“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.

The company has grown from fewer than 100 to more than 1,500 employees, to more than 3,000 brand customers and more than $1bn in revenue, 15% of which comes from outside WPP and its Group M agency, according to Xaxis global CEO Brian Gleason.

Next up is considerable further investment in Xaxis’ underlying technology, with a big expansion of a campaign visualization tool.

“We’ll invest over $54m in our tech this year,” Gleason tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We have over 260 engineers and scaling very quickly.”

Xaxis’ technology platforms revolve around the following, Gleason says:

1. Turbine DMP: “Turbine is our proprietary advantage. That is at the centre of everything we do – regardless of platform, I need one point of truth for my audience.”
2. Copilot: “The ability to bring intelligence to a DSP. The results we saw (were from) 40% and, in some cases, over 100% improvement on campaigns, which is massive.”
3. Spotlight visualization tool: “Think about the ability to bring audiences in a boundaryless world. The next thing is to be able to measure them. CMOs and traders can log in. It shows you a complete view, in real-time, of your media. It took us four years to build. It was traditionally in three markets, we’ll roll it out to 56 by the end of the year.”

This video is part of a series titled “Exploring Data & Technology as Catalysts for Creativity.”  This series was produced at Cannes Lions 2016 in cooperation the Xaxis. The series is sponsored by comScore.  For more segments from the series, please visit this page.

Also a big area of growth has been “direct” media sales, meaning transactions that have come outside of the WPP network of media agencies under the GroupM umbrella.  This non-WPP business is now 25 percent of the unit’s revenue, he says.

Gleason was recently named global CEO of Xaxis.

We interviewed Gleason for the “The Road to CES” — our lead up series sponsored by YuMe.

We spoke with him about the year ahead and the plans at Xaxis for CES which includes hosting a high-level industry event featuring Sir Martin Sorrell and others.

This video is part of our series the Road to CES, which can be found here.  The series is presented by YuMe.

Succeeding Lesser at Xaxis as CEO will be Brian Gleason , CEO of Xaxis Americas.

Rob Norman, the global Chief Digital Officer of GroupM Worldwide, will have the added post of Chairman of GroupM North America.

Clark announced he would stepping down earlier this week.

More on the announcement can be found in this report on Advertising Age.

Earlier this year, we sat down with Lesser for our series, the Media Revolutionaries. In this segment about his career journey, he is interviewed by Dave Moore, his long time colleague at 24/7 then Xaxis where Moore serves as Chairman. This video is part of series sponsored by Xaxis.

“That’s still an open discussion,” says global product manager Stefan Maris of TV-syncing ad technology service Civolution. “One of the discussions we are having is with Ad-ID. Ad-ID could be in a very logical place to be this unique (campaign) identifier the industry – but we are not there yet.”

Ad-ID has been operating for a decade under the auspices of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers, attempting to define common rules for packaging up video ads for publishing platforms.

“Addressability is extremely valuable,” says Brian Gleason, north America MD of Group M’s Xaxis data-driven ad unit. “If we can take advantage of that relationship between broadcast and the mobile device … and come back with relevant results – that is definitely an ‘ah-hah’ moment.”

They were interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet.TV’s recent annual executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

“We’ve been measuring GRPs for a long time and clients are comfortable with GRPs so if they look to extend their buy into digital, that is a comfort level for them and they will pay for that,” he explains. But if it’s not working for a client, then other measurements come into play, he adds. “Is the measurement there? Will it continue to change? Absolutely.”

Programatic is pacing at 25% of online ad dollars, and the key going forward is to work closely with publisher partners to make sure that programatic buys make sense in tandem with others, such as local buys, he says. Going forward, the best way to drive this segment of the business lies in the content that marketers are supporting. “Provide valuable content that draws individuals  and provides an engaging experience,” he says. In recent months, Xaxis has expanded its platform to bring traditional TV measurement to premium online inventory with its Xaxis TV product. With the platform, digital inventory can be bought the same way TV is bought.

For more insight into measurement, agency remuneration models and the building of proprietary ad technology, check out this video interview.

“It puts us in some rare air – we are the largest programmatic and media platform,” Xaxis north America MD Brian Gleason tells Beet.TV.

WPP merged the units to cater to an ad market seeing publishers and advertisers dealing with each other, cutting out agencies, AdAge reports. “We are shortening the gap between publisher and advertiser,” Gleason says in response, speaking of the greater proximity to publishers advertisers will gain through 24/7 Media’s ad server.

Just how big is the new-look Xaxis? Gleason says:

• “We went from dealing with 500 billion impressions on an annual basis to over 2.2 trillion.”
• “We have over $750 million that we’re managing in terms of billing.”
• “We have over 840 employees.”
• The merged unit has 240 engineers.
• “We have, just in the US alone, 60 analysts – understanding all the different media types is not easy.”

Gleason was interviewed on stage by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the Beet.TV summit on programmatic advertising for video hosted by Xaxis in New York and sponsored by Videology.

“Programmatic video has not grown as quickly as our overall business in north America,” says Brian Gleason, the north America MD of GroupM’s data unit Xaxis admits to Beet.TV

“Video in the digital arena continues to grow – but the big opportunity is going to be tapping in to the broadcast dollars.”

Many industry practitioners are now starting to inject programmatic buying techniques in to online video buying, and even forecasting the TV industry – which has long sold its ad spots using conventional reach metrics – could do the same. But Gleason says the TV industry won’t be revolutionized by programmatic buying unless it feels good and ready to.

“It’s not digital video that offers the opportunity,” he tells interviewer Joanna O’Connell, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “Everyone keeps focusing on the $70 billion (of ad revenue) that exists in broadcast. That is closed down – there’s no way anyone (in digital) will touch that revenue without broadcast understanding the value from that.

“We have to … figure out how I’d bring digital in to that to enhance that, rather than take away from that.”

This segment was from the Beet.TV leadership summit on premium programmatic video advertising presented by SpotXchange and hosted by The Hearst Corporation.   Please find other clips from the event right here.

We spoke with Gleason last week at the Beet.TV leadership summit about premium programmatic buying for publishers.