NBCUniversal launches diverse-owned small business ad platform

NBCUniversal today launched a new advertising program to support diverse-owned small businesses. The program, called Open Doors: Where Small Businesses Thrive, is a partnership between NBCU, agency Walton Isaacson and State Farm, with the potential for more partners to join.

Open Doors utilizes NBCUniversal’s One Platform cross-portfolio ad buying suite to offer marketing resources to small businesses still recovering from the pandemic. At its base, the program offers a virtual playbook that includes insights and strategy on marketing from website design to business planning to social media campaigns. The playbook is downloadable in both English and Spanish.

The program comes as media companies and brands continue to look for ways to invest in diverse-owned businesses. Among others, Roku announced an agency partnership program to extend its ad-buying platform to small business clients earlier this month, and last month, OMD Worldwide unveiled a similar program to educate small businesses on media planning and buying.

Open Doors will also offer monthly spotlights in which it will develop and execute creative for select small businesses through Walton Isaacson and NBCUniversal’s in-house team. For Hispanic Heritage Month, Open Doors has selected New York-based Venezuelan restaurant Cachapas y Mas, and for October’s National Women’s Small Business Month, Louisiana retailer Fleurty Girl.

“Since the pandemic, so many blue chip brands have leaned in to support small businesses, particularly within diverse communities,” said Christine Escribano, senior VP and head of One Platform Marketing at NBCUniversal. “One of the things that they were missing to me was—you can give someone a creative grant, you can give someone a platform, but if they don't know how to tell their story, how do they do that?”

State Farm is the first to integrate its small business grant program as a launch partner, and Escribano hopes more companies will link their philanthropic offerings with Open Doors as it scales. She also hopes to expand its resources to eventually offer creative templates for small businesses lacking the means to hire creative agencies.

The program will be supported by a spot running across the NBCUniversal portfolio.

Open Doors is the result of over a year of work that Escribano and her team have done since NBCUniversal developed a small business grant at the beginning of the pandemic, which awarded creative resources to 11 small businesses. The initial test run was a success, Escribano said, but inspired her to ask, “That's 11 out of thousands of businesses—how do we scale this?”

“Ultimately, I had the idea that we would build a DEI platform with the filter of small business,” said Escribano. The initial idea behind Open Doors was to universalize access “to what big brands take for granted. Big brands have award-winning creative agencies develop their story. They have incredible, very robust TV campaigns and films and digital campaigns. So how do we level the playing field and how do we give access to help build up our small business community?”

Escribano’s ambition is to make Open Doors a year-round program with a revolving door of partner sponsors and diverse-owned small businesses. She said the program is “the launch of what we hope will be a long tail business for us” as well as “a call to action to all businesses” to join NBCU in its support of small businesses.