• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 4, 2013

One of the hottest trends in the so-called “programmatic premium” space is publishers setting up their own in-house trading desks to extend their audience reach beyond their own audience. In other words, they’re buying it programmatically off of audience exchanges.

That’s more or less how Alanna Gombert, senior director-programmatic & trading at Conde Nast -- the most premium of premium publishers -- described her job during the Programmatic Premium panel discussion at OMMA Premium in New York.

“It’s an organic evolution thing,” she said, noting that she began by working on CN’s exchange, but ended up running its programmatic efforts as a means of buying additional audience reach from the wild on behalf of CN’s audiences and, yes, even its own publishers.

“We’re analagous to a trading desk at any agency,” she explained.

“For this space to grow, we need more of it to be activated across the board, whether it is with premium publishers or long-tail publishers,” said Paul Rostkowski, president of Varick Media Management, the agency trading desk inside MDC Partners.

Rostkowski said he would welcome the competition from publishers, suggesting that it would help grow the overall programmatic marketplace. “We're still in the early innings of programmatic, probably the first inning,” he said.