Happy Friday!
There’s so much going on in the programmatic industry at the moment I decided to create a weekly email that a) summarizes key events b) provides a buyside view of the news that is shaping the market we operate in.
You’re a founding subscriber & I greatly appreciate that, I’d also appreciate any feedback on how I can make next week better and indeed if there’s anything you think I should focus on in the future.
Comcast buys Sky
The big news this week was that Comcast beat 21st Century Fox to buy Sky in an auction held by paying $38.8 billion, that’s 40% more than their initial bid and around 10% more than Fox were willing to pay. Sky have recommended shareholders accept the Comcast bid immediately & it was announced yesterday that Comcast will own all of Sky as Fox has agreed to sell its stake for $15 billion!
Obviously the acquisition is seen by many as a move to protect against the rising threat from streaming giants like Netflix & Amazon. From a programmatic perspective what’s interesting is that just last week it was reported last week by Digiday that Sky was building its own exchange to keep margins high:
Sky is building its own Ad Exchange to realise its vision of making TV 📺 #Programmatic 🤖 whilst keeping margins high.
It’ll start with VOD & it’s then will roll out the exchange to linear broadcast inventory, next stop after that live broadcasts? 📡🛰 via @IDComms pic.twitter.com/UoWYZWFD6M
Back to Sky & Comcast, whatever happens I hope Sky get their skates on and maximize the amount of addressable inventory available asap, they have a goldmine of quality content & this is a huge opportunity for them given the programmatic market is still dominated by video impressions with a small player size: The buyer demand is definitely there and it’ll certainly be exciting to see how this plays out.
Twitter & OpenX
I mentioned this briefly above; Twitter and OpenX have partnered on a pretty cool new initiative which will allow buyers to insert ads into Timelines (strings of tweets) that publishers embed into their websites:
It’s early days for this initiative, and it’ll be interesting to see how this scales. I’m really excited about this partnership.
People often talk about the commoditization of advertising exchanges, I think it’s great to see OpenX working with a huge player in social media to create a real point of difference through unique inventory. Read about this in more detail on the Twitter blog here
Say Hello To xandr
On Tuesday this week AT&T announced the rebrand of its “AdCo” unit to xandr:The name is a nod to the businesses founder Alexander Graham Bell & during the launch AT&T said the unit looks to “solve new challenges for the future of advertising”. The new unit will house AT&T’s advanced TV service AdWorks, the analytics business ATT.net as well as the recently acquired AppNexus.
What was really interesting is xandr will not only sell addressable TV advertising brands that it owns (like Turner) but also aggregate third parties addressable inventory, with Altice & Frontier Communications both named at launch. To me this appears to be the foundation of a national TV marketplace for advertisers and premium content It will certainly be interesting to see if former competitors can collaborate to defend their market position against the streaming giants.
Regardless it appears that Brian Lesser is not wasting any time in putting AppNexus to work it’ll be interesting to see whether they create a walled garden around this content (I suspect they might) and given the US centric nature of AT&T, how xandr will play our in Europe (or not). More on Ad Week here
Rubicon London Automation Summit
The Rubicon Project leadership team was in town yesterday & they put on a great summit in London. Most of the publishers and buyers I spoke to at the event viewed it as a return to form for the business, after what was tough year in 2016 & a year of stabilization in 2017. This makes sense given they’ve had a roaring 2018 thus far, with a 95% increase in share price no doubt spurred by an epic 70% growth in ad spend in H1 2018.
Video appears to be a big focus for Rubicon, as are new tools for both the sell and the buy side. For buyers testing “Estimated Market Rate” (EMR) tools will be of particular interest, certainly the case studies here & here look compelling.
Last year many (myself included) thought Rubicon was ripe for acquisition given that their cash reserves were greater than their market cap, despite the massive valuation AppNexus was able to achieve recently, given their current form I wouldn’t be surprised if Rubicon carried on forward on their current path rather than selling, I guess only time will tell though!
Keep your eyes peeled for a couple of upcoming VLOGs with some of Rubicon’s key people in the coming weeks where we discuss the past, present & future. It’ll be interesting, I promise.
Okay so that’s the first newsletter done, thank you for reading this far, I really appreciate it. Hopefully you’ll agree it has been a passable starter for ten, if not let me know where I can improve, feedback is a gift.
Finally if you think of someone who might like to receive next weeks newsletter ask them to sign up, I’d really appreciate that also.
Thanks & have a lovely weekend
Simon.