Extreme Reach rebrands as XR and hires new unit president

Extreme Reach is rebranding as XR and hired former Innovid and TVSquared executive Jo Kinsella as president as part of a wave of new hires for the video technology and measurement player. Kinsella is joining XR as president of Source, the company’s new platform for powering and analyzing creative and media globally, which is being launched along with the new branding at CES this week. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs XR Source, which is designed for use by brand or agency clients, is designed to deliver and track creative assets across any type of screen. Overall, XR delivers video creative on 19,000 TV and digital platforms in 130 countries covering around $150 billion in spending. Kinsella, a 25-year software veteran well known in the measurement and ad tech industries, left Innovid following the acquisition of the company she co-founded, TVSquared, in 2022. The XR brand launch follows a period of integrations to provide clients with a single unified platform, according to CEO Louisa Wong. “Jo’s appointment at re-brand was intentional as she is highly respected in our industry and was a trusted advisor throughout this process,” Wong said. “We now need her where our team, clients, partners and investors will benefit from her leadership the most, in execution mode.” Rebranding XR is a priority in part because Wong, when she was going through recruitment before she joined as CEO in May, realized how complex, far-reaching and hard-to-understand Extreme Reach’s business is. “My first reaction was who is Extreme Reach?” Wong said. “Why would I even be interested in talking to them?” After reading the investor deck and the website, she realized none of it did justice to a company that’s quietly at the backbone of the vast majority of video production and delivery for the ad industry. “I looked at the suite of solutions, everything from production capabilities to advising clients on where ads can run in market to managing rights associated with every single piece of an ad that’s been produced,” she said, “and I guess the big chunk of the business everybody knows, which is delivery.” All that is built into a single enterprise platform, which Wong said “democratizes access to understanding what the creative workflow looks like from inception.” Among other things, all that data allows XR to provide insight into such things how the entire industry, individual companies and segments of companies are performing in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion both in front of and behind the camera. “We do everything from paying Patrick Mahomes and Taylor Swift and understanding what rights are associated with paying celebrity talent to the music and digital rights we secure, and track that through globally,” Wong said. “We know that for every piece of creative that’s run, because of the rights associated with it, when it can or can’t actually run in a market.” More from Ad Age: Taylor Swift’s influence on marketing From idea to consumer engagement Among other things, XR serves all of the Super Bowl ads and works with more than 90% of the top 200 advertisers. That “extreme reach” generates a lot of data that the Source business can turn into insights to improve creative and media efficiency and impact, Kinsella said. “I don’t care that much about the subway tracks,” Kinsella said. “I care about the train and what’s inside the subway train.” Digital ad serving itself is “a race to the bottom” where Google can provide service at CPMs of 5 cents, she said. “Where we have value is that we’ve delivered to around 19,000 end points in 130 countries,” she said. “No one else can do that. Extreme Reach can seamlessly bridge the gap between production and media, then link that to the creative asset and all the data generated by it from the initial idea all the way through to consumer engagement.” That includes a content catalog that goes back as far as 50 years to help brands understand their history in building the XR Source insights platform. In December, XR also added Simon Sikorski as president of global operations; Donna Kladis as chief information and security officer; Meredith Brace as chief marketing officer; and Eric Rubenstein as chief legal officer. That followed the appointments of Wong and Chandler Bigelow as chief financial officer earlier in 2023. Media measurement blog Tracking TV, social and digital updates Click here

Extreme Reach rebrands as XR and hires new unit president

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