“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.

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.

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.