HOLLYWOOD, Florida -- Magazine and digital publisher Time Inc is shooting toward a future where it can sell across the spectrum - from high-touch, human sales, to automated online transactions.
Now the outfit is bolstering that last part, by making an acquisition which will put more of the automation power in the hands of its ad buyers.
Last year, Time Inc bought itself in to the ad-tech ecosystem, by acquiring ad data outfit Viant. Now Viant is making an acquisition of its own.
In January, the company announced it is buying Waltham, MA-based Adelphic, a six-year-old demand-side platform for ad buyers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Time Inc global data commercialisation VP Judith Hammerman explains the company wants to cover both ends of the chain.
"There's a piece of (Time Inc) ... that is a more curated (advertising) opportunity," she says.
"That doesn't mean we can't (also) put automation, data and people behind it. More and more, people want automation, and they want it in a self-service way."
The move from managed service to self-service is an emerging trend in ad-tech right now. Venture investment is turning away from business models where revenue is linked to ad spend itself, as VCs prefer the certainty of guaranteed recurring revenue and the efficiency of empowering customers to do the heavy lifting some ad-tech providers do behind the scenes.
For Hammerman, it is about satisfying ad buyers, rather than investors.
"We're sitting on a tremendous amount of data with 155m subscribers, 140m uniques, 120m on our mobile side. The acquisition of Adelphic helps to super-charge that.
"Now we have cross-device powered by Viant's ID graph, measurement associated with that, and we have it in a self-serve platform.
"We're creating the first people-based DSP, giving democratisation to the data."
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV's coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
You can find this post on Beet.TV.
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