AT&T’s Turner and Xandr Partner on New, Enhanced Ad Opportunities Entering 2019

Companies Collaborate to Improve Precision, Performance and Delivery Speed for Advertisers

Just a little more than six months after coming together under the AT&T umbrella, WarnerMedia’s Turner and AT&T’s advertising business Xandr are working together to improve the relevancy of advertising, fueled by data and content connections.

Making advertising matter and more relevant to consumers are among the greatest challenges facing the industry today. Turner and Xandr are bringing together a unique set of assets—valuable consumer data and insights, advanced advertising capabilities and engaged passionate fanbases—all in service of marketers who want to make a real impact, and for consumers who want better experiences.

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The Turner and Xandr ad sales teams have been working on the following four initiatives, with several enhanced products available from Turner today:

• More relevant advertising across Turner’s TV brands, with AT&T first-party set-top-box data
• Using Xandr’s data capabilities to fuel more relevant advertising on Turner’s digital properties
• Expanding the reach of branded storytelling to addressable TV
• Proving the impact of advertising through attribution

“AT&T brought our companies together as part of a vision of developing a modern media company, a key part of which is modernizing present day advertising,” said Donna Speciale, president of Turner ad sales. “We have spent the better part of the last decade with that shared vision, investing in stronger ad solutions and experiences, alongside our continued commitment in producing premium content across entertainment, news, kids and sports. The groundwork has been laid, and now we have the fortune of tapping into Xandr to supercharge our capabilities already out in the marketplace. This will be a win for marketers and for our viewers as the experience becomes more relevant to them.”

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“Xandr is the leader in advanced TV advertising and is in a unique position to help marketers improve the performance of their campaigns using data and technology—this incredible combination helps create relevant moments for consumers,” said Mike Welch, SVP, corporate strategy and development, Xandr. “Combining insights from AT&T’s 170 million direct to consumer relationships with Turner’s terrific content and fanbase, gives us a greater ability to serve relevant advertising that is driving results for brands and agencies.”

More relevant advertising across Turner’s TV brands, with AT&T first-party set-top-box data

Today’s research about marketing is clear: Television is still one of the most, if not the most, effective ad medium. Turner is home to some of the world’s most valuable networks—including Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, CNN, TBS, TNT and truTV—delivering premium content to fans across all screens, in all environments and spanning all experiences. This portfolio now reaches 3 in 4 American adults each month across television, digital and mobile platforms.

To better enhance the advertising experience within these environments, Turner invested in a data-powered solution, AudienceNOW, that enables its advertising customers to more precisely distribute brand messaging to fans on its premium content networks. Hundreds of deals have been executed to-date, all proving the impact of advertising that goes beyond traditional age and gender planning methods and metrics.

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Today, Turner’s AudienceNOW capability incorporates Xandr’s viewership insights from more than 40 million set-top-boxes, delivering far more precise advertising to Turner’s audiences across all of its networks. This enhanced offering also provides a much faster turnaround of campaign posting, enabling advertisers to access and understand these crucial campaign results in weeks instead of months.

Recently, Turner delivered the first-ever AudienceNOW brand campaign powered by Xandr’s viewership insights for client, AT&T Mobility. The results were powerful, including AT&T Mobility reaching 30% more of their defined audience segment compared to a traditional television buy. A number of additional advertisers across the auto, financial, and technology categories will have live campaigns using AudienceNOW, enhanced by Xandr viewership insights, this quarter.

Using Xandr’s data capabilities to fuel more relevant advertising on Turner’s digital properties

With a combined reach of more than 135 million unique users a month*, Turner’s digital properties, such as CNN and Bleacher Report, encompass some of the most valuable and sought-after video opportunities for marketers. For many years, advertisers have worked with Turner to deliver relevant brand messages on digital aligning with the interests of fans.

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Marketers can now access Xandr Audience Segments through Turner’s digital content properties, providing a new level of first-party consumer insight that helps deliver relevant advertising to interested audiences. Marketers can buy directly from Turner or programmatically across all Turner’s digital properties.

To date, Turner has already closed and executed eight campaigns using this enhanced capability across the financial, luxury, auto, and travel categories on CNN Digital with positive incremental results.

Expanding the reach of branded storytelling to addressable TV

With the explosion of new platforms and formats, it has become increasingly difficult for brand marketers to stay creatively nimble in all of these spaces while still having control over their marketing messages.

Telling amazing stories is in Turner’s DNA. The launch of its branded content studios over the past several years, combined with the premium IP of its media properties, has further enabled Turner’s advertisers to not only tell their story in truly breakthrough ways, but also reach the exact right audience through Turner’s audience intelligence practice, Launchpad.

Effective Q4 2018, advertisers that partner with Turner in branded content can extend their campaigns across Xandr’s addressable TV advertising footprint, which includes more than 15 million households. Additionally, these placements can be enhanced with consumer insights to drive effectiveness.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise and L’Oréal Paris will be among the first brands to tap into this opportunity.

“HPE has had a long-standing partnership in innovation with Turner. First-to-market programs in content creation and targeted reach via addressable TV are the latest examples of that – ensuring our branded content is additive and not interruptive to the overall viewer experience,” said Marissa Freeman, Chief Brand Officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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Proving the impact of advertising through attribution

Advertising works, but to what extent does it drive people to take an action, like visit a brand’s web site or showroom? These are the actionable insights Turner and Xandr are delivering to advertisers, revealing the depth to which campaign results and analytics improve through data-powered capabilities.

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Being able to attribute the impact of ad exposures on Turner’s networks and digital properties to performance metrics that matter most to a specific advertiser has already proven valuable. The results of a beta trial with a major retailer showed a material lift in store visits when comparing an ad campaign optimized with AT&T first-party set-top-box data versus a traditional campaign using age and gender targeting.

These initiatives shared at CES are just a glimpse at how Turner and Xandr are working together to enhance advertising today, with more work happening amongst the teams to understand how to reinvent advertising for the next generation.

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