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Audience Square: a second
alliance in France
T
he French market saw the
launch of a second alliance –
Audience Square – a few months
after La Place Media. Audience
Square was founded by Le Monde,
Les Echos, Prisma Média, M6,
L’Express
and
Libération
and
now includes the stakeholders
Express Roularta, NextRadioTV,
Nouvel Observateur, Le Point, CCM
Benchmark and RTL Net.
In addition to offering inventory
from different groups of publishers,
Audience Square and La Place Media
are delivered by different technology
partners; the Audience Square
platform is powered by AppNexus,
with targeting capabilities from
the French data company Ezakus,
which has developed a technique to
build lookalike audiences based on
customers’ purchasing behaviour,
thereby increasing the value of
inventory.
Publisher co-operatives
extend throughout Europe
and beyond
P
ublisher co-operatives are par-
ticularly attractive in smaller
markets, where automation offers
significant advantages to both buy-
ers and sellers. Examples include
the Danish Publisher Network (DPN,
or Dansk Udgivernetværk, DUV, in
Danish) and the Czech Publisher Ex-
change (CPEx), while the trend has
continued beyond Europe’s borders
with RPA Media Place in Argentina
and the Kiwi Premium Advertising
Exchange (KPEX) in New Zealand.
The concept has recently been ex-
tended to reach audiences at global
scale, with the Guardian-led Pan-
gaea Alliance. With a claimed global
audience of over 200 million influ-
ential individuals, Pangaea offers
advertising inventory from publish-
ers including The Guardian, CNN In-
ternational, The Financial Times and
Reuters.
The Media Exchange: a
new way to trade audio
inventory
T
he Media Exchange is an
independent
programmatic
online audio trading platform,
established in 2013 by two Dutch
entrepreneurs. The platform allows
media agencies to buy digital audio
inventory on dozens of web-only
radio stations, including the digital
brand extensions of the Netherlands’
top radio broadcasters as well as a
number of publishers offering niche
programming.
The technology allows inventory to
be traded in real time, and it brings
the accuracy of digital measurement
to audio for the first time. Marketers
can also better understand the
true impact of their campaigns
by, for example, correlating audio
impressions with visits to a brand’s
website.
In a recent update, The Media Ex-
change included the capability to
add demographic data to the reach
figures for online audio streams
through a partnership with the re-
search company MSI-ACI Europe.
Digital audio campaigns delivered
through The Media Exchange now
carry a measurement pixel, which
gives a census-based reach figure.
This also allows demographic data
the FlexTrack panel, which was de-
veloped for the Dutch market by
MSC-ACI and the media agency
Mindshare, to be appended to the
reach figures.
While The Media Exchange is an in-
dependent organisation, the success
of this initiative is dependent on the
close cooperation of some of the
leading radio broadcasters and audio
publishers in the Netherlands, and
the platform represents an import-
ant stepping stone towards a truly
end-to-end programmatic trading
environment for the market. Coop-
erations such as this provide scale,
data and convenience to buyers of
online audio advertising and give au-
dio publishers strong arguments to
promote their offers.