News publishers are becoming more serious about avoiding the brutal brand safety tools that have been demonetizing them for years.

They’re accomplishing this by creating private markets of reputable news sites, which, in principle, should not create brand safety problems.

On Wednesday, Prohaska Consulting, a publisher consulting business, launched the ProNews Collective, a private marketplace (PMP) for premium news publishers. ProNews Collective’s ad inventory will be solely accessible via its SSP launch partner Index Exchange. These PMPs will provide access to any ad inventory sold programmatically by participating publishers, including display, video, and, in certain circumstances, audio.

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“Our goal here is twofold,” said Matt Prohaska, CEO and partner of Prohaska Consulting. “To move dollars back to news publishers, and to help buyers combine scale with safety while buying many publishers at once – without having to spend money on [brand safety] tech that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.”

Brand safety is not suggested.

Although Prohaska Consulting and Index do not ban marketers from employing third-party brand safety and verification technology for ProNews Collective campaigns, they highly advise against it, Prohaska said. Instead, they want marketers to trust the safeguards that publishers have put in place, such as eliminating advertisements from coverage of conflicts and catastrophes.

To that aim, Prohaska Consulting has spent the last year working with publishers and agencies to establish safety guidelines for its PMPs.

At least ten premium news companies are in discussions to join the collective, although Prohaska refuses to identify any on the record. At least three media buyers, including ad agency Goodway Group, have also shown support for the proposal.

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“Too much of the industry has adopted an unnecessarily cautious approach to engaging these consumers, even when it is viable to do so in brand safe conditions. Stephani Estes, chief media officer of Goodway Group, believes ProNews has the potential to attract them back. “We believe in the value of news audiences and their ability to drive results.”

According to Prohaska, the ProNews Collective debut was timed to enable member publications and marketers to take advantage of the prospects afforded by the November US presidential election.

He said that the collective would be confined to a small number of well-known news brands that enter into revenue-sharing agreements. “We’re not bringing in 700 publishers.”

“Don’t call it an ad network,” Prohaska said. “We’re not doing the shenanigans others did for 20 years, where we buy a few impressions in open auction and then sell [the publisher’s] logo when we don’t really have a deal.”

According to Prohaska, advertisers will not be required to purchase inventory from all participating sites. For example, if an advertiser currently has a direct arrangement in place with one of these publishers, it may simply remove that publisher from the marketplace to avoid disrupting the two parties’ existing direct transactions. Advertisers will now have contextual purchasing options to help them target their advertisements.

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Prohaska Consulting will supply publishers with monthly reports outlining why they were withdrawn from specific deals and how they compare to other publications in the collective, he added.

The collective’s inventory is priced using the price floor and ceiling set by each publisher for programmatic guaranteed and open auctions.

“The last thing we want is for any publisher to say, ‘Gee, I could have gotten at least that on my own in open auction,'” Prohaska told me. “We want to make sure it’s all incremental.”

Furthermore, since these PMP arrangements include fewer middlemen and technical layers, publishers should anticipate a higher income share than they would get via an open auction, according to Prohaska.

According to eMarketer, nearly 80% of advertisers in the United States and other developed markets rely on last-click attribution, so the PMPs should also work for performance buyers and dispel the myth that news does not work for performance campaigns.

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This focus on last-click “hurts any publisher who is really good at the top of the funnel but not as good as the five or six companies [that excel] at the bottom of the funnel,” Prohaska added, referring to huge social media and ecommerce platforms. “We want this product to be able to stand on its own and compete fairly, dollar for dollar, conversion for conversion, with everything else.”

However, the primary goal of the collective is to dispel the industry’s overreliance on automated brand safety measures.

“The goal is to change hearts and minds,” Prohaska said. “We’re talking eight years plus of going in the wrong direction because of the culture fear, with agencies not wanting to screw up, combined with brand safety tools that, unfortunately, have been used as too much of a default.”

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