Scoop: Concert and Quartz create business ads partnership

Quartz, the business news website owned by Atlantic Media, and Concert, the digital ad marketplace founded by Vox Media and NBCUniversal, will announce a new partnership today called "Concert C-Suite" that combines their collective ad inventory for marketers to target elite business readers.

Why it matters: Previously, advertisers would target this type of high-end business audience online by either a) buying ads separately across a bunch of different web publishers or b) buying ads across a third-party ad network that typically has less brand-safe inventory. Now they can do it all in one place, with less hassle and less risk.

How it works: Using the combined advertising inventory through traffic from Vox Media and its brands (Recode, Vox, The Verge, etc.), NBCUniversal's digital brands (CNBC, NBC.com, etc) and Quartz, marketers can target 14 million C-suite business executives and 86 monthly unique viewers, per executives citing comScore's unduplicated metric.

• The traffic only comes from those websites directly, so marketers can be sure their ads aren't being aligned next to spammy sites they often encounter with ad networks or large social media sites.
• Sales teams from all three properties — Vox Media, NBCU and Quartz — can sell inventory across the network, as well as Concert's own sales staff.
• The goal is to use the custom ad units, created by Concert, and sell them against the combined business traffic from the three publications, creating a seamless experience for advertisers looking to target business executives.

"This creates a seamless experience for marketers to access an elite audience in one place, without using a social platform," says Joy Robins, Chief Revenue Officer at Quartz.

The types of advertisers that executives from Quartz and Vox Media predict this will appeal to are traditional enterprise companies, like financial services and business software firms, as well as luxury auto advertisers, corporate advertisers with brand messaging and affluent consumers.

The bigger picture: "A lot of times these advertisers are behind the shift to digital because there's nothing like this at scale with this ease of execution," says Ryan Pauley, VP Revenue Operations at Vox Media and Head of Concert.

• Pauley says that Concert doesn't plan on adding any more publishers to the C-suite vertical mix, although it plans to add more publishers to the Concert portfolio. "With addition of Quartz, we'll have enough runway to get off the ground quickly."