On Wednesday, June 19, Connectiv teams up with ANA Business Marketing to bring leading B2B advertisers, agencies and media and information companies together in New York City for What Goes 'Round: Re-imagining the Media Marketer Relationship in a Digitally Transformed World.

BPA Worldwide this week announced the official launch of its B2B Media Exchange, a programmatic marketplace connecting advertisers with brand-safe B2B media suppliers. More than 100 business brands have signed on for the debut, including publishers such as SourceMedia, PennWell, GrandView Media and Wainer Finest Communication's Whole Foods Magazine.   

This is a guest post by Scott Roulet,, founder, The Roulet Group

Guest post by Glenn Hansen, president & CEO, BPA Worldwide

It's what Prescott Shibles warned us about last year at the 2015 Connectiv Executive Summit when he said, "Targeting data will soon be worth more than advertising inventory." But for Hanley Wood, accepting and adapting to this change in buyer behavior became an opportunity to reverse engineer the formula to provide unique data points to advertisers, charge a premium for it and even boost performance on its own properties. 

“What do we mean when we say, programmatic?” asked Michael Morrow, marketing director for advertising intelligence, Kantar Media SRDS, in a Connectiv webinar last week titled Media Boot Camp on Programmatic Buying Part 1. “Historically, people have said open auctions, real-time bidding. It’s important to know that the programmatic eco-system is much broader than all that. At its essence, programmatic is an umbrella term for automated and data-driven ways that you can offer your inventory to buyers.

Programmatic: It’s word that sends shivers down the spines of many B2B sellers but just hoping it passes you by isn’t an option—79 percent of B2B marketers expect to buy digital advertising programmatically in 2016, according to a new study from Connectiv and Kantar Media. 

At the Connectiv Executive Summit in May, John Ebbert, publisher and CEO of AdExchanger, drew a burst of applause when he said that as a mid-sized publisher, he wouldn’t sell advertising programmatically (Ebbert himself noted the irony, given that AdExchanger’s entire focus is covering the emergence of data-driven advertising).

Some B2B publishers may be on the fence when it comes to investing in programmatic solutions, but increasing evidence suggest b2b advertisers are embracing programmatic—whether publishers are ready to serve them or not.

By Todd Krizelman, MediaRadar