• by Skip Brand , November 12, 2013

The mission of Xaxis, GroupM’s audience buying company, is to use data and technology to help advertisers reach and engage audiences at scale. GroupM is the largest buyer of media in the world; Xaxis is the largest audience buying company.

“We have all this anonymous data about how users globally interact with advertising and content in the digital world,” says Paul Dolan, senior of global business development at Xaxis. “We harness that data using technologies like our DMP, DSPs, exchanges and real-time bidding to craft audiences. We then help advertisers target those audiences wherever they are in the digital world with display banners, videos, mobile ads, even radio ads and beyond.” 

Xaxis is often referred to as GroupM’s trading desk, but this is a misnomer, according to Dolan. “We do so much more than that,” he tells me. “We’re not focused solely on real-time bidding, exchanges or DSPs; we’re really taking advantage of all the data and technology to help advertisers reach their audiences.”

While interested in premium ad units and publishers, Xaxis has its sights well beyond digital display. “We are interested in extending the traditional buying experience – like TV, outdoor or print – to the digital world, bringing the world’s largest dataset. We have more data about how consumers interact with media than anyone in the world.”

“If you’re a brand or advertiser that’s still participating in open RTB auctions, you have no competitive differentiation or advantage,” Xaxis plans to move beyond the auction, building a direct relationship with the publisher to agree on upfront pricing, so that media can be transacted more freely. “We’re talking about programmatic upfronts, about big brand experiences, Rising Star units, video, audio, out-of-home and billboards.”

In fact, roughly 65% to 70T of Xaxis’s global business is currently in non-standard display, according to Dolan. “It’s video and other emerging units and creative.”

A case in point, earlier this year Xaxis launched an industry first: Xaxis Places, a new programmatic platform allowing advertisers to buy digital-out-of-home (DOOH) ad inventory across more than 100,000 screens via real-time bidding. Over 1.4 billion monthly impressions were already available at launch via screens in various locations including taxis, shopping malls, doctors’ offices, stadiums, gas stations, office buildings and hotels among others.

 This launch came on the heels of another industry first,  Xaxis Radio. Both of these products enable brands to greatly refine who they’re actually reaching, making campaigns across DOOH and digital radio both more efficient and more effective.

So how far away is programmatic media buying for TV? “We need to start with measurement, which needs to be consistent,” Dolan claims. “We must be able to speak in the way that TV media professionals have, incorporating net reach, reach and frequency, reach curves, GRPs and TRPs in the digital world. We’re able to de-duplicate audiences and make sure that advertisers are getting incremental benefit from the digital buys on top of traditional channels.” 

But to get to the point where TV and other “traditional” channels are purchased via real-time channels? One key is that digital needs to look and behave more like traditional. “When we’ve established that, the evolution will happen naturally,” Dolan predicts. He adds that most advertisers are not leveraging the full advantage of interactive TV right now. “We’re either looking at it from a traditional broadcast perspective and running campaigns that way, or we’re looking at it in an online video sort of way,” Dolan notes. “I think that over the next 12 months we’ll see creative, environment and experiences being crafted specifically for the connected TV. We need to bring out the best of traditional, linear TV advertising and digital online video, and merge them together.” Stay tuned.

The shift is finally occurring, and perhaps we can stop looking at TV as the channel that competes with digital, and start looking at media more holistically.

And while we’re doing that, we can also stop looking at Xaxis as a trading desk. They’re clearly a great deal more. Dolan and the Xaxis team are helping usher in the era of validation, data and insights as the driver for premium programmatic, and embracing measurement holistically to finally think of media buys as 360 degrees.