Updated 9:45 A.M. January 27
Juice Mobile and Mediaocean have formed a partnership that will see Juice’s mobile media platform, Nectar, added to Mediaocean’s portfolio of automated RFP tools for digital media buying.
Mediaocean provides a range of solutions for buying TV, radio and digital media in Canada and globally. It has come to be one of the biggest global players in the burgeoning market for automated guaranteed direct. With Nectar, Mediaocean adds a powerful solution focused on premium U.S. and Canadian mobile inventory, including display, native and video.
“We’re giving them some bleeding-edge mobile technology for a very top-of-mind trend, that being automated guaranteed,” said Juice Mobile founder and CEO Neil Sweeney. “Mediaocean is the biggest planning tool in the world. Putting those two things together to solve the challenges and meet the goals of both companies was the genesis of the plan.”
The unique Nectar platform connects buyers with large-scale premium mobile inventory, without the hassle of cold-calling dozens of publishers to see how many impressions they have available and in which geographic regions. Buyers can create digital RFPs and select which publishers they want to participate, based on their location and available inventory. The publishers then submit offers, which are informed by Nectar’s data about their past performance, as compared to the average historical performance and price range of other publishers bidding against them.
Mediaocean, meanwhile, has developed a suite of software called Prisma that helps buyers coordinate deals with digital media publishers without resorting to dozens of excel spreadsheets and e-mails back and forth. It streamlines all the workflow that happens before and after the actual buy, including planning, up-front negotiation, contracting, ad trafficking, reporting and reconciliation.
Prisma’s open framework can be used with any third-party media buying platform, whether it’s RTB, private exchange or automated guaranteed direct. “This is a platform meant to allow you to procure any kind of digital media — display, mobile, video, social, any kind of digital media that’s out there,” said Manu Warikoo, Mediaocean senior vice-president of product and platforms. “The framework for buying is Prisma, but you can invoke a buying workflow that is native to a particular media type or particular seller’s capabilities.”
With Nectar integrated into Prisma, clients will be able to access guaranteed mobile inventory from publishers like Wikia, Grandex, Postmedia and The Weather Network within Mediaocean’s end-to-end buying ecosystem. Warikoo said Juice Mobile and Mediaocean worked on a fairly deep integration, that includes a unified log-on, so buyers can easily launch Nectar from within Prisma to expand ongoing campaigns or run Nectar-specific buys.
A big part of the integration is consolidated media planning and reporting. Prisma enables buyers to coordinate their spend across mobile and desktop, through Nectar as well as through any programmatic DSPs they use or direct publisher buys they execute. The buyer sees a single campaign, with combined performance reports and financial statements.
For Juice Mobile, the deal is both about adding broader workflow capabilities for existing clients, and connecting with Mediaocean’s global client base.
“This provides us ubiquitous distribution of the Nectar platform through the U.S.,” said Sweeney. “What we’ve been fortunate about is being able to get the largest amount of supply in the automated guaranteed space in mobile into one platform, and now we have largest amount of demand inside that same platform.”
He stressed the fundamental transparency and human-controlled decision-making built into the Nectar platform, something that agencies and marketers have grown increasingly concerned about in digital buying. “Nectar is 100% transparent, down to impression level,” he said.”Because there are no supply side platforms, or any other partners between us and the publishers, when you’re transacting an impression through Nectar, it is going directly on to that publisher’s site, period. As far as tactics or tools to erase fraud, this is a huge one.”
Note: an earlier version of this article stated that Mediaocean and Juice Mobile had formed a global partnership; this was incorrect, as the Nectar platform will only be available in the U.S. and Canada.
