Canada’s Premium Audience Exchange (CPAX) has four new members: Blue Ant Media, St. Joseph Media, Metroland Media and the Winnipeg Free Press.
The new additions join existing members like Rogers, CBC, Shaw, Postmedia and Yellow Pages, bringing CPAX’s total publisher count to 18. The private programmatic marketplace now reaches 21 million Canadians, or 71% of the internet-using population.
Demand for CPAX’s inventory has been steadily growing since it was re-launched last year under the management of Index Exchange. Last month it topped 1 billion impressions sold.
“We joined CPAX to more effectively monetize our remnant display inventory,” said Ryan Fuss, SVP, Media Solutions, Blue Ant Media, in an email. “CPAX provides a great opportunity for us to align our premium channels with a broader audience of advertisers looking to align their brands with our passionate audiences.”
Unlike typical programmatic exchanges, CPAX auctions remnant impressions on behalf of member publishers in a blind, invite-only exchange environment. That means that publishers can set minimum bids on their inventory, and buyers can’t buy up a specific publisher’s remnant impressions to try and undercut their direct sales CPMs.
The setup appeals to major publishers because it means they have better control over their rates and the quality of the ads that end up on their sites (i.e. they can screen out all those “lose weight in 4 weeks” ads) than they would in a typical programmatic environment. Many of CPAX’s members don’t sell any inventory programmatically outside of private marketplaces like CPAX.
Buyers, meanwhile, see CPAX as a source of exceptionally high-quality, locally-published media where they can apply first- and third-party data to target specific audiences, without worrying about the risks present on open exchanges, like fraud and poor viewability. A large sample of Index Exchange’s inventory (including private marketplaces it operates, like CPAX) was recently evaluated by Moat and found to contain less than 2% non-human traffic.
Pam Laycock, senior vice-president of strategy and digital at Metroland Media, said in a statement that CPAX’s reputation for being a premium environment was a big part of why Metroland sought membership. “As a publisher that’s focused on community and nurturing real relationships with our consumers, we think it’s imperative to provide the highest quality inventory to buyers that is free of fraud and non-human traffic,” she said.
