The Canadian Premium Audience Exchange will sell online ad inventory on behalf of four new publisher members: Postmedia, Yellow Pages, DHX Television and The Chronicle Herald. The new partnerships increase the programmatic media consortium’s national reach substantially, and brings its total membership to 15 of Canada’s most well-known publishers and 100 premium websites.
With the addition of Postmedia and its flagship National Post, CPAX has broken into the trifecta of top Canadian newspapers. At the same time the partnership with Yellow Pages brings ad inventory from Canada’s largest local directory sites, YellowPages.ca and Canada411.ca, while DHX brings the Family Channel, Disney XD and Disney Junior.
CPAX is a private online RTB exchange where premium ad space is auctioned to advertisers. It was founded in 2012 by CBC, Rogers and Shaw, and has since brought on Corus, Cineplex, Quebecor, Reader’s Digest, Channel Zero, V and Tele-Quebec as partners.
The announcement brings the organization a step closer to its goal of creating a single marketplace where advertisers can access inventory from every top Canadian online publisher using programmatic technology. Several notable holdouts remain, however, including Bell Media, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, The Huffington Post and TC Media (which recently introduced its own multi-publisher exchange, The Programmatic Marketplace, with Spin Media and Hockeybuzz).
Last year management of CPAX was taken over by Index Exchange (formerly Casale Media), which privatized the exchange and a stringent vetting process for buyers was put in place. Index has gained a reputation among buyers as being trustworthy and relatively “hygienic” compared to other RTB exchanges, because of its rigorous approach to transparency, brand safety and fraud prevention.
That seems to have made a difference to the new publisher partners as well. “We are committed to providing quality inventory to buyers, by building and curating premium content and rich audiences that are free of fraud, non-human traffic, and other concerns currently on the minds of marketers,” Postmedia VP audience and analytics Jeff Clark said, in a statement. “Ensuring brand safety and trust in programmatic is a guiding principle for everything we do at Post Media.”
“Since the beginning, the goal of CPAX has been to provide premium inventory in a clean, brand safe and transparent programmatic environment. We want buyers to have access to legitimate Canadian inventory,” added Brad Jeffrey, senior director of strategic partnerships at Index Exchange. “The addition of The Chronicle Herald, DHX Television, Post Media and Yellow Pages speaks volumes to CPAX’s reach, and is clear proof that there is strong market demand for premium inventory at scale.”
Update 04/20: Yellow Pages’ audience-buying subsidiary, Mediative, has confirmed that as part of Yellow Pages’ membership it will have a seat on the exchange as a buyer. Mediative VP platforms and technology Jon de la Mothe said that the conversation to join CPAX began with the goal of gaining access to the exchange’s premium inventory for the company’s advertiser clients, and from there expanded to adding Yellow Pages inventory to the exchange.
“CPAX is a group of like-minded publishers on the same mission when it comes to improving the programmatic space in Canada, specifically when it comes to issues like fraud, and excessive arbitrage,” he said.
“I think the CPAX 2.0 refresh last summer was the big reset the entire market needed and immediately moved the conversation to one of quality and performance. This is just the approach we want to have with our partners — real conversations between real people about the programmatic set-up that is performing best for their objectives.”
