• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, March 11, 2020

In another advance in enabling buying advertising across networks using a common audience definition, Disney and AMC Networks, as well as AT&T’s WarnerMedia, are making their linear television inventory available through Xandr Invest, the programmatic buying platform of Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising unit.

Starting next month — through an open beta in time for the upfronts — buyers will be able to use Xandr Invest to access the networks’ linear private marketplaces (PMPs), which are hosted on linear supply-side platform Clypd, acquired last fall by Xandr.

Making their linear, ad-supported inventory available through Xandr Invest will enable the networks to offer buys that combine standard linear and targeted advanced audiences.

While the networks will maintain control of the sales (Xandr will charge transaction fees), the willingness of Disney and AMC to participate in the AT&T-owned linear marketplace platform speak to growing advertiser demand for unified buying and reporting across platforms.

Advertisers will be able to define a single audience across the networks using their own first-party data, viewership data from Nielsen, or Xandr’s audience segments. Xandr’s 700 audience segments derive from data from its 170 million combined AT&T wireless and DirecTV customer relationships.

Buyers will be able to forecast estimated unified reach and —because the networks’ order management systems are integrated with Clypd — forecast pricing across programmers before they buy.

They can then measure deduplicated delivery and reach through unified reporting metrics post-campaign.

The solution reaches 76% of all U.S. households, with the potential to reach more than 208 million total viewers per month, according to Xandr, which already powers addressable TV at the household level, as well as digital and OTT through its premium video marketplace, Community.

Buyers can still work with the networks’ sales units to place buys, but the ability to use Xandr Invest’s self-serve user interface to make buys may encourage smaller advertisers to buy linear programmatically.

“Having the right technology platform will enable us to offer buyers unique data sets, unified audience segments, and a self-service tool to improve the experience of buying data-driven linear across the Disney platform,” said Rita Ferro, president, Disney Advertising Sales, in the announcement.

The rival advanced advertising OpenAP Market platform, which was opened up to all advertisers as of last October, already offers the ability to generate consolidated optimized linear and digital media plans and post-campaign analytics across the linear and digital inventories/assets of the platform's owners, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS and Fox, as well as Univision. 

WarnerMedia pulled out of that venture in April due to its acquisition by AT&T, and AT&T's focus on developing Xandr both as a tech platform that generates revenue from clients and a tool to enable its own properties to better compete for digital advertising dollars.