SANTA BARBARA, CA \u2013 Dave Morgan certainly knows the value of partnerships when scaling advanced audience targeting for television. So when he takes in the aspirations of AT&T\u2019s Xandr, it\u2019s the partnering theme that gets his attention.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a really big mission. Whether AT&T itself is going to be able to do it or not we\u2019ll see,\u201d Morgan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference<\/a> in which he discusses his Simulmedia advanced TV solutions company having achieved\u00a0profitability and its new Transparent TV offering.<\/p>\n Although AT&T has the means to distribute its own content, it will need to work with multiple MVPD\u2019s 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\u2019s at play.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s certainly trying to bring together the whole ecosystem,\u201d he says of Xandr. \u201cI think it realizes that it\u2019s going to require a lot of partners to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked whether the combined assets under Xandr<\/a>\u2014which include AppNexus\u2014will constitute another walled garden, Morgan says that\u2019s an overused term. It\u2019s not a \u201cbinary issue\u201d of whether a business is either a walled garden or not, he says.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d Morgan says.<\/p>\n He expresses praise for AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson\u2019s presentations at the conference, noting that Stephenson was \u201cpretty clear\u201d that he\u2019ll be making more acquisitions. \u201cHe talked about why they did the deal, and he talked a lot of specifics about the advertising business and what they need to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Morgan mentions in passing that Simulmedia has achieved profitability and explains the unveiling of Transparent TV in June of 2018. \u201cWe\u2019ve unbundled our audience network offering so that we\u2019re providing more direct automation to marketers,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. This includes spots, networks, dayparts, GRPs and CPMs, and such marketing outcomes as reach maximization, conversions, and sales attribution and ROI.<\/p>\n