Welcome back to the Xandr tech blog!

A lot has changed since the last time you heard from us. Advanced TV, and all that it comes with, has become more popular with consumers than ever before, Google has announced its long anticipated plans to end Chrome browser’s support of third-party cookies, new privacy restrictions like CCPA have finally been put in place, and in a twist no one could have predicted, we’re finding ourselves having to adapt to a new norm of staying at home.

Clearly our industry is ever-changing and evolving. While at times it can seem complex, we’ve broken down the three major trends we’ve noticed from a technical perspective, and how the industry is adopting below.

1. Consumer viewing habits are changing

With the proliferation of high-quality content, available at any time, consumers have freedom of choice — not just what they watch, read, and listen to but where, and when.

Now, marketers’ needs from buying platforms are changing as they look to reach the right audience across multiple environments and media consumption habits. To make their cross-channel plans more effective, they’re looking for solutions in aligning target audiences, performance metrics, and showing ROI.

At the same time, media companies need access to holistic inventory management controls, unique data, and buyer demand to unlock the full value of their inventory and improve the experience for their consumers.

To help buyers and sellers keep up with evolving consumer needs, our engineering team tackled these challenges by quickly putting together the technical framework for and developing Xandr’s three tentpole products in 2019.

• Xandr Invest: Our strategic buying platform offering simplified access to and tailored buying of premium, brand-safe content, as digital and TV silos give way to converged buying. Omnichannel inventory includes traditional TV, OTT, mobile, digital video, audio, native, and display.
• Xandr Monetize: Our strategic selling platform giving publishers and media owners full control to navigate the consumer journey and client relationships. The platform offers content owners improved monetization, through better inventory management capabilities, data-driven yield optimization, and differentiated buyer demand.
• Community: A curated marketplace of publishers that enables advertisers to reach their audiences at scale in a brand-safe, privacy-protected, premium video environment.

2. Platforms are beginning to converge

In today’s advertising and technology landscape, the term “convergence” is arguably one of the most commonly used to describe the direction in which the industry is going. But what exactly does it mean? And how are technology platforms bringing it to life?

At Xandr, we follow the Capabilities model where each capability function/team in tech can support multiple products by building and leveraging common services across our platform. Employing this type of platform thinking means having the ability to create services and reuse components across the ecosystem.

In each product we’ve introduced in the past year, we’ve included critical elements that lay the foundation for converged capabilities. For example, we recently introduced enhanced TV solutions available through Xandr Invest, which enable data-driven, audience-based buying at scale for linear TV. Buyers can plan and execute optimized data-driven linear (DDL) buys using just one self-serve UI while also taking advantage of advanced forecasting and measurement capabilities.

The progress we’ve made is evident through our newly developed solutions, however brainstorming ways to expand on these offerings and continue to help buyers, sellers and data providers move the local ecosystem forward is our priority every day.

3. Privacy and identity remain top of mind

Earlier this year, Google announced that it will end the Chrome browser’s support of third-party cookies within two years. While they have caused some uncertainty in the industry, we realize that these technical changes are being put in place for the benefit of consumers and to reflect the direction of privacy laws globally — like GDPR and CCPA. We will continue to focus on helping publishers successfully monetize their inventory and advertisers reach their potential customers during this next evolution of advertising while keeping consumer privacy and data security top of mind.

Just recently we announced our minority investment in a UK-based data platform named InfoSum, a Unified Data Platform (UDP) that enables multiple first-party data sources to be matched, analyzed, and activated, without moving raw data between parties.

Through our investment, we are aiming to:

• Provide marketers, agencies, and media companies with an additional innovative capability to activate first-party data on Xandr’s technology platform, while potentially enhancing platform privacy features.
• Encourage premium publishers and media companies who will endeavor to harness their first-party data to more effectively collaborate directly with advertisers in the absence of third-party cookies.

So, now that you’re all caught up, we look forward to bringing you more thought-provoking content about the complex technical challenges we have the privilege of solving as engineers and sharing insights and predictions about some of the seismic shifts we’re seeing in the industry. Stay tuned!

Interested in joining the Xandr engineering team? We’re hiring! Check out our open roles here.