News Corp. Unveils Global Programmatic Exchange: Says 'Third Parties No Longer Invited To The Party'
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, August 21, 2013
News Corp. this morning unveiled plans to launch a "global programmatic advertising exchange," which it says will enable marketers to "collectively leverage" News Corp.'s online and mobile properties, as well as its data, for programmatic buying and real-time bidding.
The exchange, dubbed The News Corp. Global Exchange, will utilize The Rubicon Project's platform, and will replace all other "arrangements" that News Corp. has with other third-party ad networks.
News Corp. said the exchange will roll out over the next few weeks and that it will include "more than
50 leading Web sites and mobile products," including WSJ.com, Times.co.uk, NYPost.com, TheAustralian.com.au, News.com.au, MarketWatch.com, TheSun.co.uk, as well as BallBall, the recently launched
mobile app and Web site for exclusive European football highlights in Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam.
The announcement comes just one day after Interpublic's Mediabrands unit unveiled the
Magna Consortium -- including five major media giants (AOL, A&E Networks, Clear Channel, Cablevision and Tribune) -- agreeing to participate in programmatic media-buying.
"Content aggregators would like to commodify our content, while data scrapers would like to aggregate our audience -- the only way to reach the world's greatest content and the most prestigious and lucrative audiences is directly through our digital properties," News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement, adding: "Third parties are no longer invited to the party."
News Corp. said the exchange would also enable advertisers to target the audience segments of its media properties "on a global scale via premium quality inventory and unique data."
This situation is the perfect example of "Live by the sword Die by the sword. AD networks have pushed for an automated way to sell space, without the interuption of humanity...now see where it got you...every publisher with the means to do it themselves will, without the schmooze there is no reason for a third party rep to intermediate between seller and buyer.
With the endless amount of quality inventory available on the internet, I'm not sure that one or even several publishers pulling their inventory off the market and perhaps offering it at a premium price will work or stop the rolling tide of programmatic buying. Who needs News Corp? This might have worked in the traditional marketplace with limited inventory years ago but I'm not too sure it can work in the digital marketplace of today with a near infinite amount of inventory.
There is an endless amount of inventory... but not an endless amount of quality inventory. If medium tail sites pull out of ad networks, all that is left isn't quality and it isn't endless. Big changes coming...
This is a big big deal. The Newspapers tried this way back in the 1990s (remember the New Century Network?). But they couldn't agree, nor was it easy to build a private ad network at the time, nor were newspapers getting killed the way they are today by the scrapers, aggregators, and content commodifiers. Many will decry the "Balkanization" of the Internet but rolling up the drawbridge is the only sane way for news organizations to survive in this hostile environment.
Stephen is right... this will allow newspapers a more viable option than dumping inventory for 8 cents on the dollar to an ad network. The head guy at Pubmatic (I'm 99% sure of this attribute) said a few years ago that the news sites' inventory was the best in the ad networks offering. It made THEIR overall inventory valuable enough for advertisers to buy. If ad networks lose that and are stuck with the poor long tail inventory (Larrys Bass Fishing Blog and AM 1280.. the 37th ranked station in the Toledo market) it is going to be a huge hit to their product offering. The news corp thing is a huge game changer and they have made it clear ad networks aren't part of it.