Is Programmatic Audio Ready to Take Off?

You could, I suppose, take that view, but I don’t think that’s really the case. The amount of growth we’re going to see in this space is massive in the next few years.

We’re almost through beta, so it’s growing rapidly. We’ve got increases in advertisers joining the beta. We’re within a few months, I think, of opening this up to all of our sales team.

The biggest complaint we were hearing [from advertisers] was that there wasn’t enough inventory. That it was fine if you were trying to do a national buy, but the minute you laid any amount of targeting onto it, the amount of available inventory was evaporating pretty quickly.

The market has evolved pretty powerfully away from open exchange. Open exchange is really a mechanism for liquidity more than it is anything else. In digital audio, we sell out our inventory with our direct sales team fairly regularly. It's not a situation where we get a ton of remnant inventory that we're trying to liquidate.

All of our digital sales account leads include programmatic in their pitch, but we do have a programmatic specialist sales crew that works hand in hand [with advertisers] to make sure we’re setting up deals in a way that meets their objectives.