The road to “programmatic premium,” once a cow path, has become a highway (OK, maybe a county road) cutting through the heart of ad land. And Google can’t take its foot off the gas pedal.
The company on Wednesday rolled out a programmatic video marketplace called Google Partner Select and announced support for direct deals through the DoubleClick platform.
The new video exchange will aggregate supply from big name media companies focused on producing quality video ads. So far, only Time Inc. has been identified as a participant, but Google has promised agency partners that other high-caliber media companies are in the pipeline.
On the demand side, Google is positioning its Partner Select inventory to attract large brands and agencies clamoring for programmatic access to high-quality video ads. Google can help accelerate the efforts of agencies to strike individual deals with media companies, according to Steve Katelman, EVP for global strategic partnerships, digital, at Omnicom Media Group.
“We’ve done private marketplaces for individual publishers and individual brands for some time now. What this promises to be is much bigger scale – top video publishers and buyers,” Katelman said. “We have teams that source video inventory directly. Now Google is joining the party. We both want to do this in a hand-selected fashion so working with them should dramatically increase our ability.”
Details are still sketchy on Google’s plans to support reserved media buys, an opportunity that many companies are trying to seize. Its competitors in this area include Rubicon Project, PubMatic, Mediaocean and AppNexus, to name a few.
In a blog post, VP for Display Advertising Products Neal Mohan wrote, “This new option is meant to help streamline what today can be a cumbersome process, involving days of back-and-forth negotiations, dozens of phone calls and sometimes, yes, a fax machine. We hope brands and publishers will be able to spend less time on logistics and more time building partnerships and winning creative and content.”
Google will discuss its video exchange and reserve media offerings at its Client Advisory Board event Thursday. Watch the live stream.
