Oath announced this morning that it’s uniting its ad tech brands under one new brand, ‘Oath Ad Platforms’, a move which the company hopes will make it easier for advertisers and publishers to understand its ad offering.
The company is combining BrightRoll, One by AOL and Yahoo Gemini, and splitting the resulting suite of products into ‘Oath Ad Platforms for Marketers’ and ‘Oath Ad Platforms for Publishers’. The three brands each had different focuses – One by AOL was a publisher-facing business containing supply-side platforms (SSPs), an ad server and a video syndication tool, while BrightRoll and Yahoo Gemini were both advertiser facing. Yahoo Gemini specialised in native and search advertising while BrightRoll ran a demand-side platform (DSP).
All these products will be carried over into the new branding. BrightRoll has been renamed to simply ‘DSP’ as a part of Oath Ad Platforms for Marketers, but with added functionality. DSP will now be able to access both native and connected TV inventory, as well as video and display which were previously available. Oath’s machine-learning optimisation engine AdLearn is also built into the DSP, and Oath claims tests of AdLearn have achieved a 48 percent increase in conversion and a 38 percent decrease in cost-per-click for advertisers.
Yahoo Gemini has meanwhile been renamed ‘Native & Search’, again a part of Oath Ad Platforms for Marketers. Native & Search will include Oath’s AR and 3D ad offerings, as well as more standard native inventory like video, display and sponsored posts on Oath’s blogging site Tumblr.
Oath Ad Platforms for Publishers is made up of One by AOL’s range of products. The company says this new brand will focus on omnichannel, video and broadcast publishers, as well as app developers through its ‘Flurry’ product. Oath says it will continue to add further functionality for publishers too, saying it plans to release an ‘Oath Ads software development kit (SDK) some time next year.
“Oath Ad Platforms is the culmination of years of experience creating world class advertising offerings powered by data and designed to build brands,” said Tim Armstrong, CEO of Oath. “We’ve combined the best assets from our trusted platforms with new functionality to drive meaningful results for advertisers and publishers. Oath Ad Platforms is another example of our longstanding commitment to innovation, providing a solution to today’s digital advertising challenges.”
This consolidation of Oath’s ad products mirrors similar moves by Google and Amazon. Google earlier this year retired its longstanding ‘DoubleClick’ brand, merging its range of products into three offerings: Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ads Manager. Similarly Amazon last week unified its ad products into ‘Amazon Advertising’.
Oath, like Google and Amazon, had kept its ad products siloed not by design, but rather due to the fact that they were developed at separate companies which Oath’s parent company Verizon went on to acquire. These simplifications and rebrandings make for logical next-steps for all three companies, meeting demand from both the buy-side and sell-side for big companies with wide-ranging ad tech offerings to make these products easier to navigate and use.
