Italian publishers join forces to enhance ad revenue

Premium Publisher Network represents an opportunity for Italian publishers to face the new competitive scenario within the online advertising market, offering a unique media solution to reach qualified targets and lead the performance market. Before the next week’s INMA 2010 conference, the authors of PPN: Giorgio Riva (Managing Director, RCS Digital), and  Claudio Giua (Editorial Director, Espresso Group) from Italy answer the questions for Forum4Editors.

Participants of the conference will have a chance to learn more about the consortium’s win-win approach to online advertising based on qualified performance audience. Advertisers can plan advertising campaigns on specific channels (split by topic, target, and geo-localised), selecting the most relevant keywords to reach their audience objectives.  And now, for the questions:

Forum4Editors: Premium Publisher Network is a consortium, which is supposed to give Italian publishers an opportunity for new competetive scenario within the online market. Can you tell our readers about the innovation of Premium Publisher Network?

Giorgio Riva, Claudio Giua: PPN Consortium gives the opportunity to the advertisers to reach the most important italian publishers’ sites – repubblica.it, corriere.it, gazzetta.it, stampa.it, ansa.it and more – using the “content match” technologies. There are two exclusive ways to talk to the audiences of our online properties: invest through our ad agencies (RCS Pubblicità, Manzoni-Gruppo l’Espresso, PubliKompass-LaStampa and more) for the display advertising or through PPN Consortium for contextual advertising.

According to Audiweb, RCS and L’Espresso represent together 40% of Italian internet ad market. How will the Premium Publisher Network help you expand?

We will expand  because PPN gives us the perfect knowledge of one of the most popular models of online advertising. In the past, when our online properties were managed by Google or Yahoo for the contextual advertising, we didn’t know anything about the market, the habits of the consumers, the performances of different strategies of the advertisers. Now we can have any kind of information through the partner company which is building the  “content match machine” with our help.

How do you invite and convince other publishers to join the platform?

We share with them  the strategical reasons, as a premium publisher, to be part of the PPN, even more important than the very good ad revenues results achieved in the first months by PPN, that anyway we show to the new potential partners.

Recently, a similar Joint Venture could be seen in Italy between Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset TV and Mondadori publishing company. Do you consder this JV a threat for the possible expansion of your project?

Mediaset and Mondadori are both owned by Berlusconi, and the JV simply represents  a new online ad agency, to better address, by Berlusconi’s Companies, the display online adv market. Mediaset and Mondadori, with their online publishing products, still remain perfect candidates to be part of PPN.

Do you think Google is newspapers’ friend or enemy? Do you believe your ad consortium can be a real competitor to Google?

We do not believe that PPN is a Google competitor because our Consortium is open only to the publishing companies with important selfmade contents. Google has a different value proposition from us.

Thank you very much for this interview and see you in Liverpool.

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