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Media alliances – buzzword or long-term sustainable business model?

By Martin Bojtos, sales director

November 22, 2018 | 4 min read

Most publishers know some collaboration is needed in the face of Google and Facebook but what it looks like and what shape it takes is quite difficult to ascertain.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

/ Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

We often get asked at Pangaea how we’ve made it work for nearing four years, so here are my tips on how to create a long-standing, self-sufficient alliance that works for everyone.

1. Be on the front foot, not defensive

If a would-be alliance or a publisher was to launch a product now would it be purely to defend the spend that they get or to appeal to advertisers? The worst thing an alliance can do is be built with the main purpose to run “against Google and Facebook” but seemingly not with brands and agencies in mind. After all, why would advertisers buy something that doesn’t benefit them? The starting point has to be – what does this add to their media plans, their routines, their service to clients? If it’s purely a protectionist move, it’s doomed to fail.

2. Have a point of difference

The beauty of programmatic is that agencies and advertisers have access to all sites around the world at any time. So why buy through an alliance? The offering has to have a point of difference – for us, it’s access to a hard-to-reach business-led audience who are heavily AB1 but are quite often found in pockets. By bringing these together and overlaying audience data, we’re able to make this audience easy to access at scale to add to a publisher’s own activity.

3. Build trust

Pangaea works because our publishers trust us – we operate with Chinese walls that keep information private for the benefit of their business, but it also allows us to create a unique proposition through our offering. The main driver for trust is motivation – too many companies have come knocking and looking to make huge margins from publishers in the past and they are understandably wary. We operate as a not-for-profit, returning all earnings to publishers beyond a split to cover our costs and we do not hold on to any money. This way our publishers and our clients know we are creating a clean, transparent marketplace in which to transact.

4. Encourage collaboration

By bringing together different companies, alliance members have access to varied expertise and knowledge. Collaboration between all parties helps to uncover and solve issues that affect everyone and move the needle for each. Last year, we were awarded by Google’s Digital News Initiative Fund to build a product for the Alliance. An initial blockchain idea was pivoted once we realised what our publishers really needed was a holistic view of activity across all of their SSPs. Project Arete was born, and we have now launched a prototype that is being taken to market all on the back of collaboration. This adds a huge amount of value to our members for a relatively small outlay of time.

The publishing industry is in a state of flux but sunny uplands are on the horizon. Much as the music industry suffered a major downturn in the age of the download, before its recent resurgence with the widespread adoption of paid-for streaming, we will see a flight to quality in publishing as advertisers realise that issues like ad fraud can be mitigated by working more closely with quality publishers. As a way of facilitating that, we can see a bright future for both publishers and alliances.

Martin Bojtos is sales director, The Pangaea Alliance, for The Drum November 2018

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