The road to Cannes: the same venue with new conversations

Next week, the advertising industry will descend on Cannes for the first time in three years. La Croisette may look the same, but a lot has changed since we were last together. Advertisers face new challenges in an increasingly complex and privacy-centric ecosystem.

Xandr, alongside our new colleagues at Microsoft, is approaching these needs by doubling down on our open, transparent global marketplace for premium advertising.

Here are some of the conversations we anticipate having with our clients and partners throughout the week as we discuss optimizing performance for both buyers and sellers.

Connected TV is a “must buy,” but challenges prevent advertisers from taking full advantage of the channel.

Consumer behavior has shifted dramatically over the last few years, with an increase in connected TV ownership and content consumption. As a result, content providers are churning out even more content to meet these demands. A subscription model alone can’t fund streaming businesses like Netflix, which recently announced it would be testing advertising-based video on demand (AVOD).

According to the "IAB 2021 Video Ad Spend and 2022 Outlook," CTV ad spend is expected to grow 49% in 2022 to $21.2 billion. Yet, despite three out of four video buyers labeling CTV a “must buy” in their media planning, CTV budget allocation significantly lags viewer time spent with the channel, largely due to the difficulty navigating the fragmented CTV supply landscape.

Buyers of premium video and CTV face challenges reaching consumers at scale, targeting the right audiences and having proper campaign reporting. Our integrated platform gives buyers direct and efficient access to CTV supply, including Xandr’s Premium Video Catalog, which saves buyers hundreds of hours in deal set-up across various media owners and distributors.

There is no magic bullet to solve for identity.

Every company in the advertising industry is focused on addressing the future of identity. Shifts in consumer sentiment, data and privacy legislation, as well as media consumption trends, mean identifiable traffic has started to erode and will continue to shrink significantly.

At Xandr, we take a comprehensive approach to identity, focusing on providing clients with a suite of solutions that offer flexibility, control and transparency, including the remaining identified and anonymous solutions.

While one of our initiatives in this area is around publisher first-party data activation, we are also working with clients to support the use of their preferred industry ID solution across Xandr’s demand-side platform, Invest DSP, and our supply-side platform, Monetize SSP. In addition, we are delivering advanced data solutions that help sellers and buyers sustain scale and deliver results, while at the same time preserving privacy in an identity-constrained future.

Retail media is poised for massive growth but requires strategic partnership.

You don’t need to be Amazon, Walmart or Instacart to tap into the opportunities of retail media. Curation is a great way to unlock the value of retail media, addressing challenges such as fragmentation, data monetization and extending audiences. Retailers and other industries that are following suit, such as travel, can monetize their first-party data assets, allowing retailers to extend audiences offsite to the open web by tapping into the Xandr Marketplace.

Retail media platforms empower retailers to develop a modern-day retail media business without the need to build their own tech stack. Xandr Curate allows retailers to package valuable first-party data and premium media into a single curated deal sold to brands programmatically across media buying products. As a result, retailers maintain control of their data, price it in custom ways, issue it only to trusted partners and control the media they package it with, creating a new revenue stream driven by advertising.

The complexity of technology serving the advertising ecosystem is daunting.

Advertisers face a more complex advertising technology environment than ever before. But ultimately, they need a platform partner with reach and scale and the ability to measure outcomes for data-driven linear TV and digital. It’s important to liaise with an end-to-end platform enabling unique product, pricing and data efficiencies across buy-side, sell-side and marketplace offerings.

Three years ago, our dialogue around many of these topics, such as connected TV, identity and retail media, was very different, and in some cases nonexistent. The road to get here has been an amazing journey. With Microsoft’s ownership of Xandr, I’m beyond excited for what’s ahead for Xandr and the potential for the advertising industry overall.