Newspaper & Mailroom

World News Media Congress Offers Programmatic Advertising Pioneer

Tuesday 17. February 2015 - Programmatic ad buying has profoundly changed online advertising, and nowhere has the impact been greater than on advertising sales teams and human resources in news media companies.

Alanna Gombert, a pioneer who built the programmatic branch at Condé Nast and is co-founder of the International Advertising Bureau’s Programmatic Council, will bring her expertise and insights to the World News Media Congress, the World Editors Forum and the World Advertising Forum, to be held in Washington, D.C., from 1 to 3 June next.Ms Gombert, the CEO of Combert Consulting, will lead an Advertising Forum session on programmatic advertising, with a focus on its impact on the sales team and advertising department organization.
Prior to starting her own firm, Ms Gombert was Head of Digital Sales and Strategy for Condé Nast and founder of CatalystDesk, Condé Nast’s digital media trading platform. She joined Condé Nast in 2013 from Google by way of Admeld, where she ran the trading desk, agency and demand-side platform relationships, where she helped grow real time bidding from an idea to a major business.
Programmatic advertising sales — using machines to buy ads — improves workflow efficiency and allows sales teams to focus on more important matters, like improving creativity and story-telling to accomplish the goals of a campaign. “I think we’ve kind of lost that in digital across the board,” Ms Gombert told Advertising Age last year.
More than 1,000 publishers, CEOs, managing directors, chief editors and other senior newspaper and news media executives from 80 nations are expected in Washington for the World News Media Congress, the World Editors Forum and the World Advertising Forum, organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) in cooperation with the Newspaper Association of America.
Prior to Admeld, Ms Gombert worked at Right Media, the first online advertising exchange, where she focused on ad selection algorithms and market dynamics. Right Media was acquired by Yahoo in 2007. Her early career included stints with Nielsen, DoubleClick, and the finance world with JP Morgan Chase and Commerzbank. Advertising has allowed her to travel the world, and she has experience in international markets, including EMEA, APAC, and Latin America.
Other confirmed speakers include:
– Vivian Schiller, former President and CEO of National Public Radio and former global chair of news at Twitter and one of the world’s most compelling executives at the forefront of media and technology;
– Torry Pedersen, the CEO and Editor-in-chief of Verdens Gang, the leading news site/newspaper in Norway that is among the most profitable news organisations in Europe;
– Martin Baron, Executive Editor of The Washington Post, who oversees The Post’s print and digital operations. Under Baron’s leadership, The Post newsroom won two Pulitzer Prizes in 2014, including the prestigious public service medal for a series of stories based on classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden that exposed the National Security Agency’s massive global surveillance programs.
– Raju Narisetti, Senior Vice President & Deputy Head of Strategy for News Corp, the world’s largest publisher including The Wall Street Journal, Times of London and The Australian. Mr Narisetti has a strong record of creating, rethinking and managing major news organisations on three continents (Asia, Europe and North America) through a mix of print, digital and mobile content, products and partnerships,
– Emily Bell, Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, whose speech to the Reuters Institute last year was nothing less than the year’s most definitive statement on the future of journalism;
– Troy Young, President of Hearst Magazines Digital Media, who oversees the digital content, technology, operations, product and business development strategies for 18 brand websites such as Cosmopolitan, Popular Mechanics, ELLE, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar and Seventeen, which attract more than 100 million unique visitors and 740 million page views monthly.
– Rita Chinyoka, Publisher and CEO of Alpha Media Holdings, the largest independent newspaper group in Zimbabwe which prints, markets and distributes four publications on various platforms including print, online and mobile. In a country where mobile is emerging as the preferred news medium, the company has embarked on a “mobile first” digital strategy that has resulted in two cutting edge digital products for mobile devices.