Media and Entertainment Industry Ad Spend 2014: Mobile Ads Growth Area at NBCUniversal

Scott Schiller – Executive Vice President, Digital Advertising Sales / NBCUniversal

NBCUniversal recently announced that it will create original digital video across all of its entities. Scott Schiller, executive vice president of digital advertising sales at NBCUniversal, spoke with eMarketer’s Rimma Kats about how the recent initiatives will help advertisers reach consumers.

eMarketer: How would you categorize the goal of media and entertainment ad spending in terms of direct response vs. branding?

Scott Schiller: Media and entertainment is at the point of the purchase funnel where it needs to drive action. Everything is about putting bodies in seats or finding and discovering engaging content.

More than any other media, media and entertainment advertisers must have context for the reach. It’s great to see the rise of the technology platforms that exist today, but without content and without the context of consumer behavior, the platforms are just commodities.

eMarketer: How does native advertising and content marketing fit into the media and entertainment ad mix?

Schiller: Both of those things speak to context. Native advertising and content marketing are deployments of overall media strategy so that marketers can reach consumers in the right context. The growth of technology and the evolution of techniques helps in understanding consumers more.

“NBC.com has experienced doubling its growth of full-episode video on mobile platforms like tablets, but advertisers are also focused on location marketing.”

eMarketer: Where does mobile fit in?

Schiller: Digital media is no longer a separate piece of the media equation. Mobile is both part of an overall approach to media, and it can be a separate vertical. NBC.com has experienced doubling its growth of full-episode video on mobile platforms like tablets, but advertisers are also focused on location marketing.

Marketers look at it both as part of the overall equation and a separate platform. As the world gets more fragmented, mobile brings scale, but advertisers have not yet figured out how to optimize the context for this advertising.

Many advertisers are taking digital ads and they’re plopping them on mobile platforms, but the successful models will integrate the experience that the consumer has when they’re on a smartphone or tablet device.

eMarketer: Is video advertising still relevant?

Schiller: Video has always been very important, and there is a dramatic growth in video and social, both of which are deployed across multiplatforms. When someone buys video from us or from Facebook or Twitter, they’re buying those platforms. They’re not buying Facebook mobile, they’re buying Facebook, which happens to be used a lot on mobile.

If an advertiser is buying a full episode from NBC, we employ what we call a total audience approach to reaching consumers. We don’t say, “They’re watching it on TV, and you know what, that’s a different show on mobile.” We’re saying they’re watching it everywhere.

What is different is the context of the experience of watching it on a tablet vs. watching it in a living room on a TV. We take that into account as we think about reaching a consumer across platforms.

We’ve announced initiatives to create original digital video across all our entities. It’s not just about making content and putting it out there. Because an increasingly large number of advertisers are developing content, we’re working with them to infuse their brands as we create original content, whether it be derivative content from “Heroes” or “Saturday Night Live,” or original content produced by NBCUniversal Productions.