For years, the divide between print and digital has grown wider. Programmatic buying has become the new standard for digital ad sales, providing ad buyers with automated ways of buying digital advertising and enriching their campaigns with data and audiences.

Until now — with the JP/Politikens Hus launch of programmatic print.

As the leading publisher in Denmark, JP/Politikens Hus has taken the first step towards a real cross channel that brings print and digital together in an audience-first purchasing platform. This innovation allows print ad buying to benefit from some of the same advantages of digital programmatic ad buying.

During the past 10 years, demand for print advertising has declined. Prices have gone down, as many advertisers have made the move to digital channels.

This was not because print ads were not effective — on the contrary. Rather, digital ads proved much easier to buy, handle, and measure. The entire process is smooth and effective: from placing the order, to delivering the creative material, making the campaign run, and the final reporting.

Print ads, on the other hand, have not traditionally made the same leap into the modern world. In many cases, they still involved phone calls, manual inventory checks, and ad proofing.

What we wanted to do was simplify and modernise the process of buying print ads, making it more accessible and visible for advertisers.

The first step was to try to automate as many of these processes as possible. To do this we teamed up with leading ad tech and bought side platform, Adform, to create a system that makes buying a print ad as easy as buying a digital ad campaign programmatically. 

We launched the programmatic print platform in January 2017, offering four ways of buying printed ads: 

• Private deals that offer fixed prices and terms between publisher and agency/advertiser. Through private deals, agencies can easily find, select, reserve, and book ads in a single workflow. Readership data from Kantar Gallup is available to ensure that the ads find the appropriate section (and audience).
• Real-time auctions that follow the traditional auction model, where buyers place bids for the inventory and can see other bids. When the auction closes (with respect to deadlines), highest bid wins the auction.
• Requests for proposal, where agencies and advertisers can request a quote. 
• Underbid, which opens for the chance of going below the lowest bid on standby terms.

Printed ads can now be bought on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis. Reporting includes key metrics such as time spent, geographical distribution, and audience precision — giving a new level of reporting to print campaigns.

Currently, our three national titles — Ekstra Bladet, Politiken, and Jyllands-Postens — along with our 43 local titles, are live with Programmatic Print. The first ads have been traded programmatically, and the market has responded with enthusiasm.

“The new platform provides a better overview of ad opportunities and creates more flexible workflows when dealing with print ads,” says Claes Braagaard, trading director for Omnicom Media Group Denmark. “This gives us more time for optimising ad buying, which benefits our advertisers.”

We see this as a first step towards a full cross-media platform where audience, reach, and flexibility are in focus — and not silos of offline and online, of manual processes and complexity.

Imagine for a moment if news media had been born in the digital world and now wanted to move to print. Wouldn’t we then use all our knowledge of the digital world to make the printed ad an equally strong product?

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