SANTA BARBARA, CA \u2013 Having spent more than 25 years on the sales side of the television business, Catherine Sullivan thinks AT&T\u2019s new Xandr unit can leapfrog the industry. When it comes to helping marketers understand their target audiences and making TV smarter with more attribution and relevant advertising, \u201cIt can\u2019t happen fast enough,\u201d says the President of US Investment for Omnicom Media Group.<\/p>\n

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference<\/a>, Sullivan speaks about AT&T as a client and how she perceives Xandr\u2019s blueprint for innovation going forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d says Sullivan.<\/p>\n

Omnicom Media Group\u00a0 is \u201clucky 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,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

A veteran of both Disney ABC and NBCUniversal, Sullivan says she gets where Xandr<\/a> is heading. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having heard AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson talk at the conference, Sullivan<\/a> says the audience was privy to insights about an industry \u201cthat 18 months ago we really didn\u2019t have a lot of insight to. He certainly is a person who knows what he wants and he\u2019s going after and I think they have a great roadmap for success.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cbecause for so many of them, I think that\u2019s one of the hardest things to establish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked about the utility of addressable TV ads, she says that targeting layer added to the medium\u2019s huge reach has produced \u201creally good results\u201d in her agency\u2019s testing over the past couple of years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019ve got to start understanding the audience that they\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SANTA BARBARA, CA \u2013 Having spent more than 25 years on the sales side of the television business, Catherine Sullivan thinks AT&T\u2019s new Xandr unit can leapfrog the industry. When it comes to helping marketers understand their target audiences and making TV smarter with more attribution and relevant advertising, \u201cIt can\u2019t happen fast enough,\u201d says […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":56560,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[]},"categories":[7443],"tags":[4071,5395,5909,7512,7515,7516,7554,7555],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56510"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.beet.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}