HOLLYWOOD, Florida – Meredith Corporation’s Chief Digital Officer is bullish on server-to-server ad auction integration. “We think it has a lot of value,” says Matt Minoff. “Anything we can do that decreases latency on the page, improves user experience while simultaneously driving incremental revenue growth is a positive.”
Moreover, Minoff hopes to see the day when “that will be the only way that people are integrated and we won’t have to have as many people loaded up on the page.” Meredith is working with partners like Index Exchange “who are trying to lead the charge on doing server- to-server integrations,” he adds.
As AdExchanger reports, some people believe that server-to-server integration represents the next step in the evolution of auction dynamics.
In an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, Minoff traces the development of programmatic ad selling at Meredith, calling it “a very important part of our monetization strategy.”
While the publisher’s programmatic sales people build out Meredith’s private marketplace business and try to drive up the value of its inventory in open marketplaces, its direct sellers focus more on what Minoff terms “non-IAB formats” like branded content, video, and social.
“We rely on our programmatic teams to continue to sell our more standard display inventory and pre-roll video inventory,” Minoff says. “We’ve made a lot of strides in the last few years. It’s been a big part of our growth.”
Asked about Meredith’s presence on sites other than those of its own brands, Minoff notes that large followings on Facebook and Pinterest in particular remain important user acquisition vehicles, along with search. The company prefers that users access its site directly, according to Minoff.
“At the end of the day, our focus is on continuing to bring people to our sites to become brand loyalists and to be users that come back on a habitual basis,” he says.
Reflecting on the IAB confab and its various themes, Minoff sees a trend in the willingness to collaborate among advertisers, agencies and publishers.
“I think we all realize that we need each other in order to be successful,” Minoff says. “Whether it’s topics like viewability or identity and attribution, there seems to be more of an openness in collaborating and working together to get to better results.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
