Clash Of The Titans

A NEW MEDIA WAR IS HEATING UP, WITH AT&T AND VERIZON BATTLING FOR SUPREMACY.

- Patrick Kulp

LATER THIS MONTH, AT&T will cloister 300 media, advertising and entertainment executives in a Santa Barbara, Calif., resort for three days. The telecom’s leaders will present some industry research it conducted, unveil a new brand name for its advertising and analytics business, and network over cocktails.

The exclusive gathering is essentially a peace summit. Fresh off the close of deals to absorb App Nexus and Time Warner, AT&T has big plans for the ad industry. It wants to automate the buying and selling of television advertising. It wants to re-calibrate which commercials are seen by which viewers. And it wants to eventually merge sales of premium video with those of digital display and native in the same big marketplace.

All of these ambitions are in service of AT&T’s transformation into what it calls a “modern media company”—a stack of content, data, ad tech and distribution tuned to maximize their tandem value. Experts say this model could provide a promising path forward for an industry stuck in the shadow of Google and Facebook.

But in order to match that scale, AT&T needs the cooperation of some of its competitors— which, as it happens, now include most of the media and advertising industry.

“We want to be able to support this entire ecosystem,” says Kirk McDonald, AT&T’s CMO of advertising. “A duopoly has formed in digital where two companies that didn’t spend their time bickering with the rest of the ecosystem are emerging in [a leadership] position. TV and premium video feels to us to be a place to do this right, and we don’t intend to make those mistakes.”