City AM details ‘automated guarantee’ programmatic plan as it starts to revamp its site
With its plan to create a premium programmatic proposition now underway, City AM has high hopes for its potential to carve out interesting premium data buys alongside its display activity.
City AM launched its programmatic business in 2015 but it’s moved to an automated process of selling guaranteed ad space that doesn’t involve an auction with Ad Eye. That shift to so called ‘automated guaranteed’ is heralded as a game changer by many media experts because for the first time publishers can guarantee campaigns to advertisers for any point in the future.
Ad Eye allows City AM to expose their first party data segments so they can be bought directly via the platform. These audiences can only be bought via the platform and are not replicated elsewhere.
For advertisers, that level of assurance means they can be more forward thinking around how they buy media, while importantly having a predetermined CPM. City AM controls the pricing and its sales executives can accept or decline bids using the Ad Eye user interface as well determine CPMs. Not only that, ‘automated guaranteed’ streamlines traditional workflows around the way City AM’s inventory is traded, creating a faster buying and selling process that’s less prone to errors and raising the possibility of global frequency capping to reduce waste.
While this way of trading media is still finding its feet – Google only started offering it to publishers and advertisers at the start of the year – City AM predicts it will drive future growth for its programmatic business. “Yes it could quite feasibly become a core part of our revenue contribution, and as the awareness of ‘automate guarantee’ increases, I expect revenues to follow suit,” said the publisher’s chief operating officer Charles Yardley.
The move comes as the publisher monitors viewability rates of the ads on its site, which is in the first phase of its redesign. We are continuing to monitor viewability and are currently working with Integral Ad Science,” said Yardley. “The site will evolve and change again in the coming weeks as we continue to work on the next phase.”