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Xandr is AT&T’s advertising company, developing solutions for advertisers and media companies, and a leader in addressable TV. The company has 30 offices around the world – including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America – and over 1,800 employees. Following its acquisition of AppNexus, a leading ad tech company, WNIP caught up with Jerome Underhill, SVP, Europe, Asia, and Latin America to find out more…
Can you give us some further background?
The goals of Xandr are all global. The introduction of our enhanced buy and sell-side technology, Xandr Invest and Xandr Monetize, as well as our investment in teams across functions and around the world, signals our commitment to supporting the growing needs of customers in the US, as well as in markets such as Europe, Asia and Latin America.
As we continue to evolve and develop new tools, we remain dedicated to creating a premium advertising marketplace that makes it easy for buyers to reach their target audience across screens, and at scale, and for sellers to achieve better yield by aggregating inventory with other premium publishers.
What business problem is your company addressing?
There are a few core challenges that publishers face today, with perhaps the most prominent being the rapid evolution of media consumption and advertising formats, as consumers increasingly adopt new ways of consuming content.
While the proliferation of content and consumer touchpoints has created new opportunities to engage, it has also contributed to fragmented viewer attention and fragmentation of supply across channels. This fragmentation makes it more of a challenge for publishers to package, sell, and measure the performance of inventory and offer the aggregated, scaled buying that advertisers want.
Publishers also have multiple formats (display, video, native) and sales channels (direct, programmatic) that are distributed across many ad-serving and supply-side platforms creating both operational challenges and monetization challenges. At the same time, fragmented data from myriad sources, makes it difficult for publishers to optimize yield.
What is your core product addressing this problem?
We recently announced the launch of Xandr Monetize, a strategic selling platform built on the powerful foundation of AppNexus technology. Xandr Monetize enables media companies to unlock the full value of their premium content and improve the advertising experience for consumers.
Included in the launch of Xandr Monetize were new capabilities including Programmatic OTT with Prebid, Prebid Server Premium, and Programmatic Guaranteed, that significantly advance control, access, and predictability of the cross-platform digital media marketplace while simplifying the tech stack for media companies.
The platform offers content owners improved monetization, through better inventory management capabilities, data-driven yield optimization, and differentiated buyer demand. With these powerful tools, Xandr Monetize expands the ways in which publishers can package, sell, and measure the performance of their inventory across all screens and devices.
Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solutions?
Axel Springer SE, a German media company and one of the largest digital publishing houses in Europe, set out in search of an advertising technology solution that could help each of its many brands flourish on both the buy-side and the sell-side, across desktop, mobile, and in-app environments.
Axel Springer’s sales house, Media Impact, leveraged several features available through Xandr Monetize, including prebid.js, log-level data, ad server and yield analytics to successfully monetize its video content across desktop, mobile, and in-app inventory. The publisher was also able to use header bidding and open dynamic allocation to generate the highest possible yields from every impression. Since moving to Xandr, Axel Springer’s open-market eCPMs have grown by over 13%.
Pricing?
Transaction and usage fees vary for our products and tech.
What are other people doing in the space and why?
The ways in which content is consumed and the formats in which advertisements are served are continuously evolving. As a result, ad tech companies are looking to develop new tools for buyers to reach audiences across screens, particularly for premium video and CTV, and for sellers to package, sell, and measure inventory to match buyers’ needs.
As traditional direct-sold campaigns move to programmatic pipes, decisioning technology continues to grow in importance. Our history and strength in forecasting analytics and a dedication to driving yield optimization has put us at the forefront of this converged future.
In addition, our exclusive curated premium advertising marketplace, Community, brings unique demand, while our O&O TV content, existing advanced TV technology, and the resources of AT&T support our commitment to becoming the leading technology platform for premium video advertising across traditional TV and digital.
At the same time, direct access to buyers through our omnichannel buying platform, Xandr Invest, gives publishers an optimized path to demand enabling competitive rates, 100% ID match rates, and better deals troubleshooting.
How you do view the future?
Looking to the future, premium video and CTV are the fastest growing segments within video advertising and are critical components of Xandr’s premium video strategy. Earlier this summer, we introduced Programmatic OTT with Prebid as a new feature of Xandr Monetize, bringing programmatic demand to long-form, premium digital video, enabling competitive separation across direct-sold and programmatic-sold ads, ensuring control and compliance in accordance with TV norms, and ultimately increasing revenue.
Over time, we will introduce technology that supports TV advertising in our buy and sell-side offerings.
Finally, moving forward, we will continue to introduce tools that optimize and simplify transactions across the advertising ecosystem, helping advertisers reach audiences, however, wherever and whenever they consume content, and publishers monetize their inventory to the fullest capacity, all while creating a seamless viewing experience for the consumer.
Thank you.
