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What OperaMediaworks’ rebrand to AdColony means to brands and why it's bullish on growth prospects

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By Seb Joseph, News editor

December 13, 2016 | 5 min read

Buoyed by its rebrand from OperaMediaworks to AdColony, the independent mobile ad platform is positioning itself as the destination for advertisers that want mass market audiences for video campaigns.

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AdColony is making a bigger play for mobile ad budgets.

It might seem like a bullish claim for a company with a limited profile but it has the scale and now, more importantly, the structure to make a bigger play for mobile budgets. With a pool of mobile app publishers it claims is “second only to Google in the top 1,000 apps”, that scale has perhaps been shackled somewhat by a disparate business spread across several acquisitions over the last five years.

The formation of AdColony – the name of OperaMediaworks' mobile video network – brings these strands together for the first time, housing the aforementioned platform within what executives have described as “one new programmatic infrastructure: AdMarvel (mobile ad serving); AdVine, Mobile Theory, Apprupt and 4th Screen (mobile ad networks); Hunt Mobile Ads (mobile monetisation); and Handser (mobile app store platform).

“We are a large, profitable company but nobody really knows who we are,” said Andrew French, general manager for EMEA.

His newly-installed regional role is emblematic of how the restructure will now function with one senior leadership team working with each local market to hit regional goals. Previously, local teams would’ve worked on their own version of a campaign, a setup that would often lead to six different creative teams working on localised versions of the same brief.

“Rather than having six creative teams all producing stuff for their local marketers, we can have one creative team across the whole region that really focuses on the best products rather than try and produce it six times. The idea is to leverage the best in market and best in class skills regardless of location.”

In theory, this will free up resource across the business to support teams. What it won’t mean is redundancies, with French adamant that it would weed out “dual roles” so that “if you’re in a local market and you’re doing account management, campaign management and operations, now you’re just doing one of those”.

Day-to-day there won’t be any major change such as new contacts for publishers, advertisers or agencies. Rather, clients will receive more updates on the products on sale, particularly as the repertoire is whittled down into a handful of products around video.

Much of those product pitches will centre on creativity and data science driven automation and artificial intelligence. The aim being that it can nab more brand building budgets for the rich media/display, streaming video, mobile display and native ad formats. Part of this shift will be driven by its Apollo platform, which will unify all supply and demand across pillar of the AdColony stack, and will be rolled out in phases next year.

“I am excited to unify the advertising business under the AdColony brand globally,” said chief executive Will Kassoy. “We are passionate about brand experiences that evoke emotion and drive real outcomes by combining both creativity with the next generation of advertising technologies like data science-driven automation and artificial intelligence. We look forward to building the AdColony brand around this positioning and hope to help elevate the state of mobile advertising.”

The formation of AdColony dates back to the summer when a $1.2bn deal from a consortium of Chinese companies to buy OperaMediaworks collapsed due to regulatory hurdles around data privacy. Rather than spurn the opportunity entirely, the group shelled out $600m for its consumer-facing business, which spanned OperaMediaworks’ mobile and desktop businesses alongside its performance and privacy apps. What was left was spun off into the separate company and is now AdColony, which still trades on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

It leaves the door open for AdColony should it receive another offer from another buyer at a time of much consolidation within the adtech sector. It’s an interesting time in the industry, especially when it comes to financing, M&A, and for those big enough, the decision between selling to one of the industry’s major acquirers or taking the plunge and floating on the stock exchange.

Julie Langley, a partner at investment banking outfit Results International, has said recently that despite the “bloodbath” of adtech companies in the public markets, and the beginning of an overall slowdown in the number of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the sector, there are reasons to be cheerful.

There have been more than 200 M&A deals in the adtech sector in the last 18 months, with over 186 different buyers, according to Results International. “That is a huge number of buyers that want to be in adtech," Langley said.

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