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.
]]>“We’ve been spending a lot of our time and a lot of our money on addressable television,” Mike Welch, Head of Strategy, Product & Business Development for AT&T AdWorks, says during an interview with Beet.TV this week at the Future of TV Advertising Forum.
AT&T, DISH Network and WPP recently announced their joint acquisition of INVIDI, a leader in providing addressable advertising platforms. In addition to extensive distribution in U.S. households, INVIDI is actively deploying its technology and negotiating distribution agreements in Europe, South America and Asia.
“The INVIDI acquisition is just an example of us being very bullish on the future of addressable,” Welch adds. “We think that there’s huge opportunity both domestically and internationally.”
From its billing relationships with TV and mobile customers, AT&T garners verified subscriber identities. When those identities are coupled with third-party data in an anonymous, privacy compliant manner, AT&T can deliver addressable ads to TV sets and mobile devices.
“We’ll do this with our owned and operated apps,” Welch explains. “So if it’s a DIRECTV, TV Everywhere experience that someone is watching on a mobile device, we’ll be able to deliver a specific, targeted ad to that device as well as to their TV set.”
AT&T’s cross-device reach is amplified through a partnership with Opera Mediaworks, the mobile advertising and marketing platform that serves tens of thousands of apps, Welch explains.
“You don’t have to necessarily be watching content on just an AT&T app in order for us to do this cross-screen addressability,” Welch says of the association with Opera Mediaworks.
Asked about the buy-side sentiment for cross-screen addressable solutions, Welch says “We need to continue as sellers to prove that it works. We’re seeing significant lift when you have exposure across screens.”
He cites the case study of an automotive marketer that saw an 85% lift in buy rate among targeted consumers versus a control group that was not exposed to any ads on any screens. “That’s powerful,” says Welch. “If we could get that story out and make believers out of folks, I think you’ll see this market explode.”
We spoke with Welch at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But addressable TV is not just about more refined TV targeting – the device in the living room is one platform that will feed in signals to an overall system which will produce unprecedented customer granularity – that’s multi-touch attribution, according to SMG precision video director Tracey Scheppach.
“We can combine that with other digital signals … and connect them in a unique ID through companies like Liveramp,” she told a Cannes Lions panel recorded by Beet.TV. “Make those connections to say, ‘This is a handheld device that belongs to this home’. You’re able to say ‘What piece of the media pie drove the conversion?’ That is new.”
Scheppach credits location-based ad tech platforms like placeIQ with helping enabling the change, but says many others are also advancing the possibilities.
Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media division, which is working on addressable TV ads, said: “For the past 15 years, we’ve been putting ads on television, ads on the internet and, for two thirds of that, ads on mobile phones. We have very little of an idea what the unduplicated reach and frequency is between all those screens. To (show that), that’s a really really big deal and shouldn’t be taken lightly.”
Also commenting is Mike Welch, president of AT&T AdWorks. The session was moderated by Terence Kawaja, CEO of boutique investment bank LUMA Partners.
This session was part of a Cannes panel discussion on targeted TV advertising co-presented Beet.TV and AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media division, which is working on just that proposition, says 2015 is the year it has begun to happen – but he cautions that advertising may need to adjust to the new realities of the possibilities.
“If we still live in a world where we spend a million dollars to create a spot, that’s not economically feasible for this data- and tech-driven world,” he told a Cannes Lions panel discussion, recorded by Beet.TV.
“We need to figure out a way to take these big, beautiful million-dollar spots and cut them three, four, five, 20 different ways so that the right message goes to the right consumer at the right time at the right frequency.”
Fellow panelists agreed that the prospects are vast:
This video is part of a series produced at Cannes Lions aboard the AT&T AdWorks yacht, sponsored by AT&T. For more clips from the session, please visit this page.
]]>“You know what’s really silly?” says Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media, in a panel discussion at Cannes recorded by Beet.TV. “Asking 20,000 people what they watch on television and assuming the other 114 million watch the same.”
Bologna says over 100 GroupM advertisers are running 350 campaigns on addressable TV right now, and the agency is willing to pay CPMs as high as $400 for premium inventory. And SMG’s Tracey Scheppach, EVP-Precision Video Director, says over 45 agency clients have done roughly 100 campaigns.
However, both acknowledge this is just a drop in the bucket when you consider the $70-billion TV ad market.
“I agree that distributors have been slow to embrace this technology and slow to roll it out at scale, but I think we’re starting to see that happen,” adds Mike Welch, president of AT&T AdWorks.
Scheppach says that TV networks are starting to feel an impetus to embrace new technology.
“The whole CPG category is up in review, and when you have that moment when upfront dollars are moving, it puts a lot of pressure on inventory owners, the traditional ones, to pull something off to save the account,” she says.
The session was moderated by Terence Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners.
Scheppach, Bologna and Welch were part of a Cannes panel discussion on targeted TV advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>“You’re seeing 50, 60, 70% increase in sales lift,” says Tracey Scheppach, SMG’s EVP-Precision Video Director, in a panel discussion at Cannes that was recorded by Beet.TV. “We’ve even seen it higher than that.”
The lift for CPG and automotive brands is easily measurable because of the availability of sales data through the likes of Dunnhumby and Kantar Shopcom. So there’s a means of looking at the households that viewed a given commercial, running that data through a company like Acxiom, and then matching it to shopping data to see how many households exposed to the ad wound up making a purchase.
“That’s really cool stuff, and that’s never happened in TV before,” says Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media.
Meanwhile, AT&T AdWorks’s president Mike Welch observes how his business provides a different layer of data via insights into people’s web browsing activity (which it obtains from an opt-in from customers using its fiber-optic service GigaPower.)
“We’re using that data behind the scenes to understand how exposure to a TV ad, for instance, drives particular web browsing patterns, and I think that helps fill in the in-between part of this exposure-to-purchase part of the funnel,” he says.
The session was moderated by Terence Kawaja, CEO of LUMA Partners, a boutique media investment bank.
This panel discussion on the brand lift of targeted TV advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>The mindset of big brands accustomed to the notion that they can buy a massive audience of adults from 18 to 49 is a large factor, according to Michael Bologna, president of GroupM’s Modi Media.
“In order to shift from an analog model to this model we’re talking about today, not only do we need to better refine our segments so we can reduce our waste, we need to help convince the media owners that if they go from a broad scope to a narrow scope, it will improve their yield and everyone will make money,” says Bologna, in a panel discussion recorded at Cannes by Beet.TV.
“Free the Data”
Another argument is that demand from large advertisers matters far less than the sheer availability of consumer data, which is still mostly locked up behind the cable operators.
“The thing that’s really holding us back is access to the data to really transform the business model,” says Tracey Scheppach, SMG’s EVP-Precision Video Director. “We’ve shown that we’re going to pay a higher CPM [for addressable TV]. We get more, we pay more.”
AT&T Adworks President Mike Welch notes that his unit is focused on observing consumer behavior across media.
“How do we follow that television subscriber when he or she consumes content on mobile devices and other screens?” he says. “That’s something we’re as focused on as anything right now.”
Scheppach, Bologna and Welch were part of a Cannes panel discussion on targeted TV advertising presented by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
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