The Rundown: NBCUniversal’s first-party data platform keeps pace

The media dealmakers — and, seemingly, most everyone else — decided to stay away from CES this year because of the rampaging omicron variant.

But the big media announcements pegged to the consumer tech confab remain on schedule, starting with NBCUniversal unveiling a first-party data platform which it began talking about almost a year ago.

The key details: 

• The platform, called NBCUnified, is built on three separate components: Its NBCU ID, a data marketplace where advertisers can append third-party data to NBCU IDs, as well as technology that allows advertisers to do data-matching, either through interoperability or in clean rooms.
• NBCUnified boasts 150 million individual deterministic consumer IDs, as well as 50 million household IDs. It plans to get over 200 million by 2023. NBCUniversal claims it reaches 230 million adults per month across a combination of different products and content types, ranging from news and sports to theme parks.
• NBCUniversal said NBCUnified will launch in the second quarter of 2022. It is the first product to launch out of a newly created enterprise data group, which added a top executive, John Lee, back in July.

Not first to market, but one of the biggest

Many smaller publishers spent 2021 building businesses for their first-party data products, and an ever-larger number included their data in conversations with advertisers about the new year.

NBCUniversal, which debuted a clean room last year but still hasn’t made NBCUnified available, had a lot more to tie together. But the scope of what NBCUniversal says NBCUnified can connect — content consumption across digital, streaming and linear, commerce and subscription data — is comparable to only a small number of competitors, such as Disney Select, which was announced in February 2021. And the breadth of its offering means it will be able to measure many different kinds of outcomes for advertisers without relying on third-party trackers.