• by Ray Schultz , October 29, 2021

Digital Trends Media Group (DTMG), a tech-focused online publisher that claims to reach more than 200 million people per month, is partnering with Adapex to increase its programmatic revenue across its properties, including its flagship site digitaltrends.com. 

The arrangement has been live for almost eight weeks, according to Debra Fleenor, founder-president of Adapex. 

First, Adapex looked at Digital Trend’s internal ad stack and setup. “We worked with them for a few months, to have a look at their stack and operations and come up with ways we could optimize them,” Fleenor says. “We convinced them to move us over to one full site, and since have moved to other sites.” 

Next, Adapex implemented Merlin, a header-bidding solution and a component of Adapex's full-service m4 Tech Suite. 

Merlin quickly delivered significantly higher results than Digital Trends was getting from its previous solution, Fleenor says. 

In addition, Digital Trends received access to Matrix, a unified dashboard that provides  analytics and reporting across all of their affiliate accounts by network, and metrics down to the ad unit level.   

Digital Trends is pleased with the results so far. 

“While the vast majority of our inventory is sold direct, like every other publisher we need to monetize our unsold inventory,” explains Jonathon Shaevitz, SVP of Strategy, Data & Partnerships for Digital Trends. 

“We were thrilled with the revenue uplift straight out of the gate. And with the Adapex team making ongoing optimizations, we are seeing improvements on every KPI, with a significant increase in fill rates and RPM,” he adds.

In addition, Digital Trends is receiving “demand from premium advertisers we have not worked with before, which is opening up new direct relationships.”

Fleenor argues that publishers like Digital Trends are in the forefront of marketing in the face of “the crumbling cookie.”