• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, May 21, 2013

Programmatic ad serving platform AppNexus was this morning selected by food advertising network Gourmet Ads as ad server of record. Gourmet Ads hopes the partnership will allow their food, grocery, and packaged goods clients to be more engaged with their "household grocery buyers and home cooks online" on the Gourmet Ads exchange.

Benjamin Christie, president and founder of Gourmet Ads, told RTM Daily some of the publishers on the niche exchange. Included are foodblogs.com, an aggregator of food blog content; stilltasty.com, a Web site that essentially answers how long something can be kept in the freezer; and joyofbaking.com, a site that's all about baking.

"It's all food-based, very niche," Christie said. "91% of our audience is the grocery buyer. That's where it becomes very interesting for CPG brands." Christie calls the Gourmet Ads audience "grocery intenders," much like the "auto intenders" of the auto industry.

According to the release, brands using Gourmet Ads' exchange can use more than 170 pre-defined contextual segments, or create their own custom segment. "For example, a cereal advertiser can now place its ads alongside breakfast recipes," the company claimed in the release. 

In the release, Christie stated, "This partnership will allow us to give our food advertisers greater flexibility in how they can target audiences on a contextual perspective across our network of food, cooking and recipe websites." He added, "…we've seen a spike in requests for the development of custom private ad exchanges and we see this trend continuing well into 2013."

AppNexus will power the Gourmet Ads exchange globally. Gourmet Ads is based in Australia with a presence in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and New Zealand.