Commentary

U.S. Publisher Coalitions Get Scale With Their Titles

  • by May 29, 2015

Publisher coalitions aren’t a brand new phenomenon, but they’re pretty close.  

In the move to fight the Googles and Facebooks at their own game, many online publishers and media companies have embraced the idea of “inter-publisher coalitions,” cooperating with former competitors to bring audience scale to the digital marketplace as programmatic advertising continues to gain share-of-inventory. 

According to AdExchanger, some in Europe, including La Place Media, a joint venture of the five the largest media players in France, have had success. Programmatic CPMs jumped 70% between its first and second year in operation and coalitions have formed in the UK, South Africa, Canada and other smaller media markets, as well. 

Coalitions in the U.S.: Are They Coming?

Per the Rubicon project, however, publisher coalitions in the U.S. haven’t taken off the way they have in smaller markets, given their large, independent size and scale. Many multi-title U.S. publishers, especially those coming out of the traditional print newspaper and magazine industries, already have enough scale within their own stable of titles and assets to offer high-quality “intra-coalition” audiences to agencies and brand advertisers. 

Indeed, several have begun to turn to their own desktop user bases to build enterprise-wide “like” audiences for cross-title targeting, creating high-quality inventory and keeping it away from the large exchanges.   

The Shift to Mobile: Can U.S. Publishers Scale There, Too?

Multi-title publishers and media companies have heavily invested to stay ahead of rapid user migration to mobile devices to protect their brand franchises and scale their user and advertiser bases. But there’s a disconnect—and a solution.   

The disconnect manifests itself in publishers’ inability to know which of their desktop users they’ve been successful at migrating to mobile — and to use location-based mobile to learn anything else about them. The solution is simple. They already have the platform to do it: their mobile apps.

Many innovative mobile app solutions have emerged enabling publishers to anonymously gather local, behavioral-based knowledge of their own individual app users—across each title—and aggregate them into high-scale, intra-coalition mobile audiences. 

But these audiences aren’t just limited to mobile channels.

Location-based solutions also enable publishers to drive value back into their CRM databases, providing “real-life” psychographic segmentation, based on where their app users go and what they do in their daily lives. 

With these enhanced, app-driven insights, publishers can personalize content and drive ad revenue. Not just within the mobile app itself, but they can extend the value across their desktop and mobile Web titles and even drive Audience Extension revenue through desktop and mobile ad exchanges.

1 comment about "U.S. Publisher Coalitions Get Scale With Their Titles".
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  1. Don Scott from BH Media Group, Inc., June 2, 2015 at 10:20 a.m.

    It seems the article is not quite all there. What's missing?

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