SANTA BARBARA, CA – 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’s Xandr, it’s the partnering theme that gets his attention.
“There’s a really big mission. Whether AT&T itself is going to be able to do it or not we’ll see,” Morgan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Xandr Relevance Conference in which he discusses his Simulmedia advanced TV solutions company having achieved profitability and its new Transparent TV offering.
Although AT&T has the means to distribute its own content, it will need to work with multiple MVPD’s 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’s at play.
“It’s certainly trying to bring together the whole ecosystem,” he says of Xandr. “I think it realizes that it’s going to require a lot of partners to get there.”
Asked whether the combined assets under Xandr—which include AppNexus—will constitute another walled garden, Morgan says that’s an overused term. It’s not a “binary issue” of whether a business is either a walled garden or not, he says.
“I 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,” Morgan says.
He expresses praise for AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s presentations at the conference, noting that Stephenson was “pretty clear” that he’ll be making more acquisitions. “He talked about why they did the deal, and he talked a lot of specifics about the advertising business and what they need to do.”
Morgan mentions in passing that Simulmedia has achieved profitability and explains the unveiling of Transparent TV in June of 2018. “We’ve unbundled our audience network offering so that we’re providing more direct automation to marketers,” he says.
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. This includes spots, networks, dayparts, GRPs and CPMs, and such marketing outcomes as reach maximization, conversions, and sales attribution and ROI.
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.
