Later in the morning, Beet.TV did this video interview with Magnite CEO Michael Barrett about the deal and what it means for the industry.
The adtech veteran reflects on the industry’s ups and downs, including unsuccessful IPOs that turned off investors. Also hampering investment had been a widespread perception that Google and Facebook would dominate and there would be no room for big, independent players in adtech. The Trade Desk has proved them wrong, he notes.
The combination of the two companies, which are primarily known as Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) will become an industry powerhouse in a technology which provides video and television programmers and publishers with software to make inventory available to advertisers in an automated, programmatic manner.
RTL acquired SpotX in 2017, after owning a controlling interest since 2014.
The public markets have embraced today’s acquisition news enthusiastically, with share price soaring some 25% to $55, increasing the valuation of the company by $1 billion in today’s trading (as of noon EST.)
]]>Magnite, a sell-side platform (SSP) that was formed this year with the merger of Rubicon Project and Telaria, has its eye on the burgeoning market for programmatic video as more marketers shift their media budgets away from the estimated $70 billion market for linear TV advertising. The company aims to be the sell-side equivalent of The Trade Desk, which helps marketers find media inventory as an independent demand-side platform (DSP).
In discussing the recent merger, Magnite CEO Michael Barrett sees the opportunity to build scale for content providers whose ad inventories include a variety of formats in video, audio, mobile and web channels.
“The idea was that publishers are looking to work with fewer partners that can do more for them, and ad tech is notoriously fragmented,” Barrett said in the latest installment of the Beet TV/VAB “TV Reset” forum. “We saw an opportunity to create an alternative — an independent, omnichannel play.”
Speaking to Sean Cunningham, president and CEO of VAB, Barrett said Magnite combines the strengths of Telaria in connected TV (CTV) with Rubicon’s background in display, audio and digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising to provide a more unified platform for publishers to connect with media buyers.
“Buyers don’t want to work with five platforms to get the inventory of one media company,” Barrett said. “Our partners on the publishing side can go in full-in on programmatic and still guard the economics that they rightfully fight for, but accommodate what the buyers are asking for.”
He anticipates strong growth for AVOD services as consumers look to stretch their limited budgets for subscription video on demand (SVOD) services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu and YouTube Premium.
“The most interesting shift is SVOD versus AVOD,” Barrett said. “Two years ago, it was clear that the Netflix model was the model that everyone emulated.”
However, keeping up with Netflix’s annual programming budget, which was forecast to top $17 billion this year, is a daunting proposition for any VOD service that relies only on subscription revenue. By selling advertising, AVOD services gain the financial resources to license higher-quality programming that’s appealing to viewers, while also helping marketers connect with them
“The AVOD world will be booming,” Barrett said. “Consumers have already raised their hand and said, ‘This is how I like to consume content. This is by choice. This is here to stay.'”
You are watching TV Reset, a leadership forum produced in partnership with VAB. The series is presented by 605 and Magnite. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>The pair of ad-tech companies announced their intention to merge in December, in order to seize the opportunity emerging in connected TV advertising alongside inventory of other digital channels.
They say the combined company – owned 47.1% by Telaria shareholders and 52.9% by Rubicon shareholders – would “offer a single platform for transacting Connected TV (CTV), desktop display, video, audio, and mobile inventory across all geographies and auction types”.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rubicon Project CEO Michael Barrett explains the rationale for the move…
“The missing piece of the Rubicon portfolio was our ability to work with our publishers on their CTV (connected TV) inventory,” he says. “Telaria combining with Rubicon just makes a ton of sense.”
Barrett explains that video publishers have changed the way they use supply-side platforms (SSPs) for selling and serving ads, whilst the business of selling video ads is even more different.
“Buyers are being very picky about who they work with,” he says. “They’re working with less and less SSPs. Publishers are working with less SSPs.
“From a video perspective, it’s still a very specialized area that requires a fair amount of resources to put into it. It’s a steep learning curve. Render rates aren’t where the industry wants them to be.
“To be able to have the resources that we will have as this combined entity – cash balances of $150 million, public market cap of over $1 billion – to be able to put that into the areas of the highest growth, the highest value, which is video and CTV, is going to be very exciting.”
]]>Then, new regulations and changing consumer sentiment put the brakes on advanced ad techniques which sought to solve the cookie problem.
But the latest emerging tech promises to give open-web publishers a more promising outlook for selling digital ads.
“Cookies weren’t always the greatest thing, they were sloppy,” says Michael Barrett, Rubicon Project president and CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “This time around, let’s do it in a way that’s not as kludgy.”
Some of that tech may be coming in to view, as systems which help build “identity graphs” emerge to help piece together audience activities from across the different device use.
Identity graphs work by stitching together bundles of data known about users – overcoming the historic problem which occurred when a desktop web user’s data trail could not match up with her mobile browsing behaviour.
“There’s a real shot, a real shot now for the open web … to start to be able to feel, look to buyers like a platform,” says Barrett.
“A lot of folks are working on some pretty smart ideas, and I sense that, when we get through this as an industry, we’ll be in a far better position than we are today.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV preview series titled “The Road to Cannes.” The series is sponsored by 4INFO. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>Discovery Inc., Clearing House, AutoTrader, Southern Cross, Austereo and Domain are amongst the publishers participating in a closed beta of the new Demand Manager. a solution which aims to simplify the Prebid header bidder wrapper technology which Rubicon helped create in 2017.
“(Prebid) was great for a period of time,” says Michael Barrett, Rubicon Project president and CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV Here is the company press release.
“And then (publishers) realized, ‘It’s a lot of heavy lifting. I have to hire engineers. I am sub-optimizing my monetization because I’m lacking tools, and graphics, and UI, and analytics.
“So, for the last six months, we’ve been building this Prebid as a managed service.”
Header bidding is the technology which emerged around 2015 allowing publishers to entertain ad inventory bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, rather than consecutively – a practice which had often seen them miss out on the best offer prices.
With Demand Manager, Barrett’s theory goes, publishers can worry less about technical integrations, limitations, extracting data and putting it in a spreadsheet to seek insight.
That is because, whilst Demand Manager is predicated on Prebid, it makes it all accessible through a more friendly user interface.
For Barrett, it’s a continuation of the open-source ethos which launched Prebid.
“With open source … (publishers) are no longer faced with having to choose just a vendor or having to make a bet even on a Rubicon Project, (asking themselves), ‘Hey, are those going to be around five years from now? Are they going to be responsive?'”
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