeting tool continuously scans live content to ensure that ads and creative elements automatically align with relevant moments, as they happen.
The use of AI is completing what NBCU calls the “targeting trilogy” that allows it to serve — as the advertising cliché goes — the right ad to the right person at the right time using a combination of ad innovation, its identity graph and contextual data, respectively. In a beta test of the contextual tool, an unnamed luxury brand saw increased engagement and favorability across several metrics, including enjoyment of creative, unaided brand awareness and search engagement. Plus, there are other use cases for this type of contextual targeting.
“There are environments that are not addressable with identity signals, given privacy concerns and things like that, so contextual advertising is a privacy-safe way to offer hyper-personalization of ads, even when identity signals may not be available,” said Ryan McConville, chief product officer and executive vice president for ad products and solutions, said during the briefing.
NBCU will also introduce Live Total Impact, a cross-platform tool that leverages real-time viewership of live events and extends engagement across the company’s full ecosystem to maximize ad investment in events. The tool, which was beta tested this year during “Sunday Night Football,” will roll out during live events in 2026 spanning sports and the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
During the beta test, a leading telecom brand using Live Total Impact saw lifts in awareness, memorability, search engagement and website visits, compared to benchmarks, with retargeted viewers visiting the brand’s website nearly seven-times more. The results point to the kind of lower-funnel impact usually reserved for pure-play digital marketers, per NBCU.
“That is something that has typically belonged to the social, big tech companies — that ability to retarget based on website visits. It’s now available cross-platform in television,” McConville said.
Evolving ad experience
While NBC will celebrate its 100th birthday in 2026, Peacock had its own milestone this year, celebrating its fifth birthday. The goal of the streaming service — which debuted during the height of the pandemic in 2020 — was not only to serve NBCU’s content via a simplistic user interface, but to create an ad platform that differentiated it and delivered for marketers, explained Alison Levin, president of advertising and partnerships, during the briefing.
The streamer has been NBCU’s laboratory for ad innovations like Pause Ads, Spotlight Ads and virtual concessions that connect content with commerce. Ad partners that have run sponsorship creative plus a video ad have seen a 60% increase in return on ad spend versus those that just run creative, Levin said.
To build on that success, NBCU will launch several new ad units in 2026. Arrival Ads on Peacock will let brands own the first impression as soon as viewers enter the platform — an experience that NBCU claims is the first-of-its-kind among premium ad-supported video on demand platforms.
Peacock will also expand a Live in Browse feature that shows a preview of live content on the home page beyond NBA games to additional sports and entertainment properties. Live in Browse gives advertisers an opportunity to place a brand logo on the preview, a format that executives say provides a 50% lift in ad recall. NBCU will also bring Peacock’s Premium Pause Ads to the programmatic marketplace. The format drives a 68% lift in ad memorability and has driven a 106% lift in foot traffic for advertisers, per the company.
Similarly, NBCU will offer its Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games inventory programmatically. The company will open private marketplace, biddable access for all advertisers through Amazon DSP, FreeWheel Buyer Cloud, Google Display & Video 360, StackAdapt, The Trade Desk, Viant and Yahoo DSP. Plus, Universal Ads — the self-service platform launched this year by parent company Comcast — will serve as the first exclusive ads manager for the Olympics.
Measuring performance
NBCU has long been at the forefront of developing advanced measurement tools and advocating for a multicurrency approach for the entire advertising industry that better solves for cross-platform measurement. That journey continues with the launch of Performance Insights Hub, a proprietary intelligence platform that unifies campaign delivery, audience insights and full-funnel, in-flight performance.
“We know marketers are under incredible pressure to demonstrate the value of every single dollar that they spend, but the industry, candidly, has lacked reliable, in-flight visibility into premium video performance,” Gina Reduto, executive vice president of strategy for advertising and partnerships, said during the briefing.
Built on NBCU’s One Platform tech stack, the platform looks to move reporting from post-campaign to in-flight, helping advertisers better measure and improve awareness, engagement and conversion. The hub integrates first- and third-party data with partners including Dynata, EDO, Kochava, LiveRamp, MarketCast and VideoAmp, with more category-specific integrations to come.
While digital ad platforms including Google and Amazon have similar platforms for delivering insights to advertisers, Reduto stressed that NBCU is focused on transparency, interoperability and offering depth of insight with the new hub, while offering cross-platform attribution in a way other ad platforms cannot.
“We’re not grading our own homework,” Reduto said. “Our content, our tech, our innovations have always driven outsized advertiser impact. We now finally have a way to make it easily accessible and evident for marketers.”
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