The Minneapolis Star Tribune goes Programmatic… is it working?

By Naor

The Minneapolis newspaper is a publisher that has embraced the world of automated ad buying.

ResponsiveDaily‘s insight:
This seems to be the growing trend for publishers that can not maintain their ad sales teams.  They have found a balance and leveraged the private marketplace to do so.

“Programmatic for me becomes a way for me to capture brand and direct-response dollars while still pushing high impact premiums that are directly sold,” Faust said. “Once upon a time, we looked at the workhorse as all we offered — leaderboard, skyscrapers. Now those opportunities are programmatic. We push direct for Rising Stars units. Ideally, programmatic would adopt scale around those ad units; the workhorses need to be put out to pasture.”

The Rubicon Project’s private marketplace gives the publishers the ability to manage the advertisers and let them bid out the inventory.  We see this as an opportunity where they want to start to balance between mobile and desktop and need creative options to do so.

See on www.digiday.com