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?'”
]]>That would seem to mean a hefty challenge for ad-tech techniques that, in recent years, have grown so fast that users cannot keep up.
But Tom Kershaw relishes the challenge.
As Rubicon Project’s chief technology officer, Kershaw helps run one of the leading companies that has popularized the practice of automated digital ad trading.
The tech trend is what helped Rubicon raise $93.8 million in an IPO back in 2007. But now, Kershaw says, it is time for a reboot.
“The digital advertising industry has really evolved kind of quietly towards a model entirely based on user-based targeting and interest based targeting,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We’ve never really re-established our consent agreement with our users. We’ve never given them real feedback over how their data is used and we’ve never given them control to tell us how they want to be targeted and how they want their data treated. So, I think this is a good thing.”
New GDPR stipulations give consumers new protections including:
Penalties for not supporting the new rights run up to 4% of global turnover, up to a maximum €20 million, and GDPR applies to any worldwide company processing the data of European citizens.
For Kershaw, this is all good.
“I think it’s long overdue that we establish that dialogue and we give consumers the ability to give us real feedback on how their data is used,” he says. “Because data can both be really, really helpful in terms of making ads relevant and timely and informational to users; it also can be creepy.”
“We need to be clear with users. I think GDPR will help us evolve that relationship and establish a new mechanism for handling user data. I think it’s going to take time but the directions are all positive.”
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Last year, his company felt the pain of the new technology, which allows publishers to entertain multiple simultaneous ad bids for higher yield. Rubicon conceded it had been slow to roll out – an admission that sent its stock tumbling, forcing it to make wide-ranging lay-offs and prompting it to spend $38.5mn to buy nToggle in a bid to plug the hole.
But now, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Kershaw, who then came in as Rubicon’s chief technology officer after running Google’s ad products in APAC, leaves little doubt that Rubicon understands header’s impact, and where the company can make the biggest dent.
“I think people sometimes underestimate how much effort you have to put in to making sure things work,” he explains.
“The specific implementation issues we’ve gone through in the last year, I think the biggest one was we found that, as an exchange, our full-time job was integrating with other exchanges. And so we didn’t have resources anymore to build new features and build all these cool new things and put new reporting pieces in place, because all we were doing was integrating with other (header bidding) wrappers.”
This September, Rubicon Project, PubMatic and AppNexus launched Prebid.org, an open-source version of the client-side Javascript “wrappers” on which header bidding depends.
Whilst many ad-tech rivals had launched their own wrappers, Kershaw says he sees them as a “commodity”, just a few lines of code that anyone can reproduce. It is elsewhere in the stack, he says, that header bidding can be differentiated – in the reporting, analytics, cookie matching, user identity and measurement.
“That all is going be done server-side,” Kershaw adds. “That is kind of where all the real heavy lifting is taking place.”
But he sees three issues that are now threatening to hold back development:
Kershaw leaves Beet.TV in no doubt that header bidding is transformational.
“Header bidding is becoming the new infrastructure,” he explains. “The implications of header bidding are far and wide. They go up and down the stack, and I think a lot of us didn’t realize the full implications of moving models.
“The old model was based on exclusive access to inventory and being able to monetize that inventory. The new model is, you see all the inventory, but you have to fight and monetize every impression.
“So, pretty much everything that the ad tech industry found to be foundational has crumbled and changed as a result of header bidding.”
This segment is part of a Beet.TV series on innovation in programmatic advertising around header bidding and wrappers. The series is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Matt Greenberg describes Rubicon’s expanded involvement with Cadreon as the latest step in a relationship spanning about three years. Cadreon has been using Rubicon’s non-guaranteed orders marketplace along with its open auction exchange.
Now Cadreon will be accessing “the entire spectrum of the programmatic waterfall, from the unreserved open market to the reserved automated guaranteed space” via Rubicon, according to Greenberg.
Rubicon’s new partnership with Mediaocean aims to help scale automation efforts for the direct buying sector—the largest component of the digital advertising market—through the integration of Rubicon’s Guaranteed Orders product with Mediaocean’s Prisma platform.
“This allows us to access a lot more agencies that are looking for great supply, great partnerships, great publishers for every brand and agency that connects with the Mediaocean platform,” says Greenberg.
The new deals are a far cry from the early days of programmatic buying when it mainly involved remnant inventory.
“As the years have gone along we’ve found publishers and buyers are looking for places to buy premium inventory in well-lit environments,” says Greenberg.
]]>Ad spending in the upcoming presidential election could trump the last poll by 20%, reaching $11.4bn, with digital breaking the $1bn barrier, according to a Borrell Associates forecast.
And programmatic video could get a big leg-up from the vote, a panel of ad-tech vendors convened by Beet.TV agreed…
“Television, for the political arena, is already sold out, and has been sold out for months now,” said Novak, whose Rubicon powers programmatic ad trading for many of the world’s publishers. “But there’s billions of dollars that need to be bought. There’s a huge opportunity. It allows some really quality case studies to be able to test this system in a huge way.”
Other panelists believed the upcoming vote will crystallise how media consumption habits are changing dramatically, as candidates switch screen – and buying method – to reach voters who are tuning out.
“We’re going to see a desire to access that youth demographic that is viewing in OTT,” DashBid’s Herman.
“With all the cord cutting that’s really happening. and especially among the youth group, there’s a real need to access that inventory. There’s a lot of premium video inventory available in the OTT ecosystem that just hasn’t been either addressable or it hasn’t been measurable. The elections are going to drive a real hunger for that inventory and I think they’re going to move us in a really great way.”
As OpenX’s Reed Scharff wrote on Huffington Post recently, programmatic could be the dream of political scientists and campaigners who want to reach individual voters and targeted demographic groups with specific messaging. And the election could be the perfect opportunity to bring that promise to the mass market.
“It could be a domino effect, which is really exciting,” said SpotX’s Buckley, whose company is part owned by a TV operator and producer, RTL. ” It could also have an impact on other industries. Other folks are going to feel that (inventory) shortage as well… (for example), auto. It could have a residual effect, it’s not just going to be limited to the political landscape.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
]]>She also speaks about the development of Rubicon in the video sector as a “safe” space for both buyers and sellers.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
]]>“One of the big things you’re going to see with mobile is storytelling becoming more and more important – when you’re trying to tell a story, a one-to-one relationship and not a one-to-many (relationship), which has been television,” says Rubicon chief marketer Mari Kim Novak.
“The need for mobile-first creative and storytelling is going to be more important than ever. You’re going to see the ad tech community and the creative world coming together.”
She says recently-signed Rubicon partnerships with fellow ad tech services Virool and Inmobi are helping disprove the idea that there is insufficient supply of quality ad inventory on mobile.
We interviewed her in New York, during Advertising Week.
This segment is part of a Beet.TV series presented by Virool titled “Emotions and the Virality of Videos.” The series can be found here.
]]>After the session, we spoke with moderator, Jay Sears, SVP at the Rubicon Project about the issue. He says fraud is real, but it need not be part of the equation if the buyer and seller understand the “rules of engagement.” When the transaction is clear, “there is nowhere to hide.”
For more videos from the Rubicon session, please visit this page.
]]>“If the agency and the client can have a very clean discussion about what is the value of the offer and what is the fee they charge, it is no one else’s business how it is set up,” said Dentsu Aegis Network’s AMNET global president Ashwini Karandikar.
“As programmatic evolves beyond display, the money that’s going to be at play is going to be 100 times what it is right now. So can we move beyond this silly question and talk about what is the value that you deliver? That discussion needs to be a one-on-one, not an article written in the press.”
But VivaKi global CEO Stephan Beringer and Bank of America’s global media investment SVP Lou Paskalis took issue.
“No,” Paskalis said. “The industry needs to have an understanding about the business model.
“Agencies, for the most part, are transparent about what they’re not transparent about. As a client, you have to understand that. We have to be very clear what the rules of the road are.”
This segment from the Cannes Lions Festival was part of a series on programmatic advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
]]>Programmatic ad tech vendor Rubicon Project’s international GM Jay Stevens tells Beet.TV he anticipates the “confluence” of database marketing with display advertising.
“Some of the people who hold the most valuable data are the retailers,” Stevens says. “Retailers are able to leverage their core data assets … to overlay very, very valuable point of sale data, loyalty data.
“That becomes a very valuable proposition for a major retailer – (with) the products they sell on their shelves, they are making razor-thin margins in order to be competitive. In the media space, they could take advantage of those data assets at a much higher margin and grab a nice piece of the overall media pie.”
Stevens says Australian supermarket chain Coles is leading the way, having created its own internal retail trading desk, while Rubicon is also serving ads for Walmart and its UK subsidiary Asda. Furthermore, Rubicon counts Triad Retail Media, which serves engaging ads on to retailer sites, as a partner.
“They’re really thinking of their sites as publishers would – not just as a place in which to buy and sell goods,” he says. “We operate the automation platform for the way in which that media is bought and sold on those sites.”
We are starting to hear a lot about the ways in which retailers and ad tech can work together. In Cannes, Oreo and Toblerone company Mondelēz International’s marketing chief told Beet.TV he wants to bring about a fusion of media buying and ecommerce, so that his brands buy ads that drive traffic to retail sites that can sell their products.
We interviewed Stevens at the Cannes Lions Festival as part of a series on video advertising presented by Rubicon Project. Please visit this page for more videos from the series.
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“We’re seeing automation go deeper and deeper in to the operating agency,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.”
Case in point is Digitas. “We worked with them to activate their most important trading partnerships in the order automation space,” Sears says. “That’s big milestone for the business.”
According to Sears: “A number of years ago, automation was only considered after a plan was written, at the point you were in to the buying mechanics already. We’re pushing this earlier and earlier in to the process – the approach winds up being much more holistic.”
Sears also talks about how rival publishers in Europe are coming together cooperatively to leverage automated ad selling opportunities at the global level.
]]>The exec whose company powers the so-called Pangea Alliance says such comings together, once considered rare in the cut-throat world of media, are beneficial.
“(In advertising), there’s always been that trade-off between scale and quality,” Rubicon Project marketplace development SVP Jay Sears tells Beet.TV. “Publishers are seeing Google and Facebook with the ability to provide that scale. With cooperative arrangements, they can do the same thing.
“By coming together, this group of media owners has created a global footprint of 110m monthly uniques that’s pretty significant in an environment that denotes quality.
“The phenomenon of the cooperative is something we’ve seen quite a bit of. You can see La Place in France, the Czech Publisher Exchange in the Czech Republic, the Danish Publisher Network in Denmark.”
These networks along with the Pangea are powered with technology from the Rubicon Project.
Sears was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.
]]>The Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters are together forming the Pangea Alliance, a shared scheme to pool first-party ad data for ad buyers to target their combined 110 million users in an automated fashion.
The Pangea system is announced by The Guardian, powered by programmatic ad tech platform Rubicon Project and is due to launch in beta in April. Rubicon already powers programmatic operations for several news brands including News Corp. speaking with Beet.TV last year, Rubicon international GM Jay Stevens said automation serves publishers’ “demand for greater efficiency”.
Speaking to me as I interviewed him during a panel at Guardian Changing Summit 2015 in London today, Guardian News & Media deputy CEO David Pemsel said advertisers in the US, where The Guardian is building a business, want to see scale. The Guardian itself reports the launch as a defensive play against dominant ad platforms offered by Facebook, Microsoft and Google.
Pangea will facilitate trading of display ads and ads via trading desks but even including native ads. The Economist is also a launch partner.
Collaborations in the competitive news publisher space are rate, especially amongst the fierce rivalry of the British newspaper market. But last November three local UK newspaper publishers – Johnston Press, Newsquest and Local World – also teamed to launch 1XL, a joint advertising network.
]]>The company is growing in a number of markets including Italy, where Rubicon powers a majority of the major sites, Stevens says.
The company went public this past April.
Update: Reporting on an IAB study, the Wall Street Journal reports today that a most major U.S. publishers are selling ads programmatically.
We spoke with Stevens for “The Road to DMEXCO,” a series of interviews with industry leaders produced in New York, London and San Francisco. The series is sponsored by the automatic content recognition (ACR) technology provider Civolution.
Please find more videos from the series here. Beet.TV is a media sponsor of DMEXCO and will be covering the conference extensively.
]]>“You always see innovation happen at the bottom of the market, which is exactly what happened around the rise of RTB (real-time bidding) and open-auction,” says Project Rubicon‘s marketplace development SVP Jay Sears.
“But what you’ve seen is increasing investment and organisation around the order-automation piece, the private piece.”
He was speaking to Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.
]]>Under the recently announced Turner agreement, as an example, the Turner Premium Xchange will offer programmatic options to “trusted partners” across the Turner portfolio of sites, powered by Rubicon. The deals with these media partners underscore the boom in real-time buying as well as how much it has shifted from a way to monetize unsold inventory to a key advertising strategy.
“We have seen a meteoric rise in programmatic buying. [On an international basis] it started in the UK and rapidly expanded to France, Germany, Italy and other markets,” he tells us, adding that each market will often rely on a different mix of tactics and inventory. Each market also has its own compliance requirements that marketers and technologists need to follow.
Rubicon executive Jay Sears has said he expects automation to become the norm in the buying and selling of ads, according to this AdWeek article.
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Although some publishers believe the ad-selling model devalues their ad inventory, News Corp and The New York Times this year launched their own programmatic ad exchanges – the latter using DoubeClick Ad Exchange and the former using Rubicon’s infrastructure across its global vehicles.
Rubicon international GM Jay Stevens tells Beet.TV in this video interview: “Whether it’s the Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Sun, the News Digital Australia properties – the concept is allowing one property to be able to programmatically sell another property and be able to easily traffic those campaigns… being able to leverage the collective data among all those assets.”
Such business is one line that’s driving Rubicon at the moment. “Increasingly we’re seeing a dramatic rise of programmatic premium, direct order automation, private marketplaces – there’s a number of words to describe it,” Stevens adds.
Watch the full interview for more.
]]>Sears moderated a session at Advertising Week about programmatic with most of the heads of the agency trading desks, We spoke with him afterwards.
]]>“In a territory market that’s a much smaller population … operational costs are a much, much bigger percentage of the overall media spend,” Rubicon Project’s international VP Jay Stevens tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Publishers and agencies alike are really forced to become more innovative with the way they think about the execution and the the systems behind how those buys take place. That’s one of the reasons we’re seeing immense adoption all over the world. Outside the US is perhaps the most exciting place where programmatic is taking root.”
Rubicon Project is one of the leading exponents of automated, real-time buying and selling of online advertising space.
Stevens was speaking with Beet.TV during the recent Cannes Lions festival at a rooftop session on programmatic buying organized by Rubicon Project.
]]>Sears also provides an update on developments at the Rubicon Project.
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We spoke with him at Cannes Lions, after a roof-top panel discussion of the heads of the trading desks of the major holding companies. The event was organized by the Rubicon Project. Here is an article in USA Today by Michael Wolff who was on hand to cover.
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