• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, September 9, 2013

A group of five Czech Republic media houses -- Centrum Holdings, Mafra, Mladá fronta, Ringier Axel Springer, and Sanoma Media Praha -- today announced a joint cooperative to offer their inventory via real-time bidding (RTB) by creating a RTB advertising platform. The consortium, dubbed the Czech Publishers Exchange (CPEx) will be powered by Rubicon Project's platform.

Jay Stevens, Rubicon's GM, stated that the consortium "will make a huge amount of inventory in the Czech Republic available for access by advertisers and their agencies who want to trade programmatically." The five publishers combined can reach a claimed 70% of the Czech population. According to the release, other publishers are expected to join the CPEx "in the future."

Matj Novák, director of the CPEx, stated, “We expect RTB to gain great importance in the future. For its members, the new CPEx platform represents the perfect RTB tool for providing advertisers with new, attractive advertising space with superb reach ratio within high quality content services. The Czech Republic follows France and Denmark as the third European country in which large publishing houses have chosen to cooperate."

The CPEx open exchange will classify inventory according to three content categories rather than offering the Website's full URL to advertisers. However, while the five publishers will be working together on the open exchange, the platform leaves room for each to operate their own private marketplace. "The client can buy advertising on private marketplaces under prearranged conditions and unlike the open auction, private marketplaces offer advertisers access to inventory which is not available in the open auction, with other advantages including full URL transparency," the release reads.

As Novák stated, the Czech Republic is the third European country in which publishers have cooperated to offer inventory via RTB. France's La Place Media was the first European publisher RTB co-op and formed nearly a year ago. Denmark's, which is also powered by Rubicon, was announced in February.