American media giant NBCUniversal announced at its One23 developer conference that it will soon be launching Peacock Ad Manager, a self-serve buying platform for its Peacock streaming service developed in partnership with connected TV ad platform TVScientific. And with the launch NBCU says it will hope to bring in more spend from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – an advertiser category for which TV has usually been inaccessible.
Peacock Ad Manager was first announced last year, and was confirmed at One23 to be coming to market in the coming months. And while the platform is open to all, and could be used by larger advertisers to book campaigns on Peacock, NBCU is looking specifically to bring in smaller advertisers.
We’ve seen a number of broadcasters introduce self-serve booking platforms as a way of simplifying access to their inventory. Disney owned streaming service Hulu launched a similar product back in 2020, the same year that ITV launched its own self-serve platform Planet V.
But the specificities of TV mean that these platforms aren’t always open to all advertisers. Planet V, for example, was initially rolled out to select agencies, with ITV training up agency staff on how to use the tool.
NBCU however sees self-serve as an opportunity to win budgets from smaller advertisers. Specifically, Peacock Ad Manager will be geared towards advertisers running performance campaigns, and those who have maxed out reach available on search and social. NBCU says tools within the ad manager will enable precision targeting and attribution, helping advertisers measure ROI on their Peacock campaigns.
And amid other product announcements and releases discussed at One23, the news demonstrates that NBCU sees open access to its inventory as the way forward.
Many broadcasters still prefer to retain tight control of who buys their inventory and how they can access it. NBCU however says that a lot of its premium inventory is now available through a range of third-party DSPs; an average of 30 live events are available each month via The Trade Desk, and OneView by Roku – with inventory set to made made available via DV360, Beeswax, Xandr, Amazon, and Yahoo in the near future.
