Apologies in advance to those not familiar with the AdTech echo-system (you may not find this all that interesting); and apologies too, to those who haven't been asleep these past few weeks (you may not find this to be breaking news)! However, I just had to triple-take a headline about yet another big AdTech merger, which was announced just a few days after I left my last job and was at the start of a few short (yet deliberate) weeks of being blissfully disconnected and, as a result, unaware of how the professional world around me continued to evolve...
Rubicon & Telaria to Merge in 2020!
For those less familiar with the AdTech ecosystem: Rubicon is a long-standing Display-first Sell-Side Platform (SSP). Telaria is a video-first SSP, and everyone in the adtech world knows that video is HOT right now. While I'm not sure what was in it for Telaria (other than the ability to tap into Rubicon's list of long-term loyal clients), Telaria had been making good news in 2019, and was perhaps most notably known as the platform that powers Hulu's ads, as of early that year.
Michael Barrett (Rubicon's CEO)'s quote in the follow-up article Five things you need to know about the Rubicon-Telaria Merger really hit home with me: "A lot of folks have said, 'Hey Rubicon, you're not that different from a PubMatic, OpenX or Index Exchange,'" (Note: all of these were my clients throughout 2019). "And there has been a certain sameness for a group of players." Agreed - this is part of why they were all managed within a single book of business at Xandr! But Barrett goes on to explain that, "after this merger, I don't expect we'll be hearing that, because there will be such a clear difference" - and I wholeheartedly agree.
Now the debate has turned to whether or not the new SSP "team" will merge with one of the large DSPs, which would allow them to compete as a full-stack exchange with the likes of Google and AT&T's Xandr. AdProfs recently released the results of such a poll, which I've done my best to paste below:
...What do YOU think? And what does this mean for the likes of the other traditionally display-first SSPs cited (ie: OpenX, PubMatic, and IndexExchange)? Will they, too, choose to merge and/or acquire "complementary" technologies in order to remain relevant?
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