AT&T’s WarnerMedia Era Ends: How Culture Clashes, Massive Debt and Donald Trump Doomed the Merger

variety.com:

AT&T summoned the big players from the worlds of media and advertising to a beachside resort in Santa Barbara. The company had finally closed its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, after a protracted fight with the Department of Justice, and wanted to celebrate — and to mark its place at the center of the media ecosystem.The three-day AT&T Relevance Conference, at the lavish Ritz-Carlton Bacara, featured appearances by Derek Jeter and Issa Rae, as well as AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

The centerpiece of the event was the unveiling of Xandr — the company’s new platform that was designed to revolutionize the ad business by bringing Facebook-style personalization to TV.

In many ways, Xandr was the fulcrum of the AT&T/Time Warner merger. The idea was that AT&T could combine its scale and customer data with Time Warner’s content to supercharge the value of its TV ads.Xandr was seen as so vital to the company’s future that its CEO, Brian Lesser, reported directly to Stephenson, and its results would be broken out separately on AT&T’s quarterly statements.

Even the name signified its centrality to the telecom’s strategy — invoking Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, the founder of AT&T, and by far the most sacred figure in company lore.The only problem was, there wasn’t much explanation of how Xandr was supposed to work.“They could have put out the blueprint for the marketplace.