Will Microsoft join Google, Facebook (and soon Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent) in the club of global digital advertising giants? In any case, the Redmond firm seems to want it by getting its hands on Xandr, AT & T’s adtech.
The US telecoms operator AT&T has announced the sale of its advertising technology platform Xandr (formerly AppNexus) to Microsoft for an undisclosed amount. According to Bloomberg, the addition would however reach a billion dollars. AT&T had been looking for several months to get rid of its adtech Xandr (acquired in 2018 for around $ 1.6 billion), after failing to find its way into an online advertising landscape largely dominated by Google and Facebook.
Xandr defines itself as a consumer data collection platform offering a marketplace that allows publishers to sell ad space and advertisers to buy targeted ads on different platforms. In other words, these are programmatic ads on different platforms. With Xandr in its fold, Microsoft could try to strengthen some of its platforms such as Bing or LinkedIn.
A post-cookie world
“As the digital landscape evolves in a post-cookie world, Microsoft and Xandr may form the digital advertising marketplace of the future”, assured AT&T with ambition in a press release. “Xandr’s technology complements Microsoft’s current advertising offering and will help accelerate the deployment of digital advertising and retail media solutions for the open web”, continued the operator.
Finding a place in the digital advertising landscape, however, promises to be difficult, as evidenced by the successive failures of the Redmond firm in this area. The historic Google and Facebook / Meta duopoly (more than 52% of global online advertising revenue in 2021, according to eMarketer), must also deal with the emergence of probable future giants in the field such as Amazon, Alibaba or Tencent.