“There’s no question that lots of folks in the marketing and media world would like more alternatives to Google and Facebook, and AT&T by bringing a lot of extraordinary assets is the latest to present a credible assembly of important capabilities,” Rothenberg says.

One of the many invitation-only attendees of the Xandr Relevance Conference, The IAB chief was scheduled to moderate a panel discussion titled Consumers’ Choice: The DTC Revolution. It was based in part on the IAB’s “Rise Of The 21st Century Brand Economy” study.

“I think the elite attendance here at The Relevance Conference is an example of the interest, the hunger for an entity that can do what AT&T is promising to do,” Rothenberg says.

That’s based on what he considers to be AT&T’s “world class” assets encompassing entertainment, news, distribution, data, privacy and a “great embedded understanding of data security.”

Add them all together and “you’ve got a company that puts together a lot of remarkable capabilities that can be brought to bear on behalf of both consumers and businesses at the same time.”

Rothenberg has words of praise for AT&T management in the walkup to the Xandr unveil this week. “I think the fact that they’ve spent a good solid year planning and building before coming out with public announcements was incredibly smart.”

He expresses a special affinity for Xandr CEO Brian Lesser and CMO Kirk McDonald, both “colleagues” and in McDonald’s case a former IAB board member.

“I think everybody here wishes them well and expects that they will do extraordinarily well to help build not just a new media entity, but a new media communications and advertising industry in the United States and elsewhere,” Rothenberg says.

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.

“It’s almost as if we need like, a little bit of a slow news movement because everything’s happening so fast and there is so much access to so much information,” Stelter says in this Beet.TV interview at AT&T’s Xandr Relevance Conference in which he discusses President Trump’s “fake news” claims and what journalists should be doing in response.

“I think right now there’s so much confusion and chaos, and maybe even most news consumers are hungry for people to hit the brakes a little bit, for journalists to hit the brakes a little bit and tell them what really matters, what really is going on and why it really affects them,” Stelter says.

At The Relevance Conference, Stelter moderated a panel discussion titled Breaking The News: Staying Relevant In A Real-Time News Cycle. It featured Jesse Angelo of the New York Post, PBS NewsHour’s Sara Just, Allison Rockey of VOX and Bari Weiss from The New York Times.

“I think the higher quality news organizations, or the ones that seek to be higher quality, are the ones that are trying to help folks digest the news and process the news and get past the headlines of what’s happening,” says Stelter.

Part of the panel discussion focused on the value that news organizations should be bringing to the table. “The value is to make people smarter. Not to make people angrier or make people confused. But to make people smarter about what’s happening. I do think we see all across the news media examples of efforts to do that,” Stelter adds.

In a Tuesday morning opening fireside chat on the main stage with CNN’s Poppy Harlow moderating, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson forcefully addressed the company’s  commitment to a free press and  its essential role in society.

“Whatever you think about CNN, whatever you think about CNN’s rivals, we need a strong and healthy and diverse news media in the United States and we need owners who respect that. And AT&T has been saying all the right things and doing all the right things since the acquisition happened,” says Stelter.

Asked about the impact on the public of President Trump’s frequent claims of “fake news,” he calls such behavior “a slow-acting poison that is gradually trickling through the American body and causing an infection, causing a disease, causing a sickness.”

Given that a subset of the U.S. public actually believes what President Trump is saying, “My big concern is let’s take that thirty or forty percent of the country that seems to believe him or agree with his attacks. What can we do to win back folks’ trust? To show them that the news is real and the journalists are trying their best to get it right. That’s a challenge and that’s a mission for these newsrooms, for all of us.”

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. 

“I think it’s incredibly exciting to see that some of the leaders in the marketplace and the biggest players are bringing together content with distribution and now technology and, most importantly, data to enable it all to happen,” the CEO & Founder of Furious Corp. says of the event on September 24-26 in Santa Barbara.

“The Relevance Conference is an amazing agenda because it’s elevating the conversation beyond the how to the why. And it’s very forward looking,” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

She credits Kirk McDonald, CMO of the soon to be renamed AT&T Advertising & Analytics, for bringing together a diversity of players and viewpoints where they can share their thoughts and business goals.

“We’re very insulated. We sort of live in this bubble and we don’t do a good job of looking outward to really understand and to help lay the course and the foundation for how we progress,” says Swartz.

With Time Warner Media and AppNexus now under its wing, AT&T has “this incredible portfolio of asserts that enables them to activate the wealth of data and information they have as ultimately what their legacy DNA is ,which is as a telco.”

Now she believes the new entity represents pieces that have come together “through the lines for traditional television to digital and addressable media overall.”

The word renaissance resonates amid all the technological change that the TV industry hopes will power its next iteration—one marked by an advanced understanding of audiences and brands can best engage with them.

“I’ve taken a contrarian position in the industry that I’m doubling down on television thriving not just surviving” by getting better at activating the hearts and minds of audiences, says Swartz. “For me, relevance is really about hearts and minds. You could end that conversation by simply talking about content, and you could end it with the acquisition of the broadcast networks and the portfolio of content they just acquired.

“But when you extend that story for The Relevance Conference and you start to leverage the data and information about audiences and you actually really get to know them, it enables you to deliver experiences, whether they’re ads or it’s content itself that means something. That activates hearts and minds.”

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.

“What everyone’s anxious to understand is a bit more of the how. With a massive footprint, with all the opportunity across data and content, how are they bringing that together seamlessly from an agency perspective and to marketers?” says Amanda Richman, U.S. CEO of the Wavemaker agency.

“How are they distinguishing themselves and how might they set some new industry standards as well?” she adds in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to the AT&T confab.

When the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics takes on a new moniker that will be announced early on at the event, one of its big competitive advantages will be its understanding of audience behavior across various platforms. Given its progress into digital television “and with the content layer on top of that now with all the Warner Media assets, it seems to be an opportunity for a seamless end to end solution.”

She notes that the term “relevance” is very often tied to targeting and precision marketing, which encompasses eliminating waste, “But I think there’s a white space around that emotional connection that brands need to make and how brands can actually connect on the heart as well as the mind across devices,” says Richman.

A WPP Group-owned media, content and tech agency, Wavemaker was created in 2017 via the merger of agencies Maxus and MEC. Contemplating what the future entails “starts with the people themselves and a physical space. Thankfully, now we’re at 3 World Trade Center. We have that new space and new energy that comes with a great environment.”

What follows includes trying to develop more seamless processes “with better navigation of all of our assets so we can customize what the solution is for each client instead of just one single approach.

“And then make sure that we’re measurable and held accountable even in our own compensation for delivering growth to our clients. We think that’s the best future.

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.

“I’m thrilled to be attending the conference in the next week or two,” she says. “I want to hear Brian’s vision from him and his team,” she adds in a reference to Brian Lesser, who is CEO of the current AT&T Advertising & Analytics unit. “I think it’s going to be so exciting.”

Speciale, who is President of Advertising Sales at Turner, is already in sync with Lesser and his people, she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.

“We’ve been working together for the past few weeks collaborating with both our teams,” she says. “And what’s so exciting is that both his side and our side, our visions have been so much aligned. So I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say and what our clients have to say.”

Like many others, Speciale is keen on knowing how AT&T plans to use customer data for better targeting of ads across media. “At Turner, we’ve always put the consumer at the center. We have been doing that for years.”

She talks about the company’s efforts to reduce commercial load “because the experience is so important to us of how our viewer really feels, making content more relevant, targeting obviously is definitely something that we have been focusing on over these years.”

With advanced targeting data, “I think addressability is what’s really going to be popping. That’s really where our vision has been for the past few years.

“It has to start with audience, that’s what we’ve been focusing on, now getting the data from AT&T is going to make that even more rich and viable and the next portion of that is going to be addressability.”

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 Founder & CEO of LUMA Partners will be one of some 250 industry leaders attending The Relevance Conference hosted by AT&T in Santa Barbara on Sept. 24-26. On the opening day he will join Otter Media’s Tony Goncalvez and others on a panel titled Putting A Price On Content that will explore the “happy medium” between paid subscription models and ad-supported media.

While AT&T has planted a very large flag in acquiring some of the biggest content and adtech assets, it all comes down to brands changing the ad experience for consumers who have lots of choices, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference.

“It will be very exciting to see a company with deep pockets, very, very capable, pursue the dream that is convergent television,” he says of AT&T in the wake of its bringing Warner Media and AppNexus under its communications, content and advertising umbrella. “It’s great for ad tech but forget that, it is great for media and marketing writ large. This is a company that demonstrates that it’s not afraid to put its money where its mouth is and get the very, very best.”

At base level, relevance can have meaning with respect to targeting, personalization and other tactics, but with today’s consumers there is a much higher level at which the term needs to be considered, according to Kawaja.

“Netflix has trained them that they can get premium content without interruption,” he says, and “with the training that these paid models have got us all used to, now it’s hard to go back, either once you have the skip button on an ad or just don’t see any ads at all. The ads have to have a different nature.”

Noting that the advertising industry is one “built on the premise of interruption,” he adds, “I think we have to get away from that.”

He cites as an admittedly “extreme” example paid search, where unlike other advertising, consumer intent means everyone involved can win.

“If I’m looking for a Thai restaurant in St. Louis and I enter that search result, I’m going to get back a bunch of media with ads in it. Turns out the ads are facilitative of my original intent of pursuing that media.”

More in the mainstream realm, he mentions ads in The Weather Channel app that don’t block the experience because they’re in the background, juxtaposed with current weather conditions. “The ad is, in fact, additive to the content. At the core we need less advertising, certainly less interruptive advertising and the notion of relevance I think gets to that acknowledgement that we need a better consumer experience.”

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. 

Not only will AT&T unveil the name and road map for its advanced advertising goals at the event in Santa Barbara, Kassan will get to explore how one of the newest video content startups intends to become relevant.

Kassan will moderate a discussion at Relevance between Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is Managing Partner of WndrCo and Chairman & Founder of mobile media startup NewTV, and Meg Whitman, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and CEO of NewTV.

“What Jeffrey and Meg have cooked up, having just raised a billion dollars from all the key entertainment companies to launch NewTV, I think should be very exciting,” the CEO of MediaLink says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.

In the walkup to Relevance, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has been emphasizing how the company’s traditional and newly acquired assets—including AppNexus and Time Warner—gives it lots of potential leverage in the advanced advertising space.

“The AppNexus acquisition certainly underscores how serious he was. While at the same time disclosing an 83 billion-dollar purchase of Warner Media there was still room and some cash left on the table to do a one point six billion acquisition of AppNexus.

“I think it validates everything Randall said publicly and as well, candidly, in the trial that happened around the Department of Justice challenging the deal,” Kassan adds.

That’s a reference to AT&T’s public position that scale was its ultimate goal in its acquisition pursuits “and they certainly have put their money where their mouth is.”

Other highlights of the conference for Kassan will include hearing from Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner, whose latest effort is a series titled The Romanoffs, and former Huffington Post chief Ariana Huffington regarding her venture called Thrive Global.

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. 

“There is almost infinite information fighting and competing for finite human attention,” Kirk McDonald, CMO,  says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We’ve embraced this moment in time when we believe advertising needs to be reimagined. It needs to change.”

To help foster that change, AT&T will host The Relevance Conference on Sept. 24-26 in Santa Barbara, CA. McDonald describes the event as an aggregation of thought leaders across entertainment, media, marketing and content production, “to get together to talk about what are the best practices that they have put together around understanding how to engage with today’s consumer and creating moments of relevance for them.”

The invitation-only event will be limited to 300 attendees.

AT&T will share new research at The Relevance Conference about the attention economy. In addition to examining where consumers are spending their time and why and what’s relevant to them, attendees will contemplate how the industry is shaped “both in terms of its organizational structure” and its practices around speaking to people in more relevant ways.

“The reality is today, as we engage with consumers, it is an engagement,” says McDonald. “We no longer tell them what to watch when to watch or where to watch. We actually now engage in a dialogue as that consumer participates in embellishing the content in their own unique ways and they actually filter for the things that are most relevant to them.”

At The Relevancy Conference, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson will participate in an opening fireside chat to share his thoughts on how “AT&T really evolves into a modern media company” combining its technological prowess, some 170 million consumer engagement touch points and the content heft of Warner Media.

“I think the most rewarding thing for everyone is to arrive and realize that they’re sitting across form the people that they work with all the time, or work against all the time, in sort of competing for consumer attention,” McDonald says. “This is a gathering of the shareholders of consumer attention. That’s who’s there.”

He calls data and technology the tools to relevance.

“Data to create an understanding and awareness of the interests or the intentions of a consumer and then technology to enable us to actually find them in the right moment and time,” McDonald adds.

“I think the pendulum is swinging in the direction where we’ll make data and technology enable better storytelling. Better storytelling is the requirement of relevance and this is the right time to happen. I’m very excited about it.

Following The Relevance Conference, during Advertising Week in New York, AT&T will roll-out the new advertising enterprise. “We wanted to not just actually announce the name just because we wanted to give a name to this already nearly $2 billion business. We wanted to actually enter the industry with some substance,” McDonald explains.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series about The Relevance Conference and emerging media trends. The project is sponsored by AT&T Advertising and Analytics.