NBCUniversal Partners with Coactive AI to Scale Custom Contextual Advertising on Peacock for Brands

Advertising in a Data-Driven World

As streaming continues to evolve, NBCUniversal’s premium content remains one of its greatest advantages, an expansive, culturally relevant library that audiences actively choose, creating a powerful foundation for meaningful brand connections.

With more buying models and algorithms entering the ecosystem, NBCU provides a premium, interoperable foundation where they can perform against high-quality signals. The value of trusted content, verified data, and consistent standards only continues to grow.

“Contextual targeting has long been a part of our advertising strategy. With technological advancements and through strategic partnerships, we are now able to operate with greater speed and precision – activating at an episode level and moving toward scene level capabilities. This allows us to surface more curated, relevant content opportunities that align closely with a brand’s objectives and drive stronger outcomes.”

— Stephane Krzywoglowy, Senior Vice President, One Platform Ad Product, Advertising & Partnerships, NBCUniversal

The opportunity: unlock millions of minutes of content to enable smarter, more precise, and scalable ways for brands to show up in the moments audiences care about most, with NBCUniversal as a critical, premium anchor in a multi-system future.

Scaling Custom Contextual Demand

As the industry evolved in response to increasing privacy changes, advertisers began rethinking how they can better connect with audiences. Contextual advertising emerged as a powerful, privacy-minded solution, but expectations around it also became more nuanced. Brands were looking beyond just broad, one-size-fits-all categories like “finance” or “travel.” Instead, they wanted alignment with specific, high-intent moments in premium content, environments that authentically reflect their business proposition. That meant nuanced requests such as:

• Aligning with conversations around taxes, but avoiding negative or fraudulent themes
• Prioritizing positive health and wellness moments, while avoiding injury or loss
• Activating against emerging areas like sustainability and environmentally conscious storytelling

This shift represented a broader industry challenge: how to deliver precision, nuance, and flexibility in contextual advertising at scale in premium ecosystems.

NBCUniversal’s existing contextual workflow relied on structured taxonomies, efficient for standard activation, but less adaptable to increasingly bespoke advertiser needs. While functional, this model lacked validation, required manual iteration, and made real-time responsiveness difficult.

At the same time, brand suitability added further complexity. Each advertiser defines “suitable” differently, requiring a more flexible and dynamic approach than static categories could accommodate. The opportunity for better efficiency and more business impact were significant. NBCU needed a way to operationalize flexibility without sacrificing precision or brand confidence.

From Fixed Taxonomies to Custom Moments

Coactive introduced a new contextual advertising model centered on advertiser-defined custom moments: specific scenes within a show that can align perfectly with a brand or product (think: a paper towel brand advertising right after a messy kitchen scene in which the kids made breakfast).

In partnership with this new tool, NBCUniversal had an opportunity to translate aligned concept intent into Dynamic Tags – customizable labels that use Coactive’s multimodal AI – to automatically categorize and classify video content based on various attributes that can be tailored to individual RFPs.

Coactive analyzed and tagged millions of minutes of Peacock content, making thousands of episodes searchable at the episode and frame level. This evolved NBCU’s workflow into an automated, scalable process:

• An advertiser request arrives with specific business objectives.
• The team builds custom Dynamic Tags aligned to that intent.
• Results are surfaced instantly across NBCUniversal’s digital catalog.
• Moments are validated visually in a user interface.
• Screenshots and examples are incorporated into a visually appealing and easily digestible presentation for the advertiser.

This shift unlocked operational flexibility, transforming the workflow into a more transparent, validated and defensible solution. The visual QA workflow was also particularly impactful, improving both internal confidence and external credibility.

“By partnering with Coactive, we were able to reimagine what our contextual targeting capabilities could deliver for our partners. Now, we can more efficiently identify and activate custom moments across NBCUniversal’s vast content portfolio – unlocking deeper brand alignment opportunities for clients.”

— Stephane Krzywoglowy

Higher Fulfillment, Stronger Sales, Opportunity for Incremental Revenue

After implementing Coactive, NBCUniversal saw operational and commercial gains. In one flagship example, NBCU operationalized a net-new advertiser-defined concept (environmentally conscious content) for a luxury brand. Using Coactive to identify and package relevant moments across Peacock, the campaign delivered measurable brand lift.

• Custom contextual fulfillment increased, allowing NBCU to deliver significantly more advertiser requests.
• Content was scanned to enable searchable, defensible contextual inventory, available in milliseconds for RFP response and proactive sales.
• Contextual selling became more effective and tangible. In buyer meetings, live demos and screenshots helped advertisers see the exact moments where their ads would run.
• The capability also unlocked untapped incremental revenue. As contextual became easier to define, validate, and package, it opened the door to new RFPs and advertiser engagements.

The results:

• +27% higher enjoyment of the creative (vs. baseline)
• +14% agreement that surrounding content enhanced the brand’s message
• +10% higher unaided brand awareness (vs. baseline)
• +38% perception of the luxury brand as environmentally responsible
• +56% higher search engagement (vs. competitive streaming)

Contextual alignment was no longer theoretical, it drove real business results.

What NBCU’s Shift Reveals About the Future of Advertising

Several key lessons emerged from NBCU’s transformation.

• Content is the most durable targeting asset in a privacy-minded landscape. When identity signals become constrained, proprietary IP becomes the foundation for precision advertising.
• Static taxonomies cannot keep pace with advertiser nuance. Flexibility and dynamic tagging are essential to meet evolving brand suitability requirements.
• Visual validation builds confidence. The ability to show exact moments, rather than describe them abstractly, accelerates sales and aids advertiser trust.
• Operational transparency drives commercial success. When product teams can validate and support contextual packages, sales performance improves.

Ultimately, contextual advertising works best when it becomes scalable. By building a structured workflow (from advertiser intent to custom tag to validated package) NBCU is transforming contextual from an ad-hoc solution into an always-on advertiser opportunity. And as NBCU and Coactive look ahead, both companies are focused on increasing precision, flexibility and new growth opportunities at scale.

All figures listed were derived from: NBCUniversal Launches First-to-Market Cross-Platform Innovations, Setting the Stage for the Next Era of Media and Advertising Ahead of CES 2026. (2025, December 17). NBCUNIVERSAL MEDIA. https://www.nbcuniversal.com/article/nbcuniversal-launches-first-market-cross-platform-innovations-setting-stage-next-era-media-and