• by Wayne Friedman , April 19, 2018

Building on its efforts to create a new currency for TV advertising and other metrics, NBCUniversal will join Open AP, the advance advertising media selling consortium started in 2016.

NBC adds to other major TV-based media companies -- Fox Networks Group, Turner and Viacom in Open AP -- which will now make up 50% of total TV inventory across national broadcast and cable entertainment.

Open AP’s initial push was to establish new audience segments for marketers.The group says it is a multi-year effort focused on new platforms for automated buying, advanced formats and cross-platform measurement and currency.

NBCUniversal will license its Audience Graph, “a single centralized store of audience attributes to create and evaluate audience targets” for media plans to Open AP. In addition, it will offer Data Sync, which matches client/agency audience segments.

Marketers using OpenAP can also benefit from NBC’s sister company Comcast’s Freewheel Shared Insights Platform -- non-personally identifiable TV viewing data for specific ad campaign planning purposes.

In a joint statement from existing Open AP members --  Joe Marchese, president of ad revenue at Fox; Donna Speciale, president of ad sales at Turner; and Sean Moran, head of marketing and partner Solutions at Viacom, said: “With NBCUniversal aligning with the consortium, we are all accelerating the industry’s efforts in providing more premium scale to drive greater adoption of advanced audience targeting, while laying the groundwork for future innovation.”

Earlier this month, NBC said it had the industry’s first unified advertising metric, CFlight, which measures all live, on-demand and time-shifted commercial impressions on every viewing platform.

The metric will be used in deals with TV advertisers this upfront season.