National ad agencies and their clients like buying their ads programmatically on digital platforms and they’ve been pushing radio to go there.
Now, iHeartMedia and Katz say they have.
IHeartMedia has launched a programmatic and automated ad buying platform for its 850+ broadcast stations. At the same time, national sales rep firm Katz Media Group will also introduce a programmatic buying ad exchange for the industry called Expressway from Katz; cloud-based technology company Jelli is providing the underlying technology for both of the ad exchanges.
Proponents of programmatic ad buying say it’s faster and more targeted to the right audience than traditional media buys. That’s what Jelli CEO and Co-founder Mike Dougherty told Radio World earlier this year.
IHeart says the announcements are huge, both for itself, and the radio industry. “Programmatic is already an important and expected method of ad buying in the digital space. Now we can bring broadcast radio into that world at a scale no digital audio provider can offer,” said iHeartMedia Chairman/CEO Bob Pittman.
Horizon Media is a charter user of the ad-buying service, which company President/CEO Bill Koenigsberg said “allows us to finally combine the tremendous power of radio advertising in a cost-effective and responsive way with unique and real-time targeting capabilities.”
Combining this technology with listener insights and data, brands will have a more seamless buying and ad-serving process, ultimately helping to reach the most relevant audience with the right message, at scale, according to the company.
Meanwhile, Katz reps more than 275 broadcasters, including iHeartMedia, Cumulus, Entercom and Cox; it will launch what the company said is the first industry-wide programmatic buying ad exchange for radio called “Expressway from Katz.”
Katz Media Group President Mark Rosenthal says the new system will give the “radio industry an additional way to sell, putting this industry ahead of even the newest digital companies.”
According to President of Cox Media Group Bill Hoffman, programmatic ad buying saves time and “significantly improves our ability to target our customers, and makes it easier to scale buys.”
“The ability to deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment is the holy grail of advertising, and we are just beginning to deliver on that promise across devices,” says David Cohen, chief investment officer of media agency UM. “Activating music-based psychographic groups, automatically triggering campaigns using weather and traffic patterns, purchase behavior and other environmental, population and consumer trends is something that we cannot wait to put into the market.”
