General Motors to use NBCUniversal's data platform to target and track ads

General Motors will be the first brand marketer to integrate with NBCUnified, the first-party data and identity platform of NBCUniversal’s network of TV, streaming and digital properties, the companies announced today.

The integration will allow for privacy-compliant, anonymized matching of GM's first-party database and custom audiences of car buyers at various stages in the decision-making process with NBCU’s first-party data and custom audiences. The tie-up was made possible through GM’s media agency, Dentsu’s Carat, which was the first agency to link with NBCUnified earlier this year.

GM was the No. 13 U.S. advertiser last year with estimated spending of $2.7 billion, according to the Ad Age Datacenter. 

While the data matching will fuel buying of connected TV inventory, it will also likely play a role in buying linear TV by lining up the custom audiences of GM brands with audience segments NBCU has identified in its linear inventory, said Heather Stewart, general director of global media and marketing services for GM.

The move is really an outgrowth of efforts dating back three to five years, Stewart said. “A lot of people say you’re doing it because of cookie deprecation,” she said. “And actually that’s not why we did it.”

Unlike packaged-goods advertisers or others that do most of their business through retailers, GM has a wealth of first-party data about its customers anyway and less need for digital identifiers such as the third-party cookies Google plans to eliminate from its Chrome browser by 2024, she said.

“Only 2% of the U.S. population is in market for a vehicle at any one time, and that’s including used cars,” Stewart said. “To do media plans that are based just on demos and giant impression numbers when only 2% give a crap about what you’re trying to say to them” doesn’t make sense, she said.

Using NBCUnified will help GM target ads to that 2% that are focused on immediate sales, while focusing other ads on people higher up in the purchase funnel who are at various stages of considering their next cars, she said, or to simply avoid what she called “GM refusers,” who for whatever reason, are never going to be buyers of the company’s brands.

The NBCUnified platform will also help GM track what happens when people are exposed to its ads—i.e. whether they end up at dealers and whether they buy—Stewart said.

As it stands, GM already can do such targeting and post-campaign measurement with digital channels, and about 40% of its media buying already is “audience informed” in that way, she said.

“What’s really limiting us is quality availability,” Stewart said. “That’s why we’re really excited for NBCU to be leading here,” she said, because it will bring more high-quality TV content into play for such “audience informed” buying.

NBCU typically talks about three approaches to advertisers—content, context and customer, said Chief Data Officer John Lee. And while the company has made “billions of dollars selling ads through context … customer has been in third place, because we didn’t know who that customer is.”

NBCUnified changes that, Lee said, and in ways that go beyond just targeting and frequency capping ads toward people immediately in the market. He agreed with an idea Stewart put forward that data from the platform may ultimately shape content that’s developed to attract customers for particular advertisers or groups of advertisers.