SANTA BARBARA, CA – The biggest play for AT&T’s new Xandr unit is the marriage of high-quality content with technology and its satellite delivery system for addressable television, according to Horizon Media’s Dave Campanelli. “Theoretically, they are the first ones to put it together,” says Campanelli, who is EVP, Co-Chief Investment Officer for the media agency.
Combining Xandr’s content assets with tech and ad delivery “is an exciting way to build an offering that hits both sides. It’s not just data and tech and targeting and it’s not just the content side. It’s a good marriage of both,” he adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference.
Asked about the broader application of addressable TV advertising, Campanelli notes that Horizon isn’t in the camp of those who believe that all TV will be addressable in the future. He sees it more as a complement to TV’s broad reach.
“Addressable is incredibly important and it’s going to play a bigger role as time goes on and an increasingly important role,” he says.
But there is a caveat in the use of TV’s reach to influence people who may not be aware of particular brands. “The value is reaching consumers who are not in your target today but could be tomorrow. Or someone who is not in your target but could be a word of mouth to someone who’s in your target.
“So there’s a value in reaching people outside of your target and addressability is about just reaching that target effectively. They’ll to coexist together but we don’t see a world where it’s entirely addressable.”
How much of TV will be linear versus on demand is a different question to Campanelli, who nonetheless says the ability to reach mass audiences is crucial. “Addressable is a critical complement to that but it’s not the way that all of television should work.”
To fully understand the rapidly evolving TV space, Horizon formed a unit several years ago called Horizon Advance to explore addressable, third-party programmatic TV vendors like Simulmedia and new techniques like data matching.
“It’s a complicated space. We learned it and we had to immerse ourselves to learn it.”
As opposed to an activation team, Horizon Advance is more consultative for clients and other in-house teams. “It’s been a huge asset to Horizon and our clients,” says Campanelli.
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.
