AT&T's Xandr Invest pitch deck plays up data, ad-tech: June 2019

For the past 10 months, AT&T's advertising business Xandr has promised to change how advertisers buy and measure TV and digital ads using the telecom company's data and content.

Business Insider obtained a pitch deck that Xandr presented to agencies in June that shows how the company has bolstered its advertising technology to compete with Google as part of the rollout of a new buying platform called Xandr Invest.

In the deck, Xandr is encouraging brands to upload their first-party data to its platform to improve their ad targeting and performance.

It also shows how the company is pitching brands on a machine-learning tool that finds the best audiences and publishers for advertisers. The deck said the tool has reduced clients' ad rates by about 80%.

AT&T wants to reinvent advertising using its data and content including that of Turner and Warner Bros.

AT&T's advertising unit called Xandr, headed by advertising veteran Brian Lesser, wants to change how TV advertisers buy and measure ads. But Xandr is also changing digital advertising, specifically through its 2018 acquisition of ad-tech firm AppNexus.

In a recent pitch deck obtained by Business Insider, Xandr shows how it's built up advertising tech to compete head-on with Google. In June, Xandr unveiled its new buying platform called Xandr Invest that lets advertisers buy ads across its marketplace of premium video content called Community and its ad exchange. The pitch deck that Business Insider viewed was sent to agencies around the same time.

Before AT&T acquired it, AppNexus' main focus was on helping publishers make money from display and mobile ads.

Since the acquisition, Xandr has beefed up its video capabilities and built out its demand-side platform that helps advertisers buy video and digital ads programmatically.

Read more: AT&T has lofty ambitions to change the way TV advertising is sold, but ad buyers worry it will become a walled garden like Facebook and Google

The pitch deck shows how AT&T is working with big brands and holding companies. For instance, the company is pitching advertisers that want to strike custom programmatic guaranteed deals and encouraging brands to use their own first-party data to access metrics. Xandr is also pitching advertisers on an optimization tool that it says can drop CPM (or cost per 1,000 impressions) costs by about 80% and promising advertisers low ad-tech fees.

As far as AT&T's data, the pitch deck says that advertisers have access to 170 million direct relationships that AT&T has with consumers, including wireless subscriptions and pay-TV services like DirecTV and HBO Now.

Xandr's pitch deck to agencies included 25 slides. Here are the 16 most important slides for advertisers.