Building on more TV measurement tests from TV advertising sellers, Xandr, the advanced advertising/marketplace unit now owned by Microsoft, announced it has struck deals with six measurement companies in preparation for the upfront TV market.

Comscore, EDO, Samba TV, TVision, VideoAmp, and 605 will work with Xandr’s buy- and sell-side advanced TV platforms — Invest TV and Monetize TV.

“Activating these data sets for trial and evaluation, especially as we approach the 2022/23 upfronts, must be made easier,” said Mark Mitchell, vice president of business development, Xandr, said in a release.

Xandr says this will allow marketers to get “preferred viewership or engagement data currency for data-driven linear campaigns.”

Xandr is among a number of major TV advertising sellers that have partnerships tests with major media agency groups along with new measurement companies to compete, and/or supplement legacy TV data measurement giant Nielsen.

Many industry observers believe there will be a new TV/cross-platform measurement world consisting of alternative currencies to that of longtime provider Nielsen.

While under the ownership of WarnerMedia, in the first quarter of 2021, Xandr posted a 5% decline in revenue to $466 million versus the same period a year earlier.

Thereafter, it no longer was a separate financial reporting unit.

For all of 2020, Xandr’s revenue was up 3% to $2.1 billion. In December 2021, WarnerMedia sold Xandr to Microsoft for $1 billion.

Xandr is a riff on the name of AT&T’s founder Alexander Graham Bell.

After purchasing ad-tech company AppNexus in June 2018 for around $1.6 billion, AT&T renamed the company Xandr in September of that year. It is expected that Xandr’s name will be changed, as part of Microsoft, according to sources.

Building on more TV measurement tests from TV advertising sellers, Xandr, the advanced advertising/marketplace unit now owned by Microsoft, announced it has struck deals with six measurement companies in preparation for the upfront TV market.