Kelly Abcarian

NBCUniversal’s ambitions to reinvent measurement have now extended to embrace emotion and ad quality, but can some factors be too abstract to quantify?

Do you know what parts of an ad campaign truly ignite your customers? Is it a beloved celebrity? Or a compelling story? Don’t we really want to know if a great, emotional ad gets the proper credit when we measure campaign performance? As a publisher, NBCUniversal knows how important the role of emotions can be. Emotional relationships to our content are what fuels fandom. It’s why we constantly test our content to understand feelings like brand love, because emotional connections with our fans can have tangible benefits for brands. And the same kind of rigor publishers apply to premium content needs to be applied to the quality of the ads as it runs alongside it.

In a return to in-person celebration on Tuesday, TVNewsCheck honored six women exemplars who set the bar high: Above: Datazoom’s Diane Strutner, BBC’s Judy Parnall, Interra Systems’ Anupama Anantharaman, Netflix’s Kylee Peňa and NBCUniversal’s Kelly Abcarian. Fox Weather/Fox Television Stations’ Sharri Berg could not be present. (Images by JohnStaleyPhoto.com)

The recipients of TVNewsCheck’s Women in Technology Awards shared their tech predictions in a webinar last week. Among the most impactful: more collaboration around the transition to the cloud, better monitoring with the aid of machine learning and better standards around and use of data.

Kelly Abcarian, EVP of measurement and impact at NBCUniversal and one of this year’s TVNewsCheck Women in Technology Futurist Award winners, sees measurement as a “team sport” that will be “all about collaboration” that her work is helping to realize.

Recipients of the 12th annual Women in Technology Awards will share their predictions for where media and entertainment industry technology is headed during a TVNewsCheck webinar set for 1 p.m. ET on April 13. Speakers are (clockwise from top left): Kelly Abcarian, NBCU; Judy Parnall, BBC; Kylee Peña, Netflix; Anupama Anantharaman, Interra Systems; Sharri Berg, Fox Weather/Fox Television Stations; and Diane Strutner, Datazoom. Register here.

The recipients of TVNewsCheck’s annual Women in Technology Futurist Award — NBCUniversal’s Kelly Abcarian and Interra Systems’ Anupama Anantharaman — have been at the forefront of next-generation advertising currency and video conferencing, respectively. They’ll participate in a webinar on April 13 and receive their awards at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 26.

An advanced advertising veteran, Kelly Abcarian joins NBCUniversal from Nielsen to accelerate the company’s investment and development in cross-platform measurement and data capabilities.