Earlier this year, Interpublic Group announced that it was working to automate more of its media transactions. To this end, IPG announced that it would like to see 50% of all its media buys, not just online buys, transacted in a programmatic manner by 2016. According to IPG’s subsidiary Magna Global, there is a need to automate the buying of both national and local inventory in most media, including TV and radio inventory. We estimate the size of the media marketplace to be approximately $182 billion in 2012, including print media, consisting of newspapers, magazines and yellow pages (none of which are mentioned in IPG’s need for automation). For those not familiar with automated buying, one should think of machine to machine transactions, with computers making trading decisions within milliseconds.
