There was no way to oversee it in last week’s news: LiveRail, leading publisher monetization platform for video announced its acquisition by the social network giant Facebook. The Romanian company headquartered in San Francisco connects marketers to publishers, both on web and mobile to target 7 billion video ads to visitors monthly. The acquisition of the 170-person company shall help Facebook own a bigger piece of video advertising market.
How to become an ad powerhouse
What makes LiveRail so desirable to a big fish like Facebook is on one hand its real-time bidding platform. It helps publishers to successfully navigate the programmatic advertising landscape and find its clients the best ad opportunities. On the other hand its relationships with both marketers and publishers will help Facebook in its desire to be an ad powerhouse across the web and mobile.
“When we started talking to the team at Facebook about how we could work together, it quickly became clear that we shared a vision for the future of digital advertising. We realized that by joining forces we’d be able to draw upon our respective strengths to move even faster towards our shared vision of creating the advertising platform of the future,” LiveRail CEO Mark Trefgarne said in his company’s announcement.
Not to forget: LiveRail will give Facebook a big advantage as now television commercials are reimagined for the web. Together, LiveRail and Facebook have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the millions of people watching digital video.
Seven years of dedication
But the acquisition by Facebook was by no means just a matter of chance. “When Andrei and I started LiveRail in 2007, it was with the vision of creating a next generation advertising platform designed specifically for digital video. Our goal at LiveRail has been to build the best technology in the world to help connect the digital video advertising ecosystem,” remembers Mark Trefgarne.
Seven years later LiveRail sets the standard for innovative video advertising technology solutions. From Major League Baseball to DailyMotion, their technology is used by hundreds of major publishers who benefit from sophisticated analytics and advanced controls. For them, LiveRail provides solutions like a single interface to manage direct advertiser campaigns and optimize major ad networks. And for Video Ad Networks, it offers a robust network management capabilities in a real-time video ad serving platform to manage and buy video advertising campaigns.
Next steps
With the launching of Audience Network, Facebook is going to work with mobile apps to target their standard ad units as well as custom native units. Consequently they will also use LiveRail for the purposes of Facebook Audience Network and bring accurately targeted video ads to all sorts of apps. Besides that LiveRail offers a necessary targeting expertise to Facebook. The company officially launched its 15-second auto-play video ads in March and will use LiveRail to match movie trailers and other video ads with the right viewers.
