Vistar Media and Place Exchange Enable Mediation for Digital Out-of-Home

Two of the leading programmatic platforms for digital out-of-home (DOOH) – Vistar Media and Place Exchange – today announce mutual support for each other’s mediation solutions to enable unified auctions for media owners.

Programmatic technology has fueled a surge in out-of-home (OOH) advertiser demand, bringing in new investments into the channel. However, the variety of platforms available today can create operational complexity for vehicle owners. Mediation allows DOOH networks to access demand from all available channels while creating a centralized auction where that demand can be competitive.

With mediation, all SSPs submit winning bids from their connected buyers, and the mediation layer conducts an unbiased auction to select the highest among those bids. This creates a level playing field and ensures that media owners can maximize profits on any inventory sold for each show. Place Exchange and Vistar Media both operate one of the world’s leading SSPs in the OOH programming space, and each also offers a mediation solution. With this interoperability announcement, vehicle owners will be able to select the mediation of their choice and the access request opportunities offered by either of these SSPs.

“While healthy competition can drive our industry forward, ultimately the needs of our customers come first, and in this case cooperation is the only responsible move to deliver value to media owners,”

“Creating a unified auction is critical to unlocking programmatic’s ability to increase rates through competition, and all of our mutual customers will benefit.”

                                                                           Eric Lamb, SVP, Supply at Vistar Media.

The technological effort of supporting various integrations is lessened for media owners thanks to mediation. An SSP can now be used by a media owner to arbitrate programmatic auctions between different SSP partners, allowing them to concentrate on one technology partner while still gaining the advantages of various monetization partners.

“With continued triple-digit growth in programmatic OOH ad spend driven by an increasingly varied mix of demand sources, the ability for our publishers to maximize yield and reduce complexity is paramount,”

“As strong advocates of a fair, open, and transparent ecosystem, we believe that reciprocal support for solutions that empower our clients is critical to removing obstacles and accelerating growth.”

                                                     Nick Bennett, SVP, Partnerships at Place Exchange.

Vistar and Place Exchange both highlighted the desire to push solutions now that might have an immediate impact on OOH media owners, even though they are actively working with multiple industry associations to develop a standardized methodology for OOH mediation. Both platforms are eager to take part in the adoption of a new industry standard and firmly support its creation. Vistar Media and Place Exchange are dedicated to providing solutions that will fuel the expansion of the OOH business as the programmatic market develops further.