Although Yahoo’s made a lot of big moves in ad tech over the past two years — buying Brightroll and Flurry, launching Gemini, and shutting out publishers from the Yahoo Ad Exchange — its strategy for the space have been somewhat of an enigma.
But the veil was lifted at Advertising Week in New York when Yahoo finally outlined its long-term strategy. The plan is to maintain the BrightRoll brand and make it Yahoo’s programmatic technology hub, incorporating BrightRoll’s solutions along with programmatic components from Flurry, Yahoo Ad Manager and the former Right Media Exchange.
Where BrightRoll pre-acquisition was focused on online video, Yahoo BrightRoll will be a cross-channel provider covering display, video, mobile and native. “We wanted to consolidate and simplify the many brands across our DSP and exchange products, with the goal of presenting a comprehensive technology solution to the industry that represents our programmatic capabilities in display, video, and native across all devices,” the company said in a statement.
Under the BrightRoll umbrella, Yahoo plans to offer two core products: BrightRoll DSP, a demand-side ad buying platform with direct access to Yahoo’s user data (similar to the way DoubleClick accesses Google data, or LiveRail uses Facebook data), and the BrightRoll Exchange, a real-time marketplace for cross-device video and display from thousands of sites and apps.
Thanks to its legacy in the programmatic space, BrightRoll Exchange is already integrated with 100 DSP partners and serves about half of ComScore’s top 50 U.S. publishers. Yahoo says the Exchange will absorb its own O&O inventory from the Yahoo Ad Exchange; it will also offer private marketplace and programmatic direct options. Yahoo says its BrightRoll products are designed under the open ecosystem ethos, so buyers and sellers can bring any of their own technology to the table with them.
Media buyers probably aren’t looking for the DSP space to get any more crowded, but Yahoo says its first-party data will be a big differentiator. The media company claims to process 165 billion data events daily generated by 1 billion users across a diverse range of verticals in both mobile and desktop. BrightRoll will use all that data to segment users into audiences and target them across the web.
Gemini, a unique AdWords-style marketplace that combines search with native ads across owned and partnered sites (as well as the Flurry mobile app network), will remain separate from BrightRoll. In its Advertising Week announcement, Yahoo said that advertisers will now be able to onboard their own first-party data for targeting in Gemini. Yahoo’s currently pushing Gemini adoption through third-party re-sellers like Acquisio, ChannelAdvisor, Kenshoo and Marin Software, though so far it hasn’t introduced the product to Canada.
