Bell Media, one of Canada’s largest media owners, finally entered the programmatic market Tuesday by unveiling its new private ad marketplace (PMP), developed in partnership with Index Exchange.
The partnership makes all of Bell’s display and video inventory available via real-time bidding and programmatic reserve. This includes several national media brands such as Much, TSN and CTV.
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• Strong relationships driving Canada’s private marketplaces
The partnership with Index started in November 2015 when Bell issued an RFP for a company to advise on and provide programmatic technology.
“Index really popped to the top [of the shortlist], particularly with their service levels,” said Kristie Painting, Bell’s newly minted vice-president of digital sales.
“We felt they would really partner with us to make sure we were making the right strategy choices around how to best position our inventory for maximum yield. Their service and their industry experience level has been invaluable to us and our go-to-market strategy,” she said.
PMPs have found great success in Canada’s programmatic market as publishers seek more controlled ways to sell ads in brand-safe environments. “It’s all to do with making sure we’re delivering premium human audiences quality inventory,” said Stuart Garvie, president of Bell Media sales. “As soon as you go to an open exchange, you don’t have that control anymore; it’s the wild west.”
As the company began exploring the programmatic space, Garvie said Bell has seen some “fairly nefarious activity” surrounding its media brands. Though he would not specify what he had seen on the record, he did say “it’s made us more cautious as we go through this process… making sure we get this right.”
At Marketing‘s recent AdTech Canada conference, panelists discussing PMP’s proliferation agreed Canada’s lucrative but small market was particularly ideal for that model. “We find where we have our best and closest relationships, we’re seeing maybe 65% of our OMO properties that come into the remnant space being purchased through a deal ID, versus folks we don’t have day-to-day relationships with,” said panelist John Erhart, the director of sales for One by AOL Canada. “Vendors that might be in the U.S., it might be closer to 25 or 30%,” he said.
At that event, Brad Jeffrey, senior director of strategic partnerships at Index Exchange, said the company is seeing “almost 50% of the dollars transacted through private marketplaces today. That’s been a trend since, I’d say, Q4 of 2013, which keeps going up and up and up.”
