Rubicon Project and Telaria Merge and Rebrand as Magnite

The Takeaways

In a statement about the rebrand, Bill Murray, Vice President of programmatic solutions at Discovery Inc., said, “The unification of their technologies as Magnite will bring greater synergy and efficiency to our omnichannel monetization and sales strategies.”
The combined entity shed 8% of its headcount in cost-saving measures accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic earlier this spring but still employs more than 600 people across 15 countries.
Publishers will be able to monetize across all auction types and formats including CTV, desktop display, video, audio and mobile.

What happened?

Rubicon and Telaria announced in December that they would be merging. A move that was eventually concluded in April. As part of the deal former Telaria chief exec Mark Zargorski stepped down from the newly rebranded Magnite.

During the merger process, leading executives chose not to retain either of the two legacy brands in favour of better assimilating the respective teams. In line with the new branding, the company’s stock price ticker on the Nasdaq changed from RUBI to MGNI on July 1.

New synergies in the conglomerate

Large media and entertainment clients now work with a single sales team, and Magnite can talk to buyers about opportunities across both Telaria’s CTV footprint and Rubicon’s desktop and mobile one. For now, the companies still run two sets of programmatic pipes, since they have very little publisher overlap with each other.

Despite the senior leadership team remaining relatively unchanged, except the departure of Mark Zagorski, strategy changes will be likely as Magnite CEO, Michael Barrett noted “there will be one seat on the exchange, and one pipe into the publishers”