• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, March 25, 2015

Varick Media Management (VMM), the trading desk inside MDC Partners, on Wednesday announced three partnerships as it puts the pipes in place to support programmatic TV advertising.

VMM has partnered with AudienceXpress, AdMore and Clypd to beef up its programmatic TV offering and formally enter the marketplace. The partnerships give VMM access to both addressable and linear TV ad inventory.

“Even though programmatic TV is relatively new and untested by a lot of marketers, we’re seeing it come up more and more on RFPs,” stated Paul Rostkowski, president of VMM.

Varick has been testing the waters for several years now, via a partnership with AudienceXpress. Today's announcement of formal partnerships with the three software providers represents the maturation of both Varick's programmatic TV offering and the space at large.

VMM will roll the programmatic TV offerings into its Varick On Demand platform, a suite of cross-screen video advertising products. 

As Rostkowski noted, programmatic TV is new and largely untested -- the bulk of trades happening “programmatically” in the TV space are at the local level and are relatively small in scale.

It is, however, a budding corner of the industry; suppliers and vendors just need to be careful to not overpromise what’s truly possible today.