What followed was Xandr’s first-ever The Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara, which brought together “the shareholders of attention,” AT&T sharing data with WarnerMedia within six months of its acquisition and the recent launches of Xandr’s Community audience marketplace and the Xandr Invest demand-side platform.

Now Xandr is once again “on the road to Relevance,” which will be repeated in Santa Barbara on Sept. 16, McDonald says in this interview with Beet.TV.

He describes the purpose behind the Community marketplace as “a premium audience marketplace that would not just be our owned and operated inventory but would be this community of like-minded publishers and content producers.” WarnerMedia (including Otter Media), Vice, Hearst Magazine, Newsy, Philo, Tubi, and XUMO are inaugural Community partners, according to a Xandr news release.

Xandr Invest is a re-launch of a demand side platform “really as an audience-buying platform,” says McDonald. It takes into account “the things that really needed to be improved as the industry’s evolved dramatically on the programmatic side around now buying against return on investment, not just a system to manipulate the quick fluctuations of rapid trading.”

Audience buying, while advanced in digital platforms, “really is still nascent in TV. As the leaders in addressable TV we think we understand what are the challenges all the way at the edge and we’re solving those to a large degree for a lot of partners,” he adds.

Last year’s The Relevance Conference “far exceeded our expectations,” McDonald says. It also marked the debut of the Xandr Relevancy Report, whose research “revealed a lot of things that we kind of knew intuitively, but it was great to put hard facts behind the sense that consumers care about advertising, understand its role. They know that it’s part of the content consumption process and part of the package.”

Xander has the launched a second wave of Xandr Relevancy Report research and will share the findings in September in Santa Barbara.

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“I think that competition is always a good thing, and I think that this new offering at Xandr led by Brian Lesser is certainly going to be a force that I’m very interested to see how it develops,” Karp says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference. “I think they have all of the right pieces to certainly make a very interesting offering.”

McHugh, who is SVP of Omni Media, Creative Solutions & Strategic Investments at the iconic personal care marketer has always been a believer in relevance. “I always said that it’s about the value exchange between the consumer and what she or he chooses to engage with. We’re all sort of attention starved. There’s too many things for us to do,” she says.

Thus Xandr’s research about just how busy people are “wasn’t surprising.” The bigger question is how, when and where brands can fit in.

“So how do we gain permission from those consumers to engage with them in a meaningful way? I think that’s part of their story, which I’m interested to see how that plays out in messaging. I think we all have to address that in an ad-blocking, futuristic world.”

Summing up the road ahead of Xandr, she adds, “They have the data behind it, they have tech, so they have a really interesting, perfect storm so we’ll see what happens.”

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.

Combining Xandr’s content assets with tech and ad delivery “is an exciting way to build an offering that hits both sides. It’s not just data and tech and targeting and it’s not just the content side. It’s a good marriage of both,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.

Asked about the broader application of addressable TV advertising, Campanelli notes that Horizon isn’t in the camp of those who believe that all TV will be addressable in the future. He sees it more as a complement to TV’s broad reach.

“Addressable is incredibly important and it’s going to play a bigger role as time goes on and an increasingly important role,” he says.

But there is a caveat in the use of TV’s reach to influence people who may not be aware of particular brands. “The value is reaching consumers who are not in your target today but could be tomorrow. Or someone who is not in your target but could be a word of mouth to someone who’s in your target.

“So there’s a value in reaching people outside of your target and addressability is about just reaching that target effectively. They’ll to coexist together but we don’t see a world where it’s entirely addressable.”

How much of TV will be linear versus on demand is a different question to Campanelli, who nonetheless says the ability to reach mass audiences is crucial. “Addressable is a critical complement to that but it’s not the way that all of television should work.”

To fully understand the rapidly evolving TV space, Horizon formed a unit several years ago called Horizon Advance to explore addressable, third-party programmatic TV vendors like Simulmedia and new techniques like data matching.

“It’s a complicated space. We learned it and we had to immerse ourselves to learn it.”

As opposed to an activation team, Horizon Advance is more consultative for clients and other in-house teams. “It’s been a huge asset to Horizon and our clients,” says Campanelli.

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, Muldoon says that after hearing talk about consumers, data, technology, reach, engagement and quality content “it’s really coming together more than it’s ever have before.”

Accordant became part of Amnet Group following Accordant’s 2016 acquisition by Dentsu Aegis Group. Amnet is Dentsu Aegis’s global programmatic unit.

Muldoon says the “exciting challenges” ahead are on the creative side, the engagement side and also on the consumer side. “We realize that consumers are more educated than ever about advertising and how they engage with advertising.”

With entities like Xandr taking shape, the industry has “more options than we ever had to really make that mission of brand engagement to be a reality.”

Having cut his teeth on the digital side, Muldoon sees the immersive storytelling properties of television intersecting with engagement. “It’s really coming into play that the programmatic capabilities and TV immersion are at an intersection and a crossroads.

Asked about Xandr’s stated desire to be a catalyst for change on both the buy-side and sell-side of advertising, he says the company is emerging at a time when there’s a track record to the evolution of DSP’s and DMP’s.

“It’s pretty exciting if you’re Xandr I’m sure right now to see all the ingredients you have and the opportunities to do things right from the start. So it’s a great time for 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.

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.

“We have now developed our own algorithms, we have a full development team, and we’re able to really custom develop it to match our inventory,” Colella says. “Nobody knows our inventory structure better than us. So this allows us to innovate more quickly and to respond to the market more nimbly as well.”

NBCU makes all of its advertising supply available through its audience optimization product. “Whether it’s programmatic TV or linear optimization, whatever’s available will be made available through those platforms. We don’t differentiate,” Colella adds.

“Typically, the live sports programs and our big-ticket items will obviously go on sponsorship. But if something hasn’t been sold we make it available.”

In April of 2018, NBCU joined the TV audience-targeting consortium OpenAP led by Fox, Viacom and Turner. In so doing, it brought its in-house Audience Studio’s data capabilities to boost the platform by integrating them into OpenAP’s standardized data sets, as ADWEEK reports.

“We’ve been spending a lot of time to really understand what we can bring to bear and how best to work with the group so that we can make it easier for our advertisers to buy on an audience basis,” Colella says of OpenAP.

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.

“They’re trying to pull off something really unique, but I can tell you that the 200 or so people who are at this conference really are leaning in and really want it to happen,” Criteo’s COO says.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the conference, Spilman talks about the positive effect that speakers like Ariana Huffington and others have had on both minds and bodies.

“To get up this morning and hear [CEO] Brian Lesser unveiling Xandr, what they’re looking to accomplish, is really inspiring and compelling.”

While most people think of AT&T as a legacy telephone company, its ambition to become “a modern media company” represents “just such the right time with the right message,” says Spilman, who has been in advertising and media for nearly 30 years.

Contemplating the attention spectrum, she references the term “CPA” for continuous partial attention. “It really goes to show how important relevance in advertising is. Because in this world of fragmentation and fragmented attention, how do you market your products and services to this audience who has partial attention at any given time across devices?

“We’ve talked for years about addressable TV and measurability and how all these things are going to converge,” Spilman says. “And now with this combination of content, distribution, technology and marketing coming together, we have a shot. And that’s just really, really exciting and inspiring to me for somebody who’s been in this industry for a very, very long time.”

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 really been optimistic about the space,” says Law, who is EVP, Managing Director, US Media Investment, Amplifi (Dentsu Aegis Network). “I think the innovation and the technology the scale of the number of people we can hit and the improvement of data sources across the board has made addressable that much more viable on a media plan.”

In addition to more scale, there’s more data to provide understanding about consumer behavior and the best ways to target them, Law explains in this interview with Beet.TV. at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.

“And then on the back end, being able to understand did they actually follow through, make a purchase, go to a store, follow them throughout the full process,” Law adds.

Asked about the workload required for addressable TV, Law says it takes commitment and harnessing different resources. “I think you need to work with your analytics teams, you need to work with your clients very closely about what their goals are. So it is bringing a lot of people together on both sides.”

On the program distributor side, each vendor can represent a silo of sorts, so “it’s really our responsibility to bring that together to think about how can we maximize what we’re getting out of this.”

Part of the process is helping clients determine how addressability fits into their overall planning, given its utility in targeting specific households. “As we think about it, you have reach happening across the marketplace, but in traditional television and across other channels we’re really getting to the top of that reach curve very quickly now and then it’s frequency and we’re just kind of running rampant at the top of the reach curve.”

In moving TV into the lower part of the funnel, it’s less about brand awareness than it is getting closer to consumers—right now at the household level. Law describes a “one ad in one room versus in another room” approach “the ultimate dream, although we’re not quite there yet.”

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.