LONDON — Back in March, The Guardian and four other UK publishers with global ambitions announced they were forming the Pangea Alliance, a shared scheme to pool first-party ad data for ad buyers to target their combined 110 million users in a “programmatic”, or automated fashion.
In beta testing since, now the alliance – which numbersThe Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters as well as The Economist – is already set to expand its membership in the next few months.
“We would expect to see, toward the latter end of the year, some announcements about other publishers joining,” Guardian global revenue director Tim Gentry tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We have created a number of new audience segments and a couple of custom ad formats. There will be many more custom ad formats that come online during the summer and further audience segments.”
But Gentry says Pangea members will not be collaborating on preroll video ad sales: “Each of us is in the same position as the whole market where there is excess demand and scarcity of supply. Collaboration doesn’t add a huge amount of value there.”
Like French conglomerate La Place, Pangea is powered by Rubicon Project, which Gentry says reduces complexity for the members.
We interviewed Gentry in London as part of the series the Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull. Please visit this page for additional segments.