NBCU Plans Layoffs in Advertising Sales Group

More than 50 positions in NBCUniversal’s advertising sales group are expected to be eliminated as the company works to allocate more resources to digital and other kinds of advertising

“From time to time we look across the business to ensure we’re best positioned to stay competitive in this rapidly changing marketplace. As a result, there will be some staffing changes within our advertising division,” the company said in a statement. “NBCUniversal is going through an effort to right size its business and allocate resources to future growth areas such as new developments in advanced advertising, automation and technology systems.” The cuts are expected to affect all areas of the divsion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

NBCUniversal, like many other media companies, is grappling to stay current with new technologies that have usurped the traditional ways that commercials associated with TV advertising are bought and sold. More advertisers are using data to pinpoint specific kids of audiences, then tapping new “programmatic” buying methods to snatch up digital inventory that accompanies streaming video. TV has long been sold as a broad-based medium, in which a single program beamed at a particular time and day, lures millions at a single moment. TV programs still do that, but a greater percentage of its audience is migrating to on-demand streaming, which creates hundreds of individual viewing sessions that both media outlets and advertisers are working desperately to monetize.