• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, March 18, 2015

Several leading publishers throughout the globe have teamed to form the Pangaea Alliance, a digital ad offering fueled by programmatic. Founding partners of Pangaea include The Guardian, CNN International, Financial Times and Reuters. The Economist will also participate.

Ad inventory from these publishers will be available to advertisers via programmatic buying.

The publishers tout a combined global audience of over 110 million users, and the company claims those individuals are highly influential. “One in four people are in the top income segments and one fifth are C-suite/senior management executives,” a press release reads.

Pangaea will be powered by Rubicon Project, a supply-side platform (SSP) and ad exchange. The alliance is beta launching in April 2015, per a release.

“Pangaea is an exciting initiative that strengthens premium publishers’ proposition by guaranteeing a trusted advertising environment, building significant scale and sharing smart targeting abilities,” stated Dominic Good, advertising sales director at the FT. 

In addition to pooling audiences, member companies will share data and formats with one another, per a release. This is significant because first-party data is typically held close to the vest.

“We know that trust is the biggest driver of brand advocacy, so we have come together to scale the benefits of advertising within trusted media environments,” stated Tim Gentry, global revenue director at Guardian News and media and Pangaea Alliance project lead.

Shane Cunningham, global commercial director at Reuters Consumer Media, added via a statement: “With trading becoming increasingly automated and data focused, trust has moved front and centre with our client and agency partners.”

These types of programmatic-focused publisher consortiums are not new, however. La Place Media in France and Dansk Udgivernetværk in Denmark have both existed for several years now, as has a consortium in the Czech Republic, among others.

And Rubicon Project is familiar with powering such initiatives. The Czech, French and Danish consortiums all use Rubicon as their programmatic platform.

"A partnership like this smartly capitalizes on the growing demand for premium programmatic opportunities at massive scale, which few publishers alone can do," said Lauren Fisher, analyst at eMarketer. "Such scale is especially attractive to those looking to take a cross-device approach."

Pangaea is expected to exit beta and have a full launch by year’s end. During beta, Pangaea will be managed by a team comprised of all member publishers, per a release. After its official launch, Pangaea will be managed by its own sales team.