How Business Insider Made Private Marketplaces Work

Embracing Programmatic Advertising

When the terms "programmatic" and "private marketplace" burst onto the scene a few years ago, publishers had two choices: fear it, or embrace it.

Many publishers initially saw programmatic as a threat to their direct sales teams, and are only now just starting to realize how having a programmatic strategy can benefit them. Others, like Business Insider, chose to embrace programmatic and are now experiencing tremendous success with private marketplaces.

Our strategy since day one has been simple: go-to-market with both direct and indirect revenue streams. We've done this by leveraging our direct sales team to help drive demand for private marketplaces as part of our overall strategy.

And it's worked. With more than 200 private marketplaces currently in place, we've seen a strong ROI from our indirect efforts. The benefits of private marketplaces are endless, but here are the top five that have had the biggest impact on Business Insider's success:

Elimination of “Remnant” Inventory
We can offer customized inventory packages to our advertisers based on their needs and how they relate to our readers. The inventory within private marketplaces is valuable because it's providing advertisers with custom audiences at-scale.

Yield Optimization 
Using private marketplaces, we’re able to optimize yield across both direct and indirect channels, since the prices in PMPs are higher than those on the open exchange.

More Limitation
We are able to invite a select number of partners to participate in PMPs, which allows us to build partnerships that often work in conjunction with direct buys.

Access to New Advertisers (And Audiences)
We have a lot of data about our readers, and private marketplaces give us the opportunity to expose our audience to a wider range of advertisers. This is mutually beneficial for advertisers, as they can access specific audience segments by leveraging our first-party data.

Access to New Budgets 
Advertisers often have separate budgets for their direct and programmatic initiatives. By using PMPs, however, Business Insider has access to a wider variety of these budgets that are — in many cases — not a part of direct-buy budgets.

As the industry continues to charge ahead and programmatic selling becomes more widespread, publishers and advertisers alike can’t afford to be left behind. Using private marketplaces has been an important way for us to continue educating, adapting, and helping to set standards in an ever-evolving

Michelle Denhart is a sales development director at Business Insider.

Learn more about Programmatic Advertising with Centro.