Xandr and Turner Sports Team Up on Sponsorship Marketplace

Turner Sports and Xandr are taking the wraps off a new sports sponsorship marketplace aimed at meeting the growing demand for premium sports video content. The marketplace offers advertisers a single place to buy specific audiences over premium live and on-demand video across all of Turner Sports’ owned and operated digital channels and properties, including Bleacher Report, NBA.com, March Madness Live and NCAA.com. Advertisers can use 300 sports-focused audience traits provided by Xandr to target audiences in the new marketplace. Those traits are a subset of Xandr Audience Segments, more than 2,500 audience segments broken out by interest, intent, lifestyle and viewership that are built out of parent company AT&T’s first-party viewership data as well as additional information and data from both Xandr and WarnerMedia. “Once we started to understand Xandr’s capabilities and their marketplace, we really felt like the combination of our O&O plus all the assets and platforms they bring to the table, that one plus one really equal three for our clients,” Seth Ladetsky, svp of client partnerships and head of digital sales strategy for Turner Sports, told Adweek. The tool is aimed at making it easier for advertisers to more easily sponsor sports content, especially for clients who haven't yet entered the sports market. “We've just seen tremendous scale in the marketplace over the course of the last eighteen months, especially with live sports, and a lot of tracking of the movement for those cord-cutters and people that are moving to these online platforms,” said Andrew Rutledge, head of U.S. sell-side sales for Xandr. “There is a tremendous amount of supply in the market, and I think in particular live sports supply has performed really well. A lot of our buyers that buy that supply marketplace just can't get enough of it. We've been looking at finding the best ways to partner and really bring access to drive growing demand and growing supply on both sides.” Within the marketplace, Turner Sports is introducing an offering that allows advertisers to specifically spend against live games on MLB.tv platforms and other baseball-related content through Turner Sports. Those buys can be conducted directly or programmatically through Xandr’s Monetize platform. Both Turner Sports and Xandr have had a long-standing relationship with the MLB, and the new tool marks an extension of that partnership. “Ultimately this is an expansion of that effort, and just finding new ways, innovative ways to partner and work together,” said Rutledge. Both Xandr and Turner Sports see the new sponsorship marketplace as a long-term partnership, despite the upcoming merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery that will put some distance between the two companies that are presently both owned by AT&T. If the deal goes through as planned, Xandr will remain with AT&T, while WarnerMedia-owned Turner Sports would become a part of a new entity, Warner Bros. Discovery. “We sort of struck gold here a little bit in this combination,” said Ladetsky. “For us I think as long as we're bringing solutions to our clients, and the clients enjoy it, like it, working for them, we keep things going. And candidly I don't see that changing for the foreseeable future.” “From Xandr’s perspective, sports is one of many categories that we’re focused on in business, so we're scaling this initiative across multiple different verticals and parts of the business where we see opportunity,” added Rutledge. “Everyone's really happy with the success of our sports partnerships so far. We're looking just to scale up.” What Now for Xandr?