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.

“Today we are on most of the connected TV platforms and in the next month or two we will be pretty much virtually everywhere,” Midha adds in this interview with Beet.TV, dubbing the connected living room “a super rich environment.”

Prior to taking over daily operations and long-term strategy at true[X], Midha spent five years at Disney ABC Television Group, where she rose to SVP, Digital Ad Sales & Operations, as ADWEEK reports. She also spent a decade at various Viacom properties.

Midha will be a keynote speaker at Beet Retreat in the City, scheduled for June 6 in Manhattan.

The company’s core product, its engagement ad format, is now used “across pretty much every broadcast and major cable network.” In addition, “We also work with some of the MVPD’s on their digital inventory and we work with some select gaming partners,” says Midha.

Since its founding in 2007, light years before anyone thought of living rooms as being “connected,” true[X] had a simple proposition: give consumers some say in which television ads they’d prefer to endure and, potentially, interact with. In its most basic form, the true[X] offering in full-episode video content gives viewers a “choice card” with the options of interacting with a 30-second ad or just viewing a “regular” ad experience

“And what we see time and time again is that most people would choose to interact than have the regular ad experience,” says Pooja. “What’s interesting is that the first time they take it, they adopt it, the rate is nearly sixty percent. The second time they see it, it goes up and it keeps going up.”

Full-screen interactivity provides for a broad pallet of advertiser and publisher storytelling and e-commerce. “There’s a lot of potential to really drive very different advertiser KPI’s.”

Advertisers are not charged if viewers leave the interactive format before its full 30-second run and default to the regular ad experience. “The idea is that at any time, we are guaranteeing that you will have someone’s full attention for thirty seconds, that they will interact at least once, and that you will be in a high-quality, full-screen environment,” says Pooja.

While the true[X] studio team last year eclipsed the 10,000 interactive ad mark, the company typically works with advertisers’ existing creative assets. Pooja says there’s lots of potential beyond simple engagement—particularly in the living room.

“We’re actually trying to see what else we can do in that environment and we’re standing up an entire CT innovation lab around that concept,” she says.

This video is part of The Road to Cannes, a preview of topics to be addressed at Cannes Lions. The series is presented by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. FreeWheel is a Comcast company.

“What we’re excited about is the ability to bring television to a new set of advertisers who maybe haven’t bought national TV in the past, particularly if we’re talking about addressable,” says Mike Dean, VP of Programmatic & Data-Driven Sales at Disney ABC Television Group.

In an interview with Beet.TV, Dean describes those targets as advertisers that have not had the type of budget to sustain a national television campaign, “Or that could be advertisers, maybe BtoB, that have been focused on trade marketing and would not have thought about a national TV campaign in the past,” Dean says.

Then there are lower-funnel use cases. “TV traditionally has not been used for lower funnel except for DR,” Dean observes. “So we really have an opportunity here to bring in lower funnel use cases and using national addressable television and national multi-platform video to drive purchase and conversion.”

Asked by interviewer Matt Spiegel, Managing Director of MediaLink, to describe Disney ABC’s approach to data-driven solutions, Dean cites the creation of a strategic audience target and applying it across all video distribution outlets.

“In linear TV we can take a data set and do audience indexing. So we’re creating a national schedule that’s going to over index for the client’s strategic targets,” says Dean.

The same data set can be applied at the impression level in digital video. “So it’s really kind of taking that one data set and using it to its best effect given the media,” says Dean.

This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.