Magnite Acquires Carbon That Will Allow Publishers Unlock The Value of Audience

Magnite, the world’s largest independent omnichannel sell-side advertising platform announced the acquisition of Carbon. Essentially, Carbon is a one-stop solution for supporting seller-defined audiences, which is one of the hottest trends right now, as inventory sellers have significant bargaining power in CTV. Publishers can create unique audience segments and improve addressability by accessing first-party data from streaming viewers. The acquisition was financed by an asset sale and financial terms were not disclosed.

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How Will Magnite Benefit From This Deal?

Magnite’s move makes logical because CTV currently accounts for one-third of the SSP’s revenue. The acquisition will benefit Magnite as it expands its audience and identity capabilities and integrates them across its omnichannel offerings.

Adam Soroca, Chief Product Officer at Magnite said, 

“CTV sellers have valuable viewer data that makes them well-positioned to create unique first-party data and we expect their demands around addressability to become more pronounced. As it relates to the open web, the likely deprecation of the third-party cookie means publisher-centric identity solutions are foundational to the future of advertising.”

Audience creation is moving from the buy-side to the sell-side, which directly owns the relationship with consumers. Although this shift is new for many publishers, first-party data has been an essential component of CTV/OTT addressability for decades. Magnite supports industry-specific IDs, it adheres to the belief that a variety of identity signals is needed to make the inventory addressable to the greatest extent possible. Carbon enters the picture here.

It will provide sellers with everything they need to maximize their audiences across all channels. In addition, it will provide Magnite with an opportunity to demonstrate its value (aka ROI) as a video ad server and CTV network.

Interesting Read: Unlock The CTV Opportunity: What The Future Looks Like

And That’s What They Said

Advertisers will expect more control and transparency in exchange for the relatively high CPMs they’ll have to pay for CTV now that the honeymoon time for CTV is coming to an end. Publishers and SSPs are beginning to realize that power (and money) will go to those who can show their efforts reached a specific audience or generated business results.

Pete Danks, CEO & Founder at Carbon said,

“Helping publishers be more profitable by providing them with technology to unlock the opportunities within their data has always been core to our mission.” 

“We’re excited to further this goal as Magnite and continue to work with publishers to lay the groundwork for a new audience-based advertising paradigm built on sell-side data.”

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