After a couple of years of intense change in the wider group, AT&T’s Xandr unit last month created a whole new digital marketplace for trading video ads.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But, in May, it debuted Community<\/a>, a new marketplace allowing advertisers to place video ads in all its brands and across different screen types.<\/p>\n In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rick Welday, Xandr Media president, explains why.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n But Welday thinks Community will be a boon.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “We also have the DirecTV content that’s in there. Both linear and satellite, and also digital like DirecTV now.”<\/p>\n