Programmatic Guaranteed is valued because it gives publishers and advertisers certainty: premium environments, fixed pricing and assured delivery. But for publisher groups with overlapping audiences, it can also create inefficiency. Frequency is usually managed publisher by publisher, not across the combined campaign, which means the same person can be reached too often while other valuable audiences remain untouched.

For Media Figaro and 366, this was a meaningful challenge, with Médiamétrie Netratings showing 40% overlap between Media Figaro audiences and the regional press inventory represented by 366.

To address this, Media Figaro, 366, Equativ, OMD, Renault, and Utiq launched the first augmented Programmatic Guaranteed activation of its kind. Utiq’s deterministic identifier acted as a shared reference across publisher inventory, allowing unified frequency management at the individual level. Equativ’s technology then made it possible to redirect impressions that exceeded frequency caps on one publisher across the combined inventory, while preserving the core strengths of Programmatic Guaranteed: guaranteed delivery, fixed CPMs and premium publisher quality.

A rigorous A/B structure compared two single-publisher deals with one unified cross-publisher deal under equivalent budget, CPM and capping conditions. This allowed the group to isolate the effect of shared frequency management and prove that when publishers collaborate through Utiq’s infrastructure, they can reduce waste, improve delivery quality and create more value for advertisers such as Renault.

The results showed that cross-publisher frequency management can materially improve the value of Programmatic Guaranteed for advertisers. Using Utiq’s deterministic identifier, the unified deal delivered 25% incremental reach, reaching 1.27 million unique users compared with 1.02 million deduplicated users across the two separate publisher deals. At the same time, CPMU decreased by 20%, proving that Renault’s budget was used more efficiently.

The work demonstrated that publishers do not need to compromise pricing, control or delivery. By removing siloed capping and managing exposure across publishers at the individual level, Utiq helped Media Figaro and 366 unlock more effective reach for Renault and establish a more powerful model for Programmatic Guaranteed.

As Damien Prybis, Head of Programmatic at OMD France, said: “The long-term ambition is clearly to extend this approach to all publishers that have integrated Utiq - as a way to encourage advertisers to continue investing in the open internet.”

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