Following its June 2018 acquisition of AppNexus, Xandr was formed by AT&T to construct a national TV advertising marketplace. Xandr was launched, on September 25, 2018, at its inaugural AT&T Relevance Conference, in Santa Barbara, California, and was named after its parent company founder, Alexander Graham Bell. In June 2019, Xandr rebranded its AppNexus DSP, launching Xandr Invest, to serve as its central ad-buying hub. On October 18, 2019, Xandr acquired Massachusetts-based Clypd, an audience-based sales platform for television advertising. On April 30, 2020, it was folded into WarnerMedia.
Leadership
Xandr is led, temporarily, by Kirk McDonald, after the departure in March 2020 by former GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser, who was appointed chief executive officer of AT&T advertising and analytics in 2017. Rick Welday serves as president of Xandr Media, with Ray Carpenter as chief financial officer, Kirk McDonald as chief marketing officer, and Michael Rubenstein is president of AppNexus. The company hosts an annual Relevance Conference. Xandr is a sponsor of Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Programs in which chief data scientist Catherine Williams is active; Williams is a frequent speaker at various Women In Tech events and for the annual AppNexus Women’s Leadership Forum. Vice president of product management Lindsay Van Kirk was named among the 2019 “40 under 40” during NYC Television Week, in October, 2019.
Operations
In May 2019, Xandr launched Community, its new video marketplace that connects advertisers, publishers, and consumer media brands, including AT&T's WarnerMedia platforms: CNN, TNT, TruTV, B/R Live, and Otter Media. Other media on the Community platform includes Vice Media, Hearst Communications, Newsy, Philo, Tubi, and Xumo, Vudu, and Bloomberg. The fee-transparent, consumer-centric Xandr advertising model combines data, AT&T’s newly acquired WarnerMedia content, AppNexus, and other proprietary advertising technology, to integrate with AT&T’s consumer network, creating the first personalized advertising of its kind, with different commercials being delivered to different viewers simultaneously. During its first year, Xandr’s revenue was mainly derived from DirecTV sales. The company has approximately 1800 employees, including 60 in Europe.
