Specialist: Pangea Alliance Against Google, Facebook, Twitter Is Just The Beginning

Last Wednesday, news broke that The Guardian, CNN International, Financial Times, Reuters and The Economist have teamed up to form an advertising alliance called Pangea.

The coalition will pool together the publishers' collective audiences to provide advertisers an opportunity to acquire advertising space across all of their sites in one transaction.

Related Link: A Media 'Pangea' Is Teaming Up Against Facebook, Google, Twitter & LinkedIn

The idea behind the project is gaining the necessary scale to compete with Internet ad behemoths like Google Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG), Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB), Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) and LinkedIn Corp (NYSE: LNKD).

Benzinga discussed the media outlets' game plan with Gary Kibel, a partner in the Digital Media, Technology & Privacy; Intellectual Property and Advertising, Marketing & Promotions Practice Groups of law firm Davis & Gilbert.

Kibel is of the view that, "this creation of a private marketplace represents an important development in the continuing trend of programmatic advertising.”

However, the specialist pointed out a few key issues as well:

He called the move by the media outlets "an interesting development in the evolution of programmatic.”

Kibel explained programmatic was previously used "with the marketplaces of large ad networks,” adding that later "the talk was about bringing programmatic in-house at publishers and advertisers.  Now this move is back towards a marketplace, but a limited, premium inventory marketplace.”

According to Kibel, "This will certainly not be the only interesting programmatic model that we’ll see. For instance, there’s regular talk of programmatic TV buying.”