Kristina Shepard on proving streaming TV performs
Welcome to Innovators Unscripted, a series where we share unfiltered insights from some of the most disruptive voices in today’s advertising ecosystem. Kristina Shepard, EVP, streaming, performance sales and partnerships at NBCUniversal, joins for a conversation about the increasing value of entertainment and live sports programming, proving streaming TV’s performance case, and why media buyer diversity is a priority for NBCUniversal.
Here are the takeaways that stuck with us.
Programmatic streaming TV is expanding media buyers’ access to premium entertainment and live sports
Premium entertainment and live sports continue to be some of the most valuable programming for brands looking to reach engaged audiences at mass scale. NBCUniversal’s portfolio keeps growing: NBA games return this fall, a new MLB partnership is underway, and Sunday Night Football will share the spotlight with Sunday Night Basketball and Sunday Night Baseball in 2027.
Live sports advertising has historically been expensive, relationship-driven, and largely out of reach for small and medium-sized brands. NBCUniversal is focused on making more inventory available programmatically, giving smaller and more diverse brands a level of premium access to participate in some of the industry’s most valuable moments.
Fully scaling programmatic access to live events inventory isn’t without challenges.
“When programmatic started getting more and more popular, there was this thought and dream of an easy button. And I think we’ve quickly learned that’s not the case.”
Kristina Shepard, EVP, Streaming, Performance Sales and Partnerships
NBCUniversal
Programmatic infrastructure wasn’t built for the viewership spikes live events create, which is why NBCUniversal works with its partners and the IAB Tech Lab to develop standards that solve challenges like timeouts and concurrency, making live inventory easier to activate programmatically. That work is what turns some of the biggest cultural moments once reserved for the biggest brands into something any media buyer can plan around with confidence.
Peacock’s Olympics coverage created room for new media buyers
Kristina points to the Olympics as evidence of what’s possible when programmatic access to live sports expands. Making Peacock the exclusive streaming destination let Olympics fans go deeper on the events and athletes they cared about most, and that expanded viewing experience created more premium advertising opportunities.
Combined with NBCUniversal’s other biggest February moments, the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star Game, that reach brought in 250 media buyers, 60% of them new. Expanding access to premium live sports advertising inventory is bringing real incremental spend into programmatic streaming TV, not just reshuffling existing budgets.
Streaming TV has always been performant, and now NBCUniversal can prove it
Kristina has spent a decade in streaming, and she has watched the category evolve from an incremental reach play into something far bigger.
“It’s the brains of TV on the largest screen in the home, but it has the digital infrastructure of everything else with the targeting and measurement capabilities.”
Kristina Shepard, EVP, Streaming, Performance Sales and Partnerships
NBCUniversal
Peacock launched in July 2020 and was built to be ad-supported from the start. NBCUniversal kept both brands and viewers at the forefront from day one. That strategy meant producing content with ad breaks in mind, so ads appear during a natural pause in the programming rather than interrupting it. NBCUniversal also capped the ad load deliberately—five minutes per hour compared to 16 minutes on cable—and has kept innovating on ad experiences since launch, introducing formats like pause ads that make the viewing experience more immersive without disrupting it.
That design gave NBCUniversal a foundation to drive performance, but proving it to agencies and marketers has been the harder half of the equation. Search and social still dominate performance budgets today because last-click attribution makes lower-funnel demand easy to capture, and most CMOs still aren’t treating streaming as a performance channel, even as the data increasingly says they should.
NBCUniversal’s Performance Insights Hub, a self-serve intelligence platform launching later this year, is built to close that gap. It gives media buyers real-time visibility into campaign performance, a shift from the historical wait time of six weeks for a report. That means brands can finally see what’s working while a campaign is still running, the kind of insight that has been standard on the big tech platforms for years but has never existed in TV.
Linear and programmatic streaming TV measurement need to work together
For Kristina, linear and programmatic streaming TV measurement are complementary, not competing, approaches. For example, reach and frequency, the legacy metrics for linear TV, are what NBCUniversal has long relied on to show live sports is worth the premium price tag. Programmatic measurement builds on that, allowing NBCUniversal to go several levels deeper. Instead of sending every viewer the same message, a brand can match a story to a specific cohort, informed by contextual signals down to the scene level, and see how that performs.
“How do we actually understand what that viewer’s watching down to the scene level and then serve an ad in that next ad break that winks and nods back to the content?”
Kristina Shepard, EVP, Streaming, Performance Sales and Partnerships
NBCUniversal
Ultimately, programmatic brings technology and data together with the precision that makes accurate streaming TV measurement possible.
Trust is what makes innovation possible
Opening up access to premium entertainment and live sports programming, proving streaming performance, and giving media buyers sharper signals to plan around can only happen with the right infrastructure in place. For Kristina, that’s the piece NBCUniversal’s partnership with Index brings to the table.
She describes the relationship as deeply collaborative, especially in how Index works with DSPs to enable differentiated ways of buying. Media buyer diversity and making TV accessible to brands of all sizes are among NBCUniversal’s top priorities, and having a partner with built-in demand and the technology to activate it easily has made a real difference.
That kind of trust is what gives marketers access to premium NBCUniversal inventory without sacrificing the transparency or control they expect from a programmatic buy.
“The partnership, the trust, the relationship is just so interwoven into how we work together.”
Kristina Shepard, EVP, Streaming, Performance Sales and Partnerships
NBCUniversal
We break down all the complexities of programmatic streaming TV in our Index Explains video series. Tune in to learn how to make the most of your streaming investments.
