Atria logo surrounded by its partnered titles including Good Food, Empire, Time Out Out and Men’s Health. Picture: PPA
Six magazine publishers have jointly launched an advertising marketplace to provide brands with more scale for their campaigns.
Bauer , Hearst UK , Immediate Media , Time Out , Hello and Future teamed up to launch Atria.
The launch is designed to enable advertisers to deliver “premium” programmatic ads at scale across a portfolio of titles, rather than arranging multiple deals.
Revenue will be allocated based on the impressions served on each individual site for each campaign.
Cath Waller, managing director of advertising at Immediate and chair of PPA Magnetic which brought publishers together for the initiative, said Atria “should drive incremental advertising spend” by simplifying the planning and buying process.
Brands on which advertisers can roll out campaigns include Time Out, Hello!, Elle, Grazia, Good Housekeeping, Empire, Radio Times, Cosmopolitan, Four Four Two, Esquire, Car, Cycling Weekend and BBC Top Gear.
Atria’s partnered publishers have a combined monthly audience of 33 million or “48% of the UK’s online population”, according to Waller.
Atria is similar in concept to Ozone, an online advertising network owned by UK news publishers News UK, Reach, Guardian News and Media and Telegraph Media Group.
Atria, which is powered by Permutive, has been developed in response to what the “market demanded”, Waller said, with an increased need for ease in accessing audiences.
This demand is driven by the scale that Meta and Google offer in comparison to publishers, she added.
Meta and Google accounted for at least half the record £42.6bn spent on UK advertising in 2024, according to Press Gazette estimates .
“Sometimes, even though lots of publishers have lots of scale, they’re nowhere near the scale that people are looking for,” Waller said.
Before the launch of Atria, if an advertiser was looking for a “certain type of audience, like a travel intender”, they would go to each publisher individually.
“You’d have to do that six times across the six founding members of Atria,” said Waller.
“Everybody on [the] buy side, whether it’s agency or client side, is time poor,” she added. “So what we recognise is that we have to make it easier, quicker, simpler for people to buy at scale.”
[Read more: Optimising programmatic advertising: What publishers need to know ]
‘Brilliant environment for advertisers’
The scale offered by Atria could increase advertising spend with publishers, it is hoped.
“We have been disinvested in by advertisers over the years,” Waller said, adding the launch “makes it easy for advertisers to invest back into quality publishing”.
“I think that any initiative like Atria… helps that [media spend], so it cuts down the amount of people in the programmatic chain, [and] it gives those clients a guarantee of where that inventory is running.”
Waller noted that the six publishers have “premium inventory” and engaged audiences.
“People aren’t just passing by,” Waller said, noting users are actively choosing to spend their time with the six publishers’ content rather than “doom scrolling”.
Advertisers can target audiences based on first-party data, for example “if someone comes to Good Food and reads three vegan recipes… we will infer, on the data management platform, that… they’re really interested in vegan food,” said Waller.
“If you’re an advertiser [and] have a vegan product, it would make a lot of sense to show it to those people.”
This will allow advertisers to “drive more revenue in that area”, she added.
Adspend is ‘precision-targeted’ and ‘brand safe’
Atria chose Permutive because the platform has “a really advanced first-party data platform”, said Waller, “which means the advertiser knows that every penny they’re spending is precision-targeted to the right people… it’s based on special interests, which again plays very much into our portfolio of brands across magazine media.”
Waller said advertisers also have a “guarantee” that their campaigns will be next to “brand safe” content.
“That’s the difference between putting something out just onto the open web… you have no idea where that is running.”
Immediate’s History Extra site highlights this challenge, with programmatic adverts blocked against some of its content which references “war and swords”.
“Keyword brand safety blocking would block that,” Waller said, “whereas if you’re coming and accessing history through Atria, you know that generally that is a brand safe site.”
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