NBC Affiliate Advertising and Promotion Services (AAPS), part of The NBC Agency, the internal advertising agency for NBC Universal, has signed a long-term contract with Teletrax to electronically track network promotional material aired by U.S. television stations. Teletrax, a subsidiary of Medialink Worldwide Incorporated, is the first and only global digital video monitoring and media asset management service. NBC Universal is a unit of General Electric.
The NBC Agency facilitates the promotional and advertising needs of all NBC Universal-owned television entities including NBC network entertainment, news, sports and corporate divisions, as well as its cable, Internet, and syndicated properties. As part of an initiative to better serve its NBC-owned and affiliate stations, AAPS will employ Teletraxs technology to help assess the effectiveness of its marketing efforts by tracking local television airings of network promotion spots in the top 100 U.S. markets.
We are excited to be partnering with Teletrax, said Scot Chastain, vice president of NBC AAPS. To be able to track and value almost instantaneously the material we are sending out will make us even more effective on bigger, long-term projects. We expect Teletrax to help the stations and The NBC Agency increase their effectiveness in promoting the network.
The NBC Agency has played an integral role in NBCs enduring programming success, and Teletrax is excited to help it continue its record of achievement, said Andy Nobbs, managing director of Teletrax. We are pleased that The NBC Agency has joined other leading media organizations, among them NBC Universal Television Distribution and NBC News Channel, two other units of NBC Universal, in recognizing Teletrax as an essential business management tool. With The NBC Agencys addition to its roster of blue-chip clients, Teletrax has established the industry standard for the marketing and promotion community.
Launched in 2002 as a service developed by a joint venture between Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and Medialink, with an underlying technology that is patent protected both by Philips and Digimarc Corp., Teletraxs technology embeds an imperceptible and indelible digital watermark into video whenever it is edited, transmitted, broadcast or duplicated.
A global network of decoders or detectors, then captures all occurrences of the embedded video being transmitted via satellite, cable or terrestrially and generates tracking reports for the content owners. Reports of individual broadcast airings are delivered online in near real-time to each clients custom-designed portal or in data file transfers. Each clients broadcast activity is updated dynamically, 24 hours a day, enabling clients to respond immediately to reported results such as changes in end-user preferences or detections of unauthorized use.
Teletrax maintains a proprietary network of detectors that monitor the television broadcasts of more than 700 television stations in the top 100 markets in the United States, representing more than 85% of all television households. Its international network is comprised of 12 monitoring stations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South and Central America, which monitor over 200 channels being broadcast from nearly 50 nations.
The NBC Agency joins a growing list of leading entertainment, news and media organizations that have contracted with Teletrax to track broadcast video content, either in the United States exclusively or globally, which includes: BBC, Buena Vista Television, ABC Television Network, Tribune Entertainment, NBC Universal Television Distribution, NBC News Channel, Reuters Television, Medialink and Australian-based Media Review International. A number of other entertainment, news and media companies are also currently testing the Teletrax service.