Global media companies enhance monetization and drive audience engagement with AWS

Late last year, AWS for Media & Entertainment (AWS for M&E) launched a new solution area focused on monetization. Through a combination of purpose-built AWS services and Partner offerings, AWS monetization solutions for M&E enable customers to simplify and modernize their advertising, licensing, subscription and marketing technology strategies, increase revenue across viewing platforms, and build deeper, more personalized relationships with audiences.

NBCUniversal leverages AWS to modernize advertising and marketing technology

The investment Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making in this area is helping publishers unlock insights and revenue generating workloads. Leading publishers are already seeing significant benefits as a result of working with AWS. During the recent AWS re:Invent conference, NBCUniversal executives discussed their experiences optimizing advertising effectiveness using AWS’ modernized approach to data and cross platform campaign management. The company discussed the development of its One Platform, which focuses on first-party data, precision targeting, and outcome-based measurement to drive continuous optimization of advertising campaigns, which it has turned to AWS to help optimize.

NBCUniversal has also specifically leveraged monetization capabilities from AWS for two use cases, resulting in improvements to performance across viewing platforms:

In-Flight Linear Optimization: Co-developed with AWS, NBCUniversal’s proprietary log scheduler enables marketers to optimize linear ad buys in-flight and second-by-second with multi-currency demos and advanced audiences, bringing the automation of digital to linear TV.

This has allowed NBCU to transform linear TV ad scheduling to be more like digital, using viewership forecast data and automatically moving TV advertisements to optimize buys in-flight for the first time based on where target audiences are watching. Using the AWS-powered log scheduler, ads are placed more intelligently to meet audience delivery goals. Its modular, adaptable architecture reduces liability and increases ad revenue while also reducing manual operations and making the process more automated, flexible and smarter. As Jessica Reed, VP of Product Marketing at NBCUniversal, said at re:Invent, “We want to improve the quality and accuracy of placements…with the in-flight optimizer that we’ve built with AWS, we’re really simplifying how we’re doing these jobs and replacing those manual tasks with automation.”

Enhanced Audience Insights: NBCUniversal also conducted a proof of concept by activating a first-of-its-kind Amazon Publisher Cloud (APC) integration. The integration allowed NBCUniversal for the first time to combine Amazon Ads signals with first-party consumer data from Peacock in clean rooms (built on AWS Clean Rooms). This enabled NBCUniversal advertisers to capture in-market customers directly through their favorite NBCUniversal content across viewing platforms. Eddie Lee, NBCUniversal’s SVP Enterprise Product, shared at re:Invent that the results of their first campaign reached 3.6x more target consumers than on a control run of network campaign, and the project also saw a 67% lower target CPM.

Building deeper, more personalized connections with audiences for the future of converged TV

AWS offers customers myriad tools to tackle the wide range of challenges they face in a converged TV marketplace. While NBCUniversal is leveraging monetization solutions to unify linear and digital advertising technology platforms and achieve privacy-compliant first-party data collaboration, companies like TV New Zealand (TVNZ) are focused on personalizing the advertising experience and making ads more effective while protecting consumer data.

TVNZ uses AWS Clean Rooms, an analytics service that helps companies more easily and securely collaborate on and analyze their combined customer datasets—without sharing or copying one another’s underlying data, to create unique audience viewing insights. TVNZ also uses Amazon Personalize, a machine learning service that enables companies to create real-time personalized user experiences faster and at scale, to recommend content based on individual viewing behaviors.

All of these tools will prove to be essential as publishers seek to overcome complexity and optimize their converged TV experiences in 2024 and beyond. Reach out to your AWS Account team to learn more and get started today.