A number of the largest media firms have joined in an effort to unify advanced advertising standards, with NBCUniversal, Fox, Turner and Viacom all on board.

“Underscoring the continued need to give advertisers a more scalable solution for marrying the reach and scale of premium video with advanced advertising capabilities, NBCUniversal, Fox, Turner and Viacom today announced a multi-year, co-development partnership focused on new platforms for automated buying, advanced formats and cross-platform measurement and currency,” the companies announced today. “This combination will join NBCUniversal’s industry-leading, unique Audience Studio data capabilities with OpenAP’s standardized data sets to accelerate innovation in the video marketplace for advertisers.”

In making the announcement, Krishan Bhatia, Executive Vice President, Business Operations and Strategy, NBCUniversal, said: “We have spent the last four years developing the industry’s best tools to empower advertisers to better target their marketing campaigns to desired audiences. We’re excited to unleash the capabilities of our Audience Studio for the rest of the industry and share our underlying technology to propel the entire business forward.”

In a joint statement, Fox’s President of Ad Revenue Joe Marchese, Turner’s President of Ad Sales Donna Speciale, and Viacom’s Head of Marketing & Partner Solutions Sean Moran said: “OpenAP was formed with a clear mission: to bring the industry together in order to advance the experience, efficiency and effectiveness of advertising. With NBCUniversal aligning with the consortium, we are all accelerating the industry’s efforts in providing more premium scale to drive greater adoption of advanced audience targeting, while laying the groundwork for future innovation.”

The announcement adds: “Specifically, NBCUniversal will license to OpenAP its Audience Graph, a proprietary enterprise data asset that provides a single centralized store of audience attributes to create and evaluate audience targets for use in media plan optimization, as well as its Data Sync, a scalable, cloud-based data infrastructure that supports secure, efficient and high fidelity client and agency data matching against audience segments. Further, advertisers and agencies using OpenAP will now benefit from the Freewheel Shared Insights Platform, one informed by non-personally identifiable TV viewing data from Comcast for specific advertising campaign planning purposes. This builds on the data sets currently available to users within the OpenAP platform.

“These new capabilities will allow marketers to create audience segments and buy national television campaigns across each company’s portfolio which, combined, comprise 50% of total TV inventory across national broadcast and cable entertainment.

“Beyond linear optimization, the companies will accelerate their joint development of API-based self-service tools, standardized measurement and attribution capabilities, addressable offerings and cross-platform advertising technology.

NBCUniversal offers leading marketplace expertise in addressable advertising, automated self-service models and household level viewership. The company actively supports multiple industry efforts that help clients and agency partners transact easier and smarter including its participation in Concert and TrustX as well as its partnership with Apple News.

OpenAP launched in 2016 by Fox, Viacom and Turner as a consortium of television publishers and is operated by a leading, neutral third-party auditor. It offers cross-publisher targeting and independent posting for advanced audiences.”