ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biigest events in the industry, and in this week's edition: Yahoo buys up BrightRoll; Google drops the ball costing publishers millions; Facebook tells ATS Paris audience ad tech has nothing to fear from  the social network.

Yahoo stakes claim in video tech

Yahoo announced its intention to acquire BrightRollin a deal worth $640m as the online publishing giant aims to stake a claim in the video ad business.

Yahoo maintains the purchase of BrightRoll is a large, whose revenues are expected to exceed $100 million this year, will make its video ad network the largest in the USA
The acquisition will accelerate Yahoo’s strategy, which is focused on search, communications, and digital content through growth in mobile, social, native, and video advertising. Acquiring BrightRoll will dramatically strengthen Yahoo’s video advertising platform, making it the largest in the US.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, said: “Video, along with mobile, social, and native, is driving a surge in digital advertising. Here at Yahoo, video is one of the largest growth opportunities, and BrightRoll is a terrific, strategic and financially compelling fit for our video advertising business.

"As with every acquisition, we have been extremely thoughtful about our approach to the video advertising space. This acquisition will accelerate the growth of both companies – we can help BrightRoll scale to even more advertisers globally and they can bring their tremendous platform offering to Yahoo’s advertisers. The combination builds positive momentum for Yahoo’s broader display advertising business in 2015.”

The deal is expected to close in Q1, 2015, with the 400-man unit also exepcted to maintain its BrightRoll brand. The deal comes as Yahoo continues to rollout of its Yahoo Ad Exchange, a year after its retirement of its Right MediaXchange.

Emarketer estimates took 2.9% of the $120bn glboal digital ad market in 2013, equivalent to Microsoft's market share, and estimates that Yahoo will drop to 2.4% market share, as global digital advertising eclipses $140bn and Microsoft maintains its 2.9% share in 2014.

Meanwhile, Google and Facebook will continue to lead the way, with 32.4% and 8% share in 2014, respectively.

Ooops! Google's DoubleClcik loses publishers millions

Google's DoubleClick went down this week for a period of just under two hours according to reports, but such is the publishing industry's reliance on the ad server that industry sources reckon it cost them 'millions of dollars an hour'.

The problem began circa 2pm (GMT) and lasted for just under the two-hour mark, meaning publishes that use the ad server were unable to serve ads alongside their content, with Brian O'Kelley telling Business Insider the lapse would have cost publishers up to $1m an hour.

Reports claim that over 55,000 publisher sites were affected, with issues around page load times also occuring due to pages waiting for ads to load before serving content.
Google confirmed the outage but has yet to publicly comment on how much the outage cost publishrs in lost ad revenue.

Facebook is here to help, not destro you ad tech business (allegedly)

Facebook made its ATS debut in Europe this week to discuss its Atlas ad server, where Francois-Xavier Pierrel, Facebook, regional manager, Southern Europe, Atlas, told attendees the social network was investing so heavily in ad tech to enable it to improve attribution when it comes to online advertising, not to put pure-play programmatic advertising companies out of business.

Under heavy-fire questioning from ExchangeWire founder Ciaran O'Kane Pierrel told the ATS Paris audience that although Atlas is part of a wider Facebook ad stack, it was genuinely agnostic when it comes to its attribution model, and not another tool in the social network's armoury to help it suck up more ad revenue.

Being agnostic is our general stance to ensure that there's a distinction between church and state. But Atlas, as part of that ecosystem, has to be in the same office. But we have our own team, our own line of measurement and reporting to remain independent. When we were part of Microsoft it was the same t ensure there were no questions about it.

We could ask the same question of companies like [Google's] Adometry that have been acquired by large players. The main job of these companies that have been acquired is to remain indepent, and educate [the wider industry] so we can drive as much value as possible.

In-ousing is on the rise

Sky Italia this week announced that it had selected Turn as its data management platform (DMP) to serve tailored advertising to customers programmatically, with 70% of its brand budget to be delivered via the DMP using RTB.

The partnership with Turn is part of a wider move towards programmatic advertising for Sky, with Turn having developed 22 consumer audience profiles for the broadcaster, with the partnership facilitated by the broadcaster's agency of record The SImple Agency, part of Amnet. Aldo Agostinelli, Sky Italia, digital marketing and sales director, said: “The plethora of data available to the broadcast industry has made digital marketing increasingly complex.

"We needed a way to match data with storytelling and creativity to deliver against the premier viewing experiences for which Sky is known. We’re already seeing greats results from this approach; click-through-rates on ads have doubled, and bounce rates from our website have decreased by 40%.”

Germany's Eyeota opens UK office

Local audience data provider Eyeota, this week announced the opening of its UK office, headed up by Peter Wallace and John Woolley, both of whom have extensive experience in the digital industry.
In support of its UK launch, Eyeota has appointed both Peter Wallace and John Woolley as agency relationship managers. Both will be responsible for nurturing and developing key relationships with media agencies and DSPs.

Kevin Tan, Eyeota, CEO, said: “The fact that audience data is such an integral component of the process of programmatic buying and selling of ad inventory has driven a seven-fold increase in the number of advertisers using our data over the last 12 months. There has also been substantial growth in the adoption of programmatic buying in the UK, with the nation's users now being amongst the most advanced and sophisticated in the world. Establishing a UK office enables us to support our key partners, publishers and data clients locally and provides us with a platform for building new partnerships with many more.”

As well as London, it has offices in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Singapore and Sydney. With one billion international unique profiles in its data set, Eyeota is able to provide advertisers with deep audience data including demographic, intent, interest as well as premier branded data such as Experian.