What Innovid Brings to the Mediaocean Table
Once the Mediaocean acquisition of Innovid (for upwards of $500 million) goes through, the company will have one tough tech stack.
“Being able to manage everything from Meta to TikTok to Snap, to now Reddit, is the latest one,” said Mediaocean CMO Aaron Goldman. Managing ads inside walled gardens is something that Flashtalking does very well, he added, and Innovid “does” CTV very well. “Think about just being able to do all the channels through one platform. That’s part of what this combination gets you.”
Mediaocean is an omnichannel software and services provider that purchased Flashtalking in 2021. With Innovid, it will be even more of an ad-tech powerhouse with capabilities in ad delivery, creative personalization, measurement, and optimization across channels, including digital, social, CTV, and linear TV.
Goldman sat down with StreetFight to provide more details on what the deal means.
Who’s Mediaocean’s biggest competitor in ad tech and what are the top three things that are going to benefit clients from this Innovid acquisition?
The biggest competitor to Mediaocean is Google and its ad-tech stack. Google is the largest ad server in the world. With Flashtalking and Innovid together you have a much more formidable competitor or alternative, I should say, to Google for people who want things like more control over their placements.
With Google, often times you don’t get the full control. They get to decide where things run within their ecosystem. Choice is another big one. Being able to both have that fine control and choose to say, “Maybe I don’t want it to run in these certain parts within a walled garden or not.”
The third benefit, I’d say is convergence. Being able to do it all in one platform, you can more easily manage your budgets across the different channels to make sure that you’re getting your best return on investment.
Will it be called Flashtalking or will it be called Innovid?
We are going to wait until the deal closes and then do a whole bunch of research, talk to customers, talk to analysts. We’ve been joking about the “celebrity” mashup names like Innoflash or Flashovid, but at this time, no decisions were made.
Have your clients been asking for CTV capabilities?
Yes, massive interest in CTV. Partly because of the growth from the user side in terms of how many people are cutting the cord and viewing their content through connected televisions, but also from an advertiser perspective. It brings you the best of both worlds. You have what digital media is really good at, which is things like measurement or being able to do calls to action. It’s got the best of what you had with linear TV in terms of site, sound, and motion on a big screen. You marry those two things together and that makes CTV very compelling.
What is your top prediction for the media industry in 2025?
We’ll see ads on ChatGPT next year. So far, I think Perplexity has been the only one so far to start to bring an advertising element, but I think it’s too lucrative for them not to do. It will be a really compelling opportunity for advertisers as well because so much search activity is moving into those AI-driven chatbot platforms, and we all know how well search advertising performs so I would expect it to be just as good there too.
