The Power of LIVE: A Fireside Chat with NBCUniversal at Cannes Lions 2024

The Verisk Marketing Solutions team is still energized after its first Cannes Lions experience. Chief Commercial Officer Zora Senat hosted a Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit fireside chat with NBCUniversal President of Advertising and Partnerships Karen Kovacs, a Verisk Marketing Solutions partner with one of the most valuable and diverse audiences available today. The duo talked about helping marketers and advertisers achieve greater effectiveness, and the power of live events, including the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games which wrapped up this month.

Catch the full conversation from Cannes Lions 2024.

Over the past few years, NBCUniversal has democratized access to premium content for brands of all sizes and developed an accelerated first-party audience capability. These efforts have helped expand advertiser effectiveness and maximize the efficacy of ad spend throughout the funnel via its live tentpole events like the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Sunday Night Football, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, among others, as well as the content that precedes and follows these unique, shared experiences.

Kovacs, who has a decades-long career leading advertising for large publishers, explained, “Our mission at NBCUniversal is to help marketers make advertising more effective. As partners in data, you know that over the past 5 years we have really invested in our data platform and migrated a vast audience that lived across our Comcast NBCUniversal ecosystem to build an audience graph of over 200 million adults and over 90 million households. Now, we are able to seamlessly move from where we used to transact on age and gender to listening to customers and transacting on strategic audiences. We have 50% of our linear digital transactions moving in that direction and we are increasing this audience. We are getting closer to the customer and delivering more focused results for them.”

The power of live content and sports marketing were primary themes throughout this conversation and on many other stages in Cannes that week, as many of the top 100 televised events this year were live events. Live content has become a cultural currency that consumers are highly engaged with, connecting with each other over relevant topics and shared experiences.

Kovacs talked about NBCUniversal’s recent initiatives that have enabled programmatic buying through live sports, and the world’s leading media and entertainment company has seen an 87% increase in advertisers participating in live sports content, plus a resulting increase in transaction size and purchases based on those programs. 2024 will be the inaugural year for NBCUniversal activating programmatic advertising for live Olympic and Paralympic Games coverage.

Watch the full discussion on-demand here.

Verisk Marketing Solutions sits at the center of the adtech/media ecosystem to power interoperability and work as the fuel between first-party data sets and better customer experiences. We can help you enrich your consumer data, mitigate compliance risk, and future-proof your ability to personalize marketing interactions to ideal customers and prospects.