A new report from INMA shows how media companies can capitalise on programmatic buying as digital advertising sales evolve.

Programmatic advertising opportunities for news publishers has been written by consultant Matt Prohaska. It provides history and context on programmatic advertising sales, the market opportunities for news publishers, the local advertising landscape for programmatic, and “where this space is going next”.

Case studies from leading news media companies worldwide support the text.

Prohaska was the New York Times’ first programmatic advertising director, and claims to have closed more programmatic direct campaigns during his tenure than any other publisher in the world.

“Programmatic sales will represent the majority of digital advertising sales by 2017,” he says.

Media companies need to:

• Accelerate learning about the new economics of digital advertising;

• Understand programmatic advertising is at the heart of those new economics, with real-time bidding (RTB) an important sub-set;

• Plug into the emerging technology infrastructure to facilitate programmatic advertising; and

• Invest in people, technology, and vendors to move quickly in this space.

Among issues Prohaska tackles are questions like ‘what is programmatic advertising’, ‘what is a tech stack, and why is it important’, ‘what does the “plumbing” of a tech stack look like’… or an ad server; yield management; exchanges; data management platforms; and publisher trading desks?

He discusses the differences between open and private exchanges, where the display ad spend is expected to go, the different transaction types, and the benefits to buyers and sellers and the imbalance between them.

The report also looks at the limitations of existing advertising exchanges, how publisher sales teams are progressing towards programmatic, and how a publisher's audience data be further leveraged.

The report is free to members or US$695 to others. More details from the INMA website