Xandr, AT&T's advanced advertising and analytics company, will use Comscore to supply the ratings and currency for its addressable linear inventory marketplace, which includes DirecTV, Altice USA and Frontier, as well as AT&T sister company WarnerMedia.
“The partnership is designed to give advertisers reliable third-party measurement across the leading national live linear addressable footprint,” the companies said in announcing the agreement.
"Addressable advertising has been seen as the holy grail of the industry for decades, but it has been held back by an ability to scale," noted Scott Worthem, senior vice president, strategic partnerships for Comscore.
Xandr's addressable offering is powered by AT&T's first-party data, combining set-top-box data with anonymized subscriber data to target consumer segments.
Xandr, launched in late 2018, spans AT&T’s data and analytics business, ATT.net, AppNexus and AT&T’s advanced TV business, AT&T AdWorks.
The company aggregates and sells the national addressable ad inventories of Altice USA and Frontier, and is helping Altice USA to expand the nationwide addressable digital ad capabilities of Altice’s a4 advanced advertising unit.
“The Comscore agreement arrives as Xandr is signing up more content partners for Community, its curated video advertising marketplace,” reports FierceVideo. “Last month A+E Networks, AMC and Cheddar joined Community’s initial launch partners: WarnerMedia’s CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, B/R Live, Otter Media, and Warner Bros., along with Vice, Hearst Magazines, Newsy, Philo, Tubi and Xumo. Xandr’s cross-screen addressable solution is now integrated within Community.”
Community enables addressable TV campaigns that use first-party data from AT&T’s 170 million D2C relationships across mobile, pay TV and broadband services.
The Xandr deal is a win for Comscore, which reported widened losses in its second quarter. Comscore is up against leader Nielsen and CFlight in the battle to become the cross-TV-and-digital currency.