Australia's publishers need to collaborate and form their own private advertising exchange or someone else will build and own one for them, media buyers warn.
The warning comes after New Zealand's major publishers put rivalries aside to form the Kiwi Premium Advertising Exchange (KPEX) on Thursday of last week.
PHD chief executive Mark Coad??? said that a similar exchange in Australia here would simplify the process for advertisers and media buyers here while  allowing competition between local media rivals - which are under pressure to compete with the scale of global giants such as Google and Facebook. 
"I think in a way, they have to [form their own exchange]. They'll either do it within their own environments or someone will do it for them, and I don't see any other marketplace any differently," Mr Coad told Fairfax Media.
"If you look at the stock exchange, I don't go to a stock exchange to buy certain mining shares and go to another one to buy my retail stocks, and another one to buy my manufacturing stocks. There is a massive consolidation where someone owns the entire interface. I might be talking three to five years, but someone is going to own the exchange," he added.
James Hier, chief executive of Group M media agency MEC said local media companies risked becoming irrelevant unless they combined forces in online advertising sales to compete with larger global players.
"By consolidating you become not homogenous, but relevant again. It stops the commoditisation of their product," he said.
"For their own health it might be the right thing to do. The question is, will it work? People don't just go to Australian media for their online news or celebrity gossip, so the question is, is that enough of a pull to force me in?"
Companies such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn have carved out a large share of the online advertising market at a much lower cost than traditional media players.

Smart move
OMD chief executive Peter Horgan said the move by New Zealand publishers was smart and would give them more control of their destiny in the burgeoning market for so-called "programmatic buying" - the automatic buying of online advertising using algorithms.
"It is still at their discretion what inventory they load onto it. It keeps them in the relevance game in a growing sector which is programmatically traded inventory and they still control how deeply they put their toe in," Mr Horgan said.
He said that media buyers in Australia would like premium inventory to be traded programmatically, but that publishers themselves would benefit the most by setting up an exchange that would allow that.
"It keeps them in the game in a growing sector. I think it will be philosophically tough, but commercial imperatives can tend to prevail in those circumstances," Mr Horgan said.
Fairfax Media and Mi9 launched a mobile exchange, The Australian Premium Advertising Exchange (APEX), this year and News Corp launched its own programmatic service with MCN, Multi-Brand Exchange.
Earlier this year, the Financial Times, The Guardian, CNN and Reuters launched their own premium ad exchange, The Pangaea Alliance. The Economist is also placing inventory on the exchange.
Clients aren't crying out for a private exchange across all publishers yet, but as a media buyer it would have advantages, PHD's Mr Coad said.
"They log into an exchange, they'll programmatically optimise what that exchange can deliver, they'll log out of that and log into another one. What I'm interested in is how we optimise across that whole landscape."