Chris Moore, head of strategic partnerships for Publishing Clearing House Media, realizes that not everyone knows the company as a media, gaming and entertainment platform. But PCH, which offers brand-safe content inventory across owned digital properties, sees upwards of 2.5 billion impressions and 20 million uniques each month. According to Moore, PCH is running from a well-oiled programmatic advertising machine.
“We rely on our SSP partners very heavily,” Moore tells Beet.TV. “It works well for us.”
As an advertising platform, PCH’s strength is its users, who are logged in and registered, meaning that advertisers can target properly and see greater conversions. This audience drives engagement and customer acquisition for advertisers, as the content is more engaging than simple click-and-scrolling. The best-performing verticals for PCH are CPG, automotive and insurance. After acquiring Topix, a trivia and entertainment property, in September, PCH is readying to expand outside of its existing properties, which have up until the acquisition been the core focus.
“To be able to continue scaling our business outside of PCH walls has been an effort for us and it will hopefully one day lead to PCH being a media-first business,” says Moore.
Moore says that PCH has doubled down on programmatic direct advertising, after hearing from brands that that’s where spending was headed. But ultimately, the goal is to diversify revenue beyond programmatic advertising. As any media company knows, single-stream revenue is an unsafe bet in today’s volatile market. Moore says the goal is to put PCH’s network of identified users to work.
“We have many eggs in the open market programmatic bucket and to differentiate away from that with our existing partners and new partners will lead to success next year in addition to the identity game,” says Moore.
