Conde Nast to package its digital ad inventory with NBCUniversal and Vox Media

By Tim Baysinger

(Reuters) - Conde Nast is joining with Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal and Vox Media to package their digital inventory for sale to advertisers, the companies announced Thursday.

Digital advertising giants like Alphabet’s Google and Facebook Inc are gobbling up a lion’s share of digital ad dollars, and eMarketer forecasts the two companies will make up 60 percent of the U.S. digital ad market this year.

That has forced media companies that previously competed for ad dollars to work together to offer advertisers larger scale than each would be able to their own.

Conde Nast’s properties include major U.S. publishers like GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. The three companies claim to reach more than 200 million consumers and 99 percent of millennials, according to January data from comScore.

This new ad product with Conde Nast adds video advertising, as well as the publisher’s data offering, called Spire, which combines digital behavioral data with online and offline purchase data that is designed to help advertisers better tailor their campaigns for individual people.

“Our goal always is to deliver for our marketing partners scalable, high quality advertising experiences aligned with the targeted data they need to reach consumers in a uniquely trusted environment,” said Linda Yaccarino, NBCU’s chairman of advertising sales and client partnerships, in a statement.

The move comes at the start of the time of year known as the annual upfront marketplace, between March-May, when many major U.S. media companies sell the bulk of their ad inventory for the next year.

Though upfronts have traditionally been focused more on television advertising, the rise in digital viewing has forced media companies to come to the ad market with a more holistic approach and sell TV and digital inventory together.

Last year, NBCU and Vox came to the market with their own ad product called Concert, which allowed brands to purchase digital display advertising inventory across both companies’ properties.

NBCU invested $200 million in Vox in 2015, one of a flurry of investments into digital companies by the Comcast Corp unit, which has put $400 million into BuzzFeed and most recently invested $500 million as part of Snap Inc’s initial public offering last week.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum)