• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, September 3, 2015

Programmatic ad tech firm Rubicon Project on Thursday announced it has partnered with Bitposter, a UK-based audience buying ad platform for out-of-home (OOH) advertising. Bitposter is launching a platform for programmatic OOH buying and has tapped Rubicon to power the marketplace.

It represents the first time Rubicon Project will facilitate OOH programmatic buying.

It is not the first time advertisers will have access to OOH inventory via programmatic. Live Nation, TouchTunes, Ayuda and others -- including TubeMogul -- have dabbled in OOH programmatic trading. It is still a nascent corner of the industry, but Rubicon’s entrance adds to the noise.

Bitposter claims to have over 300,000 billboards -- both digital-out-of-home (DOOH) and traditional OOH -- at its disposal. The company’s marketplace will feature inventory from these billboards, although it’s not specified how much of that inventory will be made available through the programmatic marketplace.

Bitposter will use Rubicon’s “Orders” platform to power the marketplace. Media owners will place their available inventory on the Orders platform. Buyers can browse the available selections, match it up with their first- or third-party data,  then purchase the inventory. Further negotiations can still take place.

This is considered “programmatic direct” trading -- there is no real-time bidding (RTB) taking place. It’s a mixture of direct trading, the manual input of available inventory and any necessary negotiations, and automation, the matching of audience data with available inventory; the process of viewing and purchasing available inventory through software.

“It’s no secret that a majority of the benefits of technology in advertising are associated with process automation, freeing up creative people to reach their customers with timely, powerful and relevant messages in any channel,” stated Aidan Neill, CEO and co-founder of Bitposter. 

Jay Stevens, international GM at Rubicon Project, stated that Rubicon has always been eager to automate buying and selling “across all media types,” and that the partnership with Bitposter allows them chase that goal by stepping into new territory.