By Alexandra Bruell, Jeanine Poggi
In case you missed it, IPG’s Mediabrands’ Magna group became the latest to promise to shove the TV and radio ad business out of “the Mad Men days of the 60s” as the Wall Street Journal put it, into the digital age.
The consortium includes a handful of niche cable networks, a local cable operator, as well as some holders of broadcast TV and radio stations. In a press release, IPG called it: “an integrated programmatic-buying business model to drive critical automation advances across all media transactions.”
But wait, what does all this mean?
First, a bit of what it doesn’t mean: We’re not talking about automated auctions, the kind Google tried through Google TV Ads a few years ago. In fact, no one at Mediabrands expects TV money to actually flow through this system.