Forbes.com and its ad strategy

David Kaplan of AdExchanger.com interviewed Mark Howard, senior vice president of digital ad sales at Forbes, about how its revamped website is working in terms of selling ads.

Here is an excerpt:

As a company where the core product is still print, how does the online ad sales strategy reflect the needs of the established organization? Does Forbes have a single sales team or do you keep the two sides aware of each other, but otherwise separate and distinct?

Forbes has a team of integrated sales managers that are out in the marketplace that represent both platforms for us. We also have a team of digital sales managers that focus specifically on the digital.

What’s the approach to real-time bidding and programmatic buying? Does Forbes have a private exchange? And if so, do you primarily rely on those methods to fill remnant inventory?

We don’t view any of our inventory as being “remnant.” It is all about the same value, but we think about our business as having a two different channels, a direct channel and an indirect exchange channel.

We’ve invested heavily in beefing up our operations on the indirect side and have partnered very closely with Google and their DoubleClick Ad Exchange operation to create a much more robust offering and really taken an abundance mentality towards our indirect sales, meaning that we have opened up the marketplace, so that anybody can come in and bid on our inventory. It truly does create an open market and has proven to be very successful for us.

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