“There’s a really big mission. Whether AT&T itself is going to be able to do it or not we’ll see,” Morgan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference in which he discusses his Simulmedia advanced TV solutions company having achieved profitability and its new Transparent TV offering.

Although AT&T has the means to distribute its own content, it will need to work with multiple MVPD’s to scale household addressable advertising. Simulmedia collaborates with about a dozen of the top US television companies to aggregate and scale audience targeting, so Morgan understands what’s at play.

“It’s certainly trying to bring together the whole ecosystem,” he says of Xandr. “I think it realizes that it’s going to require a lot of partners to get there.”

Asked whether the combined assets under Xandr—which include AppNexus—will constitute another walled garden, Morgan says that’s an overused term. It’s not a “binary issue” of whether a business is either a walled garden or not, he says.

“I think companies that use data have to maintain certain protections around that data for proprietary reasons, for privacy reasons. I think clearly AT&T is going to be able to leverage a massive amount of consumer data and consumer media data and communications data for advertising that will certainly be able to drive more relevance, the title of this conference,” Morgan says.

He expresses praise for AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s presentations at the conference, noting that Stephenson was “pretty clear” that he’ll be making more acquisitions. “He talked about why they did the deal, and he talked a lot of specifics about the advertising business and what they need to do.”

Morgan mentions in passing that Simulmedia has achieved profitability and explains the unveiling of Transparent TV in June of 2018. “We’ve unbundled our audience network offering so that we’re providing more direct automation to marketers,” he says.

With Transparent TV, advertisers can directly manage their campaigns against strategic audiences with total transparency on media outputs, marketing outcomes, competitive insights and pricing, according to a news release. This includes spots, networks, dayparts, GRPs and CPMs, and such marketing outcomes as reach maximization, conversions, and sales attribution and ROI.

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.

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.

“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.