AT&T’s Xandr Media unit is showing advertisers the incremental impact on business outcomes from the combination of both big- and small-screen television viewing, given the preferences of younger viewers.
“From a TV perspective, younger audiences have left. The deeper ratings decline is within kind of the younger set and they’re just watching digital video, they’re watching CTV. There’s a need in the marketplace to find them,” says Xandr SVP Jason Brown.
AT&T has 130 million mobile customers plus 25 million on pay TV and 14 million on broadband. “We have this great opportunity where we’ve matched our device graph to our addressable TV footprint and we’re now able to advertise the same unified target that you would do with addressable TV across all the devices,” the Head of Ad Sales Partnerships says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“When a marketer comes to us, we take the unified target and we run it in TV, we run it to the devices associated to those television households and then we show most importantly the impact of TV alone, mobile alone and the incrementality of using TV and mobile together,” Brown adds.
Brown says that Xandr is constantly doing testing controls. “With each campaign we’re sending the ad to 90 percent of the target and holding out 10 percent. That’s true in TV and that’s true in mobile.”
Brands that cater to younger consumers know their audiences are literally on the go. “What we frequently see is in terms of exposure against these particular cohorts, a lot of them are mobile only viewers or watch very little TV,” Brown says. “What we’re seeing is there is an incremental impact the majority of the time on whatever the KPI is” when measuring the combination of both TV and digital.
Where advertisers want to get to is sequential messaging, according to Brown. Given AT&T’s cross section of users, “the data that comes from it allows advertisers to see how their cohorts are reacting by device type and frequency across those device types.”
Last week, AT&T’s newly formed WarnerMedia pulled out of OpenAP, the consortium of television competitors formed to provide advertisers with unified audience targets. “As our company has transformed, our advanced advertising strategy has evolved. As a result, we are withdrawing from OpenAP,” WarnerMedia said in a news release reported by Broadcasting & Cable. “We appreciate what OpenAP has supported to this point in widening the adoption of audience-based buying on television.”
In a separate statement, OpenAP said, “Fox, NBCUniversal and Viacom remain committed to working together in pursuit of a premium, open, independently verified marketplace that will continue to transform the industry. Over the next few months, we will be growing and expanding the OpenAP platform to simplify audience buying at scale, and you’ll hear more from us on these exciting developments in the coming days.”
