OpenX Blog

Today we are delighted to announce the Orange Ad Market, a brand new approach to the ad exchange space. With this partnership we will be working with Orange – one of the largest telecommunications, technology and media companies in the world – to lead the growth of the exchange space in Europe.

How the Orange Ad Market Works

Orange will operate the market, bringing suppliers (publishers) and buyers (agencies and advertisers) to the market. OpenX will power the underlying global market and technology. All supply and demand will connect via the single global market that OpenX powers, ensuring the full network effect and global competition so important to online ad marketplaces. At the same time, customers in Europe will be sold and supported by a local, dedicated Orange team with a very rich understanding of the needs and subtleties of each market.

The OpenX Global/Local Alliance Strategy

We think our approach to creating a global ad marketplace through partnerships with leading regional media companies who have extensive online advertising assets and very deep supplier and buyer relationships is unique for three reasons:

• First, it embraces and leverages our partners’ existing business relationships in each region. We think this fusion of rich local experience and relationships together with a global market platform is a new, very different and better approach.

• Second, it enables our partners to participate directly in building out the exchange ecosystem in their region. This is important to our regional partners because it allows them to approach large ad buyers, agencies and publishers with products in the ad exchange category and become directly involved in building out a new and very important space in the online ad economy.

• Third, our approach also helps drive choice and competition, which is hugely and increasingly significant to the online advertising ecosystem, because letting one company dominate in online search, contextual and display advertising would not be good for any market participant (unless you happen to be the dominant company).

We think this is a true paradigm shift in the approach to the ad exchange business that will provide a better solution for participants and a truly independent choice for buyers and sellers, something more and more players are looking for.

Looking beyond Europe, Orange represents the first major partner in a global, interconnected alliance of regional partners driving participation into the OpenX Market.

We’ve had some pretty significant initial coverage of this news from a number of major media outlets and we wanted to share some of that with you:

Reuters:  Orange teams with OpenX to push Web ads in Europe / Orange Ad Market to start in UK, France in Q2

Forbes:  Provoking Google and Yahoo / OpenX takes the fight for Web ads overseas

TechCrunch:  Orange, OpenX team up to establish pan-European ad exchange ecosystem

MediaPost:  Orange And OpenX Create Orange Ad Market Exchange

ClickZ:  Orange and OpenX Partner on European Ad Exchange

AdExchanger:  Orange-France Telecom and Open X launch a new ad exchange in Europe