Tamedia pushes programmatic advertising

Swiss software company Mediahead has developed a booking tool that offers agencies and clients easy and programmatic access to digital advertising inventory, according to a statement. Effective immediately, the programmatically available inventory of the Tamedia sites 20minuten.ch, Newsnet - consisting of the seven news sites 24heures, Basler Zeitung, Berner Zeitung, Der Bund, Le Matin, Tribune de Genève and Tages-Anzeiger - and Search.ch is listed as a separate category on Mediahead and can thus be purchased automatically with just a few mouse clicks.

Programmatic buying marks the beginning of a new era in media processing in Switzerland. Tamedia and Mediahead are at the forefront of this as innovators: On the provider side, Tamedia, in that the titles of the media house make relevant advertising inventory available for softare-supported buying. The Tamedia universe reaches over 74 percent of all Swiss Internet users and does so in a premium environment. On the demand side, the Swiss software start-up Mediahead, whose booking software makes it easy for advertisers to buy and process advertising placements in real time.

"As a publishing house, we believe that in the future a relevant share of digital advertising will be handled programmatically. With Mediahead, we have a partner that makes programmatic access to our inventory even easier for customers and agencies," says Stephan Obwegeser, Head of Digital Advertising & Services at Tamedia. Mediahead's goal is to make the RTA world, previously reserved for only a few specialists, accessible to a broad marketing audience. Mediahead CEO Remo Prinz on the collaboration: "Now that Tamedia, the market player with the largest Swiss advertising volume, has jumped on the bandwagon, an ecosystem can be established whose pricing is characterized by a direct line between advertiser and publisher."

Programmatic buying is part of a fundamental change that has swept the advertising and media industry, starting in the USA and the UK in Europe. In the area of display advertising, around four billion Swiss francs of display advertising was transacted worldwide in 2013; by 2017, this figure will already be 20 billion (source: IDC, 2013). For advertisers, programmatic buying of advertising space increases the effectiveness of the advertising budget used, while automated sales improve yield management for publishers and reduce acquisition costs. On both sides, automation in the processing of campaign budgets leads to lower transaction costs. The background that both advertisers and publishers benefit from this development is the driver for the rapid development.