Tim Wolfe, VP of Revenue Operations for Gannett recently talked about Gannett’s success in using Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers First Look product which was announced last year but only made available to all DoubleClick for Publishers clients in April.

“Gannett has historically and traditionally been a newspaper business. We like to think of ourselves as a full-fledged media company at this point,” stated Wolfe. “What’s unique about Gannett is that we have a national to local reach. We’ve got over 90 local markets across the country as well as our flagship brand USA Today.”

Wolfe added, “Some of the challenges we face selling our audiences programmatically is that we have had a lot of demand for a very specific subset of our audience. Gannett leverages DoubleClick for Publishers First Look across the network to increase yield by allowing some of our preferred advertisers and preferred relationships to engage with the top 1% of our audiences.”

“Once we started to understand the impact across that 1% we’ve really started to evaluate what our pricing strategy was and needed to be,” said Wolfe. “We at Gannett are pulling in all of the data from all of our different sources into a centralized data depository. From there we’re making the decisions around what pricing we want to set.”

Wolfe added details:

As part of the transparency that the Google Ad Exchange provides us we’re able to look into the Open Exchange details as well as the Private Exchange details and better understand who’s winning with high frequency across our audiences. We want to monazite all of our inventory and all of our audiences to the greatest extent that we can. Introducing First Look as well as Enhanced Dynamic Allocation and a lot of the other products and suites that Google has offered us has been tremendously helpful.

First Look has been a great compliment to our monetization and to our ad stat. Since implementing First Look we’ve seen a 15% lift in eCPM’s of our programmatic channel vehicle. As we look to the next 5 years we anticipate programatic to be a driver and a leader of monetization across the entire digital ecosystem including desktop, mobile and video.