Guardian Australia to represent new programmatic Pangaea alliance down under
The Guardian Australia will be the local sales representative of a new global digital advertising partnership, unveiled this evening, which will bring together The Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters.
The Pangaea Alliance will allow media buyers to access some of the world’s biggest publisher’s online inventory programmatically, with the promise of a large premium audience available easily through the alliance’s use of Rubicon Project technology.
“For us in Australia, this is a huge opportunity to be out in market with something really meaty that I think it will want to pay attention to,” said Duncan Arthur, commercial director of The Guardian Australia.
“Many publishers get overshadowed by these pure play digital networks. The aim of the game is to challenge those online giants and certainly individually we will find it hard to compete with those guys but together it allows us to compete on a slightly more levelled playing field.”
The Guardian is not the first publisher to try and challenge the might of Google and Facebook in the digital programmatic space with Fairfax and Mi9 also launching an Australian premium publisher’s exchange in late 2014.
“This is about quality inventory, quality audiences at scale,” said Arthur.
“This is an opportunity for all the partners involved to come to the fast moving programmatic market with something really compelling.”
Pangaea brings together CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters as founding partners, along with the Economist, which will also be providing access to advertising inventory but will not be a partner in the allance.
The alliance will launched in beta from April 2015 and will offer advertisers the ability to access inventory across the group of premium publishers.
“This opportunity will extend to a wide range of agencies and brands that want to harness the power of the innovative platforms, rich content mix and large-scale premium audiences delivered through Pangaea,” said Rani Raad, chief commercial officer, CNN International, in a statement.
