ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space. In this week’s edition: AOL boosts its programmatic efforts with Millennial Media acquisition; Rubicon Project takes programmatic outdoors; MoPub launches Demand Platform; Turn appoints a new MD; and Yandex changes its bid auction model.

AOL widens mobile advertising reach with acquisition of Millennial Media

Industry insiders will not be surprised: AOL has finally announced the acquisition of mobile advertising network Millennial Media at $USD1.75 a share – a deal which had been in the works since early rumours surfaced in July 2015.

The first major acquisition after being bought by Verizon in May 2015, the deal will enable AOL to boost its mobile reach through Millennial Media's SSP, comprising 65,000+ apps, and access to one billion active unique users worldwide, as well as strengthening its foothold in key international markets, among them the UK, France, and Germany.

The media technology group expects its 'ONE by AOL' programmatic platform to receive a significant boost from the acquisition: "The acquisition of Millennial Media accelerates our competitive mobile offering in ONE by AOL and enhances our current publisher offering with an ‘all in’ monetisation platform for app developers", said Bob Lord, president, AOL.

The acquisition is set to be completed in autumn 2015, by which Millennial Media will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.

Partnership between Rubicon Project and BitPoster

Programmatic goes outdoors: a strategic partnership between global ad tech provider Rubicon Project and advertising firm BitPoster takes programmatic into new media types, which have so far been neglected by automation efforts and still rely on manual trading processes.

The partnership is aimed at facilitating BitPoster's technology backend, while expanding Rubicon Project's reach into the Out of Home sphere, automating the trading process and tapping into BitPoster's audience – a new inventory source for the ad tech company.

According to Aidan Neill, CEO and co-founder of BitPoster: "Most of the benefits of technology in advertising are associated with process automation, freeing up creative people to reach their customers with timely, powerful and relevant messages in any channel. Bitposter is focused on the technology infrastructure for outdoor, which is a natural extension point for Rubicon Project’s demand."

Rubicon-GM Jay Stevens describes the partnership as a "watershed moment" and confirms Rubicon Project's commitment to the automation of ad buying and selling across all media types.

The UK outdoor market certainly holds opportunity for programmatic: digital Out of Home revenue is set to be on the rise, reaching USD$14bn by 2017.

MoPub introduces new demand side platform

MoPub is releasing a new demand platform to provide a self-service interface to facilitate programmatic ad buying.

"Real-time, programmatic ad buying is one of the most powerful ways for marketers to reach customers", says MoPub's Jeff Cunning. "The MoPub Demand Platform offers our partners a robust set of capabilities, so they can spend more time building more valuable marketing campaigns."

To that end, partners can optimise traffic by filtering the offers according to operating system, ad format, and ad unit size. Metrics are visualised in the bidder dashboard, and MoPub provides a testing ground for new features, integrations and endpoints with the 'Bidder Sandbox'.

The MoPub Demand Platform is open to advertisers globally.

Turn appoints a new MD for EMEA

Turn's European leadership has a new face: Richard Robinson joins Turn as Managing Director EMEA. As MD for Turn's Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, Robinson will be responsible for customer cooperation across brands, agencies and trading desks, and focus on helping marketers utilise big data in order to push their campaign effectiveness.

With 20 years of experience in brand development and implementation of marketing strategies under his belt, Robinson will support Turn's customers in their efforts, "to develop sophisticated approaches to reach and engage customers across the entire consumer journey".

Prior to Turn, Robinson served as Director of Brand Development at Google. Previous roles include a position as vice president at IDC, where Robinson led the consulting and marketing services business for EMEA.

Radical bid method change at Yandex

Yandex, the Russian search engine, has announced a big change to its auction advertising model. Starting September 1, Yandex has moved away from the generalised second-price auction in an attempt to, "provide advertising clients with a more transparent bidding process".

According to Yandex, advertisers regularly ignore first and second position in ad auctions because second-price auctioning requires readjusting bids and is costly, making third position more economically attractive, while still providing some traffic volume. However, significant traffic volume from the top ad positions is ignored.

To remedy the situation, Yandex will apply the VCG (Vickery-Clarke-Groves) model, which aims to provide advertisers with quality clicks and traffic volume for all ad positions, while not increasing costs of higher ad positions: A baseline click price applies to all ad positions; additional costs are incurred for clicks beyond the baseline clicks.

"VCG auction rewards upward bidding by only charging premiums for incremental clicks that an advertiser receives. Thus, competing for extra traffic is more economically attractive for Yandex advertisers", the company explains.

Ads on Yandex are positioned not only on the basis of bid price, but also on ad quality. A new relevance ranking formula has been implemented in order to bring Yandex in line with the practices used by Bing and Google, driving additional traffic to sites with higher quality advertising messages.