• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, September 15, 2014

Varick Media Management on Monday announced its foray into the “programmatic native” space with three major partnerships. The trading desk has partnered with Nativo, TripleLift and StackAdapt to offer clients the ability to buy native ads programmatically.

Jim Caruso, VP of product strategy at Varick, told Real-Time Daily that these partnerships have been in the works for about six months, and that the relatively quick turnaround is because the company wanted to “get this in front of people as fast as possible.”

“Programmatic” as it relates to native advertising does not include real-time bidding (RTB) -- at least not yet. Caruso stressed that the most important part of Varick’s partnerships with the native ad platforms is that it gives advertisers the ability to use more data when buying native ads.

“Being able to add a higher degree of audience targeting and addressability … is really the piece that the partnerships allow us to do,” said Caruso. Most of the deals Varick handles will be pre-negotiated or carried out in private marketplaces with set floors and ranges, Caruso acknowledged. The “programmatic” part will be calling out on a case-by-case basis whether or not an ad should be served to that individual.

However, Caruso is not ruling out bringing RTB to native ads in the future. “If [advertisers] are able to show to the publishers that there’s truly enough demand out there to constantly monetize and bid against these slots, then we would run into a situation where there’s multiple advertisers on the same platform trying to bid for the same slots. [We will] definitely see that down the road.” 

Varick’s backbone is in the open exchange area of the programmatic marketplace, but Caruso said these three partnerships help the trading desk expand into the other major segments of the market: private marketplaces and “programmatic direct.”

Caruso doesn’t expect integration to be a challenge, particularly with TripleLift, which is plugged into AppNexus, one of the primary trading platforms Varick uses. TripleLift specializes in visual native ads, while Nativo focuses on the “advertorial” side of things. StackAdapt is a hybrid: its in-feed ads feature both images and text.

Caruso acknowledged that the process will, however, require some heavy lifting. The marriage of native and programmatic is something new for Varick -- and something that’s relatively new for the industry at large -- and the question Varick will look to answer is: “Where is programmatic adding value, compared to executing these trades manually?” Most of Varick’s clients are familiar with running native campaigns with publishers directly, but not all have used programmatic to help.