A planner could sift through the thousands of private marketplace packages available on media platforms to help a client buy placements for a Mother’s Day sale.
Or she could open up Kantar Media’s email on Mother’s Day and find a curated list of packages, including pricing information. Presto! Insta-plan.
WPP-owned Kantar Media officially launched its Groupon-style email newsletter Tuesday. The newsletter offers a curated list of private marketplace and automated guaranteed packages around events like the Super Bowl or Black Friday, along with groups like tech enthusiasts or auto intenders. It includes pricing information for each package along with a site’s size.
The email, which goes out to more than 10,000 buyers (including many subscribers to planning platform SRDS.com), beta launched at the end of last year.
“No one has taken the newsletter model of curating and pushing out ideas to the multibillion[-dollar] advertising market,” said Dina Srinivasan, managing director of emerging media for Kantar Media SRDS.
Kantar Media provides strategic information to media buyers, including pricing and details for premium programmatic buys via SRDS.com. The company hopes the newsletter will bring liquidity to the premium side of the programmatic market.
“If the entire ecosystem is moving toward programmatic, it means the entire ecosystem is moving toward transparency and streamlined buying,” Srinivasan said. She added that she hopes the newsletter can capitalize on that push.
“We have all these partnerships in place with the programmatic guys. We’re all aligned in the interest with having the market move toward programmatic,” Srinivasan said.
However, planners can’t just click to buy a package they see in the email. “The path to buy is often set in stone by internal agency processes. We’re trying to influence how stuff is purchased,” Srinivasan said.
During beta, an Earth Day newsletter gave the trading desk at eEffective an idea for a solar client.
“We got it in front of our media planning team, and the client jumped on board,” said Nate Carter, managing director of eEffective. “It gives us the opportunity to centralize not just inventory, but a psychographic or a specific event.”
Early on, Kantar Media realized it needed to interview publishers to gain additional information for buyers.
“We want to get deeper into the publisher’s story,” Srinivasan said. When it can, it adds information about the priority assigned to the package and details about a publisher’s first-party data.
For publishers, inclusion in the newsletter offers more potential buyers in a rapidly growing segment.
“Private marketplace inventory is such an important line item to publishers right now, and all the major publishers are trying to figure out how to grow that line item,” Srinivasan said.
