Australian advertising and media-tech specialist, Max Dragon, is launching the world’s first independent advertising online marketplace, Media Exchange, in January 2017. Media Exchange is a central exchange platform where media operators will be able to list and sell their inventory directly to agencies and clients.

Max Dragon created Media Exchange to empower agencies and media publishers with a platform that creates efficiencies across the buying and selling process, with data at its core.

Media Exchange’s sales director, Natalia Cordeiro, explained, “We are seeing a global trend within the media industry wanting more efficiencies and control. Media Exchange provides the industry with a single platform that is an independent marketplace for media operators to list their available inventory, for clients to buy or bid on inventory, and intelligence benchmarking in a way that has not been seen before.

“When coupled with a data overlay from both audience measurement and third party, Media Exchange will revolutionise the media buying and selling process.”

The Media Exchange team is currently in negotiations with media operators, publishers and networks to secure advertising inventory from television, outdoor, radio, print and digital, globally.

The online media exchange platform is powered by Azure Service Fabric, a Microsoft distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices.

Microsoft Australia’s cloud & enterprise lead, Toby Bowers, added, “Media Exchange has the power to reshape the media and advertising industry by enabling rapid purchase of inventory across multiple channels and geographies.

“This rapid exchange requires an agile, robust and scalable system such as Azure Service Fabric, that can easily address the challenges of implementing mission-critical, demanding workloads.”

Media Exchange goes live in January 2017 with a global portfolio of advertising inventory which will be directly available to both agencies and media publishers.