• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 11, 2012

This time it came from Adam Potashnick, global media director at Mediacom, a sister company of Spafax’s and also the guy who oversees the agency’s Dell account.

Potashnick said that what Spafax is doing will have a significant impact on agencies that buy out-of-home media, and described it in a way that made me think of the out-of-home equivalent of a either an online “trading desk,” “demand-side platform” or “data management platform.” I’m not sure which (partly because I don’t fully understand what those entities do with online media to begin with), but I suspect it might be little parts of all those things.

Basically, it sounds like Spafax will be aggregating out-of-home inventory and data that will enable agencies and advertisers to plan, buy and target digital out-of-home media the way they might plan, buy and measure an online digital campaign.

When Spafax’s Patrick Bonomo said, “Thanks for the plug” to Mediacom’s Potashnick, he reminded him that “it’s all in the family.” You know, the WPP family. It wasn’t clear from the discussion how Spafax might work with non-WPP agencies, or if it would, but Potashnick implied it could be a significant transformer for the way agencies and brands use out-of-home.

“As the medium gets more sophisticated and as the targeting gets more granular, that’s when the medium can stack up with all the great behavioral targeting we’re doing for Dell,” Potashnick said, implying that the Spafax platform might also enable brands to target individual consumers based on their out-of-home media exposures and behaviors.

Potashnick did not elaborate. Nor did Bonomo, though he did allude to the concept of “audience-buying,” which is how agencies say they’re beginning to shift their digital media-buying strategies.