Automated advertising is about to be executed at some serious scale, after WPP this month announced it would merge its 24/7 Media unit's collection of publisher-side technologies in to data stablemate Xaxis.
"It puts us in some rare air - we are the largest programmatic and media platform," Xaxis north America MD Brian Gleason tells Beet.TV.
WPP merged the units to cater to an ad market seeing publishers and advertisers dealing with each other, cutting out agencies, AdAge reports. "We are shortening the gap between publisher and advertiser," Gleason says in response, speaking of the greater proximity to publishers advertisers will gain through 24/7 Media's ad server.
Just how big is the new-look Xaxis? Gleason says:
- "We went from dealing with 500 billion impressions on an annual basis to over 2.2 trillion."
- "We have over $750 million that we're managing in terms of billing."
- "We have over 840 employees."
- The merged unit has 240 engineers.
- "We have, just in the US alone, 60 analysts - understanding all the different media types is not easy."
Gleason was interviewed on stage by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz at the Beet.TV summit on programmatic advertising for video hosted by Xaxis in New York and sponsored by Videology.
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