Marketers want to reach underserved audiences. But the open programmatic marketplace makes that difficult.
The phaseout of third-party cookies and other identity signals means that it’s harder to know who’s on the other side of an ad impression. And brand safety blocklists tend to flag content that appeals to women and minorities as unsafe. Terms like “Black Lives Matter” or “abortion” are commonly blocked.
However, private marketplaces (PMPs) can make it easier for advertisers to reach specific audiences across multiple publishers, because ad buyers need more inventory scale if they’re narrowing their audience target. And advertisers can tailor their brand safety guidelines specifically to these PMPs.
For these reasons, SHE Media, a collective of lifestyle publishing brands primarily geared toward women, announced a strategic partnership with Colossus SSP on Thursday.
In addition to establishing another pipe for programmatic demand, Colossus will add SHE Media’s network of minority- and woman-owned publishing brands to its own minority-focused PMPs.
“As the publishing landscape continues to evolve, we want to support independent voices,” said Kate Calabrese, SVP of media solutions at SHE Media. “This strategic partnership with Colossus provides a connection point for brands to reach qualified, addressable audiences.”
Seeking scale
SHE Media’s publisher network includes the flagship owned-and-operated brands SheKnows, Flow Space, StyleCaster, Soaps and BlogHer, plus a network of 5,000 independent sites and content creators. The Penske Media-owned company says it reaches 74 million monthly visitors.
In 2021, SHE Media launched Meaningful Marketplaces — a network of minority- and women-owned publishers — in response to ad buyers pushing themselves to support diverse media and audiences.
The scale of SHE Media and its Meaningful Marketplaces network was particularly appealing for Colossus, said CEO Lashawnda Goffin. Colossus is always looking to add to its network of diverse-owned sites, which accounts for 20% to 25% of its publisher mix, she said.
Incremental demand
Colossus’s minority-owned status also helps bring demand that other SSPs can’t provide, Goffin said, because advertisers are trying to spend more of their budgets with minority-owned tech partners, too.
Despite recent backlash to DEI-influenced spending policies (commitments that some publishers always considered insincere and fleeting), Colossus and SHE Media see room to grow by leaning into the value of diverse audiences.
There was an uptick in deliberate spending on diverse publishers in 2020, Goffin said. But instead of remaining a diversity box to check, many of those commitments are becoming normalized as advertisers see a return on their investment. “We’re letting the media speak for itself,” she said.
Curation and contextual
The relationship between SHE Media and Colossus is still in the integration phase, so no real campaigns have been run yet.
While it’s too soon to say how much revenue will go through the PMP, Calabrese said that SHE Media will be watching how much unique demand Colossus can bring to the table.
Currently, Colossus is establishing connections to SHE Media’s sites and ingesting its contextual and audience data. That includes classifying site URLs according to the IAB Tech Lab’s content taxonomy, tagging the sites’ diverse-owned status for inclusion in PMP deals, implementing pricing floors and ensuring alignment on ID matches using SHE Media’s first-party audience data.
And Colossus’s PMP curation benefits because SHE Media has been breaking its sites and audiences into targetable lifestyle themes, such as women’s health, parenting, food, travel and entertainment, starting last year.
Not only does working with Colossus help brands discover these contextual segments, but it also allows SHE Media to take advantage of the industrywide shift to contextual targeting to deal with the loss of third-party cookies.
The partnership also helps SHE Media avoid dreaded blocklists, which have plagued some of its publishers in the past, Calabrese said.
Colossus encourages advertisers to instead create dedicated brand safety parameters for its PMPs, rather than relying on the same guidelines they use for open market buys.
“I can understand the need for precautions in the open exchange,” Goffin said, “but there has to be a level of trust when you are going to someone to curate for you.”
SHE Media hopes trust will grow as advertisers come to appreciate the sheer effort that publishers and SSPs undertake to ensure they’re building a premium editorial environment for brands, Calabrese added.
“There’s work to be done in creating an environment in which brands can surround content that’s appropriate in context,” she said, “but that might include some terms that, historically, brands have shied away from.”
