AT&T combines AppNexus with its own ad businesses to form Xandr

By AdNews | 26 September 2018
 
Xandr CEO Brian Lesser and AT&T boss Randall Stephenson.

AT&T has consolidated all of its advertising businesses, including AppNexus, under an umbrella brand – Xandr.

The company will be led by CEO Brian Lesser and comprises AT&T’s advertising and analytics businesses (advanced TV business, AdWorks, data and analytics business) as well as ATT.net and AppNexus.

The merged entity combines data, premium content, advanced advertising technology and AT&T’s distribution to more than 170 million direct-to-consumer relationships across wireless, video and broadband.

“Xandr is a name that draws inspiration from AT&T’s rich history, including its founder Alexander Graham Bell, while imagining how to innovate and solve new challenges for the future of advertising,” Lesser said at Xandr’s inaugural conference in Santa Barbara, California.

“Our purpose is to make advertising matter and to connect people with the brands and content they care about. Throughout AT&T’s 142-year history, it has innovated with data and technology, making its customers’ lives better. Xandr will bring that spirit of innovation to the advertising industry.”

Xandr will focus on building its advanced TV advertising capabilities and has entered into agreements with Altice USA and Frontier Communications to aggregate and sell their national addressable TV advertising inventory.

This creates the foundation of a national TV marketplace for advertisers and premium content publishers.

Xandr will also collaborate with a4, Altice USA’s advanced advertising business, to help expand a4’s nationwide addressable digital advertising capabilities.

The company said that by aggregating this video inventory from multiple multichannel video programming distributors, AT&T’s addressable TV offering can provide advertisers with a ‘one-stop shop’.

Xandr has also teamed up with Insight Strategy Group and Advertiser Perceptions to conduct surveys and on-the-ground ethnographies in order to understand the dynamics between consumer sentiment and the advertising experience.

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