“There is a need to upgrade the advertising experience,” says Jason Brown, SVP, Head of Ad Sales Partnerships at Xandr Media. He cites such shortcomings as too many irrelevant ads, too much frequency and commercial overload.

At the Xandr Front, “you’re going to hear how we’re using the technology of addressable at scale to solve these issues to create a better advertising experience, to create a better customer experience,” Brown adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

“It’s not a complete reinvention of TV advertising but it’s a big upgrade. This year especially brands are going to want to hear about it.”

The traditional concept of addressability—targeting devices and households and tracking ad outcomes—is getting a “new flavor that’s trending right now, and it’s frankly just the ability to use the technology to frequency cap and manufacture reach and create a better user experience.”

According to Brown, 50% of all national brands use some form of addressable advertising. Typically, they had been brands selling goods or services to less than 35% of the population, but now consumer packaged-goods and other categories have turned to addressable, too.

“They’re typically using the product for reach extension and frequency controlling,” Brown says. Regional brands, particularly “super regionals” like supermarket chains, are also testing addressable.

Automotive and financial services advertisers are “well beyond testing” and the “middle phase” with addressable, wherein a couple of campaigns a year had been the norm.

“Many of them are always on. They’ve realized the light bulb has gone off. They realize the benefits. They’re seeing the ROI around always being in front of their most valuable customers and the ROI it’s delivering for them,” says Brown.

Mass marketers faced with declining linear-TV ratings and “pricing well beyond inflation” are experiencing over-saturation of heavy TV viewers, because 80% of a schedule can reaches only 30% of households “at a very high level of frequency.” Addressable can add a frequency cap.

“When you do that you reach you reach the heavy TV viewer in a couple of days. The ad comes off the system and then it just extends across every decile. You have this kind of even distribution of deciles.”

Given AT&T’s own assets and its deals with Altice USA and Frontier Communications on the local level, “We now represent forty percent of all sellable impressions in the marketplace,” Brown says.

Roughly four months after AT&T unveiled Xandr, the company announced in early January an integration with WarnerMedia’s Turner to improve the relevancy of advertising, fueled by data and content connections.

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Welday talks about the new collaboration with Turner along with the high-level aspiration of Xander to make advertising more relevant while leveraging nearly 200 million consumer billing relationships that yield fertile data for both buyers and sellers.

And then there are viewers of premium video content, whose needs are a high priority. “Consumers should not have to tolerate sixteen minutes of un-targeted advertising for every hour of programming,” Welday says. “That’s a widely agreed upon problem. We think we can help with that.”

The Turner and Xandr ad sales teams have been working on the following four initiatives, with several enhanced products now available from Turner:

• More relevant advertising across Turner’s TV brands, with AT&T first-party set-top-box data

• Using Xandr’s data capabilities to fuel more relevant advertising on Turner’s digital properties

• Expanding the reach of branded storytelling to addressable TV

• Proving the impact of advertising through attribution

Elsewhere within the AT&T fold, Xander is using some of its audience targeting segment capabilities to inform both CNN digital and Bleacher Report across linear and digital. Meanwhile, it’s assisting the LaunchPad branded content solution extend into addressable. “So we can take the same audience they’re targeting with the branded content and find them on our addressable footprint,” Welday says.

Asked about Xandr’s desire to be a supply-side platform for competitors, Welday says it’s “very, very grateful” to be representing both Altice USA and Frontier Communications, with which it has agreements to aggregate and sell national addressable TV advertising inventory.

“Our intention is to build a marketplace where we can provide premium content in a brand-safe environment with visibility and transparency into how the campaign is being delivered across platforms. That by definition is open. We want all comers to be able to access that marketplace,” says Welday.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Jenckes, who is President, Advertising, Comcast Cable believes now is the time to be very optimistic about what premium video can be.

“It is the best way for marketers to reach their audiences. We’re coming off of the greatest Upfront in history. There’s a lot of successes that we can look at,” Jenckes says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Comcast/FreeWheel Client Summit.

Add to those factors “this incredibly, from my perspective, optimistic collaboration between all the players in the ecosystem.” Whether it’s networks or distributors, “We know the power of what we have and if we work together we can create value for everybody,” Jenckes says.

Now for the challenges. Alongside audience and data fragmentation, they include new digital competition and the need to rationalize different sources of demand.

While the golden age of TV is upon us, more platforms and viewing choices are making it difficult to pull together audiences for advertising purposes. And fragmentation isn’t a problem solely limited to audiences.

“Everybody has their own different data pools. People are struggling for how do you create joint identity across platform, or how do you find that segments you’re looking for across multiple pools of data.”

Among the many tools that Comcast’s Advanced Advertising Group has developed is its new Blockchain Insights Program, which combines the capabilities of FreeWheel, Strata and Visible World. The initiative expands upon the advertising relationship between Comcast and NBCUniversal as well as new collaborations with Disney, Altice USA, Channel 4 (UK), Cox Communications, Mediaset Italia and TF1 Group (France).

The companies will work together on a new and improved advertising approach to facilitate the secure exchange of non-personal, audience insights for addressable advertising.

“For us, making sure that the tools exist for that to happen as efficiently and effectively as possible is critical.”

This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying The New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.