Just because analog media are disconnected, that doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from digital efficiencies.

Case in point – programmatic, automated sales of display advertising are now gobbling up a large portion of the digital industry. Now ad tech house MediaMath is working to bring programmatic even to offline media.

MediaMath‘s OPEN global media partnerships VP Sam Cox calls it “media enablement”.

“You’ve seen some of that in programmatic print with (our deal with) Time Inc,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “It’s about taking things that are not necessarily programmatically-addressable today and making them programmatic.” As AdAge put it recently: “Machines are now selling some print ads at Time Inc.”

This new-wave ad tech is one of the trends MediaMath will be discussing at this month’s Cannes Lions festival. “It used to be we were going because the media people were there. Now I think the media people are coming because we are there as well, and ad tech is not an afterthought,” Cox adds.

We interviewed him as part of the series The Road to Cannes, our lead-up to the Cannes Lions Festival presented by Coull.  Please visit this page for additional segments.  This interview took place in the London office of SMG.