Overview

Xandr is an internet technology company that enables and optimizes the real-time sale and purchase of digital advertising. While some ad tech companies work only for either advertisers or publishers, Xandr’s platform provides proprietary solutions for both parties.

Xandr’s DSP (demand-side platform) provides advertisers with the tools to customize advertising campaigns, increase buying intelligence and decide where to best spend ad budgets. Xandr also has an SSP (supply-side platform) which helps publishers maximize fill rate on their inventory by providing advanced controls to manage various data points for demand partners across desktop, mobile, native, and video.

Xandr works with many of the world’s largest quality brands and publishers. A key goal for the company, is to harness the power of data science and machine learning to drive audience acquisition, engagement and monetization in real time and at scale. In 2017, Xandr (trading as AppNexus) was in the top 25 of the Forbes Cloud 100, the definitive ranking of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world.

We spoke with former Product Manager, Erik Savage, to discuss how Xandr's ad platform is using DeviceAtlas’ real-time device detection solution.

Xandr was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 and powers Microsoft's advertising products, including invest, curate and monetize.

The Challenge

While programmatic advertising has revolutionized the way in which advertisers reach their desired audiences, it’s an industry that continually strives for greater transparency and performance measurement. Whether it's emerging monetization technologies or new formats for ad spend, ad tech companies need to stay on top of the latest trends to get ahead of the competition.

In 2012, mobile was beginning make ripples in the industry as companies sought to execute more advertising campaigns on this rapidly growing channel. At this time, Xandr did not offer a robust device targeting layer available for advertisers. Adding to this challenge, fragmentation in the device market was rapidly increasingly with manufacturers releasing devices with a myriad of different screen sizes, operating systems and mobile browsers. This made it even more difficult for product teams at ad tech companies such as Xandr, to build an accurate device database that their clients could use to target their ads, as well as reliably identify and handle traffic from a diverse device landscape.

The resource intensive nature of maintaining a device database in a rapidly evolving device market, coupled with its clients’ desire to explore and use device targeting to reach their audiences more effectively meant Xandr needed a reliable partner to provide a robust, real-time device detection solution.

The Solution

After evaluating the market, Xandr selected DeviceAtlas to power its ad tech platform with accurate and real-time device data. With Xandr, advertisers have a user interface that enables them to define campaigns and enrich targeting options with a wide range of device characteristics. Some of the device properties Xandr’ clients can target on include Primary Hardware Type, Device Model, Manufacturer, OS Name, and Browser Name.

Xandr also has different analytical reports that clients can run to include these device properties. This granular and accurate reporting offers more value for advertisers purchasing ads, as well as making sure that publishers get the maximum value from their inventory.

DeviceAtlas has also helped Xandr stay on top of one of the most recent developments in the advertising industry: the migration of users from linear TV to Over-the-Top (OTT) services on connected TVs (CTVs). Ad completion rates on CTV of up to 98% make inventory in this immersive, full-screen environment highly valued. DeviceAtlas helps Xandr identify and verify OTT originated traffic (e.g. Set Top Boxes, Smart TVs and Game Consoles) and makes this layer of targeting available to advertisers.