Publishing Trade Body Digital Content Next Announces Online Ad Marketplace
September 25 2016 - 10:40PM
Dow Jones News
Digital media trade body Digital Content Next is launching an
automated online ad marketplace called TrustX, in a bid to bring
more transparency to online advertising.
The ad marketplace, or "ad exchange," will allow marketers to
buy ad space across properties owned by 25 media companies,
including ABC, Condé Nast, Hearst, NBCUniversal, the Washington
Post, Meredith, ESPN, Vox Media and News Corp, which owns The Wall
Street Journal.
The marketplace will function as a non-profit subsidiary of DCN
and is designed to help restore some transparency to the
increasingly complicated online advertising supply chain, according
to DCN Chief Executive Jason Kint.
"It was clear that to move the needle on trust in the market, we
needed to get in the game in a more direct way," Mr. Kint said.
With no outside investors and no profit motives, TrustX will
focus on driving long-term benefits to marketers and publishers,
DCN said.
TrustX will guarantee that marketers will only pay for ads that
real consumers can actually view, as opposed to ads served to
non-human or "bot" traffic. It also promises to provide marketers
and publishers with complete transparency about the cost of
campaign delivery, in an attempt to reduce the fees that are
sometimes charged by multiple parties in complicated online ad
arrangements.
Mr. Kint said he expects the marketplace to be operational by
early next year. It's unclear how much ad space participating
publishers will actually make available through the TrustX
marketplace.
Online publishers typically work with a range of automated ad
sales platforms in attempt to wring as much revenue from their ad
space as possible. As a result, it's likely they will test the
TrustX marketplace to see how it compares with other sales
opportunities before committing large portions of their ad space to
it.
Nonetheless, participating publishers say they support TrustX's
principles.
"We became a 'TrustX' Founder because we're seeing a growing gap
between the trusted experiences and performance that advertisers
enjoy with premium publishers versus the open programmatic markets
across the wider web," said Dave Morris, executive vice president
and chief revenue officer at CBS Interactive, in a prepared
statement.
"TrustX's mission to create a high-quality marketplace through
transparency based on engagement and viewability, is a much-needed
evolution for the industry and a movement with which we are in full
alignment," Lisa Valentino, senior vice president of network sales
and partnerships at Condé Nast, said in a statement.
Ad tech development company Iponweb has been selected to build
the underlying technology to power the TrustX marketplace, DCN
said.
TrustX participants are prepaying fees for the marketplace's
initial development and deployment costs. They will be paid back
these fees in the form of service credits after TrustX becomes cash
flow positive, Mr. Kint said.
Publishers have experimented with similar programmatic ad
alliances in the past, with varying degrees of success.
Gannett, Tribune Publishing, McClatchy and the Hearst newspaper
group joined forces to create Nucleus Marketing Solutions in April,
in an effort to leverage their geographic reach and combined scale
to help marketers more effectively target their ads.
In early 2015, the Guardian, CNN International, the Financial
Times, Reuters and the Economist said they were banding together to
form a programmatic sales alliance called Pangaea.
In France, a similar effort called La Place Media has been
operational since 2012.
Write to Jack Marshall at Jack.Marshall@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 25, 2016 23:25 ET (03:25 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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