NBCUniversal is joining its rivals Turner, Fox, and Viacom to help advertisers better use data to target people with TV ads.

The consortium, dubbed OpenAP, promises to eliminate much of the manual labor and friction inherent in data-driven TV advertising, which is nascent compared with the web.

NBCU is also licensing some of its proprietary data and tools to bolster the effort.

Ultimately, the TV ad industry needs to improve its data-and-tech chops as it battles giants like Facebook and Google for ad budgets.

NBCUniversal is signing on to help TV advertising transform itself into a digital, data-driven business – one that's ideally better armed to battle Facebook and Google.

So it's partnering with three of its rivals: Fox, Turner, and Viacom.

About a year ago, those three media titans joined forces to announce OpenAP, a consortium aimed at making it easier for advertisers to target people with specific ads, like they've become accustomed to doing in digital media.

But a few big companies, including NBCUniversal and Disney, were glaringly absent.

Now, not only is NBCUniversal joining OpenAP — it plans to license some of its premium data and ad products that could help make the consortium more potent.

Disney is remaining on the sidelines for now.

The digital advertising industry has exploded over the past decade largely through its use of sophisticated software, data, and automated platforms designed to deliver more targeted advertising. The most powerful and successful examples of this, of course, are Facebook and Google, which boast of unparalleled reams of consumer data.

While still a $70 billion-plus ad market in the US, TV is still stubbornly analogue in terms of execution. NBCUniversal's sales chief, Linda Yaccarino, has been vocal about TV's need to disrupt itself before it's too late.

Most major TV players are trying to get more digital. Yet even as individual companies embrace the use of data to improve their targeting capabilities, ad buyers complain that such precision advertising is tough to execute at scale.

And the more that giant marketers get accustomed to buying ads using digital tools and processes — and the more money that keeps getting funneled to the duopoly — the more pressure there is on the TV business to adapt.

Thus, the idea behind OpenAP is to streamline data-driven TV ad operations, to a degree.

Specifically, Viacom, Fox, and Turned built a web-based product designed to help advertisers mix and match data to create segments of consumers they want to reach — like, say, new parents — with ads. Theoretically, they can use those data segments among TV networks.

When OpenAP debuted, it pulled in data from companies like Nielsen and ComScore. Now, with NBCUniversal's arrival, advertisers will also be able to access additional cable set-top data from its parent company, Comcast, as well as several custom NBCUniversal data products, meaning the data segments available should be that much more robust.

OpenAP is primarily about allowing advertisers to create consumer segments for ad-targeting purposes. It's not a digital ad exchange where buyers and sellers can trade — the TV ad business is not quite there.

But more big TV names joining OpenAP means this form of ad buying will gain momentum.