Although it may feel like programmatic advertising has been around forever, it’s actually “still new and it’s still very much involving,” says Condé Nast’s Jim Norton.
Along the way, the industry has gone from an open-bidded marketplace where it was “a bit of spray and pray and hope you get good impressions and good audiences” to a much more refined way in which to transact media, Norton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
The state of the programmatic world will be explored this month at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade show on Sept. 13 and 14 in Cologne, Germany.
Norton, who is Chief Business Officer and President, Revenue at Condé Nast, has a deep background in the digital space. It includes three years at Google as National Sales Manager and nearly seven at AOL, where his last position was Global Head of Media Sales.
Much of his role at the venerable magazine publisher is figuring out the best ways to leverage the efficiency of programmatic but “still be able to deliver against the great content and audiences that Condé Nast provides.”
While traditional agencies have driven the trend toward programmatic, primarily from an efficiency standpoint, their clients have not sat by idly. Condé Nast increasingly sees individual advertisers become more educated on such aspects of the business as header bidding.
Like other publishing mainstays, Condé Nast draws a distinction between itself and digital powerhouses like Facebook and Google by stressing trusted audiences and brand-safe environments.
“What Condé Nast offers is the ability to find that efficiency from a transactional standpoint but yet still be able to, in a programmatic setting, ensure brand safety and viewability when it comes to video,” Norton says.
He cites fashion and luxury marketers as among those whose storytelling has evolved from basic print spread placements to vehicles like short films.
“What we like to think of ourselves as is rooted in quality content and brand safety through trusted journalism but the ability to be really flexible in the way those brand stories get told.”
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
