NBCUniversal’s Cultural Consultancy
Where cultural intelligence meets entertainment power.

I created Co-Lab to help brands understand culture the way entertainment does.

Co-Lab is NBCUniversal’s cultural consultancy, built to translate fast-moving cultural shifts into strategic clarity, creative direction, and meaningful brand opportunity. What began as an idea became a new model for how NBCUniversal partners with marketers, moving upstream into insight generation, strategy development, and creative collaboration.

Co-Lab exists to help brands think like entertainers and storytellers, not advertisers. And it reshaped how NBCU engages with global clients in the process

Why Co-Lab Exists

Culture is evolving faster than traditional insight systems can track. Audience behavior is shaped by micro-trends, fan communities, emotional need states, and storytelling patterns that shift week to week.

Brands with high cultural relevance grow 6x faster than those without it (Kantar, 2023)

Yet most marketers don’t have access to the cultural engines, creative decision-makers, or real-time audience signals that shape culture.

NBCUniversal is one of the largest creators of global entertainment, but historically, advertisers only tapped into that power at the point of media distribution. Co-Lab was created to change that dynamic, giving brands earlier access to the storytellers, trends, and creative intelligence that drive cultural impact.

What Makes
Co-Lab Different

  • We decode the cultural signals shaping tomorrow: audience emotions, fandom behavior, micro-trends, community values, platform shifts, genre patterns, and content ecosystems.

  • Showrunners. Writers. Producers. Directors. Talent. Franchise builders.

    These aren’t “influencers”. These are the people who define global cultural conversation.

    Co-Lab brings them into the strategic process.

  • No consultancy has the proximity to news cycles, national trends, proprietary newsroom analytics, and political/market intelligence that NBCUniversal does

  • Co-Lab is designed to collapse the gap between:

    • What audiences feel

    • What culture demands

    • What creative can express

    • What strategy needs to unlock.

    We build strategy and creative opportunity at once, not in a linear handoff.

Co-Lab Impact By The Numbers

32+ global brands engaged across CPG, beauty, tech, finance, retail, healthcare, and more.

20+ strategic workshops delivered bringing together marketers, storytellers, analysts, creators and producers

3,000+ marketers reached through cultural presentations, keynotes, and global thought leadership

6 proprietary cultural frameworks created spanning micro-communities, nostalgia, fandom, sustainability and behavior

Featured in multiple industry publications recognized by NBCUniversal and The Drum for redefining how entertainment companies collaborate with brands

A new organizational capability built Co-Lab established the first cultural consultancy within NBCUniversal, reshaping how the company partners with global advertisers

How Co-Lab Works

Co-Lab brings cultural intelligence, creative craft, and entertainment expertise together through a collaborative working model:

  1. Cultural Discovery
    We surface early cultural signals and emotional drivers shaping audience behavior, mapping where culture is headed and why it matters for brands.

  2. Strategic Alignment
    We translate those signals into insight frameworks, creative territories, and audience strategies that unlock brand opportunity.

  3. Creative Collaboration
    We bring in the creators and storytellers who shape global entertainment to expand thinking and co-develop stronger, more resonant ideas.

  4. Application Activation
    We equip brands with strategic tools, narratives, and frameworks that guide campaign development, narrative approach, and ongoing creative decisions.

Co-Lab is where cultural insight becomes creative and strategic acceleration.

Co-Lab in Action

Below are two examples of how Co-Lab helped brands navigate cultural complexity and find opportunity in moments of tension, transformation, and change.

Storytelling in Healthcare

Healthcare advertisers struggled to break through during lockdown, when crisis communication dominated every channel. Co-Lab brought together the showrunner, writers, and lead actor of New Amsterdam to share how they translate real medical issues into emotionally resonant storytelling.

This workshop equipped healthcare brands with new narrative frameworks to move from clinical messaging → human connection

  • In 2020, health advertisers faced an unprecedented challenge: how do you communicate with audiences who are emotionally exhausted, hyper-exposed to medical news, and overwhelmed by crisis messaging? Healthcare brands needed a way to speak to people that felt fresh, human, and resonant, not clinical or redundant, during a moment when trust and attention were at their most fragile.

  • Amid the noise of pandemic news coverage, audiences were still seeking stories, stories that helped them process uncertainty, find empathy, and stay emotionally connected. Entertainment, especially scripted medical dramas, played a critical role in shaping how viewers understood frontline workers, medical systems, and real-world health issues.

    Hollywood had long mastered the balance of real-world urgency and emotional relatability, an art that marketers urgently needed to learn.

  • Co-Lab convened a cross-disciplinary workshop bringing together healthcare leaders, data analysts, editorial voices, and the creative minds behind NBC’s hit drama New Amsterdam,including the showrunner, head writer, and lead actor.

    By revealing how the show translates medical realities into emotionally engaging storytelling, Co-Lab equipped healthcare brands with fresh frameworks for crafting culturally relevant, audience-sensitive narratives.

    This immersive session helped advertisers rethink their messaging approach, shifting from crisis communication to empathetic storytelling rooted in humanity, character, and emotional truth.

    Co-Lab Workshop featuring (L to R)

    YUSUF CHUKU, EVP Strategy, NBCUniversal

    RYAN EGGOLD, Star, “New Amsterdam”

    ERIKA GREEN SWAFFORD, Producer, “New Amsterdam”

    DAVID SCHULNER, Creator/Showrunner, “New Amsterdam”

Election Year Strategy with Steve Kornacki

Ahead of the 2024 U.S. election, global advertisers feared political noise would drown out brand messaging. Co-Lab hosted a global summit anchored by NBC News’ Chief Data Analyst, and cultural icon, Steve Kornacki, who shared proprietary electoral forecasts and media impact modeling.

Paired with longitudinal brand-health analysis, the session gave advertisers a clear, evidence-backed roadmap to invest confidently and strategically during a culturally volatile year

  • As the 2024 U.S. presidential election approached, global advertisers grew increasingly anxious about their U.S. media investments. Political advertising was expected to hit historic levels, raising concerns about cluttered airwaves, rising costs, audience fragmentation, and brand message dilution.

    For many international marketers, the U.S. political landscape felt unpredictable. They needed clarity, not just on media implications, but on the cultural and behavioral realities shaping the year ahead. The question they asked NBCUniversal was simple but urgent: “Should we continue investing in the U.S. during an election year, and if so, where, when, and how?”

  • Election years aren’t just political; they’re cultural moments that reshape how audiences consume news, entertainment, and advertising. Contrary to perception, attention doesn’t decline in these cycles, it intensifies, especially within premium, trusted environments.

    And the data was clear: Brands that retract TV investment during politically charged years consistently experience long-term declines in brand health; declines that take years, not months, to recover.

    The real risk wasn’t showing up, it was disappearing during times of heightened cultural attention.

  • To replace uncertainty with clarity, Co-Lab created a bespoke Global Political Advertising Summit, anchored by unmatched access to NBCU’s newsroom and proprietary insights. The centerpiece of the experience was a live briefing from Steve Kornacki, NBC News’ Chief Data Analyst and one of the most trusted electoral experts in America.

    Kornacki delivered exclusive 2024-2025 election forecasts, including battleground state projections, voter-behavior trends, and predictive models that no other consultancy could offer, giving advertisers a precise understanding of where political spending would concentrate and where commercial brands would still thrive.

    Co-Lab paired this with a longitudinal analysis of past election-year brand behavior, spotlighting how reduced TV spend consistently harms long-term equity, consideration, and momentum. The result was a clear, evidence-backed roadmap that guided global marketers on where to invest, when to hold, and how to stay visible during one of the most politically charged years in the U.S. media landscape.

    By the end of the summit, advertisers left not with fear, but with confidence, equipped with the strategic insight, political context, and data-driven guidance needed to invest intelligently and safeguard brand health in 2024.

Co-Lab’s

Impact

Co-Lab reshaped how NBCUniversal engages with marketers. It created a new upstream strategic capability, unlocked deeper creative collaboration, and expanded the company’s role from media distributor to cultural partner.

For clients, it delivered clarity and confidence in a world defined by constant cultural change. For me, it represents the intersection of what I do best: decoding culture, designing strategy, and building engines that accelerate creative thinking across organizations.

Press and Recognition

NBCUniversal & Sky Launch Co-Lab, a New Cultural Consultancy + Research Initiative

‘Think like an entertainer’: NBCU and Sky unveil Co-Lab to produce global ad strategies