Will AT&T’s ‘Community Garden’ Have Walls?

It’s still unclear what that data is. But onstage at the event, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson alluded to the ability to offer closed-loop attribution tied to client-specific business outcomes.

“We are at a place where we can begin to complete a full circle for advertisers,” he said. “Did that person see the ad on TV, engage on their smartphone, go to the website or end up on the lot of a car dealership?”

Dentsu Aegis Network US CEO Nick Brien, whose clients are heavily testing Xandr, said marketers are pleased to choose what they want to measure and take data with them, rather than have AT&T grading its own homework.

“Platforms like Facebook and Google have historically been marking their own papers,” he said. “The audiences, the nature of those audiences and their level of engagement has been provided from them. AT&T’s focus is on full transparency and a highly collaborative way of leaning in.”

There’s no technological hurdle for AT&T – or Facebook and Google – to offer marketers more data and the ability to do proprietary measurement, Zacharia added. But because AT&T is both a marketing and media company, it may have more empathy for the needs of the rest of the industry than the duopoly.

“Google and Facebook are product and engineering companies,” he said. “AT&T has sat on the other side. They want to have a more favorable partnership with the industry.”

Partnership was a key theme at the event, as traditional media owners and TV buyers realize they need to team up to compete with the duopoly.

“Where the TV networks use to compete against each other, they now say, ‘If we don’t become more targeted, simpler to buy and provide more measurement, we’re going to lose to the pure digital players,’” said Bryan Wiener, CEO of comScore. “They look at Facebook and Google as the primary competitor, and they’re competing networks as a secondary competitor.”

As AT&T gains more inventory from other content providers and improves its ability to target on TV, measurement will inevitably improve too, Wiener added.

“The more that you are in a marketplace where you’re buying on specific advanced audiences or demos, that allows you to better plan buy and evaluate the success,” he said.

But the extent to which AT&T shares its proprietary data – and invites a community into its garden – will depend on how regulation shakes out on a federal and state level.

“Privacy is the big issue of the day, particularly for advertisements,” Stephenson said at the event. “Facebook and Google are getting better [at sharing] how your data is being used on those platforms. I think everybody involved in this industry is going to have to play by the same rules.”

This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.