As media audiences fall apart, one analytics company hopes to knit some of them back together.
DataFuelX, a company led by former TV-sales executives is launching DFX Marketplace, a new way for advertisers to connect to commercial inventory across multiple publishers with a single point of entry. The company, co-founded by Dan Aversano and Michael Strober, two sales veterans who have between them logged stints in senior roles at places like WarnerMedia, TelevisaUnivision, and Nexstar Media, among other companies, launches its offer at a moment when advertisers find themselves hard-pressed to reach large groups of consumers across linear or digital.
“We’re launching a cross-publisher marketplace for linear and CTV, supporting both demographic and audience-based buying. Agencies will have multiple ways to participate –through the platform, APIs or their own AI agents. Our platform will also support direct transaction across linear and digital as well as programmatic execution. This is a very unique model,” says Aversano during a recent email conversation. “Most solutions we have come across are primarily focused on digital-only programmatic transactions.”
The company says DFX Marketplace is supported by 13 premium video publishers representing nearly 40% of linear impressions across more than 50 networks, reaching 70% of U.S. TV households. Aversano declined to name the companies involved, but a Wednesday event unveiling the marketplace is slated to include executives from Fox Corp. and TelevisaUnivison, as well as Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of the VAB, a trade organization that represents most U.S. TV networks to the broader advertising market.
The rise of such a marketplace comes as more commercial inventory, particularly that associated with streaming, is purchased in programmatic fashion, or via algorithms and software designed to seek out ad time that is seen by a particular audience niche, such as someone in a particular geographic region, for example, or someone who is likely to be in need of a car or baby products.
DataFuelX said its new marketplace will support buying and selling done via agentic AI and will enable AI assistants and customer agents to work across all participating publishers through a single connection.
The marketplace is being built to support agentic buying and selling, enabling DFX AI assistants and approved customer agents to work across participating publishers through a single connection while preserving human control over strategy and final decisions.
Participants in the new marketplace will be able to keep tabs on planning, activation, optimization and other tasks all under one system.
“Premium video remains one of the most powerful ways for advertisers to build reach, but the complexity of differentiating true premium video across an increasingly expanding, but diluted ad inventory infrastructure has limited the growth and its share of overall video ad dollars,” says Cunningham, in a statement. “DFX Marketplace represents an important step toward modernizing that infrastructure for cross-publisher and cross-platform, using intelligence, automation and AI to make premium video easier to access, transact and optimize at scale.”
The company says its platform is already used by major publishers and has supported more than $300 million in media transactions.