Cox Media, the ad sales division of Cox Communications, one of the largest broadcast service providers in the US, has partnered with an automated ad platform to begin selling linear TV inventory programmatically.
According to a report on MediaPost, the deal was reached with advertising platform clypd and will also enable Cox advertisers and agencies to leverage data to plan and buy its TV inventory.
Cox has not revealed how much inventory it will put into the platform, but the company’s vice president of business development and operations, Mike Zeigler, said it is part of an ongoing strategy to leverage digital technology as the company looks to open up new advertising options.
“Cox was an early innovator in offering video-on-demand advertising, interactive advertising, and we are now excited to offer national brand advertisers the ability to use this new, efficient programmatic platform to integrate agency ad buys directly with Cox Media ad inventory,” Zeigler said on Monday.
In November last year, Videology’s head of global TV strategies, Rhys McLachlan, said that all media will become programmatic as automated trading desks witness new levels of growth.
Speaking to Newsline at MediaTel’s 2013 Automated Trading Debate, McLachlan said it will be very difficult to “fight the rising tide” of automated trading, “irrespective of your media.”
Automated trading, which sees electronic platforms used to enter trading orders with an algorithm which executes pre-programmed instructions, has seen steady growth in the UK ad industry, but still only represents around 20% of all trading according to some estimates.
The automated trading systems, currently, are also focused on a fairly narrow slice of the media, but they are expanding and evolving.
For many industry experts, however, it is not television, but print that offers the most interesting opportunities given it already has online brands and the print transaction is the easiest to make work with automated trading desks.
Currently, the newspaper industry is looking to set up a new trading system with news of the new system expected later this year.
