Adauction.com Schedules First Print Media Auction

Moving to extend its online ad-auction concept to the off-line world, San Francisco-based Adauction.com has scheduled its first ever auction of print media for April 23.

The auction will feature an array of national consumer magazines and will mark the company’s transition from providing Web advertising to a full offering of traditional and online media, including print, broadcast and outdoor. The announcement follows the successful completion of a beta test in which the company sold an insertion for Stagebill, a national magazine targeted at an upscale demographic.

“We have always believed that the same principals that have made our auctions a tremendous success for online media will work equally well for traditional advertising,” said Neil Cohen, Adauction.com’s senior vice president of business affairs. “The Internet, through the standard browser, allows us to take an inefficient sales process and create an instant marketplace that makes buying and selling simple.”

The company also is planning an auction for broadcast media. Currently, there is no central exchange that specializes in buying and selling online, print and broadcast ad inventory on the Internet, Adauction said. Leveraging its base of nearly 3,000 media buyers and publishers, the company intends to offer “one stop shopping” enabling advertisers to integrate traditional and new media buys.

Adauction.com also offers consolidated reporting and billing as part of its service. Adauction.com recently formed separate print and broadcast media divisions, hiring industry veterans to head each unit.

Andrew McColough, formerly with Time Inc. magazines, manages the Print Media division out of New York; Steven Pechman, previously with FOX Sports South, Turner Broadcasting and Cox Communications, heads the company’s Broadcast Media division and supervises the new Atlanta office.