Shoptalk Spring x The New Market: Alison Levin, President, Advertising & Partnerships, NBCUniversal

Thank you. I nailed the coordination with the pink lasers today. So yes, this is definitely our most laser-filled stage we've ever had here at Shop Talk. I'm excited to be talking with you on it.

Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. This is my first time at Shop Talk, so it is an honor to be up on stage. This is something that we talk about a lot, and I know you and I spoke about this a little bit, but one of the most ironic things is that we've all known this to be true, that TV advertising is one of the best branding vehicles that exists. Yet, does TV advertising actually itself have a branding problem? And the person that actually created the word performance for lower funnel deserves all the raises in the world because it kind of indicates that the other side is not performance. You know, listen, I was in adtech and digital for most of my career and I've been at NBCU for a little over a year now. And one of the reasons I came over is because for years I was envious of the assets that NBCU had: this incredible reach, this IP, this emotional connection, executional excellence, right? If we say TV advertising didn't exist, and we came to Shop Talk and announced a product that reached 90% of US households in moments of joy, togetherness, non-skippable brand safety, it would blow people's minds, right? And that is what television advertising is. So call it what you want to call it. You can call it legacy, but it works and it's continued to work for a really, really long time.

Yeah, we believe that and we see this in the data that both are incredibly valuable and important, right? And we hear this all the time from marketers that actually they might have moved a little too far into the world of precision and that actually people have more in common than you realize. Most of us have hair and need shampoo. Most of us have a mouth and sometimes, or for me often, want chocolate. We need shoes on our feet. So there's more in common than not. And these moments of massive reach, emotional engagement matter for a brand. They move the needle for them. And there's also moments where you need to be more precise. So if you take a step back and think about engagement moments that matter for a brand, I think there's no better example of that than SNL50 that just occurred a couple weeks ago. This is a cultural phenomenon. The entire country was talking about it. We have brands that integrated into the content with commercials they've never done before. So if you guys have not seen it, you should look up: there's a Capital One delicious dish creative that is hysterical and Molly Shannon kicking it to you know K one guy like what's in your wallet that you will remember, whether you want a credit card right in that moment or later on, that's going to stick out for you. And then on the precision area, this is also an area we've been investing in deeply because there's a time for that as well when people are actually in market and want to make a purchasing decision. So we partnered with Instacart, which I'm sure most of you are very familiar with here, to leverage data and targeting for GIF peanut butter. What we saw was when we married that rich data of people who were buying peanut butter with the premium environment and the reach that we had, it drove 40% new first-time buyers for GIF that they had not seen before. So there's really a moment for each. There's a moment to reach people who might not be in the market in that moment to change their perception, and that's a long-term decision. And then there's a moment to reach people who are actually in the market. And both of those we've been really focused on advancing attribution and measurement so that brands can understand the impact of the moment as quickly as possible.

No, I mean for us the priority is pulling them together because the assets are important and people view them in different ways. Here's a stat that I saw from the team the other day that I thought was fascinating. Gen Z, that same age range, Gen Z spends 8% more time watching SNL content than that same age range did 10 years ago. People are watching more of this type of content. They're just watching it in different ways. But from an advertising perspective, a brand doesn't really care about how they reach the consumer as long as they reach them in that emotional engaging moment. So for us, we think about it from the full platform, the full portfolio. And we've been building products on the targeting side as well as the attribution to actually have one layer of targeting across every single moment that someone could be watching our content.

Yeah, the Jennifer Aniston sweater is like a legend now. We've talked about this with so many channels. I will say in the last couple years there's been incredible advancements in the capability around shoppability on the TV screen and to remove the friction that I think had existed before. We have QR codes, we have AI that scans content to find the right items in the show and being able to buy them after. We have card integrations. So NBCU has been really investing in that as well. I think as an industry that is going to become really table stakes. The new products, the advancements to actually remove friction from the consumer journey. But what makes us really unique as an organization is our ability to tie IP and our unique assets of content into that experience. So one good example of this, and there are three different flavors that we've been really focused on that have different benefits for each. One that's been around for quite some time that people don't really talk about, but has been a shoppable experience that's core to us and core to our background, is Jill's Deals and Deals on the Today Show. That's actually time-based. The deals come and then they go, and there's a QR code to shop for them. We've seen upwards of a million dollars for a single brand in a single day with this promotion. So this is huge sales that you see in this moment that might not be talked about quite as often because maybe it's not as sexy as some of the newer innovation. Another example we have is when you're not in the show itself, but it is really endemic to the content and we help brands build around it. So I think we have an example to queue up, but to quickly tee it up here, this was one that we actually ran last week for Top Chef, which is a show on Bravo. It shows people who have won Top Chef before, and it's an integration with Wayfair on how to actually buy some of the products that are featured in Top Chef or used in the kitchen. It's a great way for a brand to be part of the content without having to actually be in the content itself.

Yeah, I'm sure wherever he is, Mark from Shark Ninja appreciates, right? And they get integrated into it as well. So as you can see here, it hits on the moment. The contextual alignment is key to get people to actually shop, to change their behaviors. And then the third flavor of this as well is if it's not endemic to the content itself, we sort of try to create these moments. So an example we had from the Paris Olympics last summer, we worked with Instacart on something we call Virtual Concession. We ran this during a weekend where there was going to be an immense amount of gold moments: Katie Ledecky was swimming for gold, Sha'Carri Richardson was running for the gold medal, the men's basketball team was competing. So it's this moment of real anticipation and then at that moment you see an Instacart ad saying, 'Hey, get your products, get your snacks, get what you want to eat or drink delivered to your house so you don't miss a moment.' It featured Talenti from Unilever and MillerCoors and other brands. And we saw a tremendous increase, a 22% increase for Instacart in people who were buying versus the previous four weeks.

Great question. It was a couple weeks after as well because the real impact of these moments is not just getting people to buy in that moment itself, but do you change behaviors in the weeks that follow, and how do we leverage the data and insights to help our marketers understand the impact of those ads?

Yeah, for us this is a critical part of our business. I know we've talked about this a little bit, but the power of the TV screen is both the long-term and the short-term impact that these advertisements have. The challenge that existed historically was that we had to wait months for MMM models to come back to show our marketers the power of what they ran. Well, that's just not the case anymore. We have a partnership with Instacart, we've got a partnership with Walmart Connect, we have a partnership with Adobe and Coach and others to show our advertisers that these ads they're placing across our portfolio have double duty. They're working twice as hard for them because they are actually driving brand love and brand affinity at the highest level, but they're also moving products off the shelf as quickly as possible. So we have been really invested in giving that data back to the marketers and closing that data feedback loop so they can feel confident that the move out of lower funnel and into the upper funnel is driving results for them and for their brands.

Yeah. And we've been really invested in the data, the research, the tech to help prove that. If you move from search into upper funnel, it actually makes your search work harder for you. So what is this better together? What is the amplification of brand that it has on lower funnel? It's a really large area of focus for us, and maybe we need a different word than legacy. So for all these marketers in the room, if you want to continue to think of something, I'm very open. We'll be planning the New Market version two for next year. We'll have a better word by then.

Yeah, it's interesting. Just two weeks ago I was at another conference and somebody who runs media for one of the really large energy drink brands sells millions of dollars on Amazon and Walmart and was like, 'Yeah, I don't buy TV ads because I can't afford it.' That perception still exists for a lot of brands. So from our perspective, we just need to be louder about what the opportunity is. It's a huge area of growth for us. The SMB team we have at NBCU, who is here, is the fastest growing team, the fastest growing business for us. And one of the things that's really remarkable is that the digitalization of television has democratized access to this inventory in a way that hasn't existed before. So there is an opportunity for brands of all sizes to participate. I think a perfect case study of this is the Paris Olympics. With Peacock, for the first time ever, we democratized access to the content around the Olympics. Every single game, every single match was available on Peacock for the first time, whether it was ping pong or archery, running or whatever. And what that meant was there were more opportunities for brands to participate in a way they haven't before. For the first time ever, we opened up programmatic access with The Trade Desk to allow brands to participate. What we saw was that 90% of the advertisers that ran programmatically with us on The Trade Desk for the Olympics were first-time advertisers. And through that partnership, we also saw that 94% of the households they reached were new and unreachable in any other place on streaming, showing that it drove a totally incremental audience. So again, there's real opportunity for brands of all sizes to participate across the platform portfolio.

Yeah, it depends on what it is that you're trying to accomplish. For the Olympics, if you want to own a certain sport or want to integrate with the athletes and have a huge impact, yes, those moments are finite. There are not endless moments like that, and there are more premium experiences. But if you just want to participate with impressions with a 15- or 30-second spot in those moments of engagement, there are opportunities for brands to do that as well at lower price points.

Yeah, we are so excited about the launch of Universal Ads. The response to it has been even stronger than we had imagined. There have been a lot of conversations from many streamers and media and tech companies about removing the friction, removing the tax for all advertisers to participate in the TV ecosystem. That's been going on for quite some time. What makes this different is that historically a lot of companies were thinking about it in their own silos, doing it here and there, which would create multiple ad managers, making it really hard for a brand to decide where to go or how to get scale. If you want to make this as easy to buy as Meta or other places, you both need the tech to make it easy, which we are doing, but you also need the reach. For the first time ever, we are seeing publishers across the board come together in a way they haven't to actually partner and drive that reach, which will have a massive impact on performance. So it is not just NBC but you have Fox, WB, Paramount, Roku. All of these publishers for the first time are partnering together, and it's really the first time you see the premium marketplace coming together, showing that there's a real alternative to YouTube in the living room.

2026 is actually our 100th year anniversary. Happy birthday. Thank you. The peacocks never look better. We have the biggest year in our history. We start in September with a 20-year anniversary of Sunday Night Football. We then kick off the NBA, which we are starting again in October. In November, we're back here for BravoCon, which is my mecca of sports. Then you go into the holiday time frame with the tree lighting, Thanksgiving parade, and others. Then once you get into February, we start with the Milan Winter Olympics. We pause the Milan Olympics to go to the Super Bowl. We go back to the Milan Olympics. Then we have NBA All-Star weekend a couple weeks later, and then we have the World Cup. So in our 100th year anniversary, we have the largest stage we've ever had to help advertisers tell their stories.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure having you on our stage.