Xandr, where Martin is director of product management, forecasting and inventory management, just launched a tool he says will bridge the gap.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Martin explains the idea is applying digital logic to linear media, uniting the two channels.
The tool, converged inventory analysis, is a sub-product inside Yield Analytics that unifies audiences and ad systems across linear addressable and OTT.
Xandr says the aim is to sooth a fragmentation that has occurred as a result, with a “consolidated advertising and analytics system to manage distributors’ digital and linear addressable businesses, enabling the identification of a single
audience across channels”.
Martin says: “We’re really trying to break down the silos, so that the planning isn’t done within addressable linear and then replicated or done a second time within digital silos, but just done one time so that I understand where my best yield optimization levers are and where the most competition for that inventory exists.”
Xandr today announced the launch of a first of its kind technology that is aimed to help the largest TV distributors better manage and sell addressable inventory holistically.
More here: https://t.co/szRYQtGYzi
— Xandr (@xandr) June 29, 2021
The product is build out of Yieldex, a company Xandr’s earlier AppNexus acquired back in 2015.
Martin says the team added advanced forecasting capabilities for the ad server. Now that is being offered to TV teams, with benefits claimed on both sides:
It’s all in pursuit of enabling a “holistic” approach to media, whether buying or selling, Martin says.
]]>Now the new year is set to see it take off even farther.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Daniel Clayman, Xandr VP and MD for Northern Europe, explains what 2021 means for CTV growth in his region.
Clayman explains that, in Europe, CTV is a little less mature in some ways than in the USA.
“CTV is probably a couple of years ahead in the US just by nature of how TV and distribution of TV works, it’s quite different to Europe,” he says.
“Whilst the number of opportunities is smaller, they’re still very large and we plan to be going off to them pretty significantly next year.”
In Europe, entrenched broadcasters, many of them public broadcasters, have got their CTV game in order, bringing authenticated multi-platform viewing environments to market for consumers, and bringing consumers’ data to market for advertisers.
It’s not just market maturity that is different across the Atlantic. Strict privacy regulation has also thrown a curve-ball to TV ad targeting, limiting some aspects of advanced viewer profiling.
Even so, many CTV deployments actually lack audience identifiers in the first place.
The ways which CTV practitioners have found around that challenge actually make them more developed than some peers who are pondering the demise of desktop and mobile cookies.
“We’ve found some great partnerships with the likes of InfoSum that will allow us to take a unique stance to the buy and sell side on that front,” Xandr’s Clayman says.
Xandr emerged after AT&T’s acquisition of ad-tech firm AppNexus – the Big Bang for what is now an expanding luxury of opportunity available to Xandr itself.
Xandr launched Invest TV, a platform for TV ad buyers to transact using data across multiple linear programmers, in March 2020 – just as COVID-19 was taking hold, but just in time for a boom in connected TV viewing.
The suite began with Xandr parent WarnerMedia, AMC, and Disney on the system, and recently added A+E Networks and Crown Media Holdings.
AT&T Marketing, Hearts & Science and Media Hub also came on as buyers.
We’re ending our #XandrConnect filled week with the launch of Xandr Connect Magazine, which covers the latest technologies, thinking and collaborations driving media and advertising.
Click the link below for more! https://t.co/tOseg5F1xk pic.twitter.com/VIKu1e6ICH
— Xandr (@xandr) November 20, 2020
The company’s Clayman says ad buyers and sellers want transparency in connected TV.
“We’ve worked for the last two or three years in terms of signing contracts with our publishers that would allow us to share our SSP or technology take rate with the buyer that we charge to the publisher,” he says.
“That allows us to bring 100% working media to the supply chain. Clients can see exactly where their money goes.
“Most SSPs and DSPs won’t sign those types of contracts. The footprint on the sell side, plus our ability to get these contract signed has given us a very unique proposition that isn’t in market elsewhere.”
You are watching “Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, ” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is the challenge this year for Xandr, the advertising and analytics division of WarnerMedia, as it ponders the next phase in its product evolution.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Eric Hoffert, SVP, Video Technology, Xandr, explains that the imperative is to bring together a world of possibility in a way that is effortless for customers.
“As we look to phase three of what we’re doing, we’re looking to stand that up in an extremely powerful way,” Hoffert says.
“The digital video platform for advertising at AppNexus and Xandr and the Invest TV marketplace that we stood up, they have common look and feel, they have single-sign-on access. So we’re bringing these different workflows that are quite different under one umbrella. That’s a key part of our next step, to make this easy for buyers and also powerful for sellers.
“Typically, these have been fragmented processes in terms of selling either your digital video inventory or your data-driven linear inventory. So, I think as we look forward to 2021, we’re really looking to play a key role to bring these disparate worlds together into a unified solution.”
AppNexus’ DSP in 2019 was rebranded as “Xandr Invest”, whilst Xandr has since made a foray into the connected TV space.
Xandr launched Invest TV, a platform for TV ad buyers to transact using data across multiple linear programmers, in March 2020 – just as COVID-19 was taking hold, but just in time for a boom in connected TV viewing.
The suite began with Xandr parent WarnerMedia, AMC, and Disney on the system, and recently added A+E Networks and Crown Media Holdings.
AT&T Marketing, Hearts & Science and Media Hub also came on as buyers.
Even within that platform alone, Hoffert’s team is having to consider how to make a whole kingdom of different opportunities available to users in a way that doesn’t overwhelm.
“Within Invest TV, we have the capability to support aggregated reach for buyers, which is a really core requirement for TV buying,” he says. “And we can meet the market where it is today, which is through the use of Nielsen, age, and gender, and advanced audience.
“But we’re really showing people the possibilities for where the market can go by using Xandr first-party data, audience segments, and measurement.
“And so we’re offering really both methodologies into the buying community for how you can buy and sell premium television inventory through a digital platform.”
You are watching “Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, ” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>For some time, CTV was a powerful but challenging opportunity – the promise to target individual households, if only a host of interconnectivity issues could be overcome.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Eric Hoffert, SVP, Video Technology, Xandr, says this is the year ahead is when Xandr aims to pull together the various investments it has made in the last four years.
“We started our connected TV marketplace in 2017 when the market was really just starting to take off,” Hoffert says.
“Since that time, we have focused on a number of areas to get to market with a very strong, connected TV offering for buyers.”
Xandr’s two key platforms are:
Why must the advanced TV advertising ecosystem evolve in 2021? Xandr's Lindsay Van Kirk shares her thoughts and predictions. pic.twitter.com/aSwumBHNrJ
— Xandr (@xandr) December 31, 2020
“Over the last three years or so, we have assembled an extraordinary number of high-quality programmers and broadcasters on the sell side,” Hoffert says.
“Whether it’s a vMVPD for streaming TV services or a premier broadcaster or programmer, or a pure-play OTT service – (in) all three categories we have strong inventory access available.”
Xandr emerged after AT&T’s acquisition of ad-tech firm AppNexus – the Big Bang for what is now an expanding luxury of opportunity available to Xandr itself.
“We had the opportunity to be able to tap into a treasure trove of first party data from AT&T, and we’ve been able to integrate that into our CTV offering with a very powerful cross device capability, including a very rich and powerful device graph behind that,” Hoffert adds.
In a year when connected TV growth was accelerated further by stay-at-home orders, Hoffert reports “incredible” growth in cross-device ad viewing.
And, he says, in a landscape where navigating the new supply sources can be difficult for advertisers used to traditional TV, ad buyers want to benefit from curated offerings.
They would group connected TV inventory by characteristics like genre or vertical, rather than leaving buying open to manual precision-targeting alone, although the techniques can be combined.
You are watching “Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, ” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Xandr, where Bruckbauer is senior product manager, launched Invest TV, a platform for TV ad buyers to transact using data across multiple linear programmers, in March, just as COVID-19 was taking hold.
The suite began with Xandr parent WarnerMedia, AMC, and Disney on the system, and recently added A+E Networks and Crown Media Holdings.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Bruckbauer says linear TV targeting capabilities have taken a great leap – but now the industry’s next step must make it easier to use them across publishers.
“Audiences have fragmented and made it harder to reach them all,” he says. “It used to be that you could go to a couple of broadcasts networks, do an upfront deal, and reach the majority of your audience.
“Now, with cable networks and streaming platforms and almost the never ending supply of video, it’s harder to reach your audience and get that scale.
“So, I think that the demand from the buy side is to aggregate that, put it back together, allow them to see the whole picture of the audience that they’re looking to target.”
Bruckbauer is voicing a common concern when it comes to connected TV, even the linear variant.
The proliferation of new viewing packages and platforms has made a plethora of advertising opportunities available. But, unlike TV before them, each is distinct, often disparate technology.
The industry’s next challenge, then, is to make systems that simplify and harmonize what has become a super-capable but fragmented ecosystem.
“The industry needs to allow the buyer to focus on the audience, focus on their performance, and manage reach and frequency across all of those,” as Bruckbauer puts it.
In his most recent piece w/ @Digiday, Mike Welch, Head of Xandr, goes through the ups & downs of 2020, including rapid changes in consumer behavior, the growth of premium video in our marketplace and why Xandr is doubling down on collaboration in 2021.https://t.co/IYqoJ65iiA
— Xandr (@xandr) December 14, 2020
Even so, it is testament to how far the idea of advanced TV advertising has come that the key challenge is managing so many inventory options. A historic complaint was that there is insufficient inventory in the first place.
Nowadays, many more ad buyers are using digital platforms to target on-demand and linear TV.
“We offer Xandr database targets that are comprised of our gender data traits and segments, as well as Nielsen traits such as MRI, MBI segments,” Bruckbauer says.
“The big value that we’ve worked to enable this year is to allow first-party data matches against both of those. So, if you’re an advertiser … and you have a first-party data set, we can match that against that Xandr data subscriber base or against the Nielsen panel, and then look at the viewership of that first-party that you’ve defined in order to create an optimal proposal for it.”
Tackling that across each publisher or broadcast platform is a challenged, but Bruckbauer thinks the industry can get there.
“The industry is evolved by combining all of those different supply types and bringing it all together for the buyers,” he says.
You are watching Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, a Beet.TV series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Fully qualified, he often saw himself as an “imposter” at these gatherings.
I interviewed him this week to get his feelings and outlook during the nation’s upheaval over race.
He spoke with the formation of the I.D.E.A. Initiative as a”safe space” for people of color to gather – and more recently, to advocate for change in the C-suite and boards of media, tech and marketing companies.
Emotionally exhausted by the present turmoil, he is optimistic about change, although not sure how it will look. At AT&T, he is finding an “awakening across leadership.”
*Note: This recording was made in June. We have republished today as one of the most important segments from 2020. Kirk is not longer at Xandr having been named. CEO of GroupM NA in August.
This video is part of an ongoing Beet.TV series of interviews with men and and women of color, addressing their personal experiences and hopes for essential change addressing racial inequality. Please find additional videos here.
]]>If you thought the US CTV environment was fragmented, the European marketplace – marked by a host of nation states as well as a plethora of viewing options and trading methods – is even more so.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Vincent Soucaret, the head of EMEA video advisory for AT&T’s Xandr ad unit, describes the picture for an ad format he says has been seeing “triple-digit growth” in spending.
“We basically have less supply,” Soucaret says. “It’s very, very fragmented. The supply in local markets is very short as compared to what you can see in the US.”
CTV ad inventory supply is constrained for a variety for reasons – not least the proliferation of devices and services which have caused CTV viewing itself to rocket in the first place. In Europe, that is even more so. In France, for example. over-the-top TV apps are less popular than elsewhere, because ISPs got an early foothold by offering their own “IPTV” services to their own-brand TV-over-broadband boxes.
“The adoption of the technology by its population might be slowed down by a little older population in some countries than others,” Soucaret says. “Where, in the US, I think the median age (of a CTV viewer) is 37 years old or something in some countries in Europe, it’s a little bit older.”
In Europe, broadcasters aren’t just partnering to make ad sales easier across the industry – some are also coming together in shared content platforms. For example, BritBox has been launched as a joint SVOD by the BBC and ITV, traditionally two public service TV rivals in the UK. Soucaret sees more such services gathering pace, as the sell side aims to compete with Netflix’s ad-free experience.
“A lot of the buyers are not trained enough in what is CTV,” Soucaret says. “They’re used to that digital mindset to target individual users. (But) that might not always be the case when we talk about CTV because we usually target at the household level.”
Despite the challenges, Soucaret says broadcast TV ad sales houses are wanting to switch on to programmatically-enable their CTV ad sales.
They are now striking direct relationships with demand-side ad platforms (DSPs), often creating their own private marketplaces so they can sell their own inventory on their own terms.
“They want to stay very innovative,” Xandr’s Soucaret adds. “So we see a lot of premium publishers finding innovative ways to give not only access to the VOD content, but also the linear inventory.”
For example, Xandr recently partnered with France’s Realytics so that customers of Xandr’s Invest buying platform can reach the 80% of the French linear TV market available through Realytics.
You are watching Where We Go From Here: The Lessons and Opportunities of 2020, a Beet.TV series presented by Xandr. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That was before the pandemic forced broadcasters to lower ad rates.
But those with a glass-half-full outlook see an opportunity – although linear numbers are declining, new opportunities to see, understand and target viewers can nevertheless translate into a greater TV ad effectiveness.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Lauren Wetzel, the SVP, Head of Strategy & Corporate, at AT&T’s Xandr, contemplates a brighter, converged future.
“Consumers just aren’t tuned into the same one live stream at the same exact time,” she acknowledges. “They’re consuming in so many different ways in so many different channels, which creates a tonne of complexities to reach them.
“What that means, in terms of the way that the industry needs to think about it, is unifying, automating, planning, activation, and measurement, and attribution.
“All of those audiences that live across those premium environments, we need to find the technology and the data to really connect and allow you to plan and forecast across those screens.
“That’ll help make up for the loss in scale that you’re seeing as traditional TV continues to decline, and also allowing for the way that marketers are starting to really drive towards specific objectives and specific outcomes.”
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has already up-ended business. In TV, ad rates have plummeted and advertisers are less likely to commit large sums in upfront air-time commitments.
That means the annual “upfronts” ad sales season, when broadcasters preview their upcoming slate of content to ad buyers, looks particularly challenging this year.
But, for Wetzel, wider broadcast and ad technology changes already meant the “upfronts” were evolving.
“The upfronts (will) take a little bit of a beating, especially this year,” she says. “I also think the notion of wanting it at a discounted rate will continue.
“But I think there’s a lot of elements of the upfronts that will continue. The notion of marketers still wanting the reach and scale that linear TV offers will continue as a part of their objective.”
To deliver, Wetzel says Xandr is pursuing a number of partnerships. For example, back in March, AMC Networks, Disney and stablemate WarnerMedia joined Xandr Invest, its TV-buying platform, giving advertises more breadth, 76% of US households.
The broadcast partners said they would make most of their national TV inventory through Xandr Invest, which uses AT&T’s customer data to bosot targeting capabilities.
Xandr also invested in InfoSum, a UK SaaS business that helps facilitate the use of brands’ first-party data in ad targeting.
“With the market trends you the industry being disrupted, I think that everyone needs to come together,” Wetzel says.
]]>That means brands and publishers have to change their messaging. “Context is even more important now,” says Scott. Context has always been a “proxy for audience”, she adds. If you contextually understand behavior, intent, interest and demographic, you understand your audience. Xandr, the advertising and analytics arm of AT&T, is analyzing what strategies are emerging and what’s resonating. As Scott points out, brands are most embracing the “empathy and humanity angle,” with messages like “stay at home, save lives.”
“Making your creative and your messaging really engaging and getting to the heart of people – brands can lean into that,” Scott says. It’s certainly not the time for the hard sell or aggressive performance metrics. Unless you’re a brand primed for performance right now, like one selling hand sanitizer, that is.
It’s also time to embrace technology and new ad formats that brands might have otherwise been leaving to the wayside. “This is a world on demand,” Scott says. “So being able to adapt to that kind of consumption is needed.”
That could mean testing out artificial intelligence or live shoppable content, something that NBCUniversal’s new universal checkout platform could help facilitate. Right now, people may be open to buying in unexpected places, and brands should test that.
“Creative is evolving to meet the temperament of the new viewer,” Scott says.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>That is according to one ad executive who says companies need to be able to find their own audience amongst the newly-inflated base of stay-at-home media consumers.
“The need for personalization on direct-to-consumer relationships from brands will just heighten,” says Jason Brown, chief revenue officer of AT&T’s Xandr advertising company.
“The capabilities that come out of products like addressability and the ability to precision-target and frequency-manage will become more relevant for clients as they try to personalize the messages to their current customers and also their prospects.
“In this environment, with COVID, I believe we’ll start to use those production capabilities for brands just to message directly to consumers.”
Brown cites the example of one Xandr client, a financial services institution that is using first-party data on its own customers together with viewership insights from AT&T to connect with its customers, making clear how its online banking products allow them to go on banking without visiting a branch.
The consulting firm Prophet says brands can thrive out of COVID-19 by being customer-obsessed, ruthlessly pragmatic, distinctively inspired and pervasively innovative.
According to an Unruly survey, consumers say they want brands to continue advertising, but to be more informative.
Its data showed some brands had seen an uplift in shareability and some brands had helped consumers feel more informed.
The pandemic is putting brands’ commitment to purpose to the test. GroupM representatives have encouraged brands to be useful at this moment in time.
Brown says one consequence of a burgeoning growth in at-home media consumption is the risk a brand’s ad may get shown too many times to viewers – a reason frequency management capabilities may be necessary.
But he says commercials aren’t the only tool in the chest. Brown sees brand content messages as being deliverable on a personalized basis to specific audiences, too.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>Google has declared it will phase out all third-party cookies – the tiny, user-side files that store information – from its Chrome browser by 2022.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Xandr corporate strategy director Allison Paley describes the consequences.
“Top of mind is data and measurement,” she says. “Data, obviously with CCPA over here and GDPR in Europe. It’s hard and it’s a really meaty problem that everybody needs to come together to solve within the industry.
“And understanding how we do that and how we share data and create a universal ID with the cookie crumbling, it’s a big question that we need to answer.”
Ad-tech vendors have been racing to tout alternative technologies that rely on consumer opt-ins but which also allow parties to share and pool consumer data.
Whilst that may seem against the spirit of the new privacy regulations, they argue that such uses are permitted.
This month, Xandr announced that AMC Networks, WarnerMedia and Walt Disney would use its Xandr Invest buying platform, which allows advertisers to define audience segments to be reached through their TV programming.
Variety reports that those three networks joining Xandr’s Invest “sets up a battle of sorts”, with NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Forx Corp and Univision part of the OpenAP consortium for audience buying.
The panel was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>The division includes prior acquisitions like AppNexus and Clypd, making Xandr a key player for helping AT&T TV and video services offer targeted advertising capabilities.
Now Allison Paley, Xandr’s director of corporate strategy, wants to take tehat capability overseas.
“Latin America is a really interesting market for us,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Not many people know that AT&T has a number of different businesses in the region. AT&T Mexico has an incredible telecommunications business, Warner Media has a thriving media business throughout the region.
“And so we are working more and more closely with our colleagues at our sister companies to look for ways that we can leverage our assets across all the AT&T companies to drive value, not only for customers, but also for the company.”
Paley says Xandr’s overseas expansion auspice includes Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Xandr already has a small number of employees in Europe.
But Latin America is the first port of all.
“It’s an up and coming market,” Paley adds. “There’s a lot of interesting things going on. A lot of different people are entering the market with AVOD services and video’s becoming more and more prevalent.
“Sports is also huge and Warner Media has a number of sports properties, and we have a really thriving advertising technology platform in the region.”
Paley was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she was a participant.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
]]>The division is focused on facilitating premium video and advanced TV ad sales, and is a combination of a variety of acquisitions and launches. Most recently, Xandr acquired clypd late last year.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Xandr head of strategy and corporate development Lauren Wetzel says that, in 2020, the division wants to more closely serve WarnerMedia, the media division of their mutual owner, AT&T.
“(2019 was) a building year. We fully integrated AppNexus in 2019, we relaunched our Invest platform, we relaunched our Monetize platform and we unveiled a marketplace so that it’s not about just our owned assets, but also bringing in premium publishers.
“In 2020, it’s going to be an acceleration year with that. CTV (connected TV) is going to take off in 2020 even more than it has. What you’ll see from Xandr is a more integrated partnership with WarnerMedia. You’re going to continue to see us unifying our platforms and ensuring that it’s about buying and selling across all channels of premium video … linear television and data-driven linear and addressable TV.
Wetzel is putting the industry on notice to expect a lot of change, especially around TV ad formats. Like Hulu did last year, Xandr just announced a “pause ad”, which shows ad content when a viewer pauses playback of a show.
Wetzel expects innovation around AVOD, ad-supported video-on-demand services, which are seeing new energy after a few years of industry preoccupation with subscription video.
“As CTV continues to explode in 2020, I think the industry is going to really have to establish those standards so it makes it easier for CTV to be a part of the marketing mix,” she adds.
Lauren Wetzel will be speaking at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on February 5 to 7, 2020.
]]>Those are findings from a new report commissioned by AT&T’s ad-tech unit Xandr.
Kantar surveyed 2,004 consumers from the “general population” for Xandr’s 2019 Relevance Report. It found:
However, it is not all good news. The survey also found:
Most of all, repeat exposure to the same ad is emerging as a bugbear. Seventy-five percent of consumers feel advertising has become more frequent lately.
“They’re really tired of seeing the same ad over and over again and they also notice it even more when that ad could be considered obstructive or intrusive,” says Jill Siegel, Xandr’s assistant VP for Business Intelligence & Research, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“Consumers don’t dislike advertising. They actually do understand that it needs to exist. For one, it subsidises their cost of engaging with content that they want.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, 2019. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>For AT&T’s Xandr, however, it is more than that. This September 16 to 18 in Santa Barbara, the company hosts its second Relevance Conference.
In its first year, 2018, the conference effectively announced the creation of Xandr, the advanced advertising and media division which AT&T created after a series of acquisitions.
This year, the conference’s main aim is to explore how consumers are spending their media time, Xandr’s chief marketing officer, Kirk McDonald, explains in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“There are still only 24 hours in the day,” McDonald says. “So, with finite time and near infinite content, how are consumers really making decisions about what they spend their time with?
“For the media producers, the programmers, those that are creating the content, they have become shareholders of attention.”
The conference agenda will hear from executives like…
But that’s not all. “AT&T, under Brian (Lesser)’s leadership as our CEO, has given us permission to have a conference that is not [just] a selly conference,” McDonald says. “We’re not [just] bringing customers [and] clients together to try to hock or push a particular product.” The event is also about thought leadership, and getting a new, consumer-focused dialogue started, McDonald said.
Social change: “We’ve already announced two of our Women’s World Cup soccer stars. We’ve got Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe who are joining us. It really is their time … it’s about time that we make some of the changes, we react to the way consumers are behaving.”
Research: “We’re going to do another big bit of industry research. This year we wanted to look at ‘Do consumers begin to understand how advertising is underwriting their access to content and information?'”
Products: “We’ve introduced a bunch of new ad formats on the TV side and we’ll showcase some of those at the conference. This year we’re really proud of having brought a new strategic buying platform to the marketplace… Xandr Invest. We also announced the Community.”
Note: Beet.TV will cover the conference as part of a sponsorship arrangement with Xandr.
]]>“Community”, the platform created by AT&T’s Xandr ad-tech unit, will support buying ads in content owned by A+E Networks, AMC Networks and Cheddar, Xandr announced.
Community debuted in May, a new marketplace allowing advertisers to place video ads in AT&T-wide brands and across different screen types. That includes WarnerMedia’s CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, B/R Live, Otter Media and Warner Bros.
But the signs are that Xandr wants to expand the inventory available to ad buyers beyond the AT&T portfolio. It already claimed integration of inventory from VICE, Hearst Magazines, Newsy, Philo, Tubi and Xumo. The addition of A+E Networks, AMC Networks and Cheddar represents another step taken.
In a video interview with Beet.TV in June, Rick Welday, Xandr Media president, explained the strategy.
“Both buyers and publishers, sellers of advertising, are not happy with all of their options today,” he said. “There are a lot of challenges that they’re facing from brand safety to measurement to transparency.
“So we have been very pleased to pull together a marketplace that is a premium marketplace, that addresses those concerns, where an advertiser can feel more confident about what they’re getting for what they’re paying.”
Xandr says Community taps in to first-party insights from AT&T’s footprint, including 170 million consumer relationships, to help advertisers target audiences based on intent, interest and lifestyle attributes.
Applying those powers to third-party inventory means AT&T is starting to show how the platform part of its equation can fuel marketing services even outside of its own content operations.
Those ads can be bought across connected TV, because Xandr’s cross-screen addressable technology is integrated with its Community.
]]>Almost exactly a year after AT&T acquired ad-tech platform AppNexus, it has just rebadged AppNexus’ demand-side platform (DSP) as “Xandr Invest”, and allowed ad buyers to to target viewers using AT&T’s first-party data and its new Community premium video network.
That is all part the wider convergence, which is seeing AT&T mobile, Turner, WarnerMedia, CNN, DirecTV and other assets come together in a kind of cross-screen super-play, helping to target viewers across devices and content.
But that doesn’t mean traditional methods of TV ad sales are done. In this video interview with MTM’s Jon Watts for Beet.TV, says Christina Beaumier, Xandr VP product for TV platform, says the traditional upfront method – through which ad buyers put down money for advance slot bookings – will prevail alongside programmatic-, exchange-based transactions.
“We need automation. Automation is coming,” Beaumier says. “Automation does not mean that we are going to move towards a fully real-time auction-based exchange trade and marketplace.
“The TV marketplace is here to stay, meaning upfront, scarce reserve inventory and the business rules that surround that marketplace will continue to be grounded in an upfront reserved model. Why? Because marketers need to be able to guarantee an audience at specific times within the year, and they’re not going to want to pay at the pump for advertising.”
AT&T’s WarnerMedia is known to be planning to join the subscription video-on-demand wars in 2020 and, according to Business Insider, “rumors have emerged that WarnerMedia might offer an ad-supported version”.
AT&T is putting together the pieces of infrastructure required to make digital, targeted advertising work across a vast trove of media properties and devices.
“Real-time exchange marketplaces are great for filling out additional impressions and additional reach,” Xandr’s Beaumier adds. “But, just because we have the technology that will enable it, does not mean that the full media plan should then convert to a realtime market.
“That’s what we’re focused on is really the holistic view across the reserved upfront marketplace, and surrounding that with the realtime marketplace.”
You are watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to the sponsors of our festival coverage, which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>The Open Addressable Ready consortium announced in March is the result of Vizio having watched a number of companies try to bring more scale to addressable TV, McAfee says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“There are a lot of technical challenges with someone being in the middle of that conversation and then there are also a lot of business challenges. As long as there’s someone in the middle, there are levels of complication that just won’t make this work.”
OAR membership includes both inventory owners and platforms, ranging from CBS, Disney and NBCUniversal to AT&T’s Xandr and Comcast’s FreeWheel.
By seeking an open standard, Vizio decided against “trying to force the entire market to jump into a single stack and adopt a single solution,” McAfee says. Given that “NBC’s going to want to use FreeWheel, WarnerMedia’s going to want to use Xandr, Disney has their deal with Google,” allowing flexibility “is the only way you’re going to get to scale.”
Vizio sees itself as stewards and OAR members as owners. “They’re the ones making the decisions and we’re just building everything to their requirements.”
McAfee notes that most addressable TV execution to date has been through MVPD’s. “We think there’s a complementary ability to generate more scale on live linear,” McAfee says, hence the inclusion of companies like Comcast and Xandr. “We bring incremental reach to all of those players and scale is absolutely critical to addressable. There needs to be more and there also needs to be more premium linear inventory in that bucket for addressable.”
McAfee says he’s old enough “to have watched multiple consortiums in our business not go very well. I think as a group we’re beneficiaries of good timing in that I think the television stakeholders in our business understand that they need to work together to succeed.
“And so far our meetings have been very collaborative, everybody’s leaned in pretty hard on the subject matter and everybody’s cooperating. So I’m really encouraged by that.”
This video is from Cannes Lions if from our series, Capitalize on Convergence, presented by Amobee. For more videos from the series, visit this page. To find all Beet.TV coverage from Cannes, please visit this page.
]]>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.
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of Cannes Lions 2019. For all of our Cannes coverage, please visit this page. Thank you to our sponsors of our festival coverage which are Amobee, Innovid, Nielsen, RTL AdConnect and Teads. Special thanks to Hearts & Science for hosting Beet.TV for the Festival.
]]>Xandr, AT&T’s unit for advanced TV advertising, is barely nine months old, itself coming after a period in which AT&T has gobbled up WarnerMedia.
But, in May, it debuted Community, a new marketplace allowing advertisers to place video ads in all its brands and across different screen types.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rick Welday, Xandr Media president, explains why.
“Both buyers and publishers, sellers of advertising, are not happy with all of their options today,” he says. “There are a lot of challenges that they’re facing from brand safety to measurement to transparency.
“So we have been very pleased to pull together a marketplace that is a premium marketplace, that addresses those concerns, where an advertiser can feel more confident about what they’re getting for what they’re paying.”
Advanced ad targeting efforts of the major telco/media operators, whilst powerful for advertisers, are also rising in prominence amongst consumer advocates who see cross-device tracking as sinister.
But Welday thinks Community will be a boon.
“After the acquisition of Time Warner, we’re incredibly pleased with the scale of premium content within AT&T,” he says. “It includes all of our owned and operated inventory over time. You’ve got this amazing content out there, sports and news and kids. It’s just great fan engaged content, so that’s all in there.
“We also have the DirecTV content that’s in there. Both linear and satellite, and also digital like DirecTV now.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>WarnerMedia planned to show how its union with AT&T’s Xandr helped to a produce a first-quarter, double-digit lift in in-store visits for McDonald’s and a 6.5% increase in dealership visits for Volkswagen during the same period.
Besides the retirement of the Turner name, “We have not changed anything for the past four or five years, but now with AT&T powering us we’re going to be that much smarter, that much stronger,” Speciale said. In the walkup to its UpFront presentation, WarnerMedia has been “talking to individual holding companies and their clients who want to partner with both of us with their addressable product.”
While AT&T offers addressable advertising, WarnerMedia has been building out its audience-targeting solutions. Underlying both is AT&T data insights from its 170 million direct-to-consumer relationships. “Now buyers are going to get much more broader reach and expanded reach with both of our products,” Speciale adds.
Xandr, which is AT&T’s advanced advertising and analytics company, used the occasion of the UpFront period to announce the formation of Community. It’s described in a news release as “a curated marketplace of publishers that enables advertisers to reach their audiences at scale in a brand-safe, privacy-protected, premium video environment.” Xandr describes the Community marketplace as “the first-step towards the future convergence of linear TV and digital.”
Discussing WarnerMedia’s plans for a direct-to-consumer streaming offering, Speciale said the new SVOD service would be in beta test at the end of 2019, with a full product set to debut in 2020.
“There is a goal a year from now that there will be an AVOD service. I am working very closely with the team in LA to talk about what that AVOD service looks like,” she said.
Right now, the AVOD offering is “a clean slate” as WarnerMedia continues to research the desires of consumers and advertisers. Possible ad loads are completely open to consideration. “It’s not a one size fits all. I don’t want it to be pre-dispositioned.”
According to Speciale, advertisers have been waiting for linear TV to be more accountable for business outcomes along the lines of digital media, but lack of data has been a problem.
“Now with AT&T data, we can make that happen. We’re optimizing a lot quicker. We’re going to be guaranteeing on business outcomes. That’s what you’re going to see at this UpFront. We’re going to have proof points that television actually now works and can drive business outcomes.”
]]>“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.
]]>But that’s what the modern AT&T – incorporating WarnerMedia’s Turner and CNN – now looks like.
For the corporation – like Verizon alongside it – it is part of an ambitious move to tie telco and content in to a broad offering that leverages data on subscribers and consumers across a range of devices and content types.
And, for advertisers, the gateway to the kingdom is Xandr, the platform which gains access to each platform.
Beet.TV’s Identity in Focus forum heard from two executives now at the cusp opportunities at the unified entity:
In conversation with former Turner revenue chief Howard Shimmel, the two Dans opined on the challenges and opportunities in delivering multi-screen ads.
“What’s incredible about the TV viewership data is you’ve got an almost infinite, library of signals in terms of content, behaviours, interests that are indicators simply from a proclivity to tune into certain types of content,” Rosenfeld said.
“And that can really tell us about the passions and the interests of consumers in and for an advertiser to align their brand with a specific passion or try to connect to a consumer through that insight is very powerful.”
Aversano agreed, adding that using data on telco subscribers available through AT&T is a particular added boost.
“Mobility data – things like geolocation, app usage, mobile web usage – is a vast treasure trove,” Aversano said.
It’s not just “mobile”, however. AT&T has made a big commitment to 5G roll-out. And, whilst its rebadging of some advanced existing 4G spectrum as “5ge” has ruffled feathers, the operator will soon operate 5G spectrum proper – leaving the two Dans licking their lips.
“5G is a game changer for many different reasons for AT&T but particularly in the data world, we see there being some great opportunities as that begins to roll out,” Aversano said.
“The ability to have zero-latency video streaming virtually on any device … cis a whole new ball game. And when you talk about it and things like an identity graph, there’s a lot of opportunity, we think.”
Rosenfeld agreed: “One beautiful opportunity with 5G is the idea that there’s one pipe controlling all of your video ad experiences.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>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.
]]>“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.
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