SANTA BARBARA, CA – The new partnership between Altice USA and AT&T’s newly birthed Xandr represents the first realistic consolidation of national addressable television inventory, according to the head of Altice’s a4 advanced TV advertising business.
“There has been a lot of talk over the past few years and many companies, partners and vendors have done a lot of great strides. But there hasn’t yet been a consolidating at a realistic level,” says a4 President Paul Haddad.
“There’s a lot of theory in there, putting the pieces together and making a national addressable TV solution scalable enough for advertisers. AT&T has taken a step with tangible footprints that are really addressable today and brought the best of the best, put them together,” Haddad adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Xandr Relevance Conference.
Launched in the spring of 2018, a4 was the culmination of Altice’s acquisitions of Cablevision, Audience Partners and Placemedia, as AdExchanger reports.
“AT&T has a very similar yet much grander vision and it’s very well aligned with ours. So we are helping AT&T on the national TV addressability aspect and in return they’re helping us on the national addressability from a digital perspective,” says Haddad.
A4 is Xandr’s addressable TV partner in the New York market. Xandr also announced a deal this week to aggregate and sell the national addressable TV advertising inventory of Frontier Communications.
“We are bringing our local addressable TV inventory to the party and AT&T is putting all these pieces together of their footprint and our footprint and creating a scaled national TV solution for their clients.”
Haddad says that when he sat down with Xandr CEO Brian Lesser to figure out “how can we bring these pieces together,” it was easier than expected.
“It didn’t take long for us to figure out that this is real, this is something that we could have up and running in the next couple of months,” Haddad says. “We decided that this is the right thing for Altice, this is the right thing for AT&T, this is the right thing for the industry. And we’re hoping that the results will show themselves in the next quarter or two quarters.”
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.
