• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 12, 2009

This week saw more big deals in the online radio business. Katz Media Group's digital division, Katz 360 Sales, unveiled a new partnership with the Rubicon Project to sell premium display ad inventory using its audience-focused targeting system, which relies on contextual and behavioral data analysis to match ads to Web content.

The new Katz Online Display service allows Katz to offer online advertisers more efficient geotargeted display ad campaigns, with customized content and audience selections drawn from 40 billion monthly impressions and 500 million unique users.

Brian Benedik, president of Katz 360 Sales, explained: "The ability to segment specific audiences for these advertisers using the Rubicon Project's technology is an essential value proposition for today's sales agents."

Benedik says the new effort provides national brands and local businesses with "behavioral and contextual solutions across a host of premium Web publishers." Altogether, Katz Online Display gives advertisers access to 20,000 publisher Web sites.

To support the new service, Katz is creating a new sales structure that can handle "secondary premium display" ads -- meaning premium inventory that is sold by third parties (i.e., Katz and Rubicon) -- rather than the publishers' own sales teams. The new structure includes a dedicated sales team that will work with Katz's other account executives as needed.

Also this week, Ando Media -- which specializes in online radio measurement and ad-serving for mostly terrestrial radio stations -- announced its merger with Spacial Audio, which handles automation and ad insertion for streaming audio for mostly online-only broadcasters. The merger will give the companies a broader combined portfolio of both terrestrial and online-only radio groups. Spacial also has a broader international footprint, in contrast to Ando's mostly domestic business.

Last week, Pandora Media said it signed a deal with Katz 360's Katz Online Network, giving the latter responsibility for a large part of the online music emporium's audio ad sales. The deal allows Katz to aggregate Pandora's roughly 11 million monthly unique visitors with other large online properties in its list of affiliates -- including sites for traditional radio stations as well as pure-play Webcasters, like AccuRadio.com, Digitally Imported, RadioIO and 977Music.com. It gives advertisers a single point of purchase for campaigns covering multiple networks.