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Advertising Week Yahoo Brightroll

Yahoo consolidates programmatic offering under BrightRoll brand

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By Ronan Shields, Digital Editor

September 28, 2015 | 4 min read

Yahoo has revealed that it is to combine its entire programmatic advertising offering, as it attempts to use this week’s Ad Week New York to better articulate its offering to advertisers, a little over 18 months since it pulled the plug on The Right Media Exchange (RMX) brand.

Yahoo first announced that it is to acquire BrigthRoll – a platform more synonymous with video advertising - for $640m last year, and it has today (28 September) unveiled it will use it as the unified brand for its programmatic offering, with the outfit promising to offer “media-agnostic tools” to advertisers.

BrightRoll tops Yahoo’s purchase spree

The purchase of BrightRoll by Yahoo topped of a series of acquisitions beginning with Tumblr back in 2013, followed by the purchase of mobile analytics outfit Flurry, from the outfit with the strategy aimed at bolstering its cross-screen capabilities.

It claims the combined suite will offer advertisers unique insights into its audience, given that it has over 165 billion daily touchpoints, with the “media-agnostic” claim presumably the company trying to differentiate itself from other scale players such as Facebook and Google (who often face criticisms of being closed).

A press release announcing the move reads: “Since acquiring BrightRoll in December 2014, the company has focused on building an open, media-agnostic suite of programmatic buying and selling tools to help advertisers, publishers and partners grow and measure their business.”

DSP & Exchange

The offering includes the BrightRoll DSP, plus BrightRoll Exchange, with the former offering programmatic media buying services for display, native and video advertising slots unique to the Yahoo platform.

Additionally, the new offering will include the BrightRoll Exchange which is integrated with over 100 DSPs and lets advertisers access thousands of sites and apps in a real-time bidding (RTB) environment in private marketplaces, or more direct media selling channels.

Prashant Fuloria, senior VP of advertising products at Yahoo, added: “We’ve made significant investments to integrate Yahoo’s targeting and measurement capabilities into BrightRoll’s programmatic tools to provide more control, more transparency, and ultimately better results.”

Yahoo Gemini

Meanwhile, the outfit has also used this week to announce new features to its proprietary marketplace Yahoo Gemini, which allows advertisers to leverage their own data alongside Yahoo data to efficiently retarget audiences across devices, using both native and search advertising slots.

In addition, it has also announced the Yahoo Preferred Partner Programme, including fellow ad tech firms such as Acquisio, ChannelAdvisor, Dealer.com, DrivenLocal, Fiksu, Kenshoo, Marin Software, Sprinklr and Tealium, which it hopes it will more demand to its platform, as it will let advertisers measure how well their ads on the platform perform.

Programmatic video increasingly dominating the Ad Week New York agenda

Elsewhere, AppNexus, another company that could be considered a rival to Yahoo, is also using this week to discuss developments with its recently launched programmatic video ad buying suite of tools, with the outfit claiming the current way of doing business shortchanges media owners.

Eric Hoffert, AppNexus senior VP, of video technology, added: “There is a fundamental problem in how video media is bought and sold today, with publishers getting shortchanged and advertisers paying way too much for the media.

“AppNexus is committed to bursting the video cost bubble. We are proud to announce that our video buying solution is helping clients achieve greater audience reach at a fraction of the cost, while still maximising yield for publishers.”

Hoffert has penned a blog claiming that buyers who have tested the AppNexus video advertising platform (which launched in June) have seen improved audience reach of up to 100-times that of competitive platforms, clickthrough rates (CTR) of up to 300 per cent, plus reduced video buying costs of up to 60 per cent.

Meanwhile, the company also announced that publishers supplying its video ad product with inventory include: Facebook-owned LiveRail, SpotXchange, StickyADS.tv, Optimatic, SMARTSTREAM.TV, Fyber, AerServ, and several others it declined to name.

Advertising Week Yahoo Brightroll

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