Brian Lesser was named Global CEO of GroupM, the big media buying company that is part of WPP.

Lesser, who had been CEO of GroupM in North America from 2015 to 2017, will assume his new post in September.

He succeeds Christian Juhl, who will become president, corporate development, for WPP.

“Brian is one of the industry’s most highly regarded executives with a track record of success in data- and technology-driven marketing,“ WPP CEO Mark Read said. “GroupM, its agencies and its brilliant people are, in many respects, the engine of WPP. Brian not only knows GroupM inside out but also has a strong vision for the future of the business. We are delighted to welcome him back to WPP.”

Lesser left GroupM to become CEO of AT&T Advertising & Analytics, which became Xandr. He departed Xandr after AT&T bought Time Warner and combined the ad-tech unit with WarnerMedia. Xandr was later sold by AT&T to Microsoft.

He recently stepped down as chairman and CEO of Infosum, which he joined in 2020.

“WPP and GroupM are special organizations to me,“ Lesser said. “I have experienced firsthand the culture of innovation and collaboration that leads to exceptional work for advertisers. I look forward to building with my talented colleagues, collaborating with our industry partners, and investing with our fantastic roster of global clients.”

Juhl became CEO of GroupM in November 2019, promoted from CEO of Essence, the digital media agency acquired by WPP in 2015. 

As president, corporate development for WPP, he will work on various aspects of the agency holding company’s strategic development.

“I would like to thank Christian for his contribution to the success of Essence, GroupM, WPP and our clients over the last nine years,” Read said. “He has built a strong foundation for the ongoing transformation of GroupM, the integration of its offer, and accelerated future growth. I look forward to working with him in his new WPP role.”

Brian Lesser, the former head of AT&T Xandr advanced advertising unit, has been named chairman and CEO of InfoSum, a customer data platform.

Nicholas Halstead, who had been CEO, will work with Lesser as founder and CTO, focusing on engineering, strategic customer relationships and the vision for customer data. Lesser has been on the InfoSum board and was named executive chairman in September.

Lesser left AT&T when he was passed over for the CEO job at WarnerMedia. Xandr was folded into WarnerMedia and parts of it are reportedly for sale.

“I’m incredibly excited by the limitless potential of InfoSum and its vision to connect the world’s data,” said Lesser. “In any environment where consumer experience would be made better through seamless data collaboration – whether that is content consumption, gaming, advertising, healthcare, financial services, or a range of other consumer products and services, InfoSum will enable better, personalized, more-relevant experiences, through the non-movement of data.”

InfoSum raised $15 million in Series A funding earlier this year led by Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures and supported by strategic partners Ascential, Akamai, Experian, ITV and Xandr.

"I watched Nick build high-volume data sharing with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so when he told me he invented a new privacy-first database I immediately invested," said Mark Suster, managing partner of Upfront Ventures. "Now having an industry luminary like Brian Lesser join as CEO is huge validation for us. He oversaw data transformations at WPP and AT&T and can bring InfoSum to the enterprise."

Before joining AT&T to build its advanced advertising business, Lesser was board chair of Invidi Technologies and CEO, North America for WPP's GroupM.

Here is a statement from Lesser, upon taking his new post:

I am excited to be joining InfoSum as Chairman and CEO.

Over the course of my career I have had the opportunity to drive significant change in mature industries through the development of new technologies and new businesses. Programmatic advertising fundamentally changed media investment and customer acquisition. Addressable television brought relevance and personalization to the broadest and most-popular medium for advertisers. And converged video – across set-top boxes, connected televisions, mobile devices, and browsers – allowed marketers to engage audiences wherever they happened to be consuming content.

All of these innovations were necessitated by rapidly-changing consumer behaviors. And all of these innovations were, of course, grounded in data and technology. We live in a completely digital and data-driven world. Whether we are shopping, banking, watching, playing, socializing, working, exercising, learning, or just relaxing – our experiences are personalized, optimized, and connected. Data has become the lifeblood of every dominant company in every industry. Data produces insights, which not only drive new products and new experiences, it increasingly determines our health, well-being, and happiness.

Not surprisingly, customer-centric companies cannot get enough access to data, which increasingly comes from data partnerships. A content creator may partner with a content distributor to learn more about viewing behaviors and engagement across devices. A consumer products company may partner with a retailer to learn more about product preferences and consumption. Healthcare companies must increasingly partner with pharmaceutical companies, universities, and governments. Financial services companies must partner with each other to reduce fraud and combat financial crimes.

There is technology and infrastructure to enable these highly-sensitive transfers of customer data between parties. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this infrastructure is made up of a series of intermediaries which move petabytes of personal data between databases. This movement of data introduces security risks, trust issues, low fidelity, operational delays, and high costs. The marketing and advertising business largely uses intermediaries to ‘match’ identity between two parties – doing their best to anonymize data and protect it from bad actors. This industry has also created technologies to act as a match ‘key’ between parties such as cookies or email addresses.

Existing ‘data onboarding’ infrastructure is doing the job for now. But legacy technology, processes, and norms will be increasingly tested by the sheer magnitude of data proliferation, swelling regulation from governments, deprecation of identifiers such as IDFA and cookies, rising walled gardens of media and content, and heightened privacy concerns from consumers.

So why am I so excited about InfoSum?

InfoSum has invented a better way for data-centric companies to collaborate, learn from each other, create better experiences, and protect their consumer data. We call it the ‘non-movement of data,’ because the InfoSum platform never transfers a single data point between parties. Yet, our platform enables partners to create a ‘customer data network,’ within which data can be shared without ever being transferred. Parties within a customer data network own their own identity. They can choose any customer attribute to ‘match’ against, and they can permission each party based on commercial, legal, or regulatory considerations. 

We are a fast-growing company based in the US and the UK. Our Founder and CTO, Nick Halstead, has successfully architected some of the largest and most sophisticated data platforms in the world. Our incredibly-talented engineering team developed our patented technology for over four years before taking any product to market. Our go-to-market team has vast and deep experience in data-driven industries ranging from banking, to healthcare, to gaming and content. And our customers, so far, are early adopters and mavericks - determined to own their own identity and develop new products and businesses. 

In my career I have been a part of technology businesses that have completely changed industries. I’ve never been more excited, or more optimistic about a company or a platform, than I am about InfoSum. Please contact me directly if you would like to learn more. You will be hearing much more from us soon!

 Data company InfoSum said that Brian Lesser, who resigned as CEO of AT&T’s Xandr advanced advertising unit, will be InfoSum’s new executive chairman.

Lesser, who had been an executive at GroupM previously, joined InfoSum’s  board in April.

Lesser will work to establish InfoSum globally and in North America.

InfoSum also said that it completed a Series A funding round, raising $15.M

The investment was lead by Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures and supported by strategic partners Ascential, Akamai, Experian, ITV and Xandr,

In the wake of the sudden departure of Brian Lesser as CEO of AT&T’s Xandr ad unit, AT&T COO John Stankey said Xandr and WarnerMedia must work more closely together.

In a memo to Xandr staffers Tuesday, Stankey re-emphasized that advertising is important to AT&T as it launches its direct-to-consumer streaming service HBO Max.

“Advertising is critically important to the future of media, and I believe platforms that evolve to accommodate both subscription and ad-supported formats will be a natural content aggregation point for the industry — not to mention a preferred experience for the customer,” he said.

But he added that AT&T must approach the market in a unified manner.

"There is still much more that needs to be done to integrate and coordinate more closely our go-to-market functions between Xandr and WarnerMedia,” he said. “I will be working with the respective leadership in the coming weeks to achieve this objective — acknowledging that our inability to work from the office will likely create some challenges.”

WarnerMedia and Xandr had planned to have a joint upfront presentation in May. That event has been canceled, like almost all other upfront events, because of the coronavirus crisis.

Lesser, who joined AT&T three years ago from media buyer GroupM to run AT&T’s advanced advertising unit, resigned last week. Sources indicated that he sought the job of CEO of WarnerMedia, a post Stankey, who was named to the additional post of COO of AT&T last year, plans to eventually relinquish.

Related: Xandr Targeting Linear Ads for Disney, AMC Nets

Stankey called Lesser’s departure “unexpected,” saying “while I am disappointed Brian will not be with us for the next chapter, I want you to know that our commitment to making advertising matter has not changed.”

Stankey also said AT&T was committed to Xandr’s Monetize and Invest platforms. Just as Lesser was resigning last week, Xandr made big news as The Walt Disney Co. and AMC Networks agreed to let advertisers use Xandr Invest to plan and buy campaigns using ad inventory from their linear TV networks.

For the interim, it appears that Kirk McDonald, Xandr’s chief business officer, is in charge of Xandr. Stankey's memo did not mention when a new unit CEO might be named.

The memo also addressed how the company was dealing with the coronavirus situation.

“The widespread impact of the coronavirus continues to challenge all of us like nothing we have seen before. Priority number one is taking care of yourself and your loved ones,” Stankey said. “We will do everything we can as an organization to keep you informed as we work together to serve our customers during this stressful and uncertain time for everyone.”

One year after being christened as Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising company continues to push the message that its technology can help make advertising more palatable for consumers and more effective for advertisers.

It also wants to make advertising more lucrative for programmers and content creators — and not just for the ones owned by AT&T.

“We’ve been very busy in building technology and launching products to realize our vision of building a premium advertising marketplace, so advertisers can reach audiences and media companies can get the best value for their inventory,” Xandr CEO Brian Lesser said at the company’s second annual Relevance conference in Santa Barbara, California.

Some things have been accomplished in year one. The company has launched an ad-buying platform, Xandr Invest; an ad-selling platform, Xandr Monetize; and an ad-inventory marketplace it calls Community.

At the conference, Lesser said Bloomberg and Vudu had joined the Community marketplace.

Meanwhile, AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson, defending the company’s “modern media company” strategy at a Wall Street conference, talked about his expectations for the company’s advertising business.

“Because we have all of the viewership data from set-top boxes, we have viewership data on the mobile phones, we’re getting an amazing premium for selling that small advertising inventory in DirecTV,” Stephenson said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in New York. “When we did the Time Warner deal, now WarnerMedia, what came with it was a rather large inventory of advertising,” Stephenson said.

Stephenson noted that AT&T had hired Lesser, who had been with media buyer GroupM, and invested in technology, including AppNexus.

“We spent the last year and a half standing up the technology stack to now take the Turner ad inventory,” he said, referring to WarnerMedia’s ad-supported channels. It will use the same AT&T data and “drive advertising revenues off the Turner inventory. We will be going to the upfronts next spring with one face, Xandr, and representing all of the Turner inventory. We will be doing that next spring and we’re pretty excited about what the possibility is here for advertising.”

Xandr officials at the conference did not elaborate on how Xandr and Warner- Media would be working together more closely than they had at the past year’s upfronts.

In addition to the Turner linear cable TV ad inventory, Xandr will eventually be selling inventory from a new streaming video product from WarnerMedia. WarnerMedia plans to launch HBO Max next year as a non-ad-supported product.

About a year after that, though, the company plans to launch an ad-supported video-on-demand service. Lesser said Xandr was already looking at ad loads and ad formats for the service.

The conference, attended by media buyers, brand marketers, media companies (some that have joined Community, some that have not) and ad tech companies, continued a conversation about how advertising should react as consumer content consumption behavior changes.

“That is causing changes in how businesses behave and how they invest,” Lesser said. “It’s also causing changes in how we cooperate and how we work together. If you remember nothing from my talk today, remember that in order to meet the consumer where they are in terms of delivering content, in terms of integrating advertising, we need each other as partners.

“No one company is going to get there by itself and this conference is really a way for us to engage with all of you — our customers, our partners, our clients,” Lesser added.

Altice USA and Frontier Communications are the first announced addressable advertising clients for Xandr, AT&T’s newly formed advertising unit consolidating AT&T’s advanced TV business, AT&T AdWorks, its data and analytics business, as well as the newly acquired ad tech company AppNexus.

Xandr encompasses all aspects of the existing AT&T advertising & analytics businesses and will be run by Brian Lesser, the former GroupM North America chief who was recruited over to AT&T last year.

Related: AT&T Hires GroupM's Lesser to Run New Ad Business

“Xandr is a name that draws inspiration from AT&T’s rich history, including its founder Alexander Graham Bell, while imagining how to innovate and solve new challenges for the future of advertising,” Lesser said, in a statement.

Under the agreements with Altice USA and Frontier, Xandr will aggregate and sell the telecom companies’ national addressable advertising inventory. Xandr will also collaborate with Altice’s advanced advertising division, a4, in an effort to help it expand its addressable advertising capabilities.

The announcement was made from the Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., an industry event produced by Xandr.

Touting around “170 million direct-to-consumer” relationships across wireless, video and broadband, AT&T CEO Randall Stephens used September’s Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference to outline a strategy in which AT&T will try to take a piece of the sizable advanced advertising market share controlled by Silicon Valley giants Google and Facebook.

“Advertising models will be very, very important," Stephens said. “We think we have the elements that are gonna be required to stand up a very impressive advertising business.” 

AT&T said it hired top GroupM executive Brian Lesser to build and lead a new advertising and analytics business that will use AT&T consumer data and content assets.

Lesser, who had been CEO of GroupM North America, will be CEO of the new business and report to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

"Brian is a terrific executive and one of the best there is in harnessing technology and data to create targeted advertising," Stephenson said. "Once we complete our acquisition of Time Warner Inc., we believe there is an opportunity to build an automated advertising platform that can do for premium video and TV advertising what the search and social media companies have done for digital advertising."

AT&T is in the process of acquiring Time Warner, whose Turner unit is among the more sophisticated media companies in using data for advertising sales.

“Advertising is evolving from broad messages delivered through traditional media channels, to customized, individual content coordinated across all connected devices," Lesser said. “AT&T has amazing assets for creating engaging advertising experiences for consumers. I am excited to work with Randall and the entire AT&T team to build a world-class advertising and insights business.”


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