Xandr, AT&T’s advertising company, is working with media and entertainment companies including AMC Networks, Disney, and WarnerMedia to change the way linear TV advertising is bought, sold, and optimized.

Xandr today announced the next evolution of Xandr Invest, a strategic buying platform built for advertising. For advertisers, Xandr Invest’s TV solutions offer new ways to plan and activate audiences more consistently across TV programmers through a self-serve UI. This capability simplifies campaign execution while providing insights from AT&T data to improve the effectiveness of media buying. Participating media companies will be able to optimize linear schedules to reach audiences across networks, in turn, driving more adoption of automated, data-driven TV buying.

Advertisers can define a single audience across all participating programmers with the flexibility to use their own first-party data, viewership data from Nielsen, or Xandr Audience Segments.

Xandr Invest also powers integrated measurement across programmers. Buyers can forecast estimated unified reach across programmers before they buy, and then measure delivery and reach through unified reporting metrics post-campaign. Xandr Invest will be available for TV buyers through an open beta for the 2020 upfronts.

“Providing relevant advertising to interested consumers in a premium content environment is a top priority for the industry. Xandr Invest provides powerful technology and unique consumer insights that enable advertisers to reach consumers in an engaging way,” said Brian Lesser, CEO of Xandr. “Working with marquee media brands like AMC Networks, Disney, and our sister company WarnerMedia, will help us create a unified, data-enabled solution for advertisers, which is the future of TV buying.”

Combining the reach and impact of traditional TV advertising with the targeting of digital has long been the Holy Grail for brand marketing and the focus of investment and research by everyone from startups to media giants.

Xandr, which was formed in 2018, uses data gathered from AT&T’s platforms, including mobile, internet and TV services, to identify target audiences across different touchpoints in a single buy. According to the company, that adds up to 170 million direct-to-consumer relationships. This vast data set helps advertisers better understand the connection between their high-level brand advertising, lead generation and sales conversion.

Considering the scale of the launch and the capabilities that Xandr promises, this could end up being a big deal for a brand marketing space that is always hungry for answers about audience targeting and advertising effectiveness.