One of the big reveals at the conference will be the new name for AT&T Advertising & Analytics. “Relevance is going to be a great conference,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.

Among the featured speakers will be AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson. “He’s been very articulate about his hopes and expectations for how we put these pieces together and I think it’s going to be a great conversation,” O’Kelley adds.

“If you look at the assets that AT&T has assembled, they have this incredible connection to consumers, especially in the U.S. and Latin America,” says O’Kelley. “Now with Time Warner they have some of the best TV assets on the planet and I’m incredibly excited about the idea of taking all of our technology and plugging it in with the media and data and leadership that they have.

“I think we can do something that really no one’s ever done before, which is create a new kind of television advertising that should be transformative.”

According to O’Kelley, relevance is the confluence of creative, an emotional connection and the right medium to deliver messaging. He doesn’t think that’s particularly been the case with banner ads and “a lot of the mobile advertising we’ve seen can’t convey that emotional impact.”

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 cool thing is it’s working,” says CEO Brian O’Kelley.

That turns out to be an understatement considering that AppNexus is now one of the world’s largest video platforms. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the company signed as clients three of the biggest media companies in the world. From January 2017 to January 2018, its video spend was up 260%.

“So we saw this explosion of our video marketplace,” O’Kelley explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Conference of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Besides working directly with premium publishers—more than 150 using the AppNexus Video SSP—one advantage has been its decision to charge “a very low take rate,” which O’Kelley pegs at “half of what the other video SSP’s charge.”

One thing has led to another, and now AppNexus is taking a closer look at the linear TV space.

“A year ago, I’d have said there’s no way we’re going to touch linear, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that these worlds are converging so quickly that there’s actually a huge opportunity,” O’Kelley adds.

Some of the company’s biggest buyers are asking it to integrate with linear TV platforms. “And I think if we do that we can provide a holistic way to help these brands transition from linear to digital and help curate a digital environment that feels a lot more like TV in the sense of high quality content.”

He sees the company’s role as being able to provide “an alternative for Keith Reed or Unilever to a platform like Facebook or YouTube, where there’s really no way to know what’s going to happen next.”

His rationale: “Can you really afford to have your ad appear next to somebody who’s tasering rats on his balcony? That’s just not good for your brand, I don’t care what brand you are. Maybe if you’re a taser brand.”

While broadcast will always be different from addressable, one-to-one programmatic, where those worlds are converging is that “we’re having more and more capabilities, especially through IP and set-top boxes, to sort of bridge that gap. We can do insertions for more and more content down to the set-top, household level.”

He believes the United States is just three or four years from reaching the point where linear TV is in, say, the Netherlands, where “it’s just gone completely off the cliff. So I want to be ready. And I think to be ready we have to start helping those companies transition to programmatic and then to start shifting more and more to an audience-targeted model.”

This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.

A whopping four years in the making, the ad-tech company finally unveiled the “AppNexus Programmable Platform” (APP) this week. But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, CEO Brian O’Kelley says he thinks APP will be worth the wait.

APP introducing machine learning – currently the buzz-phrase du jour in the ad-tech industry, but one which O’Kelley thinks will help ad buyers automate more of the process than ever before.

“Traders will save a bunch of time,” he says. “Over the next year, we’ll migrate all of our current customers to this new platform and we think that they’ll see significantly better results.”

That may be true. Speaking with Business Insider, a Xaxis executive who has been testing AppNexu’s new APP says large advertisers tens of millions of dollars programmatically will now be able to bid at the right price on the right slot.

APP also sees AppNexus now competing more squarely in the video space with the likes of DoubleClick, Comcast and SpotX.

In France, Lagardère already uses AppNexus for ad serving to its IPTV properties.

“(In) the new APP, we can actually buy all of this really high-quality connected and OTT and other premium video (inventory). There’s no doubt that the video space is going to be programmatic.”

This interview took place at the AppNexus customer summit in New York this week.

In the words of the AppNexus CEO himself: “I invented header bidding back in 2009.”

Using that technology, publishers don’t have to be hemmed to selling their space through just one ad exchange, they can take bids from multiple exchanges at once.

“The first iteration was more complex for the browser to render,” O’Kelley tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re seeing more technically-savvy ways of implementing header bidding.”

Whilst that may be bearing fruit for publishers, O’Kelley has additional ideas. AppNexus acquired Yieldex two years ago and is now making in-roads in predictive ad trading.

“We took the forecasting and intelligence of Yieldex and built an ad server around it,” he says. “We are able to us Yieldex forecasting, which is used by tens of the largest publishers in the world, to decide better which impression to serve to the user. We see significant increases in price and sell-through over other ad servers in terms of overall yield.”

What’s next, however, is not just yield but more logic. Many readers may be familiar with IFTTT and Zapier, online tools that let consumers make conditional connections between otherwise-connected services (for instance, when Kim Kardashian emails me, flash the kitchen light red).

O’Kelley sees the same “programmable” logic coming to ad trading. “The world is becoming programmable,” he says. “It allows you to layer in logic. We’re doing the same in marketing technology.

‘(For instance), ‘if a user comes to my website and doesn’t come back for three days, then do these things’ – that’s a program … for user messaging and decisioning. We’re going to launch a brand new buying platform built on our own programmable technology.”

This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders. The series is sponsored by Videology. For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.

AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley, in this video interview with Beet.TV, says:  “We’re going in to open beta for our new video-buying product in early August. We’re also innovating on the sell side to fix video load time – we’ll release a product for that later in the year.”

O’Kelley’s company tried video back in 2010, but the results were disappointing and the effort was abandoned. “We weren’t thrilled,” he admits. “It didn’t allow the kind of open innovation we were hoping for. “We spent the last 18 months rebuilding our video platform from scratch.” Now the video platform hooks up with AppNexus services like Programmable Bidder (APB), which the company launched in June to offer audience reach, targeting, access to inventory, analytics and reporting.

O’Kelley says: “A couple of the largest video buyers on the internet are experimenting with ways they can use this APB capability for video.”

Coming later this year, AppNexus plans a product to tackle what O’Kelley says are becoming unacceptably long video load times because so many servers are being called when videos are played.

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

But CEO Brian O’Kelley sees one big differentiator between his company and the likes of Facebook, which recently rebooted Atlas as a cross-platform consumer targeting solution.

O’Kelley was speaking a couple of months after launching AppNexus Programmable Bidder (APB), a system to help advertisers put their own targeting algorithms in to AppNexus’ software suite.

“When I talk about ‘tech stack’, I think it’s really important that that implies an open ecosystem,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“Facebook has proprietary personal information that they can’t let out of their walls. How can you build an open platform if your best asset, the data of your users, is implicitly closed?

“They’ve argued that this is a feature, not a bug, that using Facebook for everything… exist to propose that mentality. You need a platform … that protects data, that owns no data. Do we really want to be part of an open internet or a Facebook Internet?”

This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C + Teletrax.

Instead, later in 2007, he decided to start something new.

“It took me about six weeks to realize that my passion was to build the next generation of the ad exchange, and so I founded AppNexus and had a bit of a chip on my shoulder,” O’Kelley, the company’s CEO, says in an interview with Beet.TV. “I really wanted to prove that I could build a great company and really change the way the industry worked.”

His goal was to build out real-time bidding, and now “eight years later I can say mission, sort of, accomplished,” he says.

Given how quickly both consumer behavior and technology are evolving, it’s difficult to predict what advertising will look like in 10 years, but O’Kelley does foresee the continued rise of more interruptive forms of digital ads, like interstitials and in-feed formats.

“I think that’s the only way to get a TV-like experience that’s also natural for the evolution of content to more and more personalized devices,” he says.

This is segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.

O’Kelley was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.

At times, it’s pushed to the background as an enabler. And at time it becomes a central topic,” AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“We’re at a point in the cycle where there’s so much fragmentation … that the question of how we advertise … is really important. The more complicated the world is, the more we need technology.

“Maybe five years from now, we’ll have nailed the core technology and the fragmentation will have slowed down and it will be creative again.”

We interviewed O’Kelley as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.   Please visit this page for additional segments.

“For five years, we had a good relationship,” AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Last January in Davos, I found 15 minutes with Martin Sorrel and said, ‘Martin, you really need to take this incredible asset that Xaxis has in open ad stream and combine it with all the tech that AppNexus has so that an can be the best ad technology business out there…’.

Under the deal, WPP put $25 million in to AppNexus but gave it control of its Open AdStream technology, rebadged “Xaxis For Publishers”. It was about giving AppNexus control of one specific piece of its offering.

“I see it as a perfect complementary relationship…,” O’Kelley adds. It’s critical to our future and I think it’s pretty important to Xaxis as well.”