Why smarter media allocation — not bigger budgets — is driving better reach

Susan Leland, director of audience insights, NPR

In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, optimizing ad spend to ensure both maximum reach and meaningful engagement has become a critical challenge for brands. Brands often suffer from inefficient oversaturation in traditional channels, which wastes ad dollars by hitting the same small segment of the audience repeatedly. Crucially, this strategy fails to capture the growing, often younger, and highly engaged leaned-in consumer segments who have largely abandoned traditional media platforms.

The solution is not always found in bigger budgets, but in smarter budget allocation and a diverse media mix. Nielsen’s new NMI Podcast Fusion tool helps brands do just that, allowing advertisers and agencies to plan, optimize and compare all major media types in one place — now including podcasts. NMI Podcast Fusion provides a powerful, data-driven framework for achieving better results by strategically integrating podcasts into an existing media mix.

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Inside NBCUniversal’s test to use AI agents to sell ads against a live NFL game

Traditional TV — let alone a live NFL playoff game — might be the last ad inventory type you’d think to test trying out AI agents against. And yet that’s exactly what NBCUniversal did last month.

The media conglomerate ran a test with ad agency RPA, marketing analytics firm Newton Research and Comcast-owned ad tech firm FreeWheel to have AI agents participate in buying an ad against a live NFL playoff game. But did it work?

“It works. It is a functioning technical proof-of-concept that accurately represents what the buyer wants to buy and what the seller has to sell,” said Ryan McConville, chief product officer and evp of ad products and solutions at NBCUniversal on the latest Digiday Podcast.

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