"The rulebook of how display media is bought and sold here in Europe is slowly being ripped up. Automated channels are not only empowering publishers to better monetise non-premium invenotry but also helping to augment their reach. It's the latter which is of real interest to progressive sell-side agents at present. The ability to access a mass of inventory can help publishers build out their current advertising options, and get access to new media buying spend.

I think niche publishers are in the best position to really take advantage of these new buying opportunites. Let's take the example of the FT. They arguably have the best data on any financial audience in the UK - better than any agency, ad network or publisher. Let's say that a direct advetiser or agency is planning a pan-euoprean camapaign aimed at a specific busines audience. The FT could easily meet the UK campaign objectives, but the agency or advertiser would have to look at buying inventory on European sites (quite an arduous task I've been told). Now if the FT had a dedicated exchange trading operation, its sales team could win more budget for the campaign. By buying inventory across the European exchanges the FT could augment its reach. It could theoretically target that European inventory against its own data or cookies bought from Exelate or BlueKai (although I hear that both don't have any really qulaity data sets for Europe).

Augmenting reach might not be the only motivating factor for hiring specilaist exchange traders. Access to exchange inventory and third party data can help a publisher fill blind spots in its advertising offering. Let's look at a publisher who might not have a strong offeirng in the highly lucrative auto vertical. They could conceivably buy media on auto-related sites throught the automated channels (Adx, RightMedia, Admeld, etc) and data from third parties. That publisher now has a new offering for advertisers (especially for free spending auto brands like Kia). Granted some of this invnetory wouldn't be great for brand advertising. But with access to the same inventory/data as the DSPs and ad nets there's no reason why publsihers can't send out their sales guys to win new business in verticals they've not been particularly strong in.

The lesson here for publsihers is to get to grips with the exchanges and ignore the traditional demarcation of display media buying. Soon everyone will be a seller and buyer anyway.