The main lesson that the pandemic has echoed is that brands have to work for humans and they must put their needs first.
“Let’s focus on how brands can help in these trying times,” Carter says. “And as we evolve through the lifecycle of the virus, let’s focus on how we can help customers, consumers, and businesses get back on their feet. That really has to be the guiding light of the work we do.”
Avoiding the hard sell should only help to deepen the relationship with customers. Carter added that although this period is unprecedented, there is a silver lining. With no standard formula or rulebook to follow, brands have been forced to innovate, which has led to significant growth in the industry overall.
“We’ve been on a super highway to the future of digitalization and ecommerce that frankly is fantastic for us,” Carter says.
Some examples of this include serving customers via contactless delivery or virtual consultations. Industries have had to reform how they do business in a rapid fashion, and in turn, marketers have had to deliver changes that they have been talking and debating about for some time now.
“I’m thinking about all of the big issues and as a collective with our marketers we’re urging the marketplace, ‘Let’s go and tackle some of those right now. Let’s go and drive reform, let’s break the legacy,’” Carter says.
Some of these issues include not being able to have digital competitive media intelligence across the entire ecosystem, driving the casebook and use case for diversity, greater transparency in the digital ecosystem, changing the timing of the upfront to be more flexible.
“If we don’t get inventive now, we’re not going to survive,” Carter says. “We need to come out of this strong and together for our customers and for the economy.”
This video is part of a series titled Trust in Partnership in a Time of Change presented by WarnerMedia. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
]]>Audience targeting appears to be entering a third age. After initial buying of ads against content that delivers key demographics, marketers have been in thrall to laser-targeting audiences, no matter they content they are consuming. Now we are seeing “contextual targeting”, the data-driven practice of buying content, not audiences, rise up.
But not only can these disciplines mix – in the current business environment, they are all necessary, says Fiona Carter, the chief brand officer of AT&T, who oversees global brand marketing, advertising, media, sponsorships, global events and corporate and employee communications for the telecommunications firm.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Carter explains how AT&T, which operates the Xandr advertising unit, is having to adapt to a changing world.
“People keep asking when will the (TV sales) upfront start,” she tells Beet.TV. “I stumbled across a quote the other day from (Disney executive chairman) Bob Iger, who I think was asked ‘When will the Disney parks reopen?’, and he said, ‘No dates, just data‘. I think that’s what is guiding us.
“There are so many variables right now when it comes to the upfront. I don’t know when live sports will begin. I don’t know what I can buy at a traditional upfront.
“I don’t know when there’ll be new episodes, original content. I don’t know, frankly, if upfront pricing drops below scatter pricing, whether I’ll get a return on that.
“We’re now operating with a new set of principles.”
So, Carter and AT&T are a new mix comprising four goals:
“What if, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the internet had buckled?”
Keeping our network connected didn't happen by accident. We took @TheAtlantic behind the scenes to see how we did it: https://t.co/WJTcChpCKt
Image via Paul Spella / The Atlantic pic.twitter.com/8dxBE6QrPr
— AT&T News (@ATTNEWS) May 6, 2020
Precision-targeting is important because the old certainties of finding audiences through content designed to serve up known demographics have suddenly been shifted.
Until March, advertisers could rely on programmers to serve up key audiences through, for example sport programming.
Carter doesn’t think that tactic will go away. She sees context and audience targeting as complementary.
But, in the current moment, many advertisers appear to be using audience targeting to find needles in the absence of a haystack.
“Think about a business decision maker target, for example,” she says. “The traditional approach to marketing … (is) advertising … in the traditional contextual placements.
“(But) I know that they’re really heavy streamers of video. I know that they love sports. I know they actually love listening to podcasts, and I know that they’re probably 50% millennials. That really transforms the way you think about going to find that audience.”
How do you keep a floating hospital connected? Here’s the story of @FirstNet @ATT acting in record time for #firstresponders and the @mercyship19 in the @PortofLA. #ConnectedTogether pic.twitter.com/ddnTVOtYZE
— Fiona Carter (@FionaCarter) April 20, 2020
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>“From a TV perspective, younger audiences have left. The deeper ratings decline is within kind of the younger set and they’re just watching digital video, they’re watching CTV. There’s a need in the marketplace to find them,” says Xandr SVP Jason Brown.
AT&T has 130 million mobile customers plus 25 million on pay TV and 14 million on broadband. “We have this great opportunity where we’ve matched our device graph to our addressable TV footprint and we’re now able to advertise the same unified target that you would do with addressable TV across all the devices,” the Head of Ad Sales Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“When a marketer comes to us, we take the unified target and we run it in TV, we run it to the devices associated to those television households and then we show most importantly the impact of TV alone, mobile alone and the incrementality of using TV and mobile together,” Brown adds.
Brown says that Xandr is constantly doing testing controls. “With each campaign we’re sending the ad to 90 percent of the target and holding out 10 percent. That’s true in TV and that’s true in mobile.”
Brands that cater to younger consumers know their audiences are literally on the go. “What we frequently see is in terms of exposure against these particular cohorts, a lot of them are mobile only viewers or watch very little TV,” Brown says. “What we’re seeing is there is an incremental impact the majority of the time on whatever the KPI is” when measuring the combination of both TV and digital.
Where advertisers want to get to is sequential messaging, according to Brown. Given AT&T’s cross section of users, “the data that comes from it allows advertisers to see how their cohorts are reacting by device type and frequency across those device types.”
Last week, AT&T’s newly formed WarnerMedia pulled out of OpenAP, the consortium of television competitors formed to provide advertisers with unified audience targets. “As our company has transformed, our advanced advertising strategy has evolved. As a result, we are withdrawing from OpenAP,” WarnerMedia said in a news release reported by Broadcasting & Cable. “We appreciate what OpenAP has supported to this point in widening the adoption of audience-based buying on television.”
In a separate statement, OpenAP said, “Fox, NBCUniversal and Viacom remain committed to working together in pursuit of a premium, open, independently verified marketplace that will continue to transform the industry. Over the next few months, we will be growing and expanding the OpenAP platform to simplify audience buying at scale, and you’ll hear more from us on these exciting developments in the coming days.”
]]>“You’ve got a lot going on, but ultimately each of these companies needs to figure out a strategy that ensures that the video that they’re producing and that they’re delivering is getting watched and that it’s being monetized to build a business,” the company’s CRO says.
On the publisher side, IRIS.TV has a video personalization and programming platform that drives more views and guides content strategy and makes your site. For marketers it’s a marketplace for distributing branded video and sponsored content in-stream alongside editorial video across the company’s publisher clients.
Through integrations across the ecosystem of video players and content management systems, IRIS.TV acts as “a brain in terms of helping to decide what is the best most relevant video that any individual should be seeing at any given period of time,” Harrison says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event.
The company’s focus is on the “core video environment” of major news, sports, lifestyle, entertainment media companies. More people watching more video ultimately results in more ad inventory being created.
“And if there’s more ad inventory, then it’s also about ensuring that you are highly relevant in terms of the advertising that you show,” says Harrison, who joined IRIS.TV a year ago from Oracle Data Cloud. “So we start to match up the context of the video to the actual context of the ads which solves for both sides of the equation.”
The key has always been about finding “the right mix of advertising or subscriber based-models” against content, something for which companies like AT&T Disney, Fox and others are spending considerable resources. The end goal for all, according to Harrison, is “to be viable.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
]]>“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.
]]>Such guaranteed optimization could emerge by late this year or early 2020, Turner’s Dan Aversano explains in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.
By combining behavioral and viewing data from AT&T’s digital and television assets “we can now add in some fairly simply analytics to understand when and where people are exposed to ads and then use causal analytics to actually prove that they’re taking an action,” says the SVP of Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions.
An example in the auto industry could be “being able to prove the visitation that’s driven to a particular auto dealership because of the campaign they ran on TBS or a campaign they ran on CNN Go,” says Aversano. “That’s step one. Step two, where this data gets really interesting is how we start to make it actionable.”
Many advertisers are unsure exactly who they should be targeting or uncertain when it comes to building audience segments. Those in themselves have typically consumed many weeks of conversation.
“Now that we have these analytics that we’ve built and we’re automating them so they’re fast and fairly inexpensive for us to run, we can do that at scale.” Analyzing historical campaigns to understand who actually converted provides a “seed set” that can be modeled up. “Now I have an ROI-defined segment,” Aversano adds.
Moving even higher up the value chain is the ability to optimize media campaigns based on output. “This is where you forget about the who for a second.” Historical data from Turner media can show “when I put this brand’s ad here, how many people go to the dealership, two people for this unit, three people for this unit.
“So all of a sudden, now I’m building a media schedule not based on how many impressions or GRP’s it’s going to deliver against a demo or segment, but based on how many actual physical location visits you’re going to get. It’s optimizing for the actual outcome.”
If all goes by plan, Turner could end up providing outcome guarantees by the end of this year or early next year.
Asked by interviewer Howard Shimmel, President of Janus Strategy and Insights, how all the data can help to inform advertising from top to bottom of the purchase funnel, Aversano says “Putting that puzzle together is really, really tricky.” Backed by a lot of proprietary research into, among other things, consumer journey mapping, “We’re pushing hard on it.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>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.
]]>While a lot of progress has been made in the last several years, “there’s still too many people that want to own their own solutions, own their own data,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to CES 2019. “So we’re seeing a lot of advanced television silos pop up, which makes it more challenging and less simple to aggregate that back up for marketers.”
Formerly the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, Castree took on his new role earlier this month, as AdExchanger reports. The CEO position had been held by Brian Lesser, who joined AT&T in 2017 to build an advertising and analytics platform for the data and content assets the company would acquire from Time Warner.
Castree sees too many publishers that want to create their own end-to-end solution comprising data, inventory and technology “and sell it bundled in a package.” Hence GroupM’s focus on collaboration, consortiums and a “disaggregation of technology, inventory and data so we can re-aggregate more bespoke solutions for individual advertisers.”
Judging by market mix modeling and performance attribution, “video is still the top of the performance stack” but it’s a fragmented world of premium video distribution.
Stressing the importance of scale, particularly for mass-marketed products, advertisers can’t always target their way to growth, according to Castree. Within that scale lies the ability to add targeting layers and dynamic creative optimization to find “more interesting, nuanced and targeted ways to reach certain segments of those audiences.”
Asked about marketers’ understanding the value proposition behind addressable and other forms of audience targeting, given the incremental cost of creative, data and technology, Castree adds, “I think some advertisers understand it very well and others don’t. Everybody understands it conceptually.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>As he looks ahead to CES 2019, he talks about “redefining” television, outdated audience metrics and the need to preserve the traditional cable/satellite/telco distribution business as viewing fragments across devices.
“Television has to be redefined and has to be redefined in a few different places,” prominent among them the big screen that hangs on a wall, Levy says in this interview with Beet.TV. “Television programing is still a very, very popular thing that people watch.”
Also in need of reordering is Nielsen’s “outdated metric system that we’ve been using really since the 1960’s. Television isn’t about primetime only. It’s about all dayparts. “We need to think about not selling this in dayparts but selling it in audience segments.”
He expects that among the topics of conversation at CES will be addressable targeting and attribution of campaigns to business outcomes.
Asked about the effect of AT&T’s bringing Warner Media into its arsenal of advertising and media assets, Levy points to premium content. “On the AT&T side, they were looking for that quality, premium programming and I think that’s one of the reasons why they purchased us.”
For Turner, “why I think it’s so attractive from an AT&T perspective is the data they’re going to provide,” encompassing 170 million consumer touchpoints. “That data, coupled with our first-party data and mapping it together, is going to allow us to have better information around a few things.”
With viewers as the top priority, the data will help to inform program production, provide a better understanding of viewers and facilitate better targeting for clients. But there are more fundamental issues as well.
“First and foremost, we need to keep the ecosystem that we live in today very healthy,” Levy says. “We have a great relationship with our cable operators, with our satellite providers and with our telco companies and now the virtual MVPD’s. That is a very healthy business and is going to continue to be a very healthy business at our company.”
But as a modern media company, on top of that ecosystem “we also need to have a one-on-one relationship with the consumer. Personalize content for them if need be.”
He notes that truTV has reduced almost 50% of all the primetime inventory to half of what it was three years ago, while all of TNT programming originals are now produced with about 50% fewer ads. “We’re trying to give the consumer a better experience, which is very, very important.”
Using data to generate more contextually relevant advertising amid less commercial load “is going to be a better consumer experience also.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“As a fan experience company, it’s really coming to its own now the EVP of Data Strategy & Product Innovation says in this interview at Beet Retreat 2018.
So how does a company with such vast resources seamlessly connect platforms and experiences? “That’s basically the crux of my job is to figure out across all the different divisions how are we gathering all the insights and all the data points,” says Redniss. “How do you set a standard across every app that we have at Turner, and there’s a lot of them.”
Much hinges on instrumentation of different tracking methodologies. “If CNN sets up their data instrumentation one way to measure video or measure a touch or a click and TBS or sports does it a completely different way, you can’t bring those two things together and reconcile.”
Turner’s salespeople, researchers and product teams can mine the Turner Data Cloud for core insights. “We’re getting to a point where we’re going to start using all those insights to create dynamic content experiences where what my actual experience is on CNN’s home page could be completely different then another’s. Not just from the content you’re seeing but also it could be the framework in which the actual platform or CNN site is then kind of materialized for the consumer,” Redniss says.
Given complications like the GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California, dealing with different data sets is “really challenging and interesting.” It pays to take a pro-consumer approach, according to Redniss.
“The way we think about it is when you are building a world based on consumers at the center and it’s all about fandom, you absolutely have to respect that relationship with the fans and the consumers at the center.”
Thanks to digital technology, more consumer engagement means more data to seed more product offerings.
“That to me is really exciting because that means you’re actually winning at the game of trying to scale something. Data is a massive asset for us now. When you can actually get positive consent to build something off of or provide something to consumers using what they’re provided to us, that’s a win-win for everybody,” Redniss says.
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
]]>“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.
]]>“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.
]]>“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.
]]>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’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.
]]>“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.
]]>“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.
]]>Not only will AT&T unveil the name and road map for its advanced advertising goals at the event in Santa Barbara, Kassan will get to explore how one of the newest video content startups intends to become relevant.
Kassan will moderate a discussion at Relevance between Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is Managing Partner of WndrCo and Chairman & Founder of mobile media startup NewTV, and Meg Whitman, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and CEO of NewTV.
“What Jeffrey and Meg have cooked up, having just raised a billion dollars from all the key entertainment companies to launch NewTV, I think should be very exciting,” the CEO of MediaLink says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.
In the walkup to Relevance, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has been emphasizing how the company’s traditional and newly acquired assets—including AppNexus and Time Warner—gives it lots of potential leverage in the advanced advertising space.
“The AppNexus acquisition certainly underscores how serious he was. While at the same time disclosing an 83 billion-dollar purchase of Warner Media there was still room and some cash left on the table to do a one point six billion acquisition of AppNexus.
“I think it validates everything Randall said publicly and as well, candidly, in the trial that happened around the Department of Justice challenging the deal,” Kassan adds.
That’s a reference to AT&T’s public position that scale was its ultimate goal in its acquisition pursuits “and they certainly have put their money where their mouth is.”
Other highlights of the conference for Kassan will include hearing from Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner, whose latest effort is a series titled The Romanoffs, and former Huffington Post chief Ariana Huffington regarding her venture called Thrive Global.
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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