What does News Corp want with Unruly?

Originally published on Future Media Lab

Newspaper ad spend will shrink by approximately 4.9 per cent a year through to 2017 with mobile advertising set to overtake as soon as next year, according to a recent study. With this in mind Unruly looks to be a good buy for News Corp, which has historically lagged behind its competitors in the digital space. Indeed, this buyout instantly boosts their credentials in social, video and native which are also the fastest growing areas of ad spend.

So what is Unruly? Unruly is an industry leading set of native video ad solutions which fuse data and tech to deliver video ads that people want to watch, rather than skip. They have significant experience creating video content for the open web (i.e. off YouTube and Facebook). They have even collaborated with leading academics at Harvard Business School, the University of Cambridge and Stanford University. In addition to content creation, they boast unique proprietary technology which uses historical sharing behaviour to predict the shareability of video content or themes, saving brands time and money in the process. They also provide analytics to track virality mid campaign.

What are the benefits for both parties? Unruly instantly secures the advantages that come with being part of a larger group, including access to premium media through the News Corp properties, advertiser relationships and additional investment to accelerate their product development. They will remain independent from News Corp, allowing existing talent to remain in place. In return, News Corp gets one of the best video ad players in the market, based in Shoreditch, not far from the parent company’s headquarters near London Bridge. Of particular interest will be if and how Unruly links up with Storyful, a ‘social news agency’ acquired by News Corp last year. Storyful distributes video content to partners like Facebook, YouTube and Vice.

What impact will this deal have on the industry? One could suggest it has the potential to kick-start a significant scaling up of native video advertising that will impact most advertisers. Unruly’s dataset of 2 trillion video views has become the world’s biggest database of video activity and their unique approach to video centres around video ranking by number of shares rather than views. Many view this as a far more accurate reflection of what content actually achieves impact. Indeed, Unruly sees a future in quality, non-interruptive ad formats that improve the user experience. While the deal increases revenue for News Corp. publications from day one, it also creates new inventory in the marketplace with Unruly’s in-feed format, at a time when demand for premium video inventory massively outstrips supply.

All of this comes amidst mobile ad-blocking going mainstream, with Apple’s iOS 9 including content-blocking tools by default. In theory this strengthens Unruly position given its video delivery is native, meaning traditional ad-blockers won’t filter it out from organic content. Ad tech companies which serve ads on mobile in the traditional manner should expect to see a much greater impact from such ad-blocking efforts.

Liam Russell.