The creative approvals process for political advertising at large media conglomerates has a lot of room for human error. For political media buyers, anything that can help with trafficking and approvals is a move in the right direction, particularly when companies offer cross-screen inventory that’s governed by FEC and FCC regulation.
Alleviating that friction was part of the impetus for WarnerMedia and Xandr’s new inventory partnership and the new four-step approval process unveiled Wednesday for the latter’s Invest DSP.
“We’ve made a commitment to political buyers to expedite creative approvals to streamline campaigns while meeting our rigorous compliance standards during this busy election season,” said Mike Welch, Head of Xandr, in a statement on the rollout.
“By enabling a secondary creative review within our platform, we are able to turn on political advertising programmatically in a safe and compliant manner across the WarnerMedia portfolio.”
The process works with the buyer working on behalf of a campaign or advocacy client setting up deals for CNN or WarnerMedia inventory through Invest DSP. Xandr then conducts a two-hour creative approval process, and WarnerMedia subsequently does a secondary creative review for “an added layer of creative control.”
If there are any changes mandated to the creative by the reviewers, the platform automatically restarts the process once those changes are made.
The added value of the “partnership” between WarnerMedia and Xandr, which is AT&T’s advertising arm, is that campaigns have “full creative control over how ads show up.”
“In collaborating with Xandr, we are confident that this system and solution enables political and advocacy advertisers to reach the intended audiences in the proper context, across our entire ecosystem,” Joe Hogan, executive vice president of sales and marketing at WarnerMedia, said in a statement.