An important new venture in the Italian advertising market: the launch of Gold 5 as a new advertising concessionaire specializing in the offer of video display advertising solutions. Gold 5 srl was established by the companies A. Manzoni & C S.p.A., Banzai Media Srl, ItaliaOnline S.p.A., Mediamond S.p.A. and RCS MediaGroup S.p.A., each with an equal share.
Gold 5 will be marketing, albeit not exclusively, a portion of the digital advertising of each of the shareholders and will be offering the investor market products designed to communicate effectively with the most important advertising targets using video advertising formats such as Masthead and 300×250 video.
According to research carried out by eMarketer in March of this year, in the United States the video display advertising market represents approximately 12% of total digital advertising spending, and is worth 5.9 billion dollars. Again according to eMarketer figures, in 2014 the Italian online video advertising market is expected to exceed 200 million dollars, with annual growth in the next few years of over 20%. According to FCP, this market was already worth around 90 million euro 2013, not counting the international players who do not take part in the survey.
The aim of Gold 5 is to become the main player in this important segment, offering advertising solutions on all of the best Italian digital platforms.
Gold 5 can count on an offer of an extremely high level in terms of brand and content quality because it represents the most important advertising reach of the Italian digital market. It will therefore be able to compete effectively with international players that currently hold prominent positions and have growing market shares.
Through Gold 5, the big spenders of advertising will be able to plan cross campaigns on all the websites of the publishers taking part, optimizing the coverage and frequency objectives of their campaigns and attaining unparalleled reach figures for the Italian digital market on all the most important planning targets. Investors will use predefined and optimized solutions to reach the targets that specifically interest them, without choosing individual websites for their plans as these will be marketed exclusively by the advertising concessionaires of the shareholders.
For marketing its products effectively, Gold 5 will use both traditional sales channels and methods, and a technological platform able to seize the significant business opportunities of programmatic advertising.
On a par with similar initiatives already launched by important publishers in other European countries, such as La Place Media and Audience Square in France, AdAudience in Germany and Aunia in Spain, Gold 5 aims to be the accelerator of digital market growth, opening up and stimulating competition, competing in the field of efficient and effective solutions offered to the big advertising spenders.
The Board of Directors of Gold 5, which involves a system of annual rotation of top management positions between the five companies that own it, consists of: Davide Mondo (Chairman), Andrea Santagata (Chief Executive) and Directors Gabriele Comuzzo, Gabriele Mirra and Roberto Zanaboni.
A Strategic Committee will also be set up with the role of advisory board that will contribute to the definition of guidelines for the development of the company. This Committee will contain some of the most important names in the Italian advertising and media market: Paolo Ainio (CEO Banzai), Antonio Converti (CEO ItaliaOnline), Massimo Ghedini (CEO A. Manzoni & C.), Stefano Sala (CEO Pubblitalia 80 S.p.A.), Raimondo Zanaboni (General Manager for Advertising of RCS MediaGroup).
Marketing of the first advertising solutions is expected to start by the end of 2014.