This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
But TV networks give cable and satellite platforms the ability to sell just two minutes per hour of advertising in their live feeds of network programming.
So how is addressable going to get greater scale?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Comscore strategic partnerships SVP Scott Wortherm says he is trying to push two ways of doing so.
The digital measurement group previously merged with TV viewer measurer Rentrak to offer a combined and cross-channel measurement solution.
In August, AT&T’s ad-tech group Xandr picked comScore to measure viewing of addressable ads across its live linear platforms, extending the existing deal through which comScore did so for DirecTV to also encompass Altice USA and Frontier.
1. Combining forces
“About a month ago, Xandr and comScore announced an expansion of their relationship to measure addressable advertising,” comScore’s Worthem says.
“We help them measure addressable advertising in their consortium. That’s one way we can grow the two minutes an hour, by combining forces.”
2. Every spot rated
“In every ad that is addressable, not every viewer is actually targeted and sent the message. Because of the business model and how we measure data with 30 million households, we’re able to create a rating holistically, both for the addressable portion of one ad spot, and the portion of that ad spot that was not addressable.
“We can actually help measure what was addressed, and then if it’s a national ad, everything that was not.”
This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr. Please visit this page to find more videos from the series.
]]>“I think that competition is always a good thing, and I think that this new offering at Xandr led by Brian Lesser is certainly going to be a force that I’m very interested to see how it develops,” Karp says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference. “I think they have all of the right pieces to certainly make a very interesting offering.”
McHugh, who is SVP of Omni Media, Creative Solutions & Strategic Investments at the iconic personal care marketer has always been a believer in relevance. “I always said that it’s about the value exchange between the consumer and what she or he chooses to engage with. We’re all sort of attention starved. There’s too many things for us to do,” she says.
Thus Xandr’s research about just how busy people are “wasn’t surprising.” The bigger question is how, when and where brands can fit in.
“So how do we gain permission from those consumers to engage with them in a meaningful way? I think that’s part of their story, which I’m interested to see how that plays out in messaging. I think we all have to address that in an ad-blocking, futuristic world.”
Summing up the road ahead of Xandr, she adds, “They have the data behind it, they have tech, so they have a really interesting, perfect storm so we’ll see what happens.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>For years, marketers have talked about reaching a point in the advertising ecosystem where they can know so much about their audiences that they can craft and customize the most precise messages and content for consumers.
That is still the hope, but getting there is going to take some foundational components, a conference on the topic of “relevance” in advertising heard.
“Ultimately if media companies and advertisers and marketers are going to be able to deliver good, relevant content, it has to start with understanding consumer behavior and understanding consumer identity,” TransUnion’s Matt Spiegel told Beet.TV in this video interview.
“How we can provide information about consumers so that you can make sure you’re dealing with as much certainty as possible?”
That’s something Spiegel has been working on since this summer, when he joined TransUnion, a credit score and identity protection company, from MediaLink, a strategic advisory.
Why did Spiegel make the switch? In TransUnion’s words: “His expertise will further TransUnion’s ability to deliver the addressable solutions required by enterprise marketers and media companies to make informed modeling, strategic investment planning and digital targeting decisions.”
And that makes relevance, well… relevant.
“Part of what we’re doing is being able to use that kind of intelligence to provide targeting segments, both custom-built as well as syndicated audiences, that allow us to help be that fuel,” Spiegel tells Beet.TV.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“There’s a really big mission. Whether AT&T itself is going to be able to do it or not we’ll see,” Morgan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference in which he discusses his Simulmedia advanced TV solutions company having achieved profitability and its new Transparent TV offering.
Although AT&T has the means to distribute its own content, it will need to work with multiple MVPD’s to scale household addressable advertising. Simulmedia collaborates with about a dozen of the top US television companies to aggregate and scale audience targeting, so Morgan understands what’s at play.
“It’s certainly trying to bring together the whole ecosystem,” he says of Xandr. “I think it realizes that it’s going to require a lot of partners to get there.”
Asked whether the combined assets under Xandr—which include AppNexus—will constitute another walled garden, Morgan says that’s an overused term. It’s not a “binary issue” of whether a business is either a walled garden or not, he says.
“I think companies that use data have to maintain certain protections around that data for proprietary reasons, for privacy reasons. I think clearly AT&T is going to be able to leverage a massive amount of consumer data and consumer media data and communications data for advertising that will certainly be able to drive more relevance, the title of this conference,” Morgan says.
He expresses praise for AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s presentations at the conference, noting that Stephenson was “pretty clear” that he’ll be making more acquisitions. “He talked about why they did the deal, and he talked a lot of specifics about the advertising business and what they need to do.”
Morgan mentions in passing that Simulmedia has achieved profitability and explains the unveiling of Transparent TV in June of 2018. “We’ve unbundled our audience network offering so that we’re providing more direct automation to marketers,” he says.
With Transparent TV, advertisers can directly manage their campaigns against strategic audiences with total transparency on media outputs, marketing outcomes, competitive insights and pricing, according to a news release. This includes spots, networks, dayparts, GRPs and CPMs, and such marketing outcomes as reach maximization, conversions, and sales attribution and ROI.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>Combining Xandr’s content assets with tech and ad delivery “is an exciting way to build an offering that hits both sides. It’s not just data and tech and targeting and it’s not just the content side. It’s a good marriage of both,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.
Asked about the broader application of addressable TV advertising, Campanelli notes that Horizon isn’t in the camp of those who believe that all TV will be addressable in the future. He sees it more as a complement to TV’s broad reach.
“Addressable is incredibly important and it’s going to play a bigger role as time goes on and an increasingly important role,” he says.
But there is a caveat in the use of TV’s reach to influence people who may not be aware of particular brands. “The value is reaching consumers who are not in your target today but could be tomorrow. Or someone who is not in your target but could be a word of mouth to someone who’s in your target.
“So there’s a value in reaching people outside of your target and addressability is about just reaching that target effectively. They’ll to coexist together but we don’t see a world where it’s entirely addressable.”
How much of TV will be linear versus on demand is a different question to Campanelli, who nonetheless says the ability to reach mass audiences is crucial. “Addressable is a critical complement to that but it’s not the way that all of television should work.”
To fully understand the rapidly evolving TV space, Horizon formed a unit several years ago called Horizon Advance to explore addressable, third-party programmatic TV vendors like Simulmedia and new techniques like data matching.
“It’s a complicated space. We learned it and we had to immerse ourselves to learn it.”
As opposed to an activation team, Horizon Advance is more consultative for clients and other in-house teams. “It’s been a huge asset to Horizon and our clients,” says Campanelli.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference, Muldoon says that after hearing talk about consumers, data, technology, reach, engagement and quality content “it’s really coming together more than it’s ever have before.”
Accordant became part of Amnet Group following Accordant’s 2016 acquisition by Dentsu Aegis Group. Amnet is Dentsu Aegis’s global programmatic unit.
Muldoon says the “exciting challenges” ahead are on the creative side, the engagement side and also on the consumer side. “We realize that consumers are more educated than ever about advertising and how they engage with advertising.”
With entities like Xandr taking shape, the industry has “more options than we ever had to really make that mission of brand engagement to be a reality.”
Having cut his teeth on the digital side, Muldoon sees the immersive storytelling properties of television intersecting with engagement. “It’s really coming into play that the programmatic capabilities and TV immersion are at an intersection and a crossroads.
Asked about Xandr’s stated desire to be a catalyst for change on both the buy-side and sell-side of advertising, he says the company is emerging at a time when there’s a track record to the evolution of DSP’s and DMP’s.
“It’s pretty exciting if you’re Xandr I’m sure right now to see all the ingredients you have and the opportunities to do things right from the start. So it’s a great time for them.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference, Sullivan speaks about AT&T as a client and how she perceives Xandr’s blueprint for innovation going forward.
“I love the fact that they took a look back in order to take a look forward by using Alexander Graham Bell, and then seeing where the company is going and the logo they came up with. I think they are the future,” says Sullivan.
Omnicom Media Group is “lucky enough to represent AT&T as their agency of record and I will tell you that having them as a client consistently keeps us on our toes. Constantly thinking about the future and where the business is going,” she adds.
A veteran of both Disney ABC and NBCUniversal, Sullivan says she gets where Xandr is heading. “They have the opportunity to leapfrog and really be at the forefront of what a media company looks like going forward. So I find it fascinating.”
Having heard AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson talk at the conference, Sullivan says the audience was privy to insights about an industry “that 18 months ago we really didn’t have a lot of insight to. He certainly is a person who knows what he wants and he’s going after and I think they have a great roadmap for success.”
The most pressing goal is to make TV more like digital and, in the process, smarter, according to Sullivan. It starts with helping clients get a better read on who they are trying to reach “because for so many of them, I think that’s one of the hardest things to establish.”
Asked about the utility of addressable TV ads, she says that targeting layer added to the medium’s huge reach has produced “really good results” in her agency’s testing over the past couple of years.
“I do think that all of our clients are realizing that, if not all of their campaign but certainly anywhere from thirty to sixty percent of their campaign, they’ve got to start understanding the audience that they’re really trying to target in order to stop having this be a test and learn and actually have it be a practice that they do every single time they go to market.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>The theory is all well and good – but how do you actually make it happen?
Perhaps inconveniently, a key ingredient of “relevance” seems to be another thing about which consumers are becoming wary – data about them.
So how can marketers navigate the waters? In this interview with Beet.TV, Forrester Research principal analyst Joanna O’Connell, who has also spent time as a marketers, opens up on key considerations.
“Things like identity management become really really important,” she says. “It’s not a ‘nice to have’, it’s literally a ‘how do I resolve to people so that, when I’m doing my advertising, I’m doing it at the people level?’
“Another thing would be ‘how are my different ad technologies talking to each other in a way that allows me to better manage my frequency more globally?'”
So-called “frequency management”, understanding how often audiences are exposed to particular ads, is an oft-discussed topic, O’Connell concedes.
But she says marketers have to put their money where their mouths are – and actually switch on the systems.
However, gaining consumer relevance isn’t just about technology, it’s also about crafting creative, human-driven messaging that can meet the right audiences once you know who they are, O’Connell adds.
“In the digital world we’re not as good at that in the day-to-day with the creative that is out in market,” she complains. “How do we make sure we’re always thinking about the consumer, and there’s tech that actually is giving advertisers those palettes and agencies those palettes to be able to do that kind of stuff?”
O’Connell is a seasoned marketing analyst who also had a stint as MediaMath’s chief marketer.
Her recent work has included a playbook report on selecting ad-tech vendors for an omni-channel strategy, a breakdown of 34 media agencies and an upcoming Forrester Wave dissection of tech firms that help power ad creative.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>In this video interview with Beet.TV, Reddit COO Jen Wong discusses the company’s strategy to marry content, distribution and customer data produce relevance and addressable TV.
On March 19, Reddit, one of the biggest community publishing platforms, began offering native posts to advertisers. The only difference from a regular post by a community member? The “promoted” label at the top of the unit. In keeping with Reddit’s standard post format, users can even upvote, downvote or comment on native ads.
Wong says video is a capability, too. “We’ve always allowed embeds into the platform,” she adds. “And, with the redesign, we opened a native player so that our users, in addition to posts and stills, could actually upload video. And it just exploded.
“Our users, which are 18 to 24, spend a lot of time with video, there was a lot of discussion about that today. And as a result, we accelerated the deployment of our video ad product.”
To that end, Wong, who joined in April after being Time Inc’s COO and digital president, recently launched the ability for advertisers to buy Reddit video on a cost-per-view (CPV) basis.
In keeping with Wong’s idea of full control, Reddit runs its own ad auction platform and a proprietary ad server. It is guaranteeing results for advertisers.
Wong says Reddit communities tend to be brand-safe because moderators are already motivated to keep well maintained spaces.
“We have now developed our own algorithms, we have a full development team, and we’re able to really custom develop it to match our inventory,” Colella says. “Nobody knows our inventory structure better than us. So this allows us to innovate more quickly and to respond to the market more nimbly as well.”
NBCU makes all of its advertising supply available through its audience optimization product. “Whether it’s programmatic TV or linear optimization, whatever’s available will be made available through those platforms. We don’t differentiate,” Colella adds.
“Typically, the live sports programs and our big-ticket items will obviously go on sponsorship. But if something hasn’t been sold we make it available.”
In April of 2018, NBCU joined the TV audience-targeting consortium OpenAP led by Fox, Viacom and Turner. In so doing, it brought its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.
“We’ve been spending a lot of time to really understand what we can bring to bear and how best to work with the group so that we can make it easier for our advertisers to buy on an audience basis,” Colella says of OpenAP.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“They’re trying to pull off something really unique, but I can tell you that the 200 or so people who are at this conference really are leaning in and really want it to happen,” Criteo’s COO says.
In this interview with Beet.TV at the conference, Spilman talks about the positive effect that speakers like Ariana Huffington and others have had on both minds and bodies.
“To get up this morning and hear [CEO] Brian Lesser unveiling Xandr, what they’re looking to accomplish, is really inspiring and compelling.”
While most people think of AT&T as a legacy telephone company, its ambition to become “a modern media company” represents “just such the right time with the right message,” says Spilman, who has been in advertising and media for nearly 30 years.
Contemplating the attention spectrum, she references the term “CPA” for continuous partial attention. “It really goes to show how important relevance in advertising is. Because in this world of fragmentation and fragmented attention, how do you market your products and services to this audience who has partial attention at any given time across devices?
“We’ve talked for years about addressable TV and measurability and how all these things are going to converge,” Spilman says. “And now with this combination of content, distribution, technology and marketing coming together, we have a shot. And that’s just really, really exciting and inspiring to me for somebody who’s been in this industry for a very, very long time.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“We’ve really been optimistic about the space,” says Law, who is EVP, Managing Director, US Media Investment, Amplifi (Dentsu Aegis Network). “I think the innovation and the technology the scale of the number of people we can hit and the improvement of data sources across the board has made addressable that much more viable on a media plan.”
In addition to more scale, there’s more data to provide understanding about consumer behavior and the best ways to target them, Law explains in this interview with Beet.TV. at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.
“And then on the back end, being able to understand did they actually follow through, make a purchase, go to a store, follow them throughout the full process,” Law adds.
Asked about the workload required for addressable TV, Law says it takes commitment and harnessing different resources. “I think you need to work with your analytics teams, you need to work with your clients very closely about what their goals are. So it is bringing a lot of people together on both sides.”
On the program distributor side, each vendor can represent a silo of sorts, so “it’s really our responsibility to bring that together to think about how can we maximize what we’re getting out of this.”
Part of the process is helping clients determine how addressability fits into their overall planning, given its utility in targeting specific households. “As we think about it, you have reach happening across the marketplace, but in traditional television and across other channels we’re really getting to the top of that reach curve very quickly now and then it’s frequency and we’re just kind of running rampant at the top of the reach curve.”
In moving TV into the lower part of the funnel, it’s less about brand awareness than it is getting closer to consumers—right now at the household level. Law describes a “one ad in one room versus in another room” approach “the ultimate dream, although we’re not quite there yet.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>But that’s what ad-tech Acxiom – a data warehouse firm that sells consumer profiles to the world’s largest companies, available to advertisers and ad-tech platforms for advanced customer targeting – is doing when it is due to complete the sale of its Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) division to the Interpublic Group (IPG) agency today.
The deal leaves Acxiom focusing on LiveRamp, which is more fixed on letting brands use their own customer data in ad targeting than just buying in consumer data sets.
After two years in which both agencies and tech vendors have been accused of a host of misdeeds, LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe says the sell-off means: “We’re now absolutely completely neutral.”
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Howe says: “(We are) now going to be armed with a really attractive balance sheet, which is going to allow us to accelerate innovation at LiveRamp, go win more clients, do more integrations.”
Acxiom has faced challenges. Earlier this year, Facebook said it would shut Partner Categories, through which it allowed advertisers to target ads using customer profiles bought from data brokers like Acxiom. Meanwhile, Europe’s GDPR has introduced more stringent controls on the levels of consent required to process consumer data in this way.
Now Howe is focusing on letting marketers unleash the power within the customer data they already have, rather than just buying in customer data segments to stitch together.
“To make every experience relevant … you need to activate those interactions with consumers with data,” he says. “But, for too long it’s been just too difficult to do. There was no easy button for activating data.
“What LiveRamp has done is, they’ve gone and integrated all of the world’s data providers, linked that data to all of the world’s people, and then in turn, link that to built connections to all of the world’s use cases.”
That goes even for TV advertising, as LiveRamp enables the use of marketer data in addressable, OTT and linear ad campaigns.
AMS’ sale to IPG comes in at $2.3 billion, for which IPG just raised $2 billion. The exercise has pleased some financial analysts, who see the move as facilitating a stock performance that has grown despite what some saw as threats early in 2018.
And Howe is keen to stress the new Acxiom understands the importance of privacy.
“At both Acxiom and LiveRamp, we are huge proponents of having federal privacy legislation,” he says. “At the heart of all privacy legislation is an intent to be transparent with consumers, ensure that data is ethically sourced, and give people better visibility and control over how their data is utilized. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing for businesses, it’s a good thing for consumers.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>But building ads like this has traditionally been hard. With so many fragments to assemble and new skills to learn, it’s no wonder that so much ad creation for connected TV is still outsourced.
But now Innovid, a tech company that has been working in the field for years, has taken a step forward to empowering more people to make the ads.
Innovid just launched OTT Composer, a software suite that lets brands, agencies and publishers design creatives for connected TV on a self-serve basis.
“There was absolutely no-one that did that for television,” says Innovid CTO Tal Chalozin in this video interview with Beet.TV. We spent a long time building a tool that allows both brands and broadcasters to create interactive, personalised, data-driven ads of the living room.
OTT Composer supports ad creation for more than 25 devices, includes ad server integration and transcoding features, and even a nifty feature for Roku called TV Monster, essentially allowing users to preview their ads on Roku quickly, just as viewers would see them.
Chalozin says OTT Composer is being used by existing Innovid customers like Fox’s true[X] and Hulu.
The tool’s introduction comes as a time of growth and increasing solidity for the format.
Innovid just gained accreditation from the Media Ratings Council (MRC) for video ad measurement in a connected TV environment, which it says makes it the first vendor to have gained the designation. That means customers should be able to trust that the figures Innovid gives them on ad views should be reliable.
“The environment behaves very differently from desktop or web-based video,” Innovid’s Chalozin says. “There is an unbiased body that doesn’t have skin in the media game that can apply measurement that is very key for the transaction.”
Beet.TV interviewed Chalozin at the Xandr Relevance Conference.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>Within the next 12 months, Xandr envisions having “aggregated significant amounts of supply. We will have enabled AT&T’s first-party data to be used on the front end of a buying tool to create segments and target. And then we’ll have a marketplace up and running that monetizes not only for AT&T’s owned-and-operated premium inventory, but for that of multiple publishers throughout the industry,” says Mike Welch, Xandr’s SVP of Strategy & Business Development. “Our vision all along was to create this marketplace for premium advertising centered on video.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Xandr Relevance Conference, Welch says the Altice and Frontier partnerships increase Xandr’s addressable TV footprint by 20% and explains how the acquisition of AppNexus will ramp up Xandr’s cross-screen targeting capabilities.
Reflecting on the conference itself and taking the pulse of conference attendees, Welch says it’s gratifying to see such widespread and supportive response. “The interesting thing for me and I think for all of us has been the feedback has been so positive. People are pulling for us,” says Welch “They’re saying the industry really needs this, we think you guys are going to bring a much needed alternative to some of the options that are out there.”
For cross-screen addressability, “This is where AppNexus really, really helps us and becomes a key part of our portfolio,” Welch adds. While AT&T via DirecTV has been a leader in addressable TV for six years, it was limited in reach since it was limited to television homes.
“You sort of plug and play AppNexus into what Xandr already has and you can now take a custom list or AT&T first-party data, build a segment from that and reach those same target audiences not only on the inventory on the television screen but the premium inventory that AppNexus has throughout their platform. It opens up another door for us to extend the reach of our addressable targeting capabilities.”
AT&T has never been supply constrained for addressable television. “In other words, we’ve been able to fulfill our campaigns and frequency tap our campaigns across the households that DirecTV could always reach. But what addressable really needs is extended scale of household reach and that’s what Altice and Frontier bring to us.”
Those providers will increase Xandr’s household reach by about 20% so that it can now reach 20 million households with an addressable ad in a live television stream “and it’s just a first step towards that aggregation that I think will ultimately drive dollars from digital back to television,” says Welch.
“We’ll probably start with a concept we call versioning. An advertiser would still buy a full unit that runs across the entire distribution that a particular cable network or broadcast network has, all TV households.”
However, in the portion of those households that are enabled with addressable technology, Xandr can deliver a different version of the ad.
“One household gets the Millennial version of the ad the other household might get a Baby Boomer version of the ad. So it makes the ad a little more relevant to them.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“And now comes the heavy lifting,” says Brian Gleason, CEO, Performance Media Group, GroupM. “From a vision, I think they’re spot-on.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the Xandr Relevance Conference, Gleason talks about Xander’s expected ambitions in the media ecosystem and why it has a leg up on Verizon in pulling together data and technology.
Having AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson present at the conference shows support for what Xandr is setting out to do, according to Gleason. “When you look at AT&T as a company, they’re massive. I think Randall said they spend more in the U.S. than any other company. You start to tie those things together and I think they outlined it quite well.”
In addition to data, a 142-year track record is “important when we think about things like trust. I think the title of the conference with Relevance is exactly what it should be, is how do they make all of those things relevant and put them together in a way that fulfills the ambition of making advertising matter.”
Asked about Xandr’s influence on the buy-side and sell-side, Gleason says the company has to be “an ecosystem play,” with its AppNexus acquisition providing the pipes. “The next step will be, is there other assets that you could put alongside that inventory in the marketplace itself? Can they bring data to it?”
He notes that Verizon had “a similar ambition and was never able to connect the data to the inventory. They had a little bit more of a plumbing problem as well because they had a lot of different technologies to try to stich them together. So I think the execution is critical.”
The end result of the execution must be performance, data and technology aligned with advertisers’ goals to “achieve actual outcomes. It’s not as easy as people think.
“AT&T we look to as a key partner in being able and hopefully enable us with more tools to connect those different assets together, which will enable our brands,” says Gleason.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“There has been a lot of talk over the past few years and many companies, partners and vendors have done a lot of great strides. But there hasn’t yet been a consolidating at a realistic level,” says a4 President Paul Haddad.
“There’s a lot of theory in there, putting the pieces together and making a national addressable TV solution scalable enough for advertisers. AT&T has taken a step with tangible footprints that are really addressable today and brought the best of the best, put them together,” Haddad adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Xandr Relevance Conference.
Launched in the spring of 2018, a4 was the culmination of Altice’s acquisitions of Cablevision, Audience Partners and Placemedia, as AdExchanger reports.
“AT&T has a very similar yet much grander vision and it’s very well aligned with ours. So we are helping AT&T on the national TV addressability aspect and in return they’re helping us on the national addressability from a digital perspective,” says Haddad.
A4 is Xandr’s addressable TV partner in the New York market. Xandr also announced a deal this week to aggregate and sell the national addressable TV advertising inventory of Frontier Communications.
“We are bringing our local addressable TV inventory to the party and AT&T is putting all these pieces together of their footprint and our footprint and creating a scaled national TV solution for their clients.”
Haddad says that when he sat down with Xandr CEO Brian Lesser to figure out “how can we bring these pieces together,” it was easier than expected.
“It didn’t take long for us to figure out that this is real, this is something that we could have up and running in the next couple of months,” Haddad says. “We decided that this is the right thing for Altice, this is the right thing for AT&T, this is the right thing for the industry. And we’re hoping that the results will show themselves in the next quarter or two quarters.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“There’s no question that lots of folks in the marketing and media world would like more alternatives to Google and Facebook, and AT&T by bringing a lot of extraordinary assets is the latest to present a credible assembly of important capabilities,” Rothenberg says.
One of the many invitation-only attendees of the Xandr Relevance Conference, The IAB chief was scheduled to moderate a panel discussion titled Consumers’ Choice: The DTC Revolution. It was based in part on the IAB’s “Rise Of The 21st Century Brand Economy” study.
“I think the elite attendance here at The Relevance Conference is an example of the interest, the hunger for an entity that can do what AT&T is promising to do,” Rothenberg says.
That’s based on what he considers to be AT&T’s “world class” assets encompassing entertainment, news, distribution, data, privacy and a “great embedded understanding of data security.”
Add them all together and “you’ve got a company that puts together a lot of remarkable capabilities that can be brought to bear on behalf of both consumers and businesses at the same time.”
Rothenberg has words of praise for AT&T management in the walkup to the Xandr unveil this week. “I think the fact that they’ve spent a good solid year planning and building before coming out with public announcements was incredibly smart.”
He expresses a special affinity for Xandr CEO Brian Lesser and CMO Kirk McDonald, both “colleagues” and in McDonald’s case a former IAB board member.
“I think everybody here wishes them well and expects that they will do extraordinarily well to help build not just a new media entity, but a new media communications and advertising industry in the United States and elsewhere,” Rothenberg says.
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“It’s almost as if we need like, a little bit of a slow news movement because everything’s happening so fast and there is so much access to so much information,” Stelter says in this Beet.TV interview at AT&T’s Xandr Relevance Conference in which he discusses President Trump’s “fake news” claims and what journalists should be doing in response.
“I think right now there’s so much confusion and chaos, and maybe even most news consumers are hungry for people to hit the brakes a little bit, for journalists to hit the brakes a little bit and tell them what really matters, what really is going on and why it really affects them,” Stelter says.
At The Relevance Conference, Stelter moderated a panel discussion titled Breaking The News: Staying Relevant In A Real-Time News Cycle. It featured Jesse Angelo of the New York Post, PBS NewsHour’s Sara Just, Allison Rockey of VOX and Bari Weiss from The New York Times.
“I think the higher quality news organizations, or the ones that seek to be higher quality, are the ones that are trying to help folks digest the news and process the news and get past the headlines of what’s happening,” says Stelter.
Part of the panel discussion focused on the value that news organizations should be bringing to the table. “The value is to make people smarter. Not to make people angrier or make people confused. But to make people smarter about what’s happening. I do think we see all across the news media examples of efforts to do that,” Stelter adds.
In a Tuesday morning opening fireside chat on the main stage with CNN’s Poppy Harlow moderating, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson forcefully addressed the company’s commitment to a free press and its essential role in society.
“Whatever you think about CNN, whatever you think about CNN’s rivals, we need a strong and healthy and diverse news media in the United States and we need owners who respect that. And AT&T has been saying all the right things and doing all the right things since the acquisition happened,” says Stelter.
Asked about the impact on the public of President Trump’s frequent claims of “fake news,” he calls such behavior “a slow-acting poison that is gradually trickling through the American body and causing an infection, causing a disease, causing a sickness.”
Given that a subset of the U.S. public actually believes what President Trump is saying, “My big concern is let’s take that thirty or forty percent of the country that seems to believe him or agree with his attacks. What can we do to win back folks’ trust? To show them that the news is real and the journalists are trying their best to get it right. That’s a challenge and that’s a mission for these newsrooms, for all of us.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
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The news comes as AT&T convenes The Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara to explain how its communications, data and content assets will create the foundation of a national TV marketplace for advertisers and premium content publishers.
“But as we go forward, what we’ve got to figure out is how do we actually make the advertising less interruptive, more symbiotic to the consumer’s experience and then much more addressable,” Xandr CMO Kirk McDonald says in this interview with Beet.TV. “How are we capturing and understanding the moment that a consumer may be going through something and then giving them an ad that is relevant to them in a moment in time? I think the future is going to be more addressable TV and less interruptive TV for advertising.”
In addition to the new deals with Altice and Frontier, Xandr will also collaborate with a4, Altice USA’s advanced advertising business, to help expand a4’s nationwide addressable digital advertising capabilities.
“By aggregating this video inventory from multiple multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), AT&T’s addressable TV offering starts to provide advertisers with a one-stop shop,” Xandr said in a news release. “This allows marketers to reach the audiences they want to connect with most, while improving yield by helping inventory owners compete more effectively.”
Xandr encompasses AT&T’s advanced TV business, AT&T AdWorks, AT&T’s data and analytics business; ATT.net and AppNexus. While the integration proceeds, the AppNexus name will remain as it pertains to the products and services currently in market supporting U.S. and global customers.
In settling on the new brand name for the company, AT&T wanted to be mindful of its legacy while also looking forward. “The history and legacy of innovation, entrepreneurship, technology, investment all driven toward consumers’ interests has been such a rich part of AT&T’s history for its 142 years,” McDonald notes. “It’s a company that’s reinvented itself a number of times.”
As a modern-day media company, “We wanted a name that would capture all of that.”
According to “surveys and on-the-ground ethnographies” conducted for the inaugural Xandr Relevancy Report, 66% of consumers wish advertisements were more relevant to their interests and lifestyle while 57% said ads are not relevant to them. However, consumers recognized the importance of advertising, with 64% of those surveyed believing advertising enables independent voices to be heard on the Internet, while 70% like when ads go beyond just selling a product.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. The series is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“I think it’s incredibly exciting to see that some of the leaders in the marketplace and the biggest players are bringing together content with distribution and now technology and, most importantly, data to enable it all to happen,” the CEO & Founder of Furious Corp. says of the event on September 24-26 in Santa Barbara.
“The Relevance Conference is an amazing agenda because it’s elevating the conversation beyond the how to the why. And it’s very forward looking,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV.
She credits Kirk McDonald, CMO of the soon to be renamed AT&T Advertising & Analytics, for bringing together a diversity of players and viewpoints where they can share their thoughts and business goals.
“We’re very insulated. We sort of live in this bubble and we don’t do a good job of looking outward to really understand and to help lay the course and the foundation for how we progress,” says Swartz.
With Time Warner Media and AppNexus now under its wing, AT&T has “this incredible portfolio of asserts that enables them to activate the wealth of data and information they have as ultimately what their legacy DNA is ,which is as a telco.”
Now she believes the new entity represents pieces that have come together “through the lines for traditional television to digital and addressable media overall.”
The word renaissance resonates amid all the technological change that the TV industry hopes will power its next iteration—one marked by an advanced understanding of audiences and brands can best engage with them.
“I’ve taken a contrarian position in the industry that I’m doubling down on television thriving not just surviving” by getting better at activating the hearts and minds of audiences, says Swartz. “For me, relevance is really about hearts and minds. You could end that conversation by simply talking about content, and you could end it with the acquisition of the broadcast networks and the portfolio of content they just acquired.
“But when you extend that story for The Relevance Conference and you start to leverage the data and information about audiences and you actually really get to know them, it enables you to deliver experiences, whether they’re ads or it’s content itself that means something. That activates hearts and minds.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“What everyone’s anxious to understand is a bit more of the how. With a massive footprint, with all the opportunity across data and content, how are they bringing that together seamlessly from an agency perspective and to marketers?” says Amanda Richman, U.S. CEO of the Wavemaker agency.
“How are they distinguishing themselves and how might they set some new industry standards as well?” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to the AT&T confab.
When the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics takes on a new moniker that will be announced early on at the event, one of its big competitive advantages will be its understanding of audience behavior across various platforms. Given its progress into digital television “and with the content layer on top of that now with all the Warner Media assets, it seems to be an opportunity for a seamless end to end solution.”
She notes that the term “relevance” is very often tied to targeting and precision marketing, which encompasses eliminating waste, “But I think there’s a white space around that emotional connection that brands need to make and how brands can actually connect on the heart as well as the mind across devices,” says Richman.
A WPP Group-owned media, content and tech agency, Wavemaker was created in 2017 via the merger of agencies Maxus and MEC. Contemplating what the future entails “starts with the people themselves and a physical space. Thankfully, now we’re at 3 World Trade Center. We have that new space and new energy that comes with a great environment.”
What follows includes trying to develop more seamless processes “with better navigation of all of our assets so we can customize what the solution is for each client instead of just one single approach.
“And then make sure that we’re measurable and held accountable even in our own compensation for delivering growth to our clients. We think that’s the best future.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“The genesis behind the comScore-Rentrak merger was brilliant,” Wiener says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we haven’t done well is integrate those two platforms and provide rapid product innovation to the market, and that’s really what we’re doing with this resurgent comScore.”
At AT&T’s upcoming The Relevance Conference later this month, Wiener will participate in a panel discussion of industry executives titled The ROI of Attention. He believes the conference comes at an appropriate time.
“I think we’re at this point in time where the industry needs to evolve pretty rapidly and, one of the core elements of that is how do we measure audiences and how do we measure advertising ROI,” Wiener says.
Wiener joined comScore in April of 2018, having been a board member since the previous fall. He was tasked with righting the comScore ship following a string of accounting crises and losses, as the Wall Street Journal reports. In his first 60 days at comScore he had more than that number of customer meetings in which he heard “over and over again” the desire from buyers and sellers for reliable, third-party measurement of audiences and advertising ROI.
“And that’s something that the current state is not doing very well and I think that’s our big opportunity.” comScore has laid out “an aggressive road map over the next six months of launching products that are going to solve that need,” says Wiener.
“That primary need is unduplicated reach and frequency in this cross-platform world. We’re going to start with currency products, but we’re going to move on to planning products.”
To Wiener, being “relevant” is table stakes for convincing people to buy something. “This entire industry is based on growing marketers’ business. I think people sometimes lose sight of that. At the end of the day, marketing is not about marketing. Marketing’s about fueling profitable growth for marketers. If that’s happening that creates a virtuous cycle for everybody in the ecosystem.”
At the AT&T event, Wiener will be joined on stage by Scott Howe, CEO, Acxiom; Peter Naylor, SVP Ad Sales, Hulu; and Donna Speciale, President, Advertising Sales, Turner. It will be moderated by AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I’m thrilled to be attending the conference in the next week or two,” she says. “I want to hear Brian’s vision from him and his team,” she adds in a reference to Brian Lesser, who is CEO of the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics unit. “I think it’s going to be so exciting.”
Speciale, who is President of Advertising Sales at Turner, is already in sync with Lesser and his people, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.
“We’ve been working together for the past few weeks collaborating with both our teams,” she says. “And what’s so exciting is that both his side and our side, our visions have been so much aligned. So I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say and what our clients have to say.”
Like many others, Speciale is keen on knowing how AT&T plans to use customer data for better targeting of ads across media. “At Turner, we’ve always put the consumer at the center. We have been doing that for years.”
She talks about the company’s efforts to reduce commercial load “because the experience is so important to us of how our viewer really feels, making content more relevant, targeting obviously is definitely something that we have been focusing on over these years.”
With advanced targeting data, “I think addressability is what’s really going to be popping. That’s really where our vision has been for the past few years.
“It has to start with audience, that’s what we’ve been focusing on, now getting the data from AT&T is going to make that even more rich and viable and the next portion of that is going to be addressability.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The Founder & CEO of LUMA Partners will be one of some 250 industry leaders attending The Relevance Conference hosted by AT&T in Santa Barbara on Sept. 24-26. On the opening day he will join Otter Media’s Tony Goncalvez and others on a panel titled Putting A Price On Content that will explore the “happy medium” between paid subscription models and ad-supported media.
While AT&T has planted a very large flag in acquiring some of the biggest content and adtech assets, it all comes down to brands changing the ad experience for consumers who have lots of choices, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.
“It will be very exciting to see a company with deep pockets, very, very capable, pursue the dream that is convergent television,” he says of AT&T in the wake of its bringing Warner Media and AppNexus under its communications, content and advertising umbrella. “It’s great for ad tech but forget that, it is great for media and marketing writ large. This is a company that demonstrates that it’s not afraid to put its money where its mouth is and get the very, very best.”
At base level, relevance can have meaning with respect to targeting, personalization and other tactics, but with today’s consumers there is a much higher level at which the term needs to be considered, according to Kawaja.
“Netflix has trained them that they can get premium content without interruption,” he says, and “with the training that these paid models have got us all used to, now it’s hard to go back, either once you have the skip button on an ad or just don’t see any ads at all. The ads have to have a different nature.”
Noting that the advertising industry is one “built on the premise of interruption,” he adds, “I think we have to get away from that.”
He cites as an admittedly “extreme” example paid search, where unlike other advertising, consumer intent means everyone involved can win.
“If I’m looking for a Thai restaurant in St. Louis and I enter that search result, I’m going to get back a bunch of media with ads in it. Turns out the ads are facilitative of my original intent of pursuing that media.”
More in the mainstream realm, he mentions ads in The Weather Channel app that don’t block the experience because they’re in the background, juxtaposed with current weather conditions. “The ad is, in fact, additive to the content. At the core we need less advertising, certainly less interruptive advertising and the notion of relevance I think gets to that acknowledgement that we need a better consumer experience.”
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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