Week In Review: Telaria Merges With Rubicon Project, iSpot Launches Business Outcome Benchmarks

1. Telaria Merges With Rubicon Project

Telaria, the company formerly known as Tremor Video and the Rubicon Project are merging in a deal that was announced earlier this week. And though the former sounds like the name of an anti-asthma drug and the latter like the name of a new Matt Damon movie, the combination of the two publicly traded companies promises to be a net positive for the industry.

Why It Matters

The two companies have very diverse businesses. Telaria sells advertising in the CTV market (they set up Hulu' s private marketplace) while Rubicon is an SSP that is mostly active in digital display advertising.

Together though, they should be able to create enough synergy to attract more clients, especially clients who are looking for more of a one-stop shop and an alternative to Google and Facebook.

That (more than likely) means they are not combing their exchanges or coming up with a standard “take rate” (aka commission) given the disparity in the ways that CTV and display are bought and sold.

What they will rely on, however, is scale—they can use the same infrastructure, the same big processing technology and they can begin to steer clients towards each other, given the large number of brands running both CTV and digital. (If nothing else, the sharing leads part will be huge.)

At a time when brands prefer to work with fewer, not more partners, it seems like a very savvy move.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re a brand looking for an alternative to the duopoly, at least take a meeting with the new company. 

If you’re one of their competitors, figure out whether the merger actually gets them anything other than a bigger Holiday Party and consolidated back office functions and figure out what your best next steps should be.

If you’re working in the broader media industry and the whole notion of CTV and what Telaria actually does conjures up a murky haze… time to buy the new TV[R]EV Special Report on Addressable TV Advertising. 49 easy-to-digest pages of wisdom and explanation that will leave you feeling like you finally managed to wrap your head around all the intricacies of, new developments in, and byzantine jargon of, the addressable TV advertising ecosystem. 

Download your copy here.

2. iSpot Launches Business Outcome Benchmarks

iSpot announced that they were going to be taking their whole business outcome game to the next level, launching a series of business outcome benchmarks for TV advertising. The goal here is to provide standardized, predictable numbers for key measures like incremental reach and conversion rates.

Why It Matters

The whole concept of tying TV commercials to business outcomes is fairly radical in that it finally gives networks a way to prove that TV commercials are working in a way that’s as data-based as digital advertising stats, in a way that allows brands to actually understand which spots actually worked, where, when and why.

And so normalizing two of the most commonly requested metrics—incremental reach and conversion—seems to be a logical next step.

As dollars are starting to flow back to TV (the broader definition of “TV” anyway—OTT, vMVPDs and VOD as well as linear), having these sorts of stats as a way to reinforce the value of TV commercials is going to result in a win for the industry.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re a network and you haven’t started thinking about using business outcomes to prove your case to advertiser, what are you waiting for? This is the closest thing to a “no brainer” in the industry right now.

If you’re already using business outcomes, take a look at why creating benchmarks is the logical next step.

And if you’re a brand advertiser and you still think that “50% of my ad budget is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%” (e.g., the apocryphal Wanamaker quote) then the whole notion of business outcomes may just be Mind Blown territory. (At the very least you should talk to the companies doing it so that you understand it. Or just download our new Addressable TV Advertising Report.)