That is why the new owner of Cablevision has launched what it’s calling a “one-stop shop”.

Altice USA’s a4, a division which helps brands and agencies advertise to citizens across screens, launched Athena, a system for agencies and brands to build audience-based media plans targeted at the household level.

“(They can) create audiences quickly within minutes by using either viewership data or third party data,” Altice’s president, A4, media and data solutions, Paul Haddad in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“They can use geolocation data, or they could use their own CRM to do an onboarding within an hour and create their own lists.”

For the last couple of years, ad technology companies have been racing to present options through which ad buyers can holistically plan and deliver campaigns that run across device types but which, nevertheless, target individual consumers or their households.

In the latest trend, platforms are switching on technology that helps brands use the data they have gathered on their own consumers or prospects, seemingly swinging the industry emphasis away from super-targeting otherwise-unknown prospects.

In a4’s Athena, ad inventory could be linear, optimized linear, VOD or other kinds.

“If it is inventory that requires cable networks, or broadcasters, or MVPD inventory, we issue the orders to our partners and they fulfill these campaigns for us. And then we report all the impressions back,” Haddad adds.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.

Active on both the national and local side, a4 regularly confronts the complexities of trying to help local advertisers, who “don’t have a lot of time and don’t have a lot of bandwidth to deal with multiple parties,” says President Paul Haddad in this interview with Beet.TV.

“So when they talk to someone, they would like to buy a solution for their advertising,” he adds, citing local television, digital video and display, social media and mobile targeting.

With its previous acquisition of Audience Partners, a4 added local, audience-based optimization. What ZAPP360 brings to the table is the mobile targeting piece.

“What we were missing was geo-targeted mobile messaging,” says Haddad, who founded and led Cablevision’s data business, which used census-level audience data from set-top boxes in millions of households in the New York DMA. Netherlands-based Altice acquired Cablevision Systems Corp. for $17.7 billion in 2016.

After testing with ZAPP360 for about a year, “the results were phenomenal and we decided we might as well start adding them to our portfolio. We completed the acquisition two weeks ago and we’re very excited about it.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.

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.

“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.

In April, the Netherlands company’s USA division, which bought Cablevision in 2015, launched a4, a business allowing advertisers to build audience segments, plan campaigns and activate and measure them across screens.

For Paul Haddad, the president of a4, it means big extension of the TV ad targeting capabilities Cablevision already had under its belt.

“This whole thing started many years ago with Cablevision doing data-driven, audience-based addressable television,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We said, ‘If we can identify households that fall within a certain segment and reach them on TV in an addressable way, why not also compliment that with digital?'”

The acquisition of Audience Partners, which helps political groups target up to 50 million voters across screens, already saw Altice using these techniques outside of the Cablevision cable subscriber footprint. Additionally, the acquisition of Place Media, a supply-side ad platform for targeting linear TV, began extending the capability to around 50 other cable networks.

Now a4 combines elements of Audience Partners and Place Media in to a single offering, which Haddad says involves two types of ad inventory – premium TV spots and sub-premium long-tail networks.

What’s a long-tail network? “Not the top 40,” says Haddad, who was previously with Cablevision. “If you can find an impression that reaches a specific target segment, that impression is a valuable impression regardless of where it is in the ecosystem. We leverage data to find those impressions across all that long-tail inventory.

“We do the same on digital. We go outside the top premium yet safe … and we bundle a sub-prime kind of an inventory play.”

Based in the Netherlands, Altice is one of the global companies recently engaged in a huge acquisition roll-up in order to build a powerful worldwide position in media and advertising.

Founded and headed by the Moroccan-born Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, Altice previously acquired several French telecoms firms, culminating in SFR in 2014. It has since been linked with plays for Time Warner and Bouygues. In 2015, it got its US prize in the shape of Cablevision and delved further in to the world of digital and advanced TV.

Haddad says he wants TV advertisers to realize, in a digital TV world, there is more to life than premium.

“There’s a different way to do advertising,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be done the same old way that we always did it which is try to work with different data sets, different players. Try to buy inventory in different aspects, in different silos and then try to stitch on the back end the efficiency of the campaign.”