The Emeryville, CA-based company has just confirmed an agreement to be acquired by the digital media powerhouse for $540m.
What does Adobe want with TubeMogul? According to its announcement: “Adobe’s acquisition of TubeMogul will create the first end-to-end independent advertising and data management solution that spans TV and digital formats, simplifying what has been a complex and fragmented process for the world’s biggest brands.”
TubeMogul has software to enable planning, buying, measurement and optimizing of programmatic, cross-screen TV advertising. It went public two years ago, for half this value.
“We aim to be totally aligned with advertisers so they never second guess the incentives,” TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson tells The Wall Street Journal.
The acquisition is a further sign of consolidation in a video ad-tech ecosystem where the number of companies has grown dizzyingly.
Across the landscape, companies are bolting on point solutions to go end-to-end. Mar-tech M&A advisory group Results International Group reports 331 mergers and acquisitions took place in ad-tech and marketing-tech in the first nine months of this year. Digiday calls the TubeMogul acquisition a “tipping point” for this consolidation.
Previously, AOL had acquired Adap.tv in the space, helping its effort to form its One offering.
TubeMogul’s Wilson recognizes the need for consolidation. Back in June, he told Beet.TV: “I think what’s actually happening is it’s getting more fragmented, not less so. Yes there’s some very dominant players out there. But there’s also huge new platforms that didn’t even exist a couple of years ago like Snapchat. So the implication for advertisers is it’s getting more complicated and fragmented.”
]]>Bonin Bough reckons a coming fusion of media buying and ecommerce opportunities will fuel massive business expansion.
“We saw a unique opportunity in the marketplace right now to build a bridge between the media practice and what we think will be one of our fastest-growing P&Ls, which will be ecommerce,” Bough told a Beet.TV discussion panel with TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson. That fusion is what gave Bough his own new title recently, of SVP, Chief Media and eCommerce Officer.
“Everybody’s talking about ‘unicorns‘, growing a billion-dollar business really quick… we believe this notion of digitising traditional businesses will actually grow bigger, better, faster unicorns than even the tech business can build.
“Ecommerce will be 50% of the growth of most CPGs over the next five years.”
Mondelēz does not sell its own goods direct to customers but instead through retailers. In an ecommerce world, Bough says he wants to be “driving more traffic to our retailers, ultimately driving what we think will be the fastest-rowing ecommerce business out there”.
We interviewed Bough at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by TubeMogul. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>“Right now, we do a really job at automating the buying a desktop pre-roll buy or a mobile video buy or a linear television buy – but you still have to buy these individual silos,” CEO Brett Wilson tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“You’ll see us begin work on removing the silos of buying video. Over the course of the year, you’ll see us build products that make buying video across any screen a lot more seamless.”
That channel neutrality will give vendors like TubeMogul a leg-up from their digital heritage in to the much larger business of TV. But Wilson speaks out for platform independence, complaining that rival ad tech vendors owned by broadcast networks may not operate in clients’ best interests.
“Our largest competitors are also media owners – they also sell software. We think a lot of advertisers think it’s uncomfortable to use the software from a media owner,” he says.
This video is part of a series produced from the TubeMogul Cannes rooftop event. Please find additional videos from the series here.
]]>The Emeryville, California-based outfit has unveiled PTV, allowing data-driven buying of TV advertising. Ad buyers can already use this “programmatic” technique on the internet, but PTV brings the same tools to bear for access to ad slots on over 80 US cable networks.
“Advertisers will enter in a demographic target along with a secondary or strategic target,” TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson told Beet.TV in this video interview recorded at the launch. “The software is going to assemble the best mix of cable networks, broadcast networks, given day parts and days to achieve the lowest target CPM for that strategic target.”
PTV works by aggregating relationships with several providers that already offer this functionality. “We want to be the pipes for true cross-screen buys,” Wilson adds.
WSJ observes that the commonly-held view is that programmatic will not be adopted as easily in TV as it has been in display, with many powerful vested interests likely to hold on to their positions.
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TubeMogul is not in the media business and will not, says Wilson in this interview with Beet.TV Part of reason it went public was to maintain its independence, he explains.
His sentiments echo those of Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP who told Beet.TV that he sees Google and Facebook as media owners and prefers to keep his company’s media planning separate. Please find this video here.
We interviewed Wilson last week in Manhattan at an event with Mondelez International, the giant snack food company, which is a client of TubeMogul. He was in New York to ring the opening bell of the NASDAQ. The company went public in July.
]]>We are republishing that interview today.
]]>Recently, we spoke with TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson about the opportunities for brands to manage video ad decisioning in various scenarios. We have republished that video today.
Update from Cannes:
The Mondelez program will likely be discussed here later today at a roof-top event on programmatic video advertising presented by TubeMogul and SpotXchange
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Although advertisers are often keen to drive down the prices they pay in a world now threatened by fake views, TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson warns that logic could be detrimental.
“We get a lot of information requests – ‘Can we buy pre-roll, only on targeted audiences, only viewable, only at $10 CPMs?’,” he says. “No, of course you can’t.
“There’s unnatural price pressure – often, if the advertiser spends just a little bit more, the quality goes up, the effective pricing goes down.”
We spoke with him at the Beet.TV Video Ad Fraud Leadership Summit where he was a panelist, interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz. TubeMogul was the presenting sponsor of the summit.
]]>“We take the burden,” says says Brett Wilson, CEO of video ad tech vendor TubeMogul. “Anything you buy that isn’t what you think it is, we’re gonna take care of it.”
Wilson says site-level reporting and proactively identifying botnets that fake ad views are two ways to bring clarity to the problem: “This isn’t an issue we’re responding to – we’re creating the issue, we found these botnets. We published a list of sites that were driven by non-human traffic – any clients that bought a significant number of impressions on the site, which was very few, we gave them the money back.”
Wilson added that smaller, overseas advertisers are adapting their business back-office to programming trading techniques quicker than US agencies.
We spoke with him at the Beet.TV Video Ad Fraud Leadership Summit where he was a panelist, interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz. TubeMogul was our presenting sponsor.
]]>“There’s another set of inventory that’s more premium – advertisers and publishers both want to leverage the power of software to streamline the buys,” Wilson tells Beet.TV. “Software can help do things like set how much inventory there might be if an advertiser is bringing their first-party data to the table.”
Wilson says around 40 million impressions through his TubeMogul were traded using programmatic direct techniques last month: “The advertiser worked directly with the publisher and we simply provided the pipes.”
]]>The state of video ad fraud and viewabilty standards will be explored in a Beet.TV Leadership Summit on June 5 in New York City. The event is being sponsored by TubeMogul with comScore and Innovid. Here are the participants
Software can minimize the effect of fraud by exposing botnets and also by eliminating smaller banner spots from sales inventory, Wilson says. “The best way to battle ad fraud is to understand it and beware of the tradeoff in ad buys,” he says. For instance, don’t buy a pre-roll spot for $7. Those type of rates don’t exist. TubeMogul has also produced a list of botnet sites to “out” them, and has implemented measures to exclude 25o by 300 banner spots from video buys since those often lead to fraudulent views.
Beet.TV Leadership Event on June 5 in NYC
Wilson will be a speaker at the Beet.TV leadership summit on video fraud. TubeMogul is presenting along with comScore and Innovid.
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“We provide viewability metrics at the site and domain level. For a marketer those are actionable and they can turn a site on or off if they don’t like the viewability,” he tells us. Video viewability still means different things to different companies, ranging from a viewer clicking to another page, to a video running under the fold. “Viewability helps you understand if anyone is watching the ads marketers are paying a lot of money for. You need to see what is going on at the site level…Marketers should also want to see player size. Player size is a dead giveaway for fake preroll,” he says. For example, many 300 by 250 pre-rolls are video autoplays in a banner, Wilson says.
In general, of the impressions substantiated in an ad exchange buy, about 40% are viewable and 60% are not. “We have a lot of chances to increases this understanding and eliminate the bad players and rewarding the good ones,” he says.
Here is the company’s press release on the product offering.
]]>He also notes that an increasing numbers of brands are using programmatic buying. (Here is a report from Adweek on the trend.)
These are some of the takeaways of Wilson of the his company’s three-day executive retreat which included 130 attendees from agencies and brands.
Today, comScore reported that TubeMogul has 1.7 billion video ads viewed in September.
Disclosure: Beet.TV covered and produced a series of video from this event as part of sponsorship arrangement.
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The pair announced TubeMogul has been integrated in to IPG’s custom data stack, in what CEO Brett Wilson says adds ” seamless access to private inventory and cross-inventory GRP optimization” … “that enables IPG Mediabrands to execute campaigns that would not have been possible previously”.
Speaking at Beet.TV’s programmatic video leadership summit, presented by SpotXchange and hosted by The Hearst Corporation, Wilson was asked to what extent TubeMogul supports emerging programmatic video buying.
“Ninety percent of our clients are logging in and doing everything themselves,” he said, “so it’s truly programmatic. ‘Programmatic’ is just a buzzword and sometimes it’s meaningless. It’s not programmatic unless people are logging in, doing it themselves.”
Wilson was interviewed at the summit by Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell, who is leaving to join AdExchanger, it was announced on September 25. This taping took place on September 17.
]]>“We want to make the tools easier to use since 90% of our users are self-serve buyers,” Wilson explains in this video interview. TubeMogul is also focused on its new offering, BrandPoint, that measures digital media on a GRP basis so that digital buying can be more akin to TV buying. “That’s opened up a new segment of buyers…who have never bought digital video before,” he said. Next up, TubeMogul wants to add features that let buyers import their TV plans to view their overall reach as well as additional targeting technology. “The road ahead is continuing to make buying digital video buying a lot like TV,” he said.
TubeMogul’s efforts are part of a growing industry trend to bring more aspects of TV buying to digital media. Earlier this week, GroupM’s Xaxis unit said that it’s aiming to layer in TV-style metrics to Web video via an offering called Xaxis TV.
For more insight into BrandPoint, programmatic buying and TubeMogul’s Viewability consortium to develop standards for viewability of ads, check out this video interview.
We interviewed Wilson last week in San Francisco at the Beet.TV networking party co-sponsored by TubeMogul.
]]>But two ad tech executives speaking at Beet.TV’s Chicago programmatic video ad summit said algorithms can serve creatives, too – if creatives let their output be subjected to efficiency testing.
“I haven’t seen a dynamic solution that creative-tests dynamic creative,” said Starcom digital media director and SVP Tracey Paull.
“We need to go back to partners like our creative testing partners and get them to really figure out dynamic creative testing, so that the same principles we’re using at television and all the other places, we can actually then apply to get smarter creative.”
TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson echoed Paull’s views, adding: “The promise of programmatic is it streamlines everything. To the extent that you are going to multi-variant test different pieces of feedback, you can get really quick feedback.
“It’s pretty easy for someone at a media buying agency to load in different creatives with that exact same media and audience objectives, measure what’s working in real-time and optimize. In practice, that doesn’t happen enough.”
]]>TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson’s company has open-sourced code to let advertisers see what percentage of a video window is really in-view. But he thinks such data will soon make waves when it becomes more commonly available.
“I think, by the end of the year, you’ll start seeing some kind of standard around video viewability,” Wilson told Furious Minds CEO Ashley Schwartz in this taped interview at Beet.TV’s programmatic video advertising summit. “What percentage of video is viewable? We think it’s going to be pretty shocking once people start running these reports – maybe 50% of video right now is viewable.”
Such a number could spook many advertisers. But Wilson says the data will help distinguish quality traffic from poor.
“What happens when you roll out viewabiity is you expose the bad behaviour and the good behaviour. CPMs will go up for the best sites – big players that feel TV-like.” Losers from viewability data will include sites that try fooling the numbers by auto-playing videos in banners and playing third-party video, Wilson added.
Disclaimer: TubeMogul sponsored the summit on programmatic buying at VivaKi.
]]>In this taped interview at Beet.TV’s programmatic video advertising summit, Brett Wilson said the marketplaces have created a new layer of mid-tier pricing: “You had your premium tier – where your direct sales force would sell $15-to$30 CPMs – and … then you’d have the bottom of the pyramid – $4 to $5 – you’re selling to ad networks.
“(Now) there’s this other level of pricing for a publisher that’s above remnant. For publishers, it can be a great thing – they can reduce their sales costs, they learn a lot, they can see who’s buying. this is why you’re seeing a lot more inventory become available – because it is working for publishers.”
Wilson was interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
Disclaimer: TubeMogul sponsored the summit on programmatic buying at VivaKi
]]>We sat down with him recently to talk about growth at the company which now employs 200, its recent financing, the competitive landscape and trends in the video ad marketplace.
More on TubeMogul in this story in AdExchanger by David Kaplan.
Chicago, July 10 with TubeMogul at VivaKi
Beet.TV is producing a leadership summit about programmatic video advertising at the global headquarters of VivaKi. The event is sponsored by TubeMogul. We are not streaming the event live, but will produce several video session highlights and interviews. Moderating the sessions will be Ashley Swartz, CEO of the New York digital media consultancy Furious Minds. These are our panelists:
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Last week TubeMogul, the California-based video ad technology company, announced a $10 million round of financing from SingTel, a Singapore-based telecommunications company.
“Asia’s a part of the world where we’ve invested really significantly, and this makes it a little bit easier to partner with someone that’s already there and dominate in the market,” Wilson says.
We spoke with Wilson during an interview with Ashley Swartz, CEO and founder of NY-based digital consultancy Furious Minds and a regular contributor to Beet.TV, at the VideoNuze Online Video Ad Summit in New York.
]]>Earlier this year we interviewed TubeMogul CEO and founder Brett Wilson about the company and its opportunities for growth around the emerging real-time bidding marketplace for video advertising. We are republishing that interview today.
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