Should publishers use programmatic ad trading mechanisms or continue selling direct to ad buyers? The emergence of private marketplaces means those options are no longer mutually exclusive, says one big video publisher.

“This set of pipes and plumbing that fuel a programmatic system was created for anonymous inventory,” according to Jonathan Carson, chief revenue officer of Vevo, the world’s biggest music video distributor. “For someone like Vevo, that’s not going to be a very interesting space – we’ll probably never release our inventory in to a big anonymous pool just like that, because there’s value in the quality of the inventory.

“However, the private marketplaces have been an important evolution – that gives the ability for that set of plumbing to be applied to content like Vevo’s – a brand that wants to transact in that way can transact both in the open marketplace as well as with individual partners.”

He was speaking at the BrightRoll Video Summit. In the same session, Heineken USA’s senior media director Ron Amram said ad tech platforms had to be easy to use, have good content partners and be able to scale with enough inventory to make it worth advertisers’ while.

You can find more coverage of the summit here. Disclaimer: BrightRoll sponsored Beet.TV’s coverage of the event.