Pangaea adds Dennis' Alphr to its ranks to engage high value prosumers
Dennis Publishing’s tech-focused title Alphr is joining the Pangaea Alliance, bringing with it an audience segment of prosumers the collective of publishers believes will open new targeting opportunities for advertisers.
Alphr's audience of decision makers read the title for both business and pleasure, a niche audience commonly known as prosumers
The special interest title is the latest to join the premium audience network, sitting alongside titles such as Reuters, CNN, the Guardian and Fast Company, offering to advertisers a suite of lucrative verticals like business, finance and luxury goods.
Having the opportunity to boost programmatic yields by offering these brand-safe, fraud-free environments is quickly becoming a core aim for many publishers looking to premium-ise their inventory at scale. Hence why the media house struck a deal to bring The Week to the Pangaea Alliance in August, a move it claimed was a successful trial of how to trade excess inventory at higher prices than it would have otherwise sold.
Paul Hood, who heads digital for Dennis Publishing’s technology division, shared his initial observations with The Drum: “The spread of advertisers engaging with the Pangaea Alliance and the spend they are committing to this brand safe environment has exceeded our expectations so far.”
Pangaea hopes Alphr will boost advertiser demand even further, particularly given its readership largely consists of business decision makers such as chief information officers and chief technology officers.
However, rather than having to read about technology solely for their jobs, Alphr’s readers “love technology in the rest of their lives”, according to Hood. He further points out how this subtle difference is down to the “strong demand for this content proposition”, and is why it “fits in very well to the audience profile of a Pangaea reader”.
“The notion of remnant inventory is something of anathema to me,” continued Hood. “Remnant implies a left-over surplus that is therefore traded at low value. But as a special-interest publisher our M.O. is to create only high-quality content and events, which in turn deliver high-value audiences of in-market buyers. We're not in the low-value game. So one of our challenges is to find high-value solutions to the trading of any surplus inventory.”
Part of the attraction to Pangaea from the likes of Dennis is that unlike similar collectives, the issue of inventory being peddled at cheaper rates is a moot one, as Fiona McKinnon, general manager at the Pangaea Alliance, explained: “We work closely with Pub Ops teams to ensure Pangaea is in the right place in the stack to make sense for each business we work with, and sites contribute what makes sense for their own yield management strategy.
“Floor CPMs are agreed as an Alliance, Pangaea does not offer any discount from these agreed rates so that the publishers are confident that their valuable inventory is not being 'given away' through programmatic channels.”
McKinnon put to bed any potential concerns over the potential for individual publishers to lose-out on the uniqueness of their own insights. Pangaea does not collate data directly, it is shared to us from each publisher, she explained, meaning there is full transparency and agreement on what is shared between alliance members.
“It is the same for all publishers. We normalise data so that there is no way for an individual Publisher to gain from the data of another. Pangaea does not sell 1st party data, this remains the domain of the Publishers. We focus on the cross-site insight and finding those users at scale,” added McKinnon.
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