Corus joins digital advertising alliance

Television and radio firm Corus Entertainment Inc. has joined a digital advertising alliance formed by Rogers Communications Inc., Shaw Communications Inc. and the CBC.

The unusual partnership, first brokered between the two cable/ media giants and the public broadcaster in April, allows advertisers to pinpoint Web users in real time for targeted ads across the scores of online sites operated by the three.

Toronto-based Corus will expand the partnership’s inventory by including sites for TV properties such as W Network, Cosmopolitan TV, the Oprah Winfrey Network and Nickelodeon Canada among other “brands that deliver sought-after audiences” to advertisers, Corus said.

Such exchanges have risen fast, enabled by tracking technology as well as fierce competition for digital ad dollars.

Forrester Research, a U.S.-based consulting group, expects realtime bidding services to account for close to a fifth of the online display market this year, up from 13 per cent worldwide in 2011.

Rogers, Shaw, the CBC and now Corus are each looking for a bigger piece of the estimated $3.1 billion that will be spent on online advertising in 2012, a figure which includes digital ad sales among newspapers, according to TD Securities.

The alliance also underscores how media and content-distribution companies of all sorts are looking online for new revenue streams as older ones face pressure. Like all players in the fastconverging domestic telecom and media sectors, competition from myriad sources is denting growth prospects.

Rogers and Shaw have seen new television services introduced by phone rivals BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. eat into cable subscriber bases. The other two “pure play” media firms are battling for viewers and advertiser attention with online programming competition from the likes of Netflix Inc. as well as digital ad behemoths such as Google Inc.

The partnership among the four is a way for each to partially offset revenue strain elsewhere.

There are, however, mounting privacy concerns, as exchanges gather information about individual user activity in order to customize ad experiences and allow buyers to match individuals up with products.

“CPAX” or the Canadian Premium Audience Exchange — the name given the joint initiative — pools unsold display inventory from each company’s sites making it available to bid on.

For many exchanges, bids occur automatically through the use of computer algorithms.