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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer
The move ought to be a significant step for Yahoo, which has struggled to grow its ad business over the last few years. Yahoo revenues slipped 2% in Q4, during a period when the online and mobile ad business is seeing robust growth.
CEO Marissa Mayer has repositioned Yahoo as a mobile app media company. It has created some beautiful apps - such as Tumblr, Yahoo Weather and Yahoo News Digest - but they are only lightly monetized with advertising right now.
The Mocean deal suggests the company is finally moving to monetize all that inventory.
Here is the press release:
Mocean Mobile and Yahoo Launch Premium Mobile Ad Marketplace
Mocean Mobile selects the Yahoo Ad Exchange to combine premium mobile inventory with real-time programmatic buying and precise targeting
NEW YORK CITY - February 4, 2014 - Mocean Mobile (http://www.moceanmobile.com), the leading mobile technology ad-serving platform, today announced the launch of the Mocean Mobile Marketplace, a premium mobile ad marketplace powered by the Yahoo Ad Exchange. Mocean Mobile will work with Yahoo to help advertisers and publishers efficiently buy and sell premium mobile inventory - with Yahoo's unified platform, advanced targeting capabilities and real-time bidding at scale. Mocean Mobile brings top tier publishers reaching over one billion mobile devices to the Yahoo Ad Exchange. Combined with Yahoo's existing mobile offerings, advertisers can now target one of the largest mobile audiences globally, across quality content and with the latest creative and native formats.
According to recent research from eMarketer, programmatic buying is expected to account for nearly 30 percent of all display ad spending by 2017-or over $9 billion.
"We want to help publishers maximize revenue and advertisers target mobile campaigns based on our audience insights - and our work with Mocean Mobile combines Yahoo's scale, efficiency, publisher controls, and data with their high-quality mobile inventory to do just that," said Brian Silver, Vice President, Ad Platforms for the Americas, Yahoo. "Following our launch of the Yahoo Ad Exchange at CES, we have moved quickly to integrate with premium partners and make it easy to create mobile campaigns with the precise targeting of real-time programmatic buying, all in a single platform."
Mocean Mobile is the only global enterprise-grade ad-serving platform built specifically for the complex mobile advertising ecosystem. The Yahoo Ad Exchange is a global ad marketplace that offers premium publishers more visibility and control over advertising on their sites.
Key benefits of the Mocean Mobile Marketplace include:
• Built mobile-first: No other platform allows publishers to yield manage their mobile direct guaranteed, performance, and programmatic campaigns in one place.
• Premium inventory: Mocean Mobile brings premium mobile inventory from publishers such as Nokia and Univision to the Yahoo Ad Exchange.
• Data and targeting capabilities: The Yahoo Ad Exchange enables data-driven marketing and mobile audience buying including Mocean Mobile inventory.
• Programmatic and real-time bidding: The Yahoo Ad Exchange provides scale and stability, a unified platform that is easy to navigate, advanced inventory and demand controls, and proprietary bidding.
"We've invested over five years in building the world's most comprehensive mobile ad serving and monetization software. Mocean Mobile now handles every facet of mobile ad serving and demand needs, and today's announcement with Yahoo is a key part of our single-stack solution, best-in-class ad server approach," said Graham Mosley, Senior Vice President, Business Development, Mocean Mobile.
By working with Yahoo, Mocean Mobile can increase fill rates and revenues, standardizing the way its publishers, networks, ad agencies and their trading desks access inventory within marketplaces. Mocean Mobile's technology platform provides the industry's leading ad server and now offers buyers and sellers real-time bidding and integrated data in one platform.