AOL has acquired AlephD, a company specializing in programmatic pricing analytics as it brings together its various publisher tools under a unified platform to simplify customer experiences.
At an IAB leadership conference taking place in Florida on Monday, AOL unveiled One by AOL: Publishers, which will consist of AlephD and earlier acquisitions such as Gravity and Millennial Media that handle various aspects of managing ad inventory.
Last fall, the company launched One by AOL: Creative, which integrated disparate products and services such as Pictela to approach responsive HTML design. One by AOL: Publishers serves to address a similar customer pain point — having one pricing model and master service agreement.
“When we walk into an advertiser’s [office], there could be six or seven different reps,” Tim Mahlman, AOL’s president of publisher platforms (pictured above), told Marketing a few days before the announcement. “Each in their own right had been successful. They grew and exceeded expectations. That being said, we were more tactically selling to these publishers and not solutions selling. Now we’re going in with one unified story and taking the conversation up a level.”
The other benefit, Mahlman said, is AOL’s willingness to be open to third-party tools and services that may already be live in publisher environments. “Some of the competitors are coming with a strong solution, but it’s been a walled garden approach, which made publishers quite nervous,” he said.
“You’d see all these different workarounds, things like header bidding,” he said. With all of this going on, we decided that in 2016, it’s the year of the publisher, where we’ll compile it into one… This is not a product release. This is more of a god-to-market of how we leverage all of these assets.”
One by AOL will also include tools to manage and curate video content such as the AOL On Network, Vidible and Be On.
