RTL Group and Amobee have announced that they are forming a new European partnership called TechAlliance, to strengthen their ad tech offerings on the continent. The partnership will entail a sales and services company that will unite Amobee’s ad tech offering with RTL’s Smartclip in Europe.
The two say the joint offering will be tailored to the needs of European broadcasters and streaming services, and will offer programmatic access to addressable TV advertising. The deal must be approved by regulators before it can go through, but is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.
The partnership will bring together Amobee’s demand-side platform and Smartclip’s supply-side platform. Amobee counts broadcasters like ITV, Fox and Univision among its clients, this new partnership will give the company access to RTL Group and Smartclip’s broadcast partners.
The TechAlliance offering will also leverage Yospace, a server-side dynamic ad insertion (SSDAI) platform that was acquired in 2019 by RTL Group.
The deal marks a new chapter in RTL’s ad tech strategy. Ad tech has been a major pillar of RTL’s ‘Total Video’ strategy. Smartclip, alongside previous holding SpotX, were key components of RTL’s tech stack. But SpotX’s place within RTL Group never seemed truly settled; it was announced that SpotX would combine with smartclip in 2017, but this merger never really materialised. SpotX was then sold to Magnite earlier this year for $1.7 billion.
Thomas Rabe, CEO of RTL Group said that the new alliance was aiming to “set market standards in the European TV industry”. He said that the partnership furthered his company’s overarching ambitions.
“RTL Group’s strategy is based on three priorities – core, growth, and alliances and partnerships,” said Rabe. “With RTL AdConnect, Bedrock and our new TechAlliance, we offer partnership opportunities to other European broadcasters in the areas of advertising sales, streaming technology and advertising technology – all based on the philosophy of bundling resources to establish open and neutral platforms,” Rabe said, “We are in advanced talks with several European broadcasters to scale up our international platforms, which complement our goal to lead in-market consolidation throughout Europe.”
