November 21, 2012
By Judith Aquino,

Glam Media Debuts Private Ad Marketplace

Glam Media, a privately held media company that owns and operates several women's fashion sites and provides an advertising platform for publishers, announced yesterday that it has launched an invite-only ad marketplace.

In a partnership with the advertising technology company Rubicon Project, advertisers will now have access to custom contextual packages and advanced audience targeting.

"Our private marketplace was launched to service our current advertisers by meshing new technology with brand needs, offering an alternative place to move dollars that were previously earmarked for ad networks and standard RTB (real-time bidding)," said Alison Kennedy, Glam Media's senior vice president of sales, in a statement. "We will be offering the ability for our top clients to buy both programmatically and branded content as part of the same deal."

With Revv Connect, Rubicon Project's deal-making automation technology, Glam is able to tag individual impressions with attributes in real time. These attributes allow Glam to classify impressions into various inventory segments, and execute multiple sales and pricing strategies around them to improve their customers' chances of receiving the highest yield possible for their inventory. Through Revv's real-time rules engine, Glam can also make trade-offs between the direct demand, RTB, and private marketplace demand for ad space—implementing a holistic approach to selling ads.

"For us to do a private marketplace, it was key to be able to fully control the targeting segmentation and inventory differentiation within our own technology stack," added Glam Media's vice president of engineering, Art Schram, "Rubicon's forward-thinking and flexible Revv Connect…allows for a really elegant and seamless way to target our premium inventory for our clients, such as combining multiple segment IDs to create a multilayered, custom segment for brands, and other implementations."

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2004, Glam maintains Web sites and blogs across various lifestyle verticals: women's style, home, entertainment, men's style, wellness, food, and parenting. The company's sites include Glam.com, its male counterpart Brash.com, and Tinker.com, a micro-blogging service that offers embedded widgets to follow Twitter events, news stories, and topics. Glam reaches more than 244 million global monthly unique users, according to comScore.