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Condé Nast Prepares First 'Private Deals' In Programmatic

Cona and StinchcombCondé Nast enjoyed a 3.3% growth in ad pages last quarter, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. While modest, this was the company's highest Q1 ad page gain – typically a weak ad quarter following the heavy holiday spending period – in five years.

Condé Nast Chief Revenue Officer Lou Cona and VP of Corporate Partnerships Josh Stinchcomb noted that digital revenues climbed 35% compared to last year, thanks in part to new targeting capabilities and an expansion of Condé's private exchange to embrace more valuable inventory.

Stinchcomb says, "We're now working on the first of what we call 'private deals,' where our clients would be able to use our programmatic buying tools to buy a whole host of inventory, including premium inventory."

Cona and Stinchcomb spoke with AdExchanger about the broadening of Condé's programmatic strategy and how print is both supporting and benefiting from online gains.

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Bezos Leads Business Insider's Latest Round - But The Pressure's On PubMatic

Blodget BezosBusiness Insider, the chief digital tabloid with its screaming headlines, bold commentary and incessant slideshows, attracts a lot of pageviews, controversy and ad spending. But the mix has left it grasping for profitability. Now, with Jeff Bezos' venture capital group leading a $5 million funding round -- bringing the total raised to $18.3 million over the past five years, notes Bloomberg's Ed Lee -- the pressure on BI to grow revenues is only going to intensify.

That's not to say that BI is shying away from high revenue expectations. (Or outside media attention, for that matter; BI and its founding editor Henry Blodget, were the subject of a Ken Auletta profile in this week's New Yorker.) As the that magazine pointed out, 85% of BI's revenues come from advertising sales and the site expects to draw $15 million in total revenues this year for what would be a 50% gain.

Given the importance of ad dollars— more than conferences or its subscription product — BI's decision to work with PubMatic on a private exchange to, in the words of Bridget Williams, SVP/business and audience development, "fill the middle layer," and augment its direct sales was no surprise.

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With Content The Draw, Scout Analytics Wants Publishers To Charge For It

scoutA variety of publisher analytics firms are analyzing the yield of the digital publisher today.  But for Scout Analytics, which is based just outside of Seattle, it’s not about better advertising yield as the end game.

The 40-person company lays claim to the optimization of well over $2 billion in annual client revenues according to CEO Mark Upson. He adds that his company’s goal - and its track record - has been to increase customer revenue 10-15% each year with particular focus on paid subscriptions in addition to advertising and commerce channels.  With a total website user base among its sell-side clients reaching 200 million registered or paying accounts, Scout has achieved significant scale to test, learn and provide solutions to publishers says Upson.

AdExchanger spoke to Upson recently about his company and the digital publishing landscape.

AdExchanger: There’s this publisher-side notion today about the "holistic yield management" of ads, content and commerce. What’s your take on all of that?

MARK UPSON: To us, the content is the draw and then comes how to monetize the content.

We’re proponents of if your content is good, you should be charging for it - in addition to having advertising.  It’s all about how differentiated your content is, how you’re building your audience and is your audience recurring. You could have a ton of unique visitors, but if they’re not recurring uniques, it’s not a long-term growth business.

As we see it, you have to pour so much money into just trying to keep people coming back to your site that if it hasn’t become a destination for them, it becomes challenging for you longer term.

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With 'CableFX,' The Weather Company Pushes Into Addressable TV

Curt Hecht, Global CROThe Weather Company, owner of The Weather Channel and its digital extensions, unveiled a plan to bring more addressability to its TV advertising.

Dubbed "CableFX," the new offering from the company’s WeatherFX Division brings existing "big data" to its local and regional TV targeting system. The idea  is to more closely bridge TWC's TV, web, tablet and mobile channels.

“Weather affects everything, and CableFX allows marketers to go from a passive ‘cope and avoid’ position to a proactive ‘anticipate and exploit’ approach, driving deeper connection with customers and better ROI with timely, relevant messaging,” Curt Hecht, global chief revenue officer for The Weather Company,  told the crowd at the company's upfront presentation on the 36th floor of the Mandarin Hotel in Manhattan.

The company's traditional focus has been on local targeting of people interested in weather -- dubbed "Weather Enthusiasts." But as Hecht told AdExchanger after the Wednesday morning presentation was over, the new strategy is to marshall data from the company's digital insights group, Weather FX, and bring it to bear on TV ads. 

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Examiner.com Shifts Away From Local In Favor 'Topics'

Ashish Kapur, ExaminerLike a lot of content aggregators, Examiner.com saw its traffic rise to new heights by focusing on search results, then saw the multitudes evaporate when Google changed its algorithm two years ago. Since then, the company has been trying to shift away from the hyperlocal model it had when it launched in 2008, and develop posts from "experts" on particular topic.

Last June, Ashish Kapur, who arrived at Examiner as COO in the fall of 2011 after serving as a top digital executive at Disney, was elevated to the CEO post. AdExchanger interviewed Kapur about Examiner's advertising strategy, which has evolved from relying on standard, direct response ads to brand sponsorships and native advertising. The company is now exploring how to augment its direct sales team with programmatic tools. A decision is expected before the summer.

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Gannett Sharpens Digital Ad Position Says CDO Payne

David Payne GannettEarlier this month, Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper chain, hosted a "digital upfront" designed to showcase the McLean, Va. media company's value across the web and mobile. After years of struggle, Gannett has recently begun to see strength in its traditional TV ad sales and newspaper circulation revenues, which gained 46 percent and 24 percent, respectively in Q4. But newspaper ad dollars have continued to slide, falling nearly 6 percent. In contrast, total digital revenues across Gannett increased 29 percent and represented 25 percent of total revenue, in part driven by properties like rich media provider PointRoll, which tapped Mario Diez, the former CEO of defunct newspaper joint venture quadrantONE, as its new head this week.

Given the pressure, the company has been working on building up its digital image, particularly for its flagship brand, USA Today, through its local integrated marketing programs and on its mobile and tablet apps. The message that Gannett is not just an "old media" company with some interactive extensions is what Chief Digital Officer David Payne and and CMO Maryam Banikarim have been shaping since the duo joined the company exactly two years ago.

AdExchanger decided to check in with Payne, a former CNN exec who previously founded video ad tech firm ShortTail Media, on how that message to marketers has evolved.

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Buzzmedia Becomes SpinMedia, With Plans To Balance Native Ads And Programmatic

SpinMedia Steve HansenSix months ago, when Steve Hansen was named CEO of blog network Buzzmedia, he realized that he shared a problem with the company's readers and advertisers: He had no idea what the company's identity amounted to.

This week, as Buzzmedia (not to be confused with BuzzFeed) rebrands as SpinMedia, after one of its newer properties, Hansen is now pursuing an ad strategy based primarily on native advertising. But he says it's keeping an eye on programmatic as well. In order to appeal to marketers and agencies who want to easily plug their messages into placements, SpinMedia will continue to offer standard units as it prepares to accept more exchange-based advertising.

"The emergence of real-time bidding is undeniable," Hansen said. "For the moment, RTB is a small percentage of our business, but it's growing. We feel the market is migrating more towards higher CPM, customizable solutions alongside programmatic offerings. We have to do both."

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First Week of March Madness: 36.6 Million Live Video Streams

Mobile March MadnessDuring the first week of college basketball's March Madness, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, there were 36.6 million live video streams across all digital platforms, according to the NCAA, Turner Sports, and CBS Sports.

This is more than twice the number of live video streams in 2012, which saw only 18.3 million for the entire multi-week tournament, and it adds up to 10 million hours of live video consumed. On broadband, there were 4.2 million unique visitors who watched an average of 105 minutes of live video per user.

The most popular games of the tournament, based on live video streams, were Valparaiso vs. Michigan State (1.84 million), Bucknell vs. Butler (1.78 million), and Mississippi vs. Wisconsin (1.78 million).

Advertising demand around the live player was also stronger this year, a Turner spokeswoman told AdExchanger in an email. This year, there were 40 clients advertising within the live video player, including AT&T, Capital One, and Coke Zero. Capital One sponsors the official bracket game of March Madness on smartphones, tablets, and other devices, while Coke Zero and AT&T sponsor the real-time video highlights being shared on Twitter.

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Time Inc. Keeps Spinning, CRO Caine Departs, Helped Establish Publisher's Programmatic Plans

Paul CaineEven as its parent Time Warner works on spinning off Time Inc. into its own separately traded entity, the company has been pursuing a more aggressive approach to programmatic ad sales the past few months --  albeit quietly.

But it will have to go forward without two champions of that process. Earlier today, Chief Revenue Officer Paul Caine announced he will leave the company after 23 years to become CEO of Dial Global, a producer and distributor of audio content. Read the release.

Caine's exit comes ahead of the departure of CEO Laura Lang, the digital vet who was brought in early last year to sharpen Time Inc.'s digital efforts in the face of industry-wide print declines. Lang will step down once parent company Time Warner completes the spin-off of the publisher into a separate, publicly traded entity.

Caine spoke with AdExchanger last week, before announcing his departure. He said Time Inc's plan is to ensure the company's flagship Time, People, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated can resist marketer and agency cherry-picking by presenting opportunities that satisfy both its traditional direct sales model and the choice buyers are demanding.

Caine hadn't let on that he would be leaving, but wanted to make the case that the publisher was more ready now than before to face the digital present and future of the content and ad sales business.

AdExchanger: How does an established magazine company like Time Inc. feel about the trend of audience buying?

PAUL CAINE: Magazines have always been about "audience buying." Brands attract certain types of consumers and those consumers are usually defined by either demography or psychographic group or some level of collective identification that would determine them to be an audience. By that nature, magazines were often bought by advertisers to try to reach a composition of a specific audience. That’s the history of our business. As we go forward the concept of selling audience is not a foreign concept to our medium and as we’ve gone into digital and mobile and tablet we now have even more data that allows us to be more targeted towards audiences in more unique and more dynamic ways. That has been a growth opportunity for us on a consumer level and on an editorial development level.

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Business Insider Filling 'The Middle Layer' With Private Marketplaces

bridgetThe private marketplace - or exchange - strategy has been bubbling for several years as large publishers look to collect programmatic media budgets from advertisers that are hunting audience across "brand-safe" sites. On Wednesday, sell-side platform PubMatic announced that business news site Business Insider had signed on as a client for its private marketplace product. See the release.

AdExchanger spoke to BI's Senior VP of Business and Audience Development Bridget Williams about the company's private marketplace offering and programmatic media.

AdExchanger: As it relates to programmatic, what do you see as the big challenges for a publisher of your size today?

BRIDGET WILLIAMS:  Well, today, it's a much better landscape than it was even a few years ago. There is a volume of spending that has moved over to what I’d call “network spending” or “audience spending.” For publishers, previously, it was a black hole. You either participated or you didn't. And, if you participated, people were selling against your audience.  Programmatic feels more encouraging to me in its current form because I have transparency into what's happening - and more control. And, with the private marketplace, [it creates] the direct relationship with the advertiser.

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