Upfront marketplaces drive price discovery, empower buyers and sellers to do long-term planning and facilitate premium content creation. Rather than resetting the marketplace at an annual event, publishers should embrace upfront strategies throughout the year.

In fact, as GDPR and other privacy measures put greater emphasis on first-party data, publishers have an opportunity to create audience segments for all content, sell those audiences on an upfront basis and deliver them programmatically.

A continued upfront marketplace means publishers won’t have to agonize between upfront sales and the open market because they’ll get price discovery on an ongoing basis. That’s a big deal for all publishers because it allows them to both mitigate uncertainty and extract maximum value for their product.

Beyond price, a continuous upfront market allows publishers to better allocate production resources. In turn, publishers will be able to increase the quality of their product by spending less on content for which demand is low as well as investing more time, money and resources where it counts. At the same time, publishers will strengthen their direct buying relationships with advertisers by engaging in an ongoing conversation about upcoming demand for specific audience segments.