At Cannes, Omnicom Media and NBCU say they’re crafting dynamic contextual ads for content

The partnership, according to Omnicom Media, is currently beta testing and should be available in the U.S. by end of 2026.

According to Megan Pagliuca, chief product officer for Omnicom Media, the secret sauce to this partnership is the value of that metadata to help ID the right opportunities for advertisers to be contextually relevant with their messaging. 

“This dynamic contextual content solution just has a granularity that I think we haven’t gotten to within contextual around episode and scene level,” said Pagliuca, who noted that Omnicom Production was again key to helping find the right way for Omnicom clients to deliver those relevant messages. 

Alissa Hansen, CEO of Omnicom Production for North America, explained the process in more detail. Take NBCU’s nature documentaries; the contextual tags from that would include sustainability, outdoors, or even environmentalists. Then that’s paired against Acxiom’s audiences that are interested in EVs or wellness in general. 

“We created this semantic layer over premium video,” she said. “We see this as the evolution of dynamic creative optimization. Now we’re introducing DCC, (dynamic contextual content), and it really is extending the capability by using those contextual signals to manipulate creative expression based on scenes to get right down to that really authentic relevancy for the creative ads we’re serving within those placements.”

“Marketers are navigating a fragmented, highly competitive ecosystem while being held to performance metrics,” said Ryan McConville, chief product officer and evp of ad products & solutions, NBCUniversal. “By pairing NBCUniversal’s content metadata with Omnicom’s audience and performance data, we can make creative optimization actionable and open up more relevant, effective ways for brands to engage their customers.”

The motivation for the joint effort comes from Omnicom Media research out of its intelligence unit, which found, among other things, that 76% of people say they connect with ads relevant to the content that is being watched. 

The ultimate goal here: better outcomes, said Keagan McDonnell, head of partner innovation and strategic initiatives at OM North America. “Being able to connect all this to business outcomes really means that we’ll be able to audit if one or another of the given contextual tags are outperforming from a business perspective,” said McDonnell.

He added that although Omnicom has offered the opportunity to several clients across CPG, financial services and telecoms, the experimental nature of this hasn’t landed a real-market example yet.

“We’ve talked to quite a few brands that are really excited, but it’s not something that we can just turn on, like ‘Oh, test this in this upcoming campaign that’s launching next week’,” said McDonnell. “We’re really having to have proactive, meaningful conversations, both on the creative and production side with stakeholders at brands, as well as the media side, to really deliver that synchronicity.”