By David Peltz, Senior Pre-Sales Engineer, mediarithmics
Since the dawn of time, alliances have benefited countries, citizens and businesses alike.
From verbal acknowledgements and handshakes right through to legally-binding contracts; agreeing on something has historically lent power to multiple negotiating parties.
Due to this, it makes sense that we see so many headlines detailing the latest collaborations between large corporations. They’re noteworthy.
The Rise of Media Alliances
Over the last 5-10 years, multiple businesses successfully landed themselves in the limelight for their media partnerships including:
These alliances are not something to be ignored, with the boost in brand awareness, market influence, and scalability offering an unparalleled competitive advantage.
Is that something that you could benefit from? If so, you should consider entering a media alliance.
What are Media Alliances?
In essence, media alliances are forged between publishers in the advertising space. Rather than entering direct competition, they recognise that joining forces will expand their reach to access more potential buyers.
The Benefits of Media Alliances
However, media alliances aren’t only about visibility – they can also offer power, intelligence, and utility.
1. Overcome GAFA Powerhouse
With competitors like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon offering the same services as you, it can be hard to convince buyers of the value you have to offer them.
After all, why shouldn’t they buy from some of the biggest advertising platforms in the world?
Instead of continuing to lose potential revenue to these market leaders, a media alliance will allow you to offer high-value, wide-reaching advertising space beyond your current capability.
2. Access Unique Opportunities
In our industry, it’s entirely likely that other publishers already have exclusive access to either an audience or a marketing channel that you’ve consistently been unable to reach.
By forging a media alliance, you’ll be able to offer enhanced targeting capabilities to a buyer that wants to tap into a specific audience – without losing them as a customer.
You could use a collaboration like this to enter new markets and cover more locations, creating an attractive value proposition that’s well worth considering.
3. Provide Data Solutions
Similarly, media alliances promote knowledge sharing — allowing you to acquire the information resources that your partner owns.
You could pool your data sources together to gain new insights that could transform the direction of your business.
In a post-cookie world where targeting capabilities are becoming less and less accurate, this could prove to be a valuable asset to your company and its buyers.
4. Offers Scale and Reach
When two SMEs agree to become partners through a media alliance, it’s going to increase their market influence — impacting commercial benefits accordingly.
While you’ll still want to stay competitive compared to the GAFA publishers, even a marginal hike in your unit economics could offer you a whole new level of profitability.
Plus, you’ll be able to re-invest these additional funds back into your business and offer even more opportunities to your buyers.
5. Improve Inventory Quality
As much as 30% of online activity is computer-generated, making it incredibly challenging for publishers to guarantee adverts reach human eyes.
Surprisingly, in a slightly roundabout way, media alliances can actively help combat this.
While it’s nearly impossible to avoid issues like domain spoofing and ad injection altogether, with the aid of more informative data, you can start to identify where no-value and low-value traffic is coming from.
Then, you can start to adjust your strategy accordingly to deliver only the best and highest quality impressions to your buyers.
An Example of a Powerful Media Alliance
With all this in mind, it’s easy to see why collaboration is becoming so popular in our space.
The Gravity Alliance Media & Data is just one example of a groundbreaking alliance, that is combining the resources of publishers across France, spurring incremental growth for each participant.
With over 35 members, including competitive businesses, each partner onboards a combination of web, app and CRM data into separate data warehouses, with data sharing rules set up at an individual level with Gravity.
By sharing data underpinned by strong and privacy safe technology, the alliance is able to offer powerful segments underpinned by data to advertising partners — enabling over 8 figure incremental revenue for all of the participating members.
How to Form a Media Alliance
By establishing a media alliance with other publishers, you’re bound to see your business potential increase significantly. It would be a worthy investment, then, to start setting one up.
Step 1: Outline Your Strategy in Detail
Before you can approach anyone else, you need to pinpoint the value you and your partners would stand to gain from a media alliance.
Ask yourself:
- What are my goals?
- What would I like to achieve?
- Is there a demand?
- Will other publishers be receptive?
- Do I have anything to offer?
- Why should someone work with me?
Step 2: Scout Potential Media Alliance Partners
Once you’ve considered a media alliance from all different angles, you’ll be able to negotiate your case more effectively.
You’ll then have to go out and find publishers that are eager to work alongside you to grow their reach, while also contributing to the partnership themselves. Key discussions may include whether a separate joint venture business is created, as well as which team will sell the alliance product — including whether an entirely new team is born.
It might take you some time to find your ideal target(s), so be careful not to dive in head-first and rush the process.
Step 3: Identify Technology to Underpin the Media Alliance
Further to this, you need to remember that a successful media alliance would be beneficial for every member.
To emphasise the value you can offer your partners, then, you need to look into onboarding technology like Customer Data Platforms, Demand Side Platforms, Supply Side Platforms and Ad Servers.
These resources can be shared across the media alliance to accelerate everyone’s growth plan and increase convenience and accessibility for your buyers.
Step 4: Create a Clear and Concise Contract
Once you’ve approached your target(s) and entered negotiations, you’ll need to put legal frameworks in place.
Your contract should outline details like privacy rules (protecting partner data) as well as extensive commercial terms.
You would be well-advised to seek professional assistance at this point to guarantee no corners get cut and your media alliance is kept above board.
Step 5: Act Upon the Media Alliance
When you have the infrastructure in place and have started commencing technical implementation, you and your partners will have an array of opportunities laid before you.
At this point in time (if not before), be sure to inform your existing buyers and potential leads of your media alliance and consider publicising it in the press.
When the benefits soon start rolling in, you’ll be able to celebrate your achievement and recognise that you’ve made a secure and worthy investment into the long-term future of your company.
In Conclusion
As the GAFA continues to wield a significant amount of power, identifying and forming partnerships with other media owners will only continue to increase.
With this in mind, it will be absolutely imperative that media owners act on these types of initiatives, in order to future proof their businesses by offering a unique proposition — where it is just as important to identify a technology partner to help execute against this goal
Speak to mediarithmics today to find out more on how we help media owners deploy alliances
